Hi everybody! I suppose I should do one of these introduction things too before I start talking about things.
I'm theGECK, because I have an agreement with my spouse that my personal name won't appear on a forum, so that's what you get to call me.
I came out to myself as transgender in 2014 thanks to a fantabulous combination of Mechwarrior: Online and MLP where a fellow group member came out as trans and I tried to write a congratulations PM but ended up writing "I'm so jealous I wish I was you," deleted the PM, and broke down sobbing. That, along with something I wrote and journaled about that ended up talking about my struggle with my gender, was when I seriously decided that I needed to investigate these thoughts.
I came out to my spouse in 2015 and we both promptly broke down for a month. Neither of us remember much from that time, we just were surviving and dealing with the pain that we each felt. We weren't sure if we could stay together but we decided that we wouldn't be us if we didn't try. Almost 3 years later and we're still together, although we feel just as uncertain about our future together as we did back then. I don't blame them for it, my partner just isn't attracted to women, and I feel like asking them to change their sexual orientation would be incredibly hypocritical of me.
That brings me to the present, where I've started hormone treatment and learned to inject myself in under 10 minutes and I don't even have to have music playing to distract myself every time I do it! And that brings me to something that I don't know how to feel about - I've started (rarely) "passing".
Passing is something that I never expected myself to be able to do. Firstly, because of my build - I've had people say my entire life that I should be in football on the defensive line because of my shoulders. Secondly, because of agreements with my spouse not to move quickly with transition or "feminize" myself too much and/or without talking to them so that we can decide together if it's something that they will be able to live with and something I'm not willing to live without. That means I don't own
"lady clothes" or wear any makeup. But apparently as I have been doing laser treatment, as I've taken hormones, and maybe moreso how I've learned how to care for my hair, I've started randomly getting referred to as "she". In the grocery store recently I was looking for dark corn syrup because Pecan Pie just doesn't work right when you use something that isn't extremely unhealthy. When I asked an employee who couldn't find it, they went to another one and said that "This lady needs help finding blah blah blah." I didn't really listen after that, because I was so stunned. It's happened in a department store, at a restaurant, and it's not frequent but it occasionally happens, and I don't know how to feel about it. I've been preparing myself to be a non-passing transwoman, and I've suddenly found myself rarely being on the opposite side of that. I don't want to participate in the expectations of women, and especially transwomen, to look or act a certain way, but it just feels
so gooood. I don't know if I have anything in particular to say about this, other than to mention that this is happening to me, and I'm having mixed feelings about it.
I also came out to our parents in the last few weeks. My partner's went well, they asked if we're doing ok, if we're going to try to stay together, if hormones will change my sexual orientation, etc. You know, normal questions. And then in the weeks afterwards they've continued asking if we're doing ok and empathizing with both of us. Mom said that she was in church two Sundays ago and just started crying because it hit her how hard it's been for me and how much she imagines I've hurt over the years. They've been incredibly sweet and, while I still don't know their opinions about transitioning, they've been loving and caring and still obviously want us in their lives. They have the obvious benefit of knowing that if things don't work out that their child and I can break up, so I wonder if that makes it easier for them.
My parents, as expected, were the more difficult ones. We knew that there would be the obvious issue that my father is a preacher in a small, conservative, evangelical, christian church. We also knew that my parents don't have the advantage that my spouse's parents did of having some distance from me via a marriage. The problem that we did not expect was that when I came out to them, literally every single reaction or question has been about them. They're mad that I came out to them last. They're upset that I didn't talk to them back in 4th grade. They're telling us about their experiences with bullying. They're telling me that I have to come out to the rest of our family by Thanksgiving so that things aren't akward for my parents. They're sad that they're losing their son. They're concerned that I'm subjecting myself to medical experimentation and turning myself into a guinea pig, which made me stop in my tracks and lose all words because I'm most definitely not doing any untested treatments and am also lucky enough to be doing my medical transition at one of the top medical centers in the world, so the risks are very well known and minimized. And of course, they're sad that Satan has stolen away their baby boy and convinced him that this will make him happier because Satan will do anything to keep you away from God and I'm being influenced by Satan now. There have been no questions about our relationship, about my experiences growing up (except for one time where they asked about how long "it had been going on" and I had to give an example that would illustrate "my whole life"), about how I've taken it or what led me to make this decision. There have been assumptions and self-focused statements from them, and that's it.
I understand that grief and anger both cause people to become self-focused, and that's happening right now. It took my mother over a week to send an email to me because she didn't want to say a single word to me because she didn't know if she could handle it. I just found out yesterday that coming to the family's Thanksgiving celebration is going to be ok for me to do, because my parents weren't sure if they could handle seeing me. They're hurt that both my sister and I have always hesitated in coming to talk to them, but are not putting any thought into what might be the reason for it, and aren't looking for an answer to that question. They're feeling like victims right now, and that's fine to do for awhile, but they've always twisted things around to look at themselves.
So, there was some good, some bad, and some WTF - but things generally ended up how I expected them to end up. I didn't think my worst fears would happen, and I didn't think my biggest hopes would happen, but it still hurts. It hurts less because I've done some of my mourning already, but I still bawled for 20 minutes when I got the email from my mother telling me how sad she is that Satan has messed with my mind. My parents have been making statements that if they had asked me about them, I could have actually talked to them about it. But instead, they assume things, build up an entire worldview around it, and then ask me why I'm acting the way that they built up in their heads instead of the way I'm acting in reality.
Overall though, I'm incredibly happy! The ball is rolling for me to actually transition for realsies; I'm not in a holding pattern any longer.
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. I am a Demi-Pansexual Transwomen and have been working on my transition since 2013 now. Electrolysis, HRT, school and finding jobs. Working on the latter two currently and the former two has been ongoing. Anyway I am a bit more stable than I was early on in my transition and hope to progress more smoothly with doing what I need to do.
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