I’m feeling (yet again) that the entire idea of my ever living as a woman is impossible and I’m pretty sad as a result.
This partly stems from a couple of things that I have read on social media that have upset me. Maybe the lesson from this is to not read stuff on social media and that probably is good advice!
The first thing was an article someone had written about the history of classification of transgenderism as a mental illness in the (US) medical establishment. It was all factual and actually really interesting. The thing that I took away from it though was the term psycho-surgical, i.e. that gender reassignment surgery was a physical surgery to treat a mental condition. I have no qualifications to say either way whether being transgender is “mental illness” or not but reading about it described in those terms affected me. I think that I view my gender as a physical condition and that I am a woman but my body doesn’t align with that. What I read was more like feeling this way is a mental delusion and we can’t seem to cure that other than by making the body fit (hence psycho-surgical) but the implication of this is that I am not really a woman even if turned into one because it is just pandering to my delusion. I’m sure it is way more complicated than that but that is how I felt when I read it. I suppose it has challenged my own beliefs about who I am. I believe that I am (inside/essentially/personality) female and have a male body (I wouldn’t go so far as born in/trapped in the wrong body but something akin to that) and that this is a real thing and who I am. If it is a mental illness or delusion, then it isn’t who I am, merely who I believe I am. That feels less “real”, less valid somehow. If I am not actually a woman in a male body, I’m just a man in a male body with a delusion or fantasy of being a woman. Maybe that’s the same thing and maybe it doesn’t matter but it feels less valid to think of myself that way.
This feeling was not helped by reading that an athlete that I have a lot of respect for, and who is active in the trans sport debate has said that she believes trans people should be helped to feel comfortable in the body they were born with rather than transitioned. If it was true that I am not really a woman but just a delusional man trying to live a fantasy life, then what she said would maybe make sense for me as a less extreme solution than actually changing my body and whole life. Now I know this is slightly dangerous ground as helping me to get over my desire to become a woman sounds a bit like conversion therapy and I don’t want to get into that debate. It also supposes that having trans feelings must be bad and need curing, and I don’t buy into that, I actually quite like my trans side and wouldn’t want to be cured of it, that would feel like losing a part of myself.
The the other thing that I read on social media was a thread which began with claiming sympathy for men (with deliberate emphasis of that word) who were lied to by the trans medical professionals to believe they could pass when they never would and would always very obviously just be men in dresses and anyone can see that. If I transition I would be ridiculous and someone to be pitied. Linked to the other article that was making me feel like just a man with a delusion, here was another sign that I could “treat” my delusion by transitioning but I would never ever be a woman I would just be a freak and hated by everyone for the sake of something that isn’t even real anyway, I’m not a woman and never could be, just a fantasist. And the comments on the thread naturally descended rapidly into a stream of abuse of trans women who use female loos who are apparently sexually motivated. Not sure how they got there so quickly from where the thread began, but they did and even though that is nonsense, the sheer number of people expressing their hate of people like me was alarming.
As I said at the beginning, maybe the mistake here was reading stuff on social media, but the point is, this has unsettled me even though I don’t believe any of it really. It has been enough to challenge how I think of myself.
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