Content warning: this entry talks about suicide.

Thursday, April 19, 1990

Only the brave kill themselves.

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That is the shortest entry in my diary. To me its meaning is crystal clear, but others may need it explained.

There is a common myth that suicide is the “cowards way out” and only fearful, weak people kill themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fear is what prevents people from killing themselves. Fear of death, or fear of the physical pain that would come from a suicide attempt. Fear of failing to die and waking up seriously injured later on, maybe with a permanent disability that makes life even harder. The only people who actually succeed in killing themselves are those who overcome that fear. They are the brave. Only the brave kill themselves.

Consider again, my first suicide attempt at age 13, which I wrote about previously. I had a note written and pinned to my clothes. I had a rope ready to make a noose. I was standing outside under the tree in the middle of the night with no one to stop me. But I did stop, because I was afraid to die. The fear of the pain, or the fear of ending up alive but in a coma, is what stopped me from acting. So I went back inside and cried myself to sleep.

My second suicide attempt came some time in 1997. I had legally changed my name and socially transitioned at that point. My employer even supported me in this and I didn’t have to find a new job. By all rights everything was going smoothly. But the CPTSD and depression from years of repressing myself was still strongly in control of my mind and suicidal thoughts were pretty common for me in that era.

One day, as usual, I drove in to work, and headed for the top level of the parking garage where there was an entrance to the building just one floor below the one I worked on. I parked and got out, but instead of going on in, I decided to walk to the highest point in the garage. There, I found a concrete beam going across the topmost opening of the parking aisles, and it led out to the edge of the building. Curiousity took hold of me, and I climbed up on the beam and walked it like a tightrope to the edge.

From the edge I could look down towards the ground, about 80-100 feet below me. I stood there calmly, thinking to myself that all I had to do was dive off head first, like you would into a swimming pool. My head would impact the ground first and break my neck, killing me instantly. It would be a quick and painless death. It seemed like the perfect idea. I was not afraid. I could do it and end all of my sorrows.

But something in the back of my mind kept nagging at me until I remembered: I was afraid of heights. Just walking across the beam would normally have had me frightened and shaking pretty violently, but I walked it just like walking down the sidewalk beside a quiet street. Being actually on the ledge, an inch away from a large fall should have had my heart pounding and me desperately trying to get away. But there I was just quietly looking straight down without a care in the world. I was not afraid, but I should have been.

This made me realize that something wasn’t right in my brain. My normal survival instinct was turned off somehow. My rational mind recognized this meant that I was not in a mental state to trust myself to make such a momentous decision as one to end my life. So, I turned around, walked back the way I came, got down and went inside to work.

A couple of years after that I had my third serious suicidal incident. That week had been a terrible week for me. I had been fired from the most enjoyable job I’d ever had, my mother told me she had an incurable liver disease (an exaggeration by her to get sympathy, but I didn’t know it at the time), and I had also been diagnosed as Bipolar 2 and started taking lithium just a month earlier. I came home from a restaurant feeling very miserable and wanting to kill myself.

So I went into my bedroom, opened up my desk drawer, pulled out a loaded revolver, cocked it, and started raising it to my head. But my hand was being jerky and I pulled the trigger too soon, firing the gun harmlessly into the wall. The loud retort frightened me and brought me back to my senses. In fear of what I might do, I gave the gun to my housemate and left the house to walk around the block while I tried to calm down. That actually led to me being evicted, and my boyfriend at the time took the gun for safekeeping. I never bothered to get it back.

The point of these stories is to illustrate the point I made at the beginning. In the first and third incidents, fear is what ultimately stopped me. In the second incident, the lack of fear is what almost led me to go through with killing myself, and only the coldly rational part of my mind turned me aside by recognizing that I was not in a normal state of mind.

If I had been able to overcome my fear the first or third times, I might have actually died. If had actually experienced fear the second time, I would never have been on the ledge in the first place.

Only the brave kill themselves.

This is a question that has plauged me ever since I realized I wanted to be a girl: why? Why am I trans? What did I do to deserve this fate? Is it biological? Is it spiritual? Why me?

Sadly, I have yet to find a satisfactory answer. I believe that there must be a biological basis for it. I am a materialist, so I think literally everything has a physical basis. If I invoke spiritual reasons it’s simply to give meaning to the physical. Also, it is very common for trans people to report knowing their true gender at a very early age, which I think points strongly to the cause not being social or psychological. Even I showed signs of this, because despite having no formal concept of wanting to be a girl as a child I naturally gravitated to taking the girl roles in games I would play with my friends.

Let’s consider the physical causes. I have only very sketchy and faint evidence of any kind of developmental difference in my body. There are a few things about me that are interesting, but nothing strong enough to ever make a doctor question if I was in any way intersex. Consider:

• As a young adult, I never developed any whiskers around my mouth or any mustache. My facial hair was mostly non existent in those areas. Below the jawline I did have facial hair, but it was thin and scraggly.
• My first endo had me submit a sperm sample before starting HRT. He told me I had a low sperm count and asked if I had trouble providing the sample, because he also said it was a low volume sample. I could only reply that the sample I provided was normal for me and I had no trouble giving it.
• When I had gender reassignment surgery, my surgeon told me he had to alter his normal surgical technique because my penis and scrotum were smaller than average.

Were these signs of some sort of developmental disorder? It could be, but I’ll probably never know since there was no testing done on me. I will add, though, that when my mother was carrying me she had cysts on her uterus, and I know those can alter the environment in the womb. Maybe there was some developmental abnormality as I grew in her belly. Again, we will never know. She had a hysterectomy after I was born, and the cysts were not cancerous, but I don’t know of any details about what the cysts really were, and she did not remember.

I would really like to get my DNA sequenced. There are quite a few gene variants associated with disorders of sexual development (DSDs) but at this moment in my life I have other, more important things to deal with.

So what about the spiritual side of things? Regardless of the biological reasons for being trans, whatever they may be, what did I do to deserve this seeming punishment, for that’s exactly what it felt like for many, many years. I am Wiccan, and we teach a doctrine of reincarnation. I have considered the following:

• In a past life I was unappreciative of being a woman, and so I was reincarnated with a male body as a lesson to learn. I will admit, that having to fight and struggle against family, society, and my own body has made me deeply appreciative of the gift of womanhood. If this is what happened, then please, Goddess, consider this a lesson learned!
• Between incarnations I decided to intentionally reincarnate as trans to challenge myself and make myself grow in ways that I could not do as a cis person. This is the happier possibility since it implies that I have a somewhat advanced soul seeking to push the boundaries of what I can be. In modesty, though, I don’t really think this is the case.

So there you have it. I don’t know why I am trans, either from a biological or a spiritual standpoint, and this bothers me. It’s not satisfying at all to think that this was all just down to random chance and that it has no meaning or explanation. I wish I had a better conclusion for this blog entry, but I just don’t.

When I was in college, before I transitioned and was still vacillating back and forth about whether I should even try, I used to be a caver. There are lots of caves in my state and I would routinely go on camping trips where I’d be part of groups exploring, sometimes surveying, wild caves. It was quite fun!

After one such trip, as I was driving back home late at night, and driving through the desert in the darkness, all alone, my mind wandered again to my gender. I so much wanted to be a woman, but there were so many obstacles in my way and so much pressure on me not to try.

At some point I started crying a lot, and so I pulled over to the side of the road. I turned off the engine, got out, walked a bit away from the roadside and stared up in the brilliant, starry desert sky. One of the things on my mind at that time was what my gods would think of me transitioning. I am Wiccan, and Wicca is very much centered on binary concepts of gender and the polarity between male and female. How could I, born into a man’s body, ever serve my Goddess as a woman?

I stared into the stars and sent out my plea: Goddess, may I be your priestess?

Suddenly, right as my supplication ended, a bright meteor flashed across the sky exactly where I was looking, and I burst into tears again, for the Goddess had answered my question and given me her blessing to transiition and become her priestess. Today I strive to be like her as much as I can, and use my experiences to help others like me.

Thank you, my Goddess, for your precious gift!

Blessed Be!

If you’ve read along so far in this series of posts, you might think that I knew I was trans at this point, and that should be the end of the story, but it’s not, really. While my parents didn’t reject me, they also didn’t accept me as female. They wanted me to be “cured”. So they sent me back to the same therapist I saw when they discovered my stash of clothes in junior high school. Thankfully, that therapist actually knew something about gender variance and he did not try and do conversion therapy on me, something I never bothered letting my parents know, of course.

Nonetheless, I found other uses for the therapy. I was seriously suffering from depression and now I had someone I could talk to about it. I also started a lifelong journey with anti-depressants that has continued until this day.

However, the big thing in my life came in the fall when I started college at a new university in my parents city. Over the summer I had started wearing make-up routinely. I thought I was doing it kind of like a goth guy, but I must have failed that, because the first day of classes one of my professors took me for a girl. It tickled me so much that I decided to roll with it and gave my name as Eve – a play on my old middle name. After that I just started bringing a change of clothes with me each day when I left the house for school in the morning. My social transition had begun!

It did not, go well, though. No one questioned me or gave me any trouble, but my depression was in full bloom at this point and I started skipping classes and not doing homework again. I was in danger of actually flunking out of school. I was also getting pressure from my parents to try and be a man, and that pressure was getting to me. About half way through the semester I decided to officially withdraw, and for some reason I also told my parents that I’d been attending classes as a woman. My mother thereafter referred to this as The Eve Incident, as if it were some scandalous event in history.

But the pressure from my parents worked eventually and they broke me. I gave in and promised that I’d try to be a man. I even convinced myself that I really wanted it, too! After all, I thought, surely it must be easier for me to be a man than to try and be a woman. Over the next 4 years I vacillated back and forth several times. I would try to be a man and the internal pressure from inside me would build up until I couldn’t stand it any more and I let myself be trans again. Then my parents would put the pressure on me and I’d go back once more.

This didn’t change until I graduated. At that point I had a degree and I started looking for a job, because my parents would not help me to afford graduate school and I felt so helpless that I didn’t think I could do it on my own. Four months after graduation, though, I did get a job, and it was a good paying job. Suddenly, I was actually financially independent from my parents. I didn’t need their support any more.

They no longer had any threat to make when pressuring me to be a man.

My trans identity came roaring back in full force, and I started adding more feminine clothing to my wardrobe. Clothing that I could actually buy with my own money, not just sneak out of a forgotten storage closet. One night I went to the see the movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and had a great time! A wonderful movie and a groundbreaker in terms of trans presentation in cinema. When I got home, my mother saw me in a jeans, a blue blouse, and with my eye make-up. She asked where I had been, and I told her. She immediately accused me of “backsliding”. But this time instead of being cowed I just rolled my eyes at her, told her she was being an idiot, and I went to bed.

I also started finally following up on some old contact information for trans support groups in my city that I had but had never used out of fear. I was able to get in touch with someone and find out when the next get together was. I showed up in the most ridiculously overdressed fashion. Someone I met told me I looked like I was going to a funeral! We had a talking support session and then a few of the women there took me over to a lesbian bar with them just to hang out and have some fun.

Well, that hooked me! I went to the meetings regularly after that and started making friends. I even somehow got voted onto the board as the meeting coordinator after like 3 months. I also met a trans girl just finishing up her final year of college, and we got to talking and decided to move in together as roomates.

And that’s when I not only told my parents that I was moving out, but that I had also made up my mind to transition and persue surgery. They were furious! My dad demanded to know what “all those years of therapy” were for and I bluntly told him that they had helped me with my depression and also helped me come to accept myself as a woman! Oof! He did not like that. But they didn’t kick me out immediately, and I was able to move out on my own time schedule.

After that, I never looked back, and never again questioned my womanhood. I knew I was trans, I knew I was a woman, and I wasn’t going to let anyone stop me from being who I was meant to be! A few months after moving out I started HRT. A year and half afterwards I legally changed my name and gender, and 4 years after moving out I had my surgery.

I’ve had no regrets about this, at all. It was the best thing that ever happened to me in my entire life.

Now we come to my early college years. I was 19 and I left home to start my first year of college. That first year I lived in a commercial, off campus dormitory and had 3 assigned roommates, with only 2 bedrooms. Thus, I simply could not risk having any of my comfort clothes with me and I had to hide away entirely again. This just added to my existing depression, and my studies suffered greatly. I skipped a lot of classes, often either just staying in bed or spending my time at a video arcade playing games all day. I even stayed in bed on the day at the end of second semester when my physics teacher took the class for a tour of the nuclear fusion reactor on campus, despite actually being a physics major.

The second semester opened up a bit for me, though. 2 of the people moved out and I had my own private bedroom at that point, so at the end of Christmas break when I returned from being home for the holidays, I brought all my clothes with me. At that point there were so many of them that they actually filled a large moving box. How I hid them from my parents successfully I’ll never know. So I was now free to dress as myself when no one was home, or at night alone in my bedroom, and this was a relief for me, though my depression still kept on getting worse.

There was one bright memory, though. It was a powerful moment of gender euphoria that I will never forget. I was, and am, a fan of the music of Philip Glass, and he had just released a new album called 1000 Airplanes On The Roof. I bought a copy of it and took it back home. That night, after I had turned in for the night, I shut my bedroom door and got dressed is a nice shirt and a pair of shorts and sat down on my bed to listen to the music on headphones.

Now, Philip Glass’ music often employs repetition in its structure and very simple melodies, which makes it a very meditative thing for me to listen to, and this new album was not an exception. As I listened to it my mind relaxed, my body relaxed and I began to enter a meditative mental state. And then, like that time in the gym in junior high school, my perception of my body shifted. I no longer felt the Thing between my legs and I became convinced that I could feel myself having a vagina like any other woman. This sent me over the edge into a state of ecstasy that I will never forget. I sat and listened to the music in a state of bliss unlike anything else I’d ever experienced. Even after the music ended the euphoria stayed with me the rest of the night.

Sadly, apart from that one experience, most of my first year at college was characterized by extreme depression, that would only get worse in the second year. That second year, though, I got together with a high school friend and we rented an apartment together, so once again I had my own bedroom and I could have my clothes with me. I even just hung them up in the closet and simply kept the closet door closed for times my roommate came into my bedroom for some reason. And he was often gone on weekends, so that I actually had quite a bit of time to be myself and live freely.

Towards the end of the year though, in the Spring, I one day found myself with another free day and I decided I was feeling good enough and confident enough in my hair and make-up that I should try something different: going out in public. I settled on going shopping at a nearby mall. So I got up early in the morning, got dressed and snuck out of the apartment hoping that none of my neighbors would see me.

The first thing I did at the mall was I hit a shoe store and bought a pair of Mexican sandals. They were very popular at the time among young women and I wanted to get in on the trend. I also simply didn’t have any decent women’s shoes at the time. Sadly, I got them a size too big and the back of them rubbed against my tendons and caused some bleeding, so I had to go to a pharmacy to get bandages. Oops!

Lesson learned and tendons now protected, I got down to the main course. First, I spotted an ear piercing booth and got my ears pierced for the first time ever so I could wear real earrings finally! That sent me over the Moon with joy and I walked away with the biggest smile on my face. Then I started browsing in the clothing stores and eventually found a dress I liked in a popular style and that I could afford, so after trying it on in the changing room to make sure it fit, I bought it.

At this point I was feeling ecstatic because everything was going just right. No one had even so much as blinked an eye at me. They just treated me like any of the other women shoppers I saw around me. And then it hit me. This was right. This was who I was supposed to be. Being a woman wasn’t just some daydream or wishful fantasy, it was something I actually needed, and something that I could actually do! And I started crying. Tears of joy at realizing who I was, and also tears of fear about the unknown future.

I went home that day and spent the rest of the day on Cloud 9, and I started my first diary that night. I wrote “[deadname] died today. He is no more. I occupy his body now. I am Elizabeth [lastname], and I am a woman.” (I did not end up keeping the name Elizabeth.)

The next day I went to one of the libraries on campus to try and find out more information on what I needed to do to really become a woman. I knew the word “transsexual” but I had avoided actually learning anything about transsexualism while growing up – it hit too close to home for comfort, I think. But in the card catalog (there were no computers in the library at the time) I found some information to get me started.

I devoured what I found and though some of it shocked me, such as the diagrams of surgical procedures, I was hooked. I finally had a word to describe the way I felt. I was a transsexual. That night I started trying to look for groups or people who could help me. Alas, there was no category for transsexualism in the phone book.

I did not sleep that second night more than about 3 hours. I was starting to freak out. I desperately needed someone to talk to and to confide in, but I had no place to turn. So I screwed up my courage and decided to tell my roommate. When he got home I asked him to come in my room, and to please stay calm. That was the first time someone I actually knew ever saw my dressed as myself.

I was terrified! I even thought about suicide before talking to him. But he handled it well. In fact, he agreed to let me dress as I wanted to around the apartment. I was so relieved by his reaction that it lifted all the worry and anxiety from me and I felt happy again.

That very night I decided to wear my new dress and go to see an opera being performed by the music school at the university. Once again I felt completely accepted by the people around me, and I even got to experience something I considered a right of passage: a long line to use the women’s restroom. That was very oddly gender affirming. When I got home, my roommate was watching TV and wanted a Coke, so I offered to go get him one. WIthout changing clothes I went to a nearby store for it and again felt perfectly comfortable and accepted being myself in public.

The next few days were a whirlwind. That first day after my mall trip, I changed my new earrings out for small pieces of paperclip so that no one would see me wearing earrings, but on the second day I decided to throw caution to the wind and just started wearing my earrings everywhere. The people I knew accepted it without criticism. I wrote a letter to my mother, too, asking her about what she remembered from my childhood. I specifically mentioned how I looked girlish as a young child as an example of what I was interested in. I also asked her to just please write me back instead of calling me.

She didn’t call. She showed up on my doorstep instead. I rushed to change clothes before letting her in. She made chitchat for a bit and then brought up the letter. I was too scared to tell her the truth right away, so I told her that I was a transvestite. She didn’t react much, but said she and my dad suspected it, and also thought I might be gay. She stayed in a hotel that night and the next and my dad also came over to join us for a day. I finally told them that I was considering a sex change operation (that’s what it was popularly known as at the time) and my mother in particular was a little shocked, but they still didn’t attack me and we all went out to dinner. My mother even gave me a bottle of perfume!

In the end we agreed that I would transfer to a university in my home town for the third year and that I would come back home to live with them and they would help me find a psychologist to talk to about everything I was feeling.

Next: finishing college and starting my life.

I am currently going through a very joyous and energetic moment. For the past 12 days I have been feeling euphoric, and so many good things have come about!

• I’ve discovered the joy of sewing. I never did sewing before, but I’ve done several small projects already and I’m waiting on some specialty thread to arrive so I can finish altering a skirt of mine.
• I’ve started a blog and have been writing nearly every day.
• I’ve fulfilled a childhood dream by getting a doll I always wanted and having Raggedy Ann has been a very emotional and comforting experience, much more so than I expected.
• I had a breakthrough in dealing with leftover trauma of growing up trans, and that in turn has led me to …
• Questioning my sexuality and realizing that I really am strongly attracted to men despite having lived most of my life as a lesbian.
• I have a sort of date tomorrow (with a young trans woman) and this will be my first date since 2002.
• I’ve really become much more expressive with my hands, I’m walking differently, swinging my hips more, for example, and just generally feeling much, much more comfortable visibly expressing myself femininely. Some sort of old inhibition I wasn’t even aware of has fallen away.
• I’ve found it much easier to talk about sexuality with others, a thing I have always been shy of, and I even shared a partially nude photo of myself for the first time in my entire life. It was quite liberating!
• I have had a breakthrough in my religious practices. Years ago I could feel and manipulate my body’s energy, but after returning to atheism around 2005 I lost that ability. This week it has come roaring back and I feel much more in tune with myself and my Goddess.
• I’ve just been having a ton of energy and getting lots of stuff done.

Mind you, this is not without a (potential) downside. For the first time in about 20 years I am having a hypomanic episode. Back in 1999 I was diagnosed as Bipolar II, a kind of bipolar disorder characterized by a lack of full blown mania. Instead I can get hypomanic, which is characterized by lots of energy, feelings of euphoria, a flood of ideas, more sexual openness, and other nice things. Sound familiar after reading the list above? But it also includes a risk of overspending, taking more risks, and being more sexually active. I’ve been having these symptoms as well.

So far, though, I haven’t had any real downside, and I’m hoping the end of this hypomanic episode will come slowly and gradually instead of being a sudden crash into depression, as it is with some people, including me in the past. My current medications have been working very well for the past decade, and I think this episode is probably more due to a combination of good things happening in my life, and is not a sign that my meds are no longer working right. Knock on wood!

When I finally decided to transition, and especially as I started HRT and faced taking my first estrogen pill, I stood on the brink of the change fearfully. I felt that to take that pill, to truly commit to transition, would be the end of everything I had ever known. It felt like death, to me. It felt like I was about to take a great leap off a cliff not knowing whether I would fall or fly, trusting only in hope. It was frightening in a way I had never known, and have never known again since.

I made that leap, and yes, the old me died. But the new me that was reborn was the true me that should have been all along.

There is a poem, The Lady of Shallot, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It is his own telling of an Arthurian legend. The Lady of Shallot lives upon an isle in the river upstream from Camelot. There she has a magic mirror in which she sees the world, and she weaves the images into her tapestries constantly. But there is also a prophecy that if she ever looks to Camelot, then a curse will come upon her.

One day, she sees Sir Lancelot in her mirror as he was riding down the path to Camelot. He, in his gleaming burnished armor with his flowing dark hair, draws her attention like no other ever has, and she stops her weaving to look upon him out her window as he rides down the road on the banks of the river, the road to Camelot. When she does this her weaving comes undone, and the mirror cracks, and she knows the curse has come upon her. She goes down to the shore of her isle and there finds a boat, upon the prow of which she writes her name.

And then comes the pivotal moment when she has to decide: turn back and live on her island in misery, never knowing what it is to be loved, or to let loose the boat and drift down to Camelot hoping to see Lancelot face to face. To live on without joy, or to risk death for a chance at true life.

This moment was captured on canvas by the painter John William Waterhouse. It shows this moment when she holds the rope in her hand ready to cast it loose, but you can see the fear on her face. You can see the difficulty in this decision that she must make, to risk death for a chance of joy.

This is how I felt when I had that first estrogen pill in my hand. I was risking death in order to embrace a chance to have true joy for the first time ever in my life. I loosed the rope and took the pill, and my boat drifted to Camelot, and the curse did take it’s effect on me. The old me died that day as I let go of everything I had ever known and embraced an unknown future.

Unlike the Lady, I was reborn. I became someone new and wonderful and the light and joy and renewal that filled me has carried me forward ever since. And though my life is now what I always dreamed of, I will never forget that terrible moment of decision when my fate could have become completely different if I had not had the courage to let go of the rope holding me to the shores of my old life.

Raggedy Ann and Andy have been popular childrens toys since 1918. When I was about 5, I was given a Raggedy Andy doll. That was nice, and I played with it, but what I really wanted was Raggedy Ann. Of course, I was not allowed that because it was a girl’s toy and I was supposed to be a boy.

Cue forward a few decades. Last week I had a longstanding emotional blockage, one I didn’t even realize was there, suddenly get freed up and in response a flood of memories from my childhood came to mind again. That’s actually part of why I started this blog. One of those memories was wanting Raggedy Ann. So I decided “better late than never” and got online and ordered one. She was delivered today and I jumped up and down and squealed for joy when I opened the package.

Ann has been sitting in my lap all day long and I’ve been carrying her around the house with me. The deprived 5 year old girl inside me is deprived no longer.

I transitioned in the 1990’s. Despite there being no legal protections back then, and no gender affirming care for minors, in many ways things were easier at that time because most of society just didn’t even know we existed, and when they would find out, for the most part they didn’t care. Today, though, there is an international movement to oppress us through the law and we are attacked nearly every day by transphobic politicians and activists. Today’s generation of people just coming to terms with their gender face a very hostile environment and have difficult obstacles to overcome. That is why I got back in touch with the trans community a few years ago after being absent from it for two decades. I thought that given all that is going on the transitioners of today could use the moral support of someone who’s been through everything already and come out the other side happier and healthier than before.

To that end I joined a Discord server for trans folk in my city and after a while I became a moderator for the server. Most of the time we just chat about random things, but when someone has an emotional crisis, as happens on a regular basis, I do my best to provide comfort and what wisdom I have to offer to help people get through the bad times.

A few days ago, someone actually brought all this up and thanked me for what I do, and said that I was an inspiration to her and showed her that all she is going through really is worth the effort. Several other people echoed her sentiments after that. I felt very humbled, but also grateful to know that my efforts have not been in vain.

So what about you, trans elder out there in the wilds of the Internet? How long has it been since you attended a support group meeting or talked to newly hatched eggs? You may think you have nothing to gain from getting involved in that community again, but I assure you that you do have something to give! Your simple presence would provide a visible example of what these new transitioners could acheive. Your presence would help to assure them that their efforts are not in vain, that the struggle is worth the effort and the pain, because beyond those things lies joy and self fulfillment.

And you may, like me, find that you do still have things to learn, yourself. Watching these young men and women come to know themselves has inspired me to do my own soul searching, and I’ve opened up parts of me that I didn’t even know were still locked away. This past week I’ve even been experiencing something that I hadn’t felt in a long time: real gender euphoria! I feel wonderful and amazed about who I am now, and I feel incredibly grateful for everything I’ve become.

So please, consider spending some of your free time talking to the current generation of transitioners. They could use your help, and you might find that you can use theirs as well. Our community doesn’t have to be fleeting, as I wrote earlier. A true community has it’s youth, it’s adults, and it’s elders and the trans community would be so much stronger if it followed the same model.

Last time I wrote about how I came to finally understand that I wanted to be a girl, and I’ve previously written about how I learned not to tell people about my attraction to girl things. Now we come to a really pivotal moment when I was finally exposed.

One evening late in my 8th grade year, my mother came to me with an angry look on her face. She told me to follow her, and I knew I was in trouble. She led me to the bathroom and then pulled up the carpet in the bottom of the closet, under which I had laid flat my hidden stash of women’s clothes. Normally there was so much junk covering the carpet that the bulge wasn’t visible, but somehow she had found it. I was in shock. I had been fearing this moment for 3 years and it had finally come.

She asked me why I had all this and I just stammered and started to cry. She asked me if I liked wearing women’s clothing and I nodded my head yes. She asked bluntly if I wanted to be a girl, and I whispered “sometimes”. I didn’t want to say it out loud, but being asked directly I just couldn’t deny it, especially not after my clothing stash had been found. She sent me to my room and I went to bed early feeling absolutely terrified by what was to come.

The next day my parents called around and found a child psychologist to send me to. They wanted me “cured”. I ended up going there once a week for a few weeks talking to a therapist telling him little bits and pieces of my story, but mostly trying to avoid doing so. After a few sessions of this he asked me if I still wanted to be a girl. This was my chance. I could have told him, and maybe it would have gone well. I didn’t know it at the time but he was actually not transphobic, though he did adhere to the orthodoxy of the time which would have precluded all gender affirming care for children.

But all I saw was an opportunity to appease my parents, get out of therapy, and go back into hiding, so I told him that I didn’t want to be a girl any more. That satisfied him and my parents and they stopped sending me to him.

I became deeply repressed at that point and genuinely tried to be a boy for at least a few months after that, but of course, it could not last.

That summer I turned 13 and in the fall I started high school. I was now in classes with completely different people, except for band. Most of the band kids got into the high school band, too. Band, it turned out, made my gender envy come back. There were two bands, an upper and lower band, but both bands combined together to form the marching band during the fall football season. As we practiced I started noticing the flute players. They were all girls, and for some reason they had a particular gait to the way they marched that made them sway their hips forward and backward a lot more than the other kids. I was fascinated by it and I found myself trying to walk like that when I was alone, because the fear of my parents was wearing off again and I was starting to envy girls once more.

There were also flag twirlers who practiced with the band, and the flag twirlers were all girls. At the first football game I finally got to see their uniforms, and lo and behold they wore long skirts. I was so jealous! They got to wear those amazing skirts while I had to wear a stupid looking pseudo military uniform. Our drum major also wore a skirt, and I envied her too!

And then there was the drill team! They were a dance team, and again all girls – there was no dance instruction for boys at that school. The drill team actually wore miniskirts and cute little vests and hats, and they all had their make-up done up in the same exagerated fashion (to make it visible from a distance I think). And sometimes the band at the games would call out “Hey drill team, how do you feel?” and the drill team would all do a little clapping dance and respond “we feel good! Aww we feel so good! Wooo!” I so much wanted to do that with them!

Why were there so many beautiful things around me that I was excluded from just beause people wanted me to be a boy? I hated it.

After football season ended it was time for concert season. We did two concerts a year, one in December and the other in May. Again, we were issued uniforms and I got a stupid fake tuxedo looking thing, while the girls all had floor length black dresses. Once again I was filled with envy.

One time, though I actually found myself alone in the uniform storage room after school and I realized I had an opportunity. I made sure no one else was around, and then … I put on a flag twirlers skirt. It made me feel ecstatic! I did a spin and made the skirt flare outward and it was amazing! But then I got scared that someone would come in and see me, so I hung the skirt back up again quickly. But there was one more thing to do before I left. I found a concert dress in my size and I stuffed it into my French horn case (I had switched instruments). I took that dress home – stole it, really – and started a new stash of clothing in a different location. I was back in business!

Throughout high school I kept on building up my stash of clothes until I got caught again, though that time I had two stashes and only one was found. This actually happened a third time during my high school years, but the second and third time I did not get sent to a shrink again, thankfully.

One time, when I was 16 or 17 and after I had gotten a drivers license, I got dressed up as best I could, which wasn’t very, and snuck out of the house at 4 am. I drove around for a while just enjoying being out of the house as a girl finally. At one point I came across an all night grocery store, so I screwed up my courage and went inside to look for make-up to buy. I picked out some blusher, and I think lipstick. The young man at the checkout counter saw through me of course, and sneered at me, but otherwise didn’t say anything. So with my cheeks red from embarassment, I paid for my things and left the store. I had successfully gone shopping dressed as a girl for the first time ever! I was so proud of myself!

Also about that time my friends gave me my first exposure to anime and got me watching Robotech, the Americanized version of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and a couple of other anime TV shows from Japan. I fell in love with the character of Lisa Hayes. And then I realized that some of the clothes I had access to looked a bit like her uniform in the show, so I made my own version of a Lisa Hayes outfit. My first, and really only, cosplay. I loved that outfit. I so much wanted to be Lisa and I was rooting for her in the Lisa, Rick, Minmei love triangle of the show.

During my late high school years, me and some other students got together and formed a school sponsored Dungeons & Dragons club. It was mostly boys, but there were a couple of girls in it too. And then there was K. K was a boy, but acted very feminine and always played female characters in games. K really got into those roles too, flirting with other players and playing up the character’s sex appeal. I was really fascinated by this but also disturbed because I was astounded that someone would be so open about playing with gender roles like that.

One night I drove K home after a club meeting. We chatted a bit on the way and I wanted to ask K if “he” wanted to be a girl like I did. I almost came out, but I chickened out. This was a sadly missed opportunity, because years later after I had started my own transition we met again through a mutual friend and it turned out that yes, K was trans and had already transitioned before me and changed her name. I missed my only opportunity to get to know another trans girl in high school.

During my sophomore year I also started occasionally doing something risky. Since being in the marching band meant I did not have to take PE classes, there was no time of the school day when I ever had to change clothes in front of anyone. So I started wearing women’s underwear to school, and knee high stockings under my socks. No one ever saw anything, and it made me feel more comfortable.

But during high school I also found myself avoiding doing something that everyone else was doing: dating. There were two girls I was actually attracted to in high school, but in both cases I was too afraid to say or do anything. I especially felt like I would be lying to them in a way if I went on a date with either of them, because they would be expecting to date a boy, and I knew inside that I wasn’t a boy. I didn’t yet really have any concept of being a lesbian, so I just ended up avoiding dating completely during high school. In fact, I didn’t end up going on my first date until I was 29 after I had gender reassignment surgery.

And during my high school years my grades went steadily down each year because of my growing depression caused by gender dysphoria, a term that I don’t think had even been invented at that point. I was in the honors classes, and as a freshman I got mostly A’s. As a sophomore I got mostly B’s. My junior year was mostly C’s, and by my senior year I was getting D’s. I was becoming more and more withdrawn and isolated, wiith fewer friends as time went by, and I spent more time at home crying alone in my bedroom as the years passed.

All of this was finally going to come to head in my second year at college, but I will save that for the next post in this series.