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.

One of the things all trans people look forward to and celebrate are what we call gender affirming moments, little things that happen during the day that make us feel like we truly belong in our true gender and that others accept us without question. One such moment for me came about a year and half after my surgery. The event that precipitated this moment was losing my virginity, which is a whole story in and of itself, and yes, I did remain a virgin until after my surgery – before then I could not stand the thought of using my birth genitals.

So without going into details of the main event, which happened on a Friday night at a large pagan fesitval, the next Monday I went in to work as usual. Well, not exactly as usual. I was feeling on top of the world! I’d had sex for the first time in my life and with a very handsome man who made me feel absolutely wonderful about myself.

At the time I worked in the offices of a large domestic violence shelter, a place where all the employees were women. I walked in and said good morning to everyone, and they all looked at me and one of them said “Well, someone had sex this weekend!” I was stunned and started stammering. I asked how she could tell, and she said that I was glowing and that it was just obvious from looking at me. Everyone else laughed and nodded and I must have turned beet red, but I confirmed it and even said it was my first time ever, which took people by surprise but everyone was so happy for me.

And that little moment of recognition of one woman by another sent my mood soaring even higher than before. Little moments like that stick out in the minds of trans people and let us know that we are doing the right thing. Being recognized and seen by others as the person you truly are is such an amazing experience and I hope everyone can have that in their lives, whether they are trans or not.

TERFs and other transphobes like to claim that trans women aren’t really women in part because we were socialized male, but were we really? I came across a post on Mastodon that made the point that trans girls can experience this attempted socialization very differently from actual males. For us it can, in fact, be a traumatic experience.

For instance, my earliest “male socialization” came in 2nd grade when I first started attending a public school. It was there that the boys started beating me up on a regular basis. I did not know why, either. They just wanted to fight me. I responded by learning how to fight back, but that was because I was literally in danger and needed to be able to defend myself, not because I enjoyed fighting. This physical abuse went on through the end of my 8th grade year when I was 12, and the constant repetition of violent attacks week after week, month after month, year after year didn’t teach me to be some stoic fighter who could stand up against the odds, or some such macho BS like that. What it taught me was that boys were capricious and violent. They enjoyed hurting people and they enjoyed hurting me, in particular. Instead of making me more like a boy, it made me just fear them.

And then there was the “cheerleader” incident when I was 10 that I have written about previously. In that instance I was exposed to some heavy male socialization in the form of my older sister making it clear that I was going to get in trouble for acting like a girl. So yeah, male socialization also meant that I learned to be ashamed of who I am and not let anyone see the real me. I learned that I could not trust anyone. In that regard I guess it had the intended result, but for different reasons than for boys, in that while I learned to hide my feelings, I wasn’t doing it to appear tough, rather I was hiding my feelings because I felt like I’d be punished if I didn’t. In reality I desperately wanted to share my feelings with others.

This came back to me again years later after I’d come out to my parents and before I’d really started my transition. At the time I would frequently break out in tears sitting at my desk at work because life just seemed overwhelming to me and I felt like I’d never be able to transition. I mentioned this to my father one day, for what reason I don’t know, and his response was typical male BS about how I shouldn’t let others see me cry because they’d think I was weak and I might get fired. His response angered me because of its insensitivity and callousness, and since I was out of the closet I felt free to tell him exactly what I thought of his advice and that I was not at all ashamed to be seen crying, because crying was cathartic and helped me deal with my depression. So that “hide your feelings” socialization went away as soon as I was out and didn’t have to worry about exposure any more.

Another big part of male socialization is instilling in the child the belief that males are superior to females. Well, clearly there was no way that would take seed in my mind. I was positively envious of the girls I knew and actively emulated them when I was alone. I wanted to dress like them, walk like them, talk like them. I observed them when I could to try and pick up tips on how I should behave myself. Sadly I didn’t get to be good friends with any of them, because again, there was the fear of being exposed as wanting to be a girl. But I definitely grew up thinking girls were superior to boys in every conceivable way, so that’s another strike against me supposedly being socialized as male.

One aspect of male socialization that gets mentioned sometimes is that boys are encouraged to learn science while girls are discouraged from it. That wasn’t really the case for me, growing up, though. I was in honors classes for some of junior high and all of high school, and in those classes we had lots of very bright young women and the teachers were often accomplished women themselves, so the girls got a fair shake in my classes. 3 of them who I knew and had many classes with even went on to get doctorate degrees: 2 MDs and one PhD. Meanwhile, I never got beyond my BS because of depression.

So, was I socialized male? Well, an attempt was made, but it didn’t really work. I grew up completely disaffected from boys and masculine things, and really envying and identifying with girls, even though I did not get socialized female at all. Sorry, transphobes, but you need to reconsider your position.