I seen my therapist yesterday and talked to her about what has started to happen at work. I still haven't been approached by anyone, which she says is most likely out of respect, but really I have no idea. What we ended up talking about was how it effected me, how it has shed some light on a few of my own thoughts, feelings and goals.
I mentioned in that post about work that the only good thing about it is that is has shown me how much I want to completely pass. along with that, I have realized on my own, is exactly how I identify myself in the world of cis, trans, gender queer, interesexed, etc. It may not seem obvious, but this is something I have struggled with since coming out as transgender. Before coming out, all I really thought was I was transgender, I had no idea what that meant other then I no longer wanted to pretend I was male, and even less of an idea of how many options I had. I was still more or less stuck in the gender binary world. Since I have come out and started living the life of a transgender individual I have met many different kinds of people, and have learned so much more of the spectrum of gender and sexuality.
My struggle was between my beliefs and my feelings toward myself. It was a simple thing that ignited my personal understanding. Not long ago Facebook implemented a new feature. They now have somewhere around fifty different options for choosing your gender. It is not in a drop down box, that is still left with "male" and "female" but now has a "custom" option. If you start typing it auto-fills with quite a few choices. I took the time to go through as many as I could think of, trans-woman, trans-female, transgender, etc etc. After looking at them all, I did not feel right choosing any of them, the only one that made sense to me, that made me feel like I was selecting something I can identify with was female.
I almost felt like I was betraying friends, and myself. How can I select female when, for one, I am hardly "there", and two I am transgender? I was not born assigned female genitalia and I am currently "riding the fence" so to speak, between genders. I felt like selecting female was a lie, I felt like I was letting my trans friends down by joining the gender binary, and worse of all I felt like I was letting my own beliefs down. I truly believe in the spectrum of sexuality and gender, I could not be the person I am if I didn't hold those beliefs dear. Even deeper then being transgender, I could not be the understanding, open-minded, free thinking individual I am if I did not honestly believe in those things.
Why was it then, that I could not, or desperately did not want to select any of the options that stem from those beliefs?
Besides that, what happened to my own conviction? Do I want to hide who I am? Did I not want to choose something other then female because I wanted to hide the fact that I am transgender? I have told people often I am free and willing to talk about being transgender, does this make me a hypocrite? This is something that my constant battle to pass would make me beat myself up over often. Then that day at work and few days later, all I could think about was how I was not passing, how I was still giving myself away, how people would not always see me as I wanted to be seen, as 100% female.
Then I understood after a few days of turmoil, not including the persistent debate I just mentioned. I finally found in myself why I was having such a debate. Go back and look at the words I just wrote, the worries I had. What am I talking about? I'm talking about what others think, mostly. My own beliefs mostly becoming a problem when I start to think about how others are perceiving them and how they would see the change, if it is even something they can see. It was then, after searching my own feelings, that I realized who I was, and who I want to be.
I am female, I do not want to identify as transgender for the rest of my life. Honestly, saying that I am transgender now even feels a little "dirty" to me, like something I want to clean off of myself. Not because of some trans fear, or something inwardly ignorant, but because that is not how I feel. I have met a number of people that happily identify as trans-something. People that consider themselves as permanently intersex. That is the, I guess label, on where I thought I was obligated to be. I may be splitting hairs here, and the change is a subtle one of my own feelings, truths and goals. To me, saying I am "transgender" is basically describing what I am doing, and telling people of my goals. Maybe I am a little under educated on these terms, maybe that is exactly what transgender means. It may be that carrying this around with me for all this time makes me feel like it is something else, more like intersexed. Whatever the case, to say I am "transgender" feels to me like it tags me as something I am not. I want people to look at me and say "Look at that woman." not "Look at that transgender person."
I take pride and inner strength in what I am doing. To declare myself as transgender to begin with, to start this journey, to carry on in the face of extreme fear, pain and loss, takes courage, and I am even starting to see that for what it is. It is slowly started to surface for me just how much I am putting myself through, just how "mind-blowing" this is to the average person. To me, it is life, to others it is an impossible decision they can not even imagine wanting to, or having to, make.
I want my label (since we live in a world of labels) to be "transitioning female" because that is how I feel. There are times I feel like a pre-teen wanting to "grow-up", and I think that is exactly what I am. I am a young female longing to become a woman. With those sort of feelings toward who I am, it is difficult for me to call myself transgender. Yes I know, I am changing genders but well.. that is according to "you". All of my body parts that suggest I was once male are meaningless to me. They have been used to assign me a gender I could never truly believe, no one ever asked me what gender I wanted to have myself assigned until I started to tell everyone.
It is because of these new revelations in how I feel about who I am, according to me I have come to a decision I thought I would either never make, or be a long time in the making. I have an appointment with my GP this coming week that I made several weeks ago for another reason. I have decided, with as much possible certainty as one can, to tell her to put me on the list for CAMH. For those that do not know, CAMH is a center through which us transitioning women and men can have genital reassignment surgery.
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