Onslaught.

So I’ve been feeling really great about everything.  Last night, my lovely boyfriend and I finally managed to pull enough money together to order a good binder so I can stop using the backbreaking one I’ve been using, my insurance is about to go through so I can see about getting a gender therapist, everyone’s been seeing me as a guy, and people are slowly but surely figuring out the name.

I feel like I’m sitting on a go-cart that I’ve been trying to make go for months now, and finally some deity descended from the heavens and gave me a gentle push and now I’m finally, slowly, starting to roll down the hill.  But suddenly, my stomach is lurching because I’m looking forward and the hill gets a lot steeper from here, and I’m just about to pass that point where, if I wanted to, I could stick my legs out and grind to a halt without any major injury, get up, and walk away.  Things are About to Happen, and if I don’t stop before the Point of No Return, then there’s absolutely no going back and I’m going to have to ride this cart for the rest of my life.

It’s unbelievable, because I never thought I’d have these feelings.  I know it’s only natural to have a little bit of apprehension before the point of no return, but now I’m having this internal critic hit me with a real onslaught of all the really hard questions, things like:

– “Everyone’s going to look at you and say, ‘Why did you even transition, if you’re a gay man?  Gay men are basically just women anyway, wouldn’t it just be easier to stay in a girl’s body?'”

– “You never fit in as a girl, but suddenly you think that if you transition, you’ll fit in as a boy, and you KNOW that’s not true.  If anything, you’ll fit in less!”

– “You’re using this trans thing to explain all your boy tendencies, but once you cross over, how do you explain away all the girl ones?”

– “What if you’re not really a guy?  What if this IS just another phase, another obsession with being different, one that could get you KILLED?”

– “You say this explains everything- the abuse, the dissociation, etc., but what if you’re just making connections that aren’t there so that you can make your life make sense, and when the novelty of being trans wears itself out, it’s just another layer of fuck-up on top of the pile?”

These are the kinds of questions that have been killing me, the ones that have been keeping me up at night, really personal questions that only I would know.
I have answers for all of those questions, and when I remember the things that can’t be explained away with a “what if” scenario, like how only wearing a strap-on makes me feel complete and how being on top is the only sex act that entirely works for me, or how I really only feel attractive and not-deformed when I bind up and have a flat chest, or how I’ve been lusting after facial hair since I was six, and how I’ve always felt gay with boys and straight with girls, even long before I knew I could possibly be trans-

When I remember all those things, and how being trans makes my life complete, and how my mind has been at more peace in the last 6 months than it’s been the entire rest of my life-

When I remember how accepting that I was trans made the voices stop, made the dissociation fade and made me stop seeing things at night, and made my mind finally healthy, and some semblance of normal-

When I see how my friends and family are finally more happy that I’m less crazy and upset and irritable and generally screwed-up these days than they are sad to see the old me go away-

Then I know that everything’s going to be alright, and I can keep going.

My little insecurities and fears are not nearly enough to turn me away from the one thing that has made my life finally worth living.  I have been more afraid to die in the last six months than I even was when I was a child, and I take that as a good and healthy sign that I finally love life enough not to want to leave it.

Today, I’m hurting.

My gender dyphoria always ramps into hyperdrive when I hang with one of my best friends, a pretty hyper-gay guy.  I’ve spent the last two days with him.  

It’s been an intense period of gender extremes for me, since Halloween is one of those gender-free days where I can dress as a guy character and most people call me by who I’m dressed as rather than my given name; it’s like a little vacation where I can be anyone I want, as long as they’re not a girl, and that’s a vast improvement anyway.  I’d rather be seen as the most mediocre guy than the most attractive female as long as people get the pronouns right.  And dressed as the Graverobber from “REPO! The Genetic Opera”, I was pimpin’.  All the girls in my circle of friends were hanging off of me and treating me like a real man, for at least a couple of hours, and even if it was just a game to them, I didn’t care.  It made things right in my own little universe for a little while, and it was… nice.

That said, there’s nowhere that gender discrepancy is thrown into sharper relief than with a gay guy you’ve wanted to be with for years who will never be able to get past the gaping hole where you’re supposed to have a dick.  It’s funny.  A lot of people new to the trans scene don’t believe how much rejection trans people get from the gay community.  You’d think, of all people, that gays would understand what it’s like to not be accepted for who you are and what you can’t change, but as far as I’ve seen, they reject transmen with such discrimination that we’re better off looking for support among cisgendered people.  And forget it if you’re a gay transman.  Might as well just turn straight.  I haven’t yet met a gay guy who would even consider going out with someone who previously had a vagina.  It’s like just being around them would call into question their gayness or something.

My dysphoria is on the rampage today.  I’m unbelievable horny, with a side dish of angry that makes me want to rape something, sprinkled with the shame and inadequacy knowing I couldn’t without rigging a contraption that makes a mockery of what I don’t have.  I’m crawling out of my skin.  It feels like someone lined the inside of a mascot costume with superglue and put it on me while I was sleeping, and I can’t get it off.  This is a nightmare.