Transgender
Content Warning:
Contains mentions of gender dysphoria, body dysmorphia, and transphobia
Hello. My name is Vivian, and I am a trans woman
Transgender?
My gender identity is different than the one that was assigned to me at birth.
From as early as I can remember, people called me a boy, a man.
They made it out like this was a statement of reality. That there was nothing deeper to these ideas. That to question them would be like questioning that the sky was blue. That it was simply a fact that I was a boy.
This "fact" was wrong
Dysphoria
From a young age, I had a sense of what was and wasn't allowed. I learn to repress myself, to disconnect my emotions, to disconnect from myself.
I'd repress and hide any part that people didn't want. I wanted to be good.
I wasn't allowed to be a girl, I wasn't allowed to be feminine.
Even though this identity of being a boy felt wrong... I never was given the chance to question it.
Being a boy was forced upon me.
I learned to live as a boy.
I never asked to be one. Never wanted to play this role, to be perceived this way, to be expected to act in these ways.
I never desired to embody masculinity. Every time that people would push me towards it, I always felt out of place and wrong.
I was forced to pretend to be a boy.
I always felt myself repulsed by the ideas of being masculine. About being in this body, about wearing these clothes, about the ways I was seen.
I hated it, but I felt there was no other way. No way out. I desired escape, but I didn't know where to find it.
I've always been a girl.
I'd search again and again for some spark of dysphoria about being a woman, but... there was never anything. It'd be fine, I wouldn't be dysphoric if I were born a woman.
I felt horribly out of place in my own body. Every push towards the masculine felt wrong, every push towards the feminine felt good.
But I didn't let myself explore that deeper. Because I felt it was out of reach for me.
It wasn't allowed
I knew what transgender people were, but I was so terrified of being hated, of being persecuted, of being despised for who I was... I couldn't let myself think about it.
I was too scared of what I'd uncover if I did.
As I grew up, I researched. I talked to other trans people, I wanted to know about their experiences. I kept looking into them more and more and more, desperate to hear their stories and their experiences. I needed to know more, I was desperate to learn more.
By the end of high school, I'd admit to myself and some others that I identified more with being non-binary than anything masculine.
And yet... I'd still wear those old masculine labels and names. Even though I always disliked them, I felt people wouldn't accept me as anything else. I still felt stuck as a boy.
Questioning
It wasn't until I got to college that I started to pick apart these issues around my gender identity. I was lucky to live with a person that was much more comfortable pushing back against the expectations of gender.
The environment of college, alongside living with someone with a much better relationship with gender, it gave me a space to pick apart how incongruent my presentation was with my sense of identity
Incongruence. That is a good word to describe it. Everything about my gender identity was incongruent. My understanding of my identity was... wrong... malformed... mishapen to fit the masculine I had been provided. I kept trying desperately to make it work, but it just kept not working.
By 2023, I was starting to think a lot about my gender. It became clear to me that I was experiencing gender dysphoria. That the body I had, the way it was perceived, all felt wrong.
By the middle of the year, one day it just... snapped...
One day, I happened to look into those thoughts of femininity one more time and... I realized I had no other choice
If I didn't transition, I was going to die.
I dreamt that night of being a woman, of waking up the next day and that having always been what I was. Of being treated the same as I always had been, but living in that body, in that identity. And it just felt... right. More right in that dream than I had ever felt in my body before
Transition
After this... things were a blur for a while. I knew I was trans, but my process of coming out was split between two worlds.
In the physical world, everything was slow. Over the next year, I slowly bought more feminine clothing, I let my hair grow out. I tried to be more feminine. Every step towards it felt right, but getting myself there was hard.
In the digital world, I transitioned as quickly as I could. A new name, new profile pictures, new furry art, a new online self. It felt good, but I struggled to feel confident in this new identity.
The digital spaces helped with finding myself. But in the physical world, my loathing for my body continued to grow.
The hormones inside my body were causing all sorts of havoc in how my body worked and felt. I began to hate my body more and more. It felt wrong, it wasn't mine, it wouldn't listen to me, it wouldn't do what I wanted it to do. I was stuck inside this thing.
The solution was obvious... but the process of getting there, of committing to this life... it took me a while
By 2024, about a full year after admitting to myself I was transgender, I came out to my family. They were thankfully supportive.
I sought an appointment with Planned Parenthood, and through the informed consent program I started taking feminizing HRT in September. I wrote this little poem about liminality of identity that night before taking the first dose.
I've felt... a lot better these last few months since starting it. There's a lot of stuff I'm still unpacking, all of which you can read through on my blog, heh
I feel less and less like I'm stuck in the body of someone else. I feel like... me... more often than I've ever felt that before
I still have a long way to go. I still have a lot of things to do. A lot of people to come out too. Being myself genuinely and earnestly is... hard. But I'm trying
Transitioning... hurts. It's the best thing I've ever done for myself... but it hurts. At times it feels like I'm dying, that I'll never rise again. But joy demands pain, and as long as I can, I'll get back up again the next day as best I can.
A Promise
There's... a lot more ahead of me. I have a long way to go before I'm living as earnestly as myself as I was in that dream. But I will get there
I won't give in, I won't surrender, I won't back down. And I'll never, ever, go back.