Wishing for a Simpler Time and a Simpler Ignorance
By: Emma Holiday
Tags: Humanity, LGBTQ, Transgender, Society, Life

When we all drank the Kool-Aid.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about my discovery that I was transgender when I turned 61 years of age. It still shocks me even though I have spent almost every minute of every day of the last four years, thinking about it since.

I have reached the point in my journey where I have to decide the final direction of my gender life. At 65 I don’t have an endless amount of time to ponder this question. I have exhausted all of the middle ground solutions for my gender dysphoria and they are not enough.

It is “put up or shut up” time and I am truly afraid.

I have learned a lot about myself in four years since I have started this journey.

I have learned that I was born with a brain wired female into a body that was built male. I have realized that I grew up in a simpler time of the 1950’s and 60’s. The world was uncomplicated; it was either male or female. You didn’t have to think. It was actually frowned upon. The doctor slapped me on the butt, declared my gender at birth, put it on my certificate, and I never looked back. Friends, family and society were satisfied with the decision. I was a little confused, but I suppressed my sense of gender and went on with the rest of my life.

But I wasn’t entirely settled.

As a child I wished I was a girl. I wanted girl things. I was corrected and successfully funneled into “guy” stuff. As I grew older I still day dreamed of being a girl and I wanted girl stuff but I believe that I would eventually outgrow it. I didn’t but I eventually rationalized it as I was simply a guy with a harmless fetish for woman’s clothes. Not perfect but not dangerous and entirely personal and an easy secret to hide.

For the rest of my life I thought the fetish was the source of my constant wish that I was a girl. My defensive wall of gender denial was so cleverly constructed that it took near suicidal panic attacks in my 61th year, followed by years of deep therapy and scathingly intense self-analysis, before I realize I had it backwards.

I did not want to be a girl to satisfy a fetish; I had a desire for feminine things because I was female. My true gender was suppressed by male socialization, gender ignorance and a lifetime saturation of testosterone. I was thunder-struck by this discovery. Suddenly everything in my life clicked into place. I could not deny my reality as much as I desperately tried to. This revelation was destroying everything in my life.

And still, my journey continued. Along the way I discovered Emma. I discovered that I was Emma all my life. She had always been a part of me. She made me who I am. She just never got the credit. She was hidden and denied all these years but the joy of discovering her and finally embracing her has been huge and special for me.

Now comes the hard part, do I stay as I physically am or do I need to see Emma in the mirror every day for the rest of my life? Does she/I need to be seen by others? My decision changes by the second.

At this moment I miss five years ago. It was a simpler time. I had this unknown gender “itch” that was still not a pain. I was happily gender ignorant. I fit in the world I grew up in. It was a blissfully unaware and totally binary and I was totally naïve.

Now my world is filled with a brutally hard decision and I truly don’t know if I have the courage to make it.

I miss the simple ignorance*.

Emma Holiday

*Honestly I really don’t.

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Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.

My writing has three specific goals:

1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.

2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.

3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to simply be understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.