Maiden’s Journey

Not something I had really thought about until today but I was responding to a question on Twitter about what the online trans community means to me and I had this realisation of how lonely it can be if you are trans.  I am not out except to one close friend and ally, and I have only had them for about three years. Prior to that I had no one to whom I could share my thoughts and feelings.  The life of a closeted trans person is lonely because of the secrecy.  When I first started to realise that I was looking at girls to imagine what it was like to be them, there was no way I could tell anyone that. At my school in the eighties that would be to invite more bullying. And who would understand anyway even if I could talk about it? When I first started experimenting with wearing my mother’s clothes in secret I had to hide, not risk being seen, cover my tracks. I was finding out about how I felt when dressing and what I liked, but I had to keep this to myself.  When I fel...

I guess this is another aspect of my questioning whether I am “trans enough”.  I can only apologise for keep going on about this, but it is a multifaceted problem so there are many things to say! What it comes down to is this: I didn’t think I felt dysphoria, so I thought that meant I was not trans.  What do I mean by that?  I suppose I was starting from a limited understanding and the assumption that dysphoria was the cliche of “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body”, which probably no one in the real world has ever actually said. But growing up with almost no knowledge about trans issues, that was the full extent of my understanding.  I don’t feel trapped in the wrong body. I don’t really have much anxiety about my maleness at all on a day to day basis. So I sort of assumed that I don’t “have “ dysphoria and by extension, that I wasn’t “proper” trans.  Except that I do have dysphoria.  I just took a while to realise that was what it was.  Dysph...