The essence of this diary is really contained in the title: I'm trans (male), and I'm coming out. Also, I'm gay. If you find either of the above statements offensive, immoral, or in any way bothersome, or if you are irritated or bored by personal diaries, I'd like to respectfully request that you return to browsing the many less squicky diaries this site has to offer, because I'm going to spend the rest of this one telling my story. Thank you!
If you're unfamiliar with transsexuality or trans* vocabulary, you can find a nice Trans 101 primer here at T-Vox.
And thanks to those who are still here.
There are those who would say that the 'standard' autobiographical trans narrative coming-out story has been done to death, and they may be right. Mine isn't particularly unusual. But then, there might be a reason why so many different people keep telling what sounds like the same story. Maybe there's value in the sameness.
Ever since my very earliest memories, I've believed I should have been born a boy. Or more simply, at the beginning, that I was a boy. It's hard to pinpoint the precise moment I realized that I was a boy in a girl's body, though, because that realization required a sort of nuanced thinking that young children don't tend to do. I knew, as a four-year-old, that I was a boy. And I also knew that I 'was' a girl. But it took years before I held those ideas in my head at the same time; in the beginning, I simply was a boy when I was being myself, and a girl when I was doing what others expected of me, and I only drew the line if I was asked to wear pink or play with girl toys. Neither of which, thankfully, happened terribly often in the home of my second-wave feminist hippie mother.
Feminism is a double-edged sword for a little trans boy, though. I was an early reader, reading children's novels on my own by kindergarten, and it took no time at all for me to develop a strongly expressed preference for books with male protagonists. My mother, of course, chalked this up to a lack of books with strong female leads, and put herself to all kinds of trouble trying to find better 'girl books,' but to no avail; I just wanted to read about characters I could identify with. I think that was the first experience that triggered resentment of the 'girl' label (rather than mere confusion) for me, and it was a resentment that carried through at least to high school, culminating in a lifelong bitter hatred of Jane Austen.
The labels weren't the only problem. It also became increasingly clear that there was something seriously wrong with my body. Specifically, I was missing some vital parts and had other foreign, uncomfortable ones in their place. I don't really like to think about my body dysphoria very much because I still have to live in this body, but just to put a timeline on it, I started being bothered by it no later than age five or six. I experimented with all number of tubular objects, from toilet paper rolls to tampon applicators, trying to stand and pee; I stuffed my pants with socks fairly often; and by age 10 I was stealing Ace bandages from the medicine cabinet and binding my breasts whenever I thought I could get away with it.
Puberty would have been unmitigated hell if it weren't for the fact that my stepdad came into the picture at around the same time. He's quite possibly the best thing that ever happened to me - he took to me like I was his own kid almost right away, and he treated me like...well, like me, and not any preconceived notion of who I ought to be. He taught me to play baseball, signed me up for Little League, and then barely even questioned why I didn't want to play softball the next year, instead just signing me up for the (formerly all-biological-boys) baseball team. And then he signed up to coach it. He built model rockets with me, let me read his entire science fiction collection, and didn't blink when we went clothes shopping and I wanted to buy my jeans in the men's section too.
I think as a preteen I and a lot of the people around me expected that I'd grow up to be a lesbian (or, from my perspective, a straight man). I was fairly typically masculine for a boy, I played sports, I was physically aggressive, I was shy but not terribly effeminate, and while I never minded wearing dresses for special occasions - I do like shiny, sparkly things - I always preferred fairly loose, boxy, drab-coloured, masculine clothes for day-to-day wear. And I wanted short hair, although I wasn't allowed to have it. I really fit most of the straight boy/young butch lesbian stereotypes. And so it came as a shock to me and probably everyone else when my sexuality began to make itself known and I found myself attracted exclusively to boys.
By that point, I'd found the Internet and I knew the word for what I was. But in the mid-'90s, the Internet was primitive, and there wasn't much information out there for trans people. What little I could find beyond the basic definitions seemed to imply that "true" transsexuals were straight. And it was becoming quite clear that I wasn't straight. Not only that, but boys were attracted to the body that I hated, and teenage hormones demanded that I respond. So I did. I started dressing (very awkwardly) as a girl, dating boys, going to the dances, attempting to dance in high heels, all the while feeling like an impostor but at least an impostor with a shot at getting laid some day.
When all my friends came out as gay during senior year, I came out as bi. Now, I wasn't bi, in any meaningful sense; I think girls are very nice to look at, but that's about as far as it goes, and my experimentation with applied bisexuality in college just made me more confident of that. But I was queer, and I was also far too chicken to try to explain in exactly what way I was queer, so 'bi' seemed like an innocuous label to claim. Sorry, bi folk. I won't misappropriate your label again.
And then, in college, I got pregnant. That's something else I really prefer not to think about anymore. I'll just say I handled it very poorly, ended up giving my daughter up for adoption, and spent the better part of a decade beating myself up over it and doing everything in my power to repress everything else.
And that brings me to where I am today. During the eight years I was repressing everything, I joined the Navy, got married to a Marine, got discharged, and went back to college. And being in college, having my brain be operational again, spending time (online and off) with liberals and such, has sort of opened the floodgates for all of the stuff I've been pretending didn't exist. So yesterday afternoon, I came out to my husband, and last night I told a few close friends. Today, I'm coming out to the internets.
There's just one thing I want to clear up - a misconception that my husband had (actually I'm not quite sure I managed to explain it adequately to him even over an hours-long conversation) and that I have a feeling a lot of people have. Being trans is not about sex, or sexuality. It's not about not thinking my body is attractive. I know it is - hell, when I was trying to pretend to be a girl, I worked as a stripper for a year, and people paid good money to see me naked. I used to be pretty stunning, and even though I'm squishier than I used to be, I don't exactly have a hard time attracting men. Even when I'm wearing men's clothes and binding my breasts and trying very hard not to be of interest.
When I dress like a girl (and am single), I can have almost any guy I want - straight, gay, young, old, military, firefighter, I've done it all. If any decision in my life was made with sex as the driving force, it was the decision I made as a teenager to try to be a girl. And it worked. Being trans - acknowledging, once again, that I am trans - means accepting that far fewer people will be attracted to me if I transition, probably including my own husband, and accepting that as a tradeoff for the ability to be who I am and be comfortable in my own skin.
I don't really regret waiting this long. There are some experiences I wish I'd been able to have, but there are also some experiences I was able to have because I stayed in the closet- I was able to serve in the military, get married, be with my husband whom I love. Those of you who know me on the site know I've always advocated for GLBT issues - of course, I believe that it was the right thing to do, but I think a lot of the fervour behind my advocacy came from the knowledge that if I were living as myself, I would be denied many of the rights and privileges I've enjoyed.