Continuiing to read my old diaries, I am up to the first entry after my surgery. It marks an important milestone: the end of body dysmorphia.

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Wednesday, January 28, 1998

On Monday, January 19, 1998, I was reborn – I finally had the surgery and the old male genitalia are gone and replaced with what is, at least to appearances, female genitalia.

It’s about time!

It’s been such a long journey getting to this point, and at first I didn’t really react. Perhaps it was the pain medication which kept me mostly asleep and drowsy while I was in the hospital over the next few days (until Friday), but I never even thought to look at myself in the mirror to see what I looked like, although if I had looked at that point all I would have seen would have been the outer bandages.

Those were removed on Friday when I returned to the residence, but it wasn’t until Saturday that I actually looked at myself in the mirror for the first time. The stent was still in and the vagina sewn shut, but I could see the vulva at least (extremely swollen) and my reaction was more of a non-reaction – “It’s just me”.

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“It’s just me.” For the first time ever in my life, I saw my naked reflection in a mirror and recognized it as being me and only me with no qualifications. Always before that I saw someone I didn’t recognize as myself, or I saw me, but with an alien Thing dangling between my legs like some sort of parasite feeding off my body. But the Thing was gone. There was nothing alien about my body any more. It looked right and it felt right, a feeling I’d never known before.

I was surprised at not being more emotional in my reaction. It seems like I should have been experiencing ecstasy at that moment, but instead I had a brand new feeling: normalcy.

“It’s just me”

In my continuing re-read of my old diaries I just came across one describing my experience with conversion therapy. Not as bad as many people have experienced, but it still hurt me in ways that have been with me for decades. It taught me not to trust people, something I still have trouble with even today.

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April 20, 1996, Saturday

…I have never dealt with my own experience with the medical communitys attempts to “correct” my gender “aberrant” behavior.

When my parents found my stash of clothing when I was – I don’t remember exactly how old I was – in junior high, they took me to see M. A. the first time.

I don’t remember much about the time that I saw him except that I was scared. I didn’t trust M. or Dr. P. and all I really wanted was for the “treatment” to end.

So I ended it.

I told them that I would never “crossdress” again.

As I spoke the words I knew that it was a lie. Mother had come into my bedroom to ask me if I thought I was ready to stop seeing M. She said that I could stop if I wouldn’t wear women’s clothing anymore. So I immediately saw my escape and swore that I would never wear women’s clothing again.

Of course, as I said this I was wearing a pair of Mother’s socks.

That night is burned forever in my mind because I learned two very important lessons: trust no one, and lying works. By foreswearing to things that I value so highly now, I was able to end the psychological torture to which I had been subjected.

They made me hate myself!

They put shame into me and tried to make me forsake my true identity!

They told me that what I was doing was wrong and that I had to stop. They told me that if I didn’t stop that I’d have lots of problems and people wouldn’t like me because “they wouldn’t understand”. They told me that I wouldn’t be able to get a job when I grew up and that my life would be miserable.

I don’t remember a lot about my sessions with M. except that he took notes on a pad and that he (sometimes at least) sat between me and the door, making me feel trapped.

I was forced to attend those sessions against my will; all I ever wanted was to live my life in the way that made me happy, the way that let me be my true self, as a woman. For although at the time [I] usually would deny that I wanted to be female (the thought of being so different scared me) I would have been wearing women’s clothing all the time if I could have. I would have lived as a woman even while denying that I was one, until one day I would finally accept myself.

But instead my parents – and M. and Dr. P. – gave me the gifts of fear, mistrust, and self-loathing.

And I’m still trying to recover.

This is an excerpt from my diary describing my second time being out with other trans folk. There was a dance at a church, and afterwards some of the people invited me to go to a lesbian bar with them. The simple act of someone saying goodnight to me at the end of the night shattered my mind.

FYI Sarah is my first name.

Typos are in the original.

-- I am Sarah.

That’s simple statement is one that carries a tremendous emotional impact. It’s just three words, but those words convey all my hopes and fears and dreams and nightmares, and wonder.

Before Saturday I had some questions as to how true that statement is. Even during the course of the day and night I had my doubts. But thourghout the evening — even as nervous and unsure of myself as I was — even then I knew I would be coming back. And all my doubts were shattered into a myriad of unrecognizable pieces when Wendy said, at the end of the night, “Goodnight Sarah.”

No magic, no science, no endless patience of a thousand Buddhas could ever hope to reassemble that doubt. It may be that some small part of it might be temporarily pieced together for a while — enough to make me question myself for a brief while, but no permanent resurrection of a desire to be male could ever occur in me after that one statement.

"Goodnight Sarah."

When she said that, it was like I was running along — running away from who I am — and suddenly I ran out into a pond. For the first second or two I didn’t notice the water; I just said goodnight, in return. Then the force of the water pushing against me rose in force and overwhelmed me. I started to cry. I didn’t cry much; at that point I still had my emotions in the box, but the lid was straining, and a few things were starting to leak out.

Now just thinking about it make me cry. I just started crying again. I hope I don’t short out my keyboard. Ha ha.

But I made myself stop, because I can’t let people see me crying. If someone sees me, then they’ll ask why I’m crying, and then I’d either wind up telling them (if they’re persistent, or I’ll rouse suspicion and rumors will start flying.

"Goodnight Sarah."

This one is unusual. A cold case of a woman who was found dead 37 years ago has been updated as she has finally been identified. Pamela Leigh Walton was found dead in 1988 near Orlando, Florida.

Say her name.

Body of ‘Julie Doe’ finally identified as transgender woman Pamela Leigh Walton after 37 years

I’ve started reading my old diaries, which begin the day my egg cracked. Those first entries are from April and May of 1989 and describe the shopping trip I made as a woman where everything just clicked in place for me and I had such a wonderful time that I realized this was what I was meant to be. Then in the immediate days after that I did research on transsexualism at the university libraries and also came out to my roommate, who was very graciously accepting of me.

Then I ended up coming out to my family. I had written a letter to my mother asking her for more information about my childhood and saying that I was feeling desperate. She actually drove across the state to come and see me in person because of that, so I cautiously came out a bit. My father then joined us and I came out completely to them. To my great joy they did not reject me. Since my college grades were really bad, we decided it would be best for me to come back to live at home and transfer to a local university, and they would help me find a therapist.

The next diary entries cover 1989-1993 and the first couple of months of 1994. There were lots of entries celebrating little gender affirming moments, and there were lots of recorded dreams. The dreams mostly centered on gender themes.

The dreams usually involved at least two versions of me, one male and one female. Sadly, “my” part was usually the male one and the female part often did not speak at all. The female me was often represented as emotionally and mentally hurt in some way. In one of the most memorable dreams I called her the Psychotic Woman. Inevitably in these dreams the two of us would start out fighting each other or at least not trusting each other. By the end of the dream, though, I would have convinced female me to be my lover and we run away together trying to escape the crowd of people that now wants to kill us both. This dream pattern repeats itself in many forms through many dreams.

The other thing about my diary is that there are two gaps of almost a year each. for 1992 and 1993 I have only a few entries for each year, and those entries say something along the lines of “I don’t want to be a woman anymore”. The pressure from my family would get to me and I’d repress myself again.

cw: mention of suicide attempt, but not my own in the next paragraph.

In 1993 there is a brief rediscovery of my womanhood that results in a big argument with my family when they find out, and then the very next day after that argument my mother made a half hearted attempt at suicide, with a note and everything. That seems to have driven me back into repression.

There are also several entries in my diary where I question exactly how gender variant I am. In one I talk about how ideally the male and female in me should be balanced, something which today I’d call non-binary. In another entry I speculate that I might be happy are a very feminine man in a way that today would be called a femboy. In another entry I wonder if I could be a gay man, but I reject that because I just could not ever imagine myself wanting to have sex as a man. But every time this comes up I always revert back to “I am a woman”.

So now it’s own to my 1994 diary which is when I had graduated college and I finally committed myself to transition.

Another trans woman has been killed, this time by cops who she called for protection.

Remember Linda Becerra Moran. Say her name!

A trans sex worker called 911 to report being kidnapped. LAPD officers shot and killed her

I’m reading my old diaries again , written the day my egg broke and the following few weeks, and I was reminded of a couple of interesting this about myself back then.

First, in junior high I developed an alternate identity. Not as in being plural, but more of a fantasy to help me escape from real life. I decided that I was really from Middle-earth and that somehow my soul was trapped in a body here. Sometimes my alter ego was male, sometimes female. I even thought myself to be Arwen from the Lord of the Rings at times.

The other thing is that in my college years I felt that the rational part of my mind was personified as Reason. Capital R and that being the name I gave to this part of me. Reason even talked to me as an independent person and I wrote about him several times in my diary over the years.

Now I’m not saying I was ever a plural system, but I think I clearly was dissociating as a coping mechanism to deal with being trans. I’m wondering what other insights into my past self I’ll have as I continue reading my old diaries.

This goes out to all the women in the world and that includes trans women! We are women too, so this is also our day!

One of the things that transphobes like to say is that gender can’t be changed. They cliam that if you are born male you will always be male and if you are born female you will always be female. And you know what? I agree with those statements, but I don’t think the transphobes really understand the true meaning of them.

Transphobes, of course, think that birth genitals determine a person’s gender. Heck, they even believe that when an intersex child is born with ambiguous genitalia that the parents have a right to pick the gender they want the child to be and that plastic surgery to alter the birth genitals somehow magically confers a particular gender on the baby. To transphobes, gender is just something society assigns to you and then you are never allowed to question it for the rest of your life.

But of course, reality is more complex than that. Intersex people are not mere aberrations to be arbitrarily forced into one of two categories, and even more importantly gender is not actually inextricable from genitals. There are plenty of people whose gender does not align with their genitals, because gender is one’s own sense of identity, and it’s seat is in the brain. Sure, most people’s gender lines up with their genitals, hence the confusion of the two by so many cis gendered people, but every trans person, every non-binary person, and every genderfluid person is a living example of how gender and genitals can be out of sync with each other.

But can gender actually be changed? Well, genitals certainly can be changed, so there is that. We have pretty darn good surgical techniques available, at least for trans women, and trans men also have surgical options available, though they sadly are not as advanced. What about the brain, though? Can the brain be changed to alter someone’s gender? This is a subject of ongoing argument. I won’t grace it with the word “debate” because the side that argues it can be done, the conversion therapy supporters, really have no evidence on their side. Just like with gay conversion attempts, people who undergo gender conversion have a strong tendency to convert back to being trans again. The brain will not be denied.

So gender, in the brain, seems to be unchangeable. Something you are born with. Here, I am thinking that non-binary and genderfluid, are themselves valid genders just as male and female are, and when a genderfluid person “switches” from male to female or vice versa, I don’t actually classify that as a change because they still remain genderfluid. Also, I am not discounting the fact that many trans people question their gender in their egg phase. I see that more as a process of self discovery and overcoming societal training to be their assigned gender, rather than as a process of changing gender. I went through that process myself, of course.

Now, this is obviously not a rigorous scientific argument. That’s not my interest here. I’m really more concerned with the moral implications. If, as I assert, gender is truly in the brain and cannot be changed, then conversion therapy must be seen as a kind of psychological abuse and banned, with those practicing it being punished. That leaves us with transition, both social and medical, as the only rational response to being transgender.

So there’s my rejoinder to the transphobes: gender can’t be changed, so the transphobes are the ones who need to stop trying to change people’s gender. We trans folk are simply doing the most logical thing when we transition, and we deserve the full support of society in this.

Postscript: After posting this I came across an article discussing the known physical differences in the brains of trans people versus cis people. It’s worth reading.

What Science Says About Transgender Identity and the Brain

Let’s face it: the news is a grim read for trans people right now. Every day we hear about some new executive order or piece of legislation targetting us and trying to strip us of our rights, and we have damn few rights to begin with. Whether it’s sports bans as in one of Trump’s EOs or the just failed bill in the US Senate, or whether it’s Texas House Bill 3399 which wants to ban all gender affirming health care for all people, the things being reported in the news are the stuff of nightmares for trans people and can cause us to become seriously depressed if we aren’t careful.

After the US Presidential election in November I myself went into an emotional tail spin where every day just made me feel worse. It seemed that my country had voted for fascism. (Note: it did.) After that, the hits just kept coming, day after day as the news reported more of Trump’s cabinet picks and plans for EOs and legislation. By the time his innauguration came I was extremely stressed out, so much so that the tiniest of things could set me off. The breaking point came one day when I was cooking. I accidentally dropped the lid of a pan on the counter and I lost control of myself for a moment. I took a metal ladle and smashed the glass touch controls of my oven.

After that I realized I had to do something, so I got in the most politically oriented Discord server of mine, where I was an admin, and I let the other admins know that I would be taking a break for my mental health. Then I muted the whole server. I muted the political and news channels in every other server I was in. On my Mastodon account, I set up a masssive filter for keywords associated with negative things so that I would not see them automatically any more. That last actually hid more than half of the posts I was seeing.

I spent a week just completely avoiding all news and only letting myself see positive things. And it worked. I started feeling much better. I became calm again. I did have to replace the oven, but c’est la vie. Life began to return to normal for me. After that first week I started allowing myself to see LGBT related news once more. The negativity was still there, but I was feeling better now, and not getting nearly as much negative news as before, so I was able to handle it.

And that’s where I am today. I let myself see LGBT news, but rarely peek at the news in general. I do see a bit of it since I took up my Discord admin and mod duties again, but now I look in those channels much less often and prefer to wait for someone to complain that the conversation is getting heated and needs a moderator to step in. I’m better able to do that now that I’m not on the verge of screaming and crying all the time.

So to everyone out there struggling to deal with the news, I suggest you do something like I did. First, just take a break from all the negative news of any kind. Give yourself time to decompress and let go of the stress. If something extraordinarily urgent happens, your friends will tell you. Anything else can wait for you to be in a better frame of mind.

Then, when you are ready, pick one topic of news that is most important to you and start following that, while still avoiding the rest. You need to take on only as much negativity as you can handle without the stress eating you alive. Maybe later still, if you are handling things well, you can do a weekly check for the general news and get a whole week in summary. Having only part of one day be stressful is better than having lots of stressors that continually recur day after day.