Content warning: Discussion of suicidal ideation
There’s a two-wolves-fighting meme for trans people like me,
who didn’t show much gender nonconformity as young children. “There were no
signs!” Shouts the first wolf, eroding baby trans’s confidence in themself.
“Well,” says the second wolf, “I have a story for you.” She
then describes events shrugged off as nothing special at the time that now seem
ludicrously out of sorts with the cis experience of life. The two wolves are
well at work in my own head.
When I was in middle school I started having these dreams.
It was the first time in my life that I had dreams on a consistent theme night
after night. The details would change, but the substance each time was that my
parents would sit me down around the time I turned 18 (in that distant future
year of 2007) and explain that there was some kind of rare genetic abnormality
in my body. By rights I should be female, but my body expressed as male, they
would tell me. Because of this condition, they’d continue, there was a
treatment that would allow me to become female again, if I wanted to. I’d nod and
accept it. I see now the transfeminine part of my core gasping for breath here.
I’d wake up, and I’d know it wasn’t normal to have these
thoughts. I was embarrassed by them, felt I couldn't forgive myself for having them. I couldn’t dismiss it all by saying “Well, dreams are weird, I guess,”
because it triggered something in me. Some deep pang of longing and envy and a
nauseated sense that something in my life wasn’t right. It was easy
enough to write off those feelings though. I was getting a handle on what
sexual attraction felt like during this time. I was told that people my age lacked
impulse control, common sense, and good decision-making ability. I daydreamed
in class, supposing that the other kids were thinking about leather or rape
fantasies or whatever, while my embarrassing fetish was wondering what life in
a girl’s body would be like and getting giddy and hot at the idea. Unsure what
to do, my mind began putting together coping mechanisms to keep this secret longing
under control.
The coping mechanisms compounded over time. I built an
understanding of myself, one layer of oblivious denial at a time, as someone
interested in but separate from whatever this funny gender stuff was. I latched
on to any details I could find about how I was different from the small number
of trans people in my life, all of whom were conveniently far enough from reach
that I knew virtually nothing about them. My scouring of the internet for
transformation stories and erotica, my equating of self-hate of my body with
attraction to women, the unshakable sense of self-loathing and disgust at
myself, well it’s not like any of that was gender dysphoria, right? The
first wolf’s argument convinced me for many years.
Where does 2021 come into this? Looking back, the first few
months of the year feel like the cruelest hour of a long dark night. Several
times since 2016 I’ve felt like I’d had it with life, and this time it felt
like I really meant it. I quit my job, walking away from a childhood dream I
worked for over a decade to achieve because I just felt numb toward it. I was
snapping at my kids too much. I felt like I’d given life my best shot and had
failed. I’m a rational person. The way I responded to this self-assessment was
rational.
Between March and July of 2021 I can clearly identify at
least three times where I seriously and coolly considered suicide. Numb, numb,
numb. That was how I felt toward it at the time. “It’s not like I was going to do,
anything,” I’d think the day after. Suicide was something other people did. I
was too duty-bound to my family and too chickenshit to do it, I thought. I have
a better understanding now of how wide the range of things I can do is. These
memories terrify me, because I was tickling the tail of a dragon that could’ve
killed me.
I have lived nearly my whole life in the absence of love,
compassion, and forgiveness for myself. These things I offer as readily as I
can to everyone in my life. Not just the people I love. I extend a lot even to
people who I kinda hate. But I was never capable of extending them to myself.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. Contemplating forgiveness of
myself felt like trying to contemplate a square circle. My mind would divide by
zero, and I’d give up.
There is a specific day when this changed: August 5, 2021.
That was the day it clicked. I’d been unconsciously building defense and denial
and coping mechanisms to block myself from realizing who I am for 20 years. I’d
leaned on them, and they felt sturdy. That was the day they broke, and I fell
through, and saw myself as a trans woman for the first time.
The memory’s not that old, but details get corrupted so quickly.
I don’t know exactly how long I stood looking at myself in the mirror, in that
nice blue dress, before I realized how my thinking had changed. It was more
than a few seconds and less than 15 minutes when I realized “Oh. This is what
it feels like to not hate yourself. This is what it feels like to be happy with
who you are.” I smiled, and I liked the person I saw smiling in the mirror for
the first time.
It’s awkward enough that I’m telling you about this. You are
not seeing man-in-a-dress pictures of me until I’m much more secure in
my transition (and if you’re interested in stats, I took six selfies that day).
I’m still a baby trans and need some time to deal with all this. But this is
what happened. It was big. It was important. It changed the trajectory of my
life. And I want to share some of that with you, even if we’ll never really grok
each other.
I don’t mean to make this all about me. I spent way too much
time talking about myself in the family Christmas letter this year. The start
of my gender transition is a huge, important story, one of the critical
chapters of my life, but it’s only one thing that happened this year. There are
other big things. The goodness of Sarah starting her first job as a full
practicing neurologist. The new beginnings of Isaac starting kindergarten and
Mira starting preschool. Writing flowing from me, not yet useful and
publishable (and not necessarily good), but flowing nonetheless.
Then there are the small things. The lovely flashes of
flavor that life is made of. Snow in Seattle on my birthday. Discovering
Formula 1 while watching the wildest race in years with my brother and parents.
Eating barbeque with Sarah and looking longingly across Elliot Bay, knowing we’d
be moving soon. Finding that our new house was one that we can make a home and
love. Walking house to house on a warm Halloween evening (me in a marvelous
pink dress), the children giddy in their costumes. Mira shouting with delight,
gazing at the mouse we caught after a month and a half of trying. My writing
instructor raving about a piece I wrote. Snow again, blanketing the beautiful
Willamette countryside as we journeyed home from Christmas. It’s enough to take
the edge off the bad times. I don’t even mind so much that December was full of
the pain of torn muscles and sprained tendons in my arm.
In all of it, I have labored to be the best spouse and the
best parent I could be. I grew up thinking I’d be a husband and father. That’s
not the case anymore. I don’t quite know how to be a wife and a mother, but I’m
working on it, every day. And when I falter, I find that I can forgive myself
and move on. I’m slowly getting out of a terrible jail, liberated not just to
feel myself but to be the best version of myself.
And, in a lovely way, this extends backwards, too. The second
wolf snuggles up to the first wolf as he pants in rage and fatigue. “It’s okay,”
she says. “I know why you did this. You had to. It was wrong. We know that now.
But you had to. And it’s okay.”
I can’t isolate any one thing and say, “This is why I’m
transitioning.” It’s all related in a complex way that only my intuition really
seems to understand. But this is the most salient single bit I can show you. By
going through this process, by easing my body into softness and letting go of
masculinity so I can carry myself through the world as a woman, I find it in me
to forgive, and to love. If there was nothing else in it, that would be enough.
2021 has been a year that I’ve cherished. I hope you have a good 2022.
