Decrying Gravity

(Divided for fluidity: part 1 safe, part 2 male, part 3 transition, part 4 female)

I've written a great many things, over the course of my years journaling, that have often been quite (if not excruciatingly) personal.  I'm not nearly as daring as some, but, given my social circles, I'd say that I ere on the side of disclosure instead of veiled retention.  But for all that, I've never really written and addressed my gender issues head on.  Part of that is somewhat paranoia; when teaching, it never felt safe to put into traceable words what my gender dysphoria is, what it feels like, what it explicitly means.  And after teaching, I've been all kinds of emotional places that haven't lent themselves to proper distillation.  Now, though, I'm entering into a different phase of transition.  A phase that goes beyond hormones, goes beyond crossing, goes beyond coming out.  This is where it becomes real.  Where I become real.  And that, as much as anything, is my greatest obstacle.

I'll start with a brief narrative, not just because it's how these things go (what is a transgirl without hir story?) but because it's how I process.  There's a conception that transness is the sort of thing a person knows from a very early age.  The boy who wore girls clothing, who always wanted to be with the girls, who played with girls things, who couldn't understand why he couldn't wear a dress to kindergarten.  And, for many people, that's true.  Common, too, is the idea that as adolescence progressed, these transgirls-in-training would wear their female family members' clothing or would transgress norms in various overt ways that signaled "I want to be a female and always have."

I wasn't like that, though.  For whatever reason, I never crossdressed.  I never felt I was "a girl trapped in a male body."  My dysphoria was, perhaps, more subtle.  Instead of crossing, I simply played.  Not house or anything terribly domestic, of course.  When we weren't playing video games during elementary school, my friends and I (usually a few friends, girls, who lived nearby) would essentially role play.  We'd create characters (often anthropomorphic), give them personalities/backgrounds, and run around doing space opera.  I don't know that there was all that much we could do our constructions, but I remember the creation.  I remember it because I remember negotiating gender.  My problem: I wanted to be a girl character.  Almost every time.  But that gets you noticed, and it's unusual even if you're playing with girls.  So I'd barter with myself.  Every three games, every four games I'd get to be a girl.  Just to "try it out."  And it felt invigorating.

I don't know if I ever wondered why I wanted to be a girl.  It just felt right.  And, even today, it's the same: I don't know why, I just know how it feels.  As you can imagine, that's very confusing.  Having an abusive, unpredictable (alcoholic) parent makes it worse.  Feelings are not things you express or count upon; they're what get you into violent situations, get you screamed at, get you punished and cowed and and and.  So you lie.  You put on a mask and you pretend when the parent is around, and when they're not everything rushes out and you're unhappy and terrible.  At least, I was.  My sister was too.  We fluctuated between being bitter, sullen, spoiled brats for our mother and quiet, compliant, passive ghosts for our father.  That is hyperbole, somewhat, but it's not far from the truth either.  The point is, though, that what you want is largely irrelevant; what feels good is a red herring.  What keeps you safe is an entirely different matter.

So I stayed safe.  Safe and terribly unhappy.  I'm sorry this keeps turning into a defense, but it's half for you and half for me.  I've wasted so much time, ignored so many signals, spent far too long doing what made sense instead of what actually felt worth doing.  Doing what kept me safe.  And safety is not happiness; it's survival.  I didn't do much aside from survive until Laura.  And even then, she became my reason and my worth.  I haven't lived yet.  I don't know how to live, in and of myself, for I've always been ethereal, not there, evasive, protected, and ultimately a construct rather an organic entity.

I feel like I have to say this to prove that I'm not crazy.  To make sense of how long I've hidden, how long I've resisted.  I don't know when I first consciously acknowledged that I wanted to be a female.  As recently as last November, I could barely verbalize it.  It seemed insane.  I mean, literally insane.  Why the hell can't be I be ok with who I am? Why can't I say what I mean?  Why can't I accept and and-