Not that I am obsessed with my nightdress but looking at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning, when I took it off, I momentarily expected to see a woman’s body in the mirror. That is powerful gender euphoria.
Anyway enough about that.
One of my online trans friends emailed me yesterday saying:
“I’m feeling selfish lately. Transitioning will blow up my wife’s life. Can I really do that? Do I want/need it badly enough? I have therapy soon and plan to make this a topic of discussion.”
This is an interesting dilemma and she deserves a proper answer.
It’s something that I have thought about a lot myself. I am able to cope with not transitioning, and have done so for many years, so for the sake of others, I should not transition? To transition would be selfish, and being selfish is bad.
Now I have decided I’m going to transition anyway, so does that make me selfish and bad?
Firstly, transitioning is in a sense, a selfish act by definition. Only I feel my dysphoria and incongruence, only I feel my euphoria. It has no impact on any other person, particularly as I am able to cope and function with it, so am not wallowing in depression or anything like that. Doing something about my incongruence and dysphoria therefore on the same basis, benefits only me, as it was only affecting me in the first place. In that sense, it is therefore selfish because it is only for me, no one else.
The second part of the question is whether I should therefore deny myself the selfish thing so as not to impact others. And there are two aspects to this.
Firstly, how much does it really impact others? It’s my body, my way of being in the world, my identity. None of those changes actually affect anyone else. It is only by association that anyone else is affected. Their perception of who I was may change, and consequently what they believed about our relationship. How others perceive them through having a trans husband, trans father or trans relative. The fact is though, all of that is just perception and down to them and how they choose to respond to it. They could choose to respond to it positively, be supportive, share my joys, pay no attention to the outside world and what anyone else might think. Or they could choose to respond negatively, and be all about how it affects them. The fact is, it would be that response which is selfish, far more so than what I’m doing by transitioning because although I’m doing something for myself it would be whilst trying to maintain my relationships and support them through it too.
The second part of this is “memento mori”. I am not immortal. I’m not going to be reincarnated and get a second chance when I might be born a girl. I will die. And if I die never having done the selfish thing and always put others first, then I will have never taken my chance or done anything for my own life. So I have to live for me. I can only live for me, because it is only my life I can live. In that sense I am ultimately alone and to the extent others join me along parts of my journey from cradle to grave, I need to remember to still live my own life and not to let it pass and not live it, or do so with my own needs subservient to those of others. That is selfish yes, but necessarily. There are myriad reasons why those that I give up my needs to make them happy or keep the peace might not even be there for all of my journey, people come in and out of your life at different stages, so to live you own life, even if it is selfish, is the only rational thing you can do.
Of course, I actually have lived my life for others, always putting my needs last, hiding who I really am and being unselfish. So it isn’t easy to follow the rational path.
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