On Coming to Terms With Being Trans
By: Mrs. Capricious
Tags: LGBTQ, Autobiography, Transgender, Coming Out, Creative Non Fiction

On Coming to Terms With Being Trans

Source: Lena Balk at Unsplash.com

I've been out as a trans woman now for a meagre fourteen months. Now, I don't know it that means I'm beyond the period when I could safely be described as 'babytrans', but despite it only being a tad over a year I've learned so very much, so very quickly. I was 48 when I came out. I have older trans siblings, for sure. Men, women, and non-binary peeps who came out at a later age even than I, but I think most would consider 48 quite the ripe age for such a monumental revelation about oneself. What can I say, I'm a late bloomer?

If only it were that simple.

Cis-sexist societal norms mean that for trans folx every day is an exercise in conversion therapy. That's not butthurt hyperbole. I knew that I 'wanted' to be a girl certainly as early as six, but perhaps even before that. However, even at that tender age I was already used to the ubiquity of lines like 'Boys don't do that' and 'No, Christopher, that's for girls'. *

Thereafter all of society, my family, my friends, the media, everyone and everything, every organisation I dealt with repeated those lines that underlined their expectation of my role. A role that proceeded directly from a brief glance at my genitalia at birth. It's absurd when you put it like that, huh? But there it is. 48 years of being forced to behave in ways that never felt natural because of what was between my legs.

Problem is, our sense of self does not reside in our generative organs. I didn't consider who I was extending from my groin, but society certainly did. My penis meant I was a 'boy'. I would wear boy clothes. I would do boy things. I would pursue boy interests. I would grow to be a man. And I would damned well respect the lines. The lines, never to be transgressed, between the genders. And respect them I tried. But when someone's identity calls so strongly to other forms of expression, of being, how are we to resist?!

As an aside, from my current perspective, I find it beyond laughable that we so rigidly police gender lines, see for example the meltdown (on those right of centre politically, it might be noted) when Harry Styles was pictured in Vogue wearing a variety of really quite fetching dresses. Take a chill pill. If western civilisation was so fragile the soviets would have been sporting frocks long ago...

October 2019 was when I realised I was transgender. Some five years after the so-called 'Transgender Tipping Point' (thanks for bloody nothing, Time). Trends had nothing to do with it. Increased media visibility had no bearing on me. I don't doubt that for many such increased representation can be catalytic, but that moment had long passed for me. I grew up with endless sitcoms with the idea of a man dressing as a woman being such an endless punchline. With Ace Ventura, and Silence of the Lambs. Those things were not as helpful as one might expect back then.

So why then? If external forces were insufficient to move me what did? How does one come to terms with being transgender?

I can't speak for the entire trans community but I gently suggest that, at whatever age it happens, there's a simple point where it's the only conclusion that fits. It becomes inescapable. An individual Transgender Tipping Point, one might say.

For myself, it happened with the merging of two separate events. A crossdressing friend (now also out as a trans woman and a close trans sister to me) asked of my history with gender variance and being a writer, rather than simply answer the question succinctly on social media, I wrote 10,000 words of autobiography. In doing so I jarred loose decades old memories that I'd buried because I had no rationalisation to offer. My going to work in a wedding dress? Fine. That was for charity. My dressing as a hooker that time? Also fine, it was a costume party after all. But walking my friends dogs, while she was away, fully dressed as a woman at the age of 18? Not so easy to explain. Hell, I couldn't even claim the motive of it being a kink because there was no sexual element to it whatsoever.

The other thing that occurred with pinpoint synchronicity was that I went out for the first time, since that occasion thirty years prior, presenting as a woman. And it was...fine. More than in fact. The simple realisation that I could actually interact with society at large presenting as a woman was an apocalypse. I felt gender euphoria for the first time that day. And when the experiment ended and I had to go back to being 'him' I finally understood gender dysphoria. I was crushed. The pangs in my chest were real, deeply visceral. I'd not known a pain of the like.

As I talked to my friend the next day, a sort of debrief, we discussed my autobiography and mid-conversation it hit me. 'I'm trans'. Quickly followed by 'Oh fuck!' as I realised what this might mean for my life, for my twenty year marriage. Fuck indeed. (Be assured, dear reader, that both my life and marriage are surviving, nay thriving, through my transition).

So for me, it was two things that caused me to come to terms with being trans. One was a catalytic event, something out of the ordinary. And the other was merely acknowledging the weight of evidence I'd accumulated over a lifetime yet buried because cisnormative society insisted I do so. Evidence that ubiquitously yelled that I'm transgender.

Honestly I'm embarrassed now that it took so long for me to come to terms with myself. Recently I started to transcribe some of my earliest fiction attempts from thirty plus years ago and there, in more stories than not, was a central theme of people coming to terms with not being who they thought they were. Duh! I should have, could have known a lot sooner. And of course I regret not transitioning at 18. And why wouldn't I regret that? I've missed out on three decades of living with a comfort I now fully embrace living as a woman. But, better late than never eh?

And that's the point really. Being transgender has massive implications for one's life. It's naturally something we resist, egged on by a cissexist society. And trust me, seeing Laverne Cox in Orange is the New Black was never going to be enough to 'convert' someone to thinking they were trans, not without a hell of a lot else in their life pointing in that direction already. When that evidence builds to a point of decision varies for every trans person. As the saying goes 'If you've met one trans person, you've met one trans person'.

So when's the right time to come to terms with being transgender? When you come to terms with it. And not a moment sooner.