Someone in a trans support Discord server commented how sad it was to see so many people leaving the community. She felt like she was losing her friends. This is what I wrote in response.

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It was like that in the 90’s too. It’s just the nature of the trans community. It is fleeting. People come in when their egg cracks and they need advice, comfort, and to be in the company of other trans people who will accept them unconditionally and actually understand what they are going through.

But we all move forward. We get HRT. We get electrolysis, or maybe grow a beard. We start living as our true selves 24 hours a day. Gradually, over the course of a few years, we get our lives in order with help from our trans siblings, and once our transition is complete, or at least complete enough, we find that we no longer need that kind of intense community support. The pain of dysphoria has receded.

That pain, though, pain shared with others, is what binds the community together. It’s what brings us together in the first place, and once it’s gone, we start seeking community based on actual shared interests: music, religion, jobs, art – the same kinds of things that bring cis people together. We may keep some friends from the trans community, people we’ve bonded with over things other than being trans, but mostly we find ourselves moving on into the wider world.

After my surgery, for example, I no longer really got anything out of attending support group meetings. I was starting to make friends in the Irish music scene, and the pagan community though. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I just stopped going to support group meetings. It wasn’t really a conscious choice, it was just that my world had opened up to other things, the things that really brought me joy, and I no longer had time to focus on the pain of others that I no longer experienced myself.

The trans community is one where we are brought together by shared pain, and we only stay in that community while the pain lasts. Some people, like me, might eventually come back. Honestly, the reason I’m here is because looking at all the anti-trans sentiment going on even a few years ago made me realize that younger trans people were starting to have a very rough time of things. I decided that given where I was in my life, that I had the time, money, and emotional energy to give back and try to help newly cracked eggs and others still on the journey. That’s how I ended up here.

So when someone leaves the community, it may make you sad, but remind yourself that it means that person has finally been able to move beyond the pain that comes from being trans and is now able to find joy simply in living their own life. And some day, you will too.

A small happy memory for me. When I was about 5 I had very long, thick eyelashes framing bright blue eyes. One day when I was visiting her, my grandmother commented on them and told me “Your eyes are too pretty for a boy. You should have been a girl!”

She was more right than she knew.

But not more right than she ever knew. When I was 25 I finally came out to her. I was terrified, but I was starting my transition and wouldn’t be able to hide it any more. I told her “I want to be a girl”. She looked at me and simply said “I know.” She had figured it out on her own, but gave me time to work through my feelings and come to her about it, and she accepted me.

Thank you, Grandmother, for being there and loving me for who I really am.

Back when I was transitioning people would ask me how I knew I was trans. That’s the kind of question that all trans people get asked. For me it was difficult to answer, and it still is something that I think about from time to time. Lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot because I had something happen that gave me a real sense of gender euphoria for the first time in decades. I won’t go into that now, but I would like to talk about my early memories and how I eventually came to realize that I was trans.

The first thing to note is that I did not realize I was trans until I was 20 and at college. It’s not that I didn’t know I wanted to be a girl, it’s just that I never really knew anything about trans people and I had no language to describe what I was feeling. When my egg cracked in the spring of 1989 I desperately needed to learn more, so I went to the library on campus. I knew the word “transsexual” from advertisements of daytime talk shows, like Phil Donohue and Jerry Springer, shows that I had always avoided watching because the thought of watching transsexuals disturbed me for some reason I did not understand. When I got to the library I went to the card catalog (there were no computers yet) and looked up “transsexual”. There was one entry that I found that caught my eye, a book called “The Transsexual Phenomenon” by Dr. Harry Benjamin. Reading that book finally gave me a name for myself, and that is when I knew I was trans.

But what about before that? What about in childhood? In my childhood years I didn’t think there was anything different about me. People said I was a boy, so I thought I was. But there were definite signs, anyway. I remember a time when I was about 5 years old. I got a pair of my mother’s boots one night when she was at work (she was a singer) and I went in the bathroom to play. I pretended I was a super spy or something trying to stop an evil villain. But the villain could magically change my sex and every time I got close to him he would do so to delay me. I would put on the boots and say out loud “oh no I’m turning into a girl!” Then I would go after the villain again and he’d turn me back and I’d take the boots off. It was just innocent play, right?

In the next couple of years I remember another pair of incidents where I wanted to do things that weren’t considered gender appropriate. One time when I was visiting my grandparents I went out to play with the other kids in their neighborhood. A bunch of us decided to play family, and the oldest of us, a girl named Toni, was going to be the mommy. I confidently announced that I would be the daughter. Toni told me no! She said I had to be the daddy! I argued with her but she was insistent, so I let it go and played the daddy. I figured I could just be the daughter next time, or something.

There was another girl in that group who lived across the street from my grandparents and she had an enormous hand made doll house in the living room that her father had built for her. Whenever I saw it I so much wanted to play with it. Finally one day I asked her if we could do so, but sadly she said she had decided she was too old for that (she was 7 or 8 at most) and so I never did get to play dolls with her.

Another early memory is something my grandmother said to me. When I was a child I had really thick and long eyelashes. One day she commented on that and said that my eyes were too pretty for a boy and that I should have been a girl. That made me feel really happy!

I don’t realy have any other gender related memories from the first decade of my life, but there is one very crucial memory from when I was 10 years old. At the time I lived next to a family with two boys. One, call him K, was a year older than me, and his brother, B, was a year younger than me. We hung out and played together a lot. One day we went into the store room off the car port of the house and started digging through the boxes in there just to see what we could find. I found a box with a small plastic footbal, a sweater with a school letter on it, some pom-poms, and a cheerleader uniform. I think they belonged to my older sister in junior high. Seeing those gave me an idea. Let’s play dress up!

So I gave the football and sweater to K and told him to put on the sweater and be the football player who just scored a touchdown. Meanwhile I put on the cheerleader outfit and I was going to be his girlfriend. I even remember stuffing the top of the outfit to give myself the appearance of having breasts. K went along with it and was laughing and seemed to be having fun, while B got this weird look on his face that I didn’t quite understand, though it was clear he thought this was not a fun game. So there I am dancing and cheering and I’m all psyched up to give the football player a kiss to celebrate winning the big game, when suddenly, a different older sister walked into the room.

I looked at her and she had a shocked look on her face. You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed. She looked at me and said in a very demeaning tone of voice “I won’t tell anyone about this. Your mother is looking for you” and then she left. I felt devastated. I didn’t know why, but I clearly got the message that dressing up as a cheerleader was apparently wrong. And not just wrong, but Very Seriously Wrong. So wrong and so terrible that even talking about it was a bad idea. It was in that moment that learned a new emotion: shame.

I was ashamed. I didn’t know why I should be ashamed of wanting to be a cheerleader, but it was clear that I should be ashamed and that I should never tell anyone about it, ever. I had learned that I had to hide my true feelings from other people or I would get in very bad trouble for it.

K and B and I silently put everything away and they went home. As for what happened the rest of the day I don’t have any memory. I just crashed into a deep fear and a bad feeling and I went numb. This was probably my first experience with depression, too, which would later become a defining feature of my life.

When I was a child I did not know I was trans. I knew I liked playing with girls and doing girl things, but I didn’t ever really get a chance to do so because for some reason no one ever wanted to do that with me. And then came that fateful day when someone finally let me know that she did not approve of me wanting to play as a girl and that I would get in severe trouble if I did.

I didn’t yet know I was trans, and I didn’t even consciously know I wanted to be a girl. All I knew was that being girly was dangerous, and I should be ashamed of it. That was the most important lesson I ever learned in my early childhood and it left me scarred for life.

Next, I’ll write about my pre-teen years.

Hi! Call me Moriel. That’s not my real name, but I’ve decided recently that as dangerous as the United States is becoming for trans people that I should try to avoid using my real name online when discussing transgender issues. That’s the sad reality of the US today.

That said, I will be spending pretty much all my time here discussing trans issues: my own personal story as much as I’m willing to tell it, news about transgender rights, and thoughts on being trans in general

So who am I? Well, I’m getting older, in my 50’s. I’m a trans woman. I transitioned in the 90’s, so it’s been a while for me. I’m mostly lesbian, though I’ve dated a couple of men before and enjoyed it. I’m a computer geek. I’m a gamer, both tabletop and computer games. I like to read books. I am an amateur musician, though not a very good one. I’m learning how to sew. I also am a moderator on a trans Discord server and end up spending a fair bit of time talking to younger trans people and trying to help them navigate transition and survive as best they can.

I am also on Mastodon as @Moriel, which is linked in the page footer, below. In fact, Mastodon is kind of why I set up this blog. My server is not customized, so it has a 500 character limit on posts, which I find very frustrating, so this blog is where I’m going to post things that are too long for a single Mastodon post.

Hi!

I’m Moriel and I’m a trans lesbian trying to survive in the new, dangerous climate of the United States. I’ll be avoiding saying things that would identify me, but I will nonetheless be using this blog to share my own thoughts on being trans and making it through these difficult times. I hope I can help other trans people feel a bit more hope and comfort along the way.