A reader’s notes to young transitioners |
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A reader notes:
Andrea asked me if I could write a little about what it is like if you cannot transition early on. There is a lot I could say, but for me there has been only one advantage of not transitioning early on, and that is my two children, who I absolutely adore and love beyond all imagining. Do what they will, I will always love them. So: if you do make the step that I wanted to in my teenage years, do make sure that you find someone to love who has some children to spare, and is willing to share them with you! To be their physical parent is a lot less important than being the person to whom they turn if they are upset or cannot sleep at night, and need a hug.
I am not saying you have to, if you are not of a parental mind, but to me a life without children would have almost been as bad as not being able to transition.
If your thoughts are such that you ought to be the other gender (either way! I can accept that now I am more grown up), then you must talk to someone. This is not something that shows in any manner at all, and affects the most beautiful of women or the most masculine of men (me). I did ask my mum, when I was eight, but in those days changing ones gender was not even dreamt of. It was brushed aside. I think now that transitioning is much more well known, a request should receive some serious attention from older people, but do “test the water” after all if your parents do not like the idea (my father) you will still have to live with them after disclosing something so elemental. It is well worth taking some time to build a few bridges – stretch conversations that lead in a certain direction to see what others think about the general subject of b.v. homosexualiteit, and such gender-not-ordinary thoughts. But coming out is still a leap into the dark, it is still something so personal to a parent or someone close to you, you cannot expect what they might think or do even if they are open-minded.
Whatever you do it will be tough on you. You have to wonder if losing everything is worth it! Mind you, if you are young, there is less to lose and more to gain, at least that is my view. I lost everything when I turned 21, or more like when I was 16-17 and found myself growing hair on my face and like things that I found troubling. It happened so slowly that I didn’t realize what I had lost by the time it was lost. It was something I would not have again for thirty years. And that really hurts me. To be blunt, it is worth at least having the choice. When I was young I was told by a psychologist my mum had sniffed out, that I would need to wait until I was twenty-one. Personally I did not see the necessity to wait until I was “morally” mature enough to make up my mind about something that did not allow me any choices. By the time I was 21, that choice was unavailable to me.
When I was young, I had no idea how such things might be done! Had I had a choice I would have given it a go, there are men who can pass easily, but I was not one of them. My facial hair grew so fast I gave up shaving the rotten stuff, and even after two years of epilating it, I still have more than my house-mate. If you are able to have the adolescence-restraining drugs, it will not stop you having a choice when you are old enough to make up your mind. Okay, you won’t be the butchest guy in town, but would you be the prettiest girl? It doesn’t matter, having the choice does, gender is not something that depends on how you look, but on how you feel inside. I am over 1,8m (six feet) and still quite male, even having had some modest facial surgery with Dr Bart: careful study of clothes, movement, manners and above all the voice, make me who I now am. I live and work in the Netherlands, where people are tall anyway, and was astonished to be taken quite naturally for a woman when travelling by train on a recent visit to the UK, and that with having many of the attributes of a man (broad shoulders, narrow hips and big feet – and hands, though for a craftsman(woman) (timmer-vrouw ben ik) they are not so big as some I have seen.
I don’t really know what else I can say, just at the moment. Having found the bedroom ceiling on the bedroom floor last week, there is rather a lot I need to do about the home just now!
Wishing you the most with your choices, if choices they be. Being one or the other gender does not really matter, you will still be “you”: it is not a fairy-tale land where there are princes and frogs (I still live in hope!). It will not solve any other problem than feeling put out when someone says “mister” (or “missus”) to you and being able to associate with the other gender on an equal basis. It won’t make your life easier, but the struggle might be more worthwhile. And one last thought: if this is the way you feel now, it is not something that you will grow out of, nor will it get better (or worse for that matter).
She also wrote this helpful letter:
I wanted to tell you about what it is like not to be able to transition when it is most appropriate to do so, in the case of the young TS at any rate.
I was around six when I realized I had a gender, and it was not the same as my sister, which puzzled me. Suffice it to say that I was not included in girl’s games, and boy’s games did not interest me in the slightest. With a mining engineer (geologist) for a father, our family was to be found settled in various parts of the world, which is why I have followed my English mother’s rather introverted sensibilities. That and English speaking schools.
I asked my mum when I was eight if I could be a girl, but the answer was no. At fourteen I learned from a psychologist that I would have to wait until I was twenty-one before I could officially make up my mind to be one thing or the other. I was devastated, it upset me that something so close and necessary to me was not allowed. I was old enough to know then, so why couldn’t I? But this was back in the seventies. I did try to be a boy, but honestly I didn’t do very well. At university I found that the Dutch and German girls would happily be my friend, without the need to be their exclusive boyfriend. As to girlfriends, most girls just laughed at me! It was this time that I became increasingly depressed. I simply did not know what had hit me! I was simply overwhelmed by it, and didn’t know where to turn. I didn’t turn to the medical professions, had I been on any kind of anti-depressant I would not be here now. Overdosing is too easy when you are that depressed.
I had had an interview with a recording studio in London as an engineer (I studied Physics and Electronics), and they had set up a state of the art direct-display video camera. It was the size of a small suitcase, but it showed me in profile on its television monitor. From that day onwards I never willingly looked at my profile again. I did not realize it quite then, but it was the end of any hope I had, that and I was (thanks to some Dutch parentage) very tall. For ages I knew nobody who was taller than I was. It really did not help.
The depression took its toll of me and I failed uni, my parents were in Africa and I had no idea what to do! I went to see some friends Uschi and Monika in Oldenburg (Niedersachsen) and stayed several weeks whilst looking for work. I must admit to being so withdrawn as not to tell my friends about myself, they were gay for goodness sake!!
What with one thing and another it didn’t work out, and I found myself in work with a design studio in the south, as their junior model-maker. It was a fabulous job if a bit dusty and not very well paid. I made power-drills and paper-holers and teaspoons and just about anything else that is made from plastic! I lived in a hall of residence, in fact a „Frauenwohnheim“ (a hall of residence for women!). Did that bother me? I did meet Beate, who became more of a friend than I could imagine. She had recently survived anorexia, which had begun as her periods had started. I did explain what I needed in life, for her to tell me that she wanted to be a boy. I could not imagine someone who was already a girl wanting to be a boy! Sabine, a later friend and lover, I was in my mid twenties by now, just looked at me and said in her dead-pan way “That’s not normal” and left it at that. It was understood as a fact that it was how I was.
She was studying to be a teacher and the thought caught on, although I had been encouraged by my local priest to study theology at Bonn with the idea of joining the church, and was making serious inquiries in this direction. Then my parents announced their intention to settle in the UK, and I took a teacher-training place in a UK university, with the determination not to fail this time around (which I did not).
This is the hard bit. I had met and married my now ex. There was so much going for us, there was friendship and shared interests (from gardening and bee-keeping to cooking and sewing, and children of course.) But sharing intimate details of ones aberrant psychology was not one of the things she could have dealt with. I know because if I had even a cold, she would get so angry with me, and even assaulted me on several occasions. Anything more than that…
We have two children, who I adore. It was me who would get up in the night to settle them after a bad dream, it was my side of the bed that they would climb into in the middle of the night. I can honestly say that was one thing that for me was as close to heaven as it is possible to get on God’s good Earth. The sense of the closeness of that small loving child nestling into your arms, against your tummy and legs. Were I their mother I could not have been closer in those moments.
By now I am working as a carpenter (don’t ask how, but I am good at it), I can use the machinery in the workshop and work on site as is required, which few carpenters can. I live and work in the Netherlands, where I have to pinch myself sometimes because people here are so tall! Even my neighbour Annemieke is taller than I am!
My last birthday was the twenty-fifth since my twenty-first (ahem!) and it all crumbled. My psychologist at the Vrij Universiteit in Amsterdam was despairing of me and suggesting I was the most difficult person to diagnose she had ever met. By this time my defences were so high that I was unable to deal with either the future or the past beyond a few days, and the fact of living twenty-five years beyond what had been a deadline almost finished me. I accidentally missed a session in Amsterdam, the co-ordinator phoned me on my mobile and I sat by the canal and burst into tears.
I was later accepted by a clinic in Thailand (at a cost, but they are the best), but outside the SOC. What did I care for the SOC? It had already destroyed most of my life up till now so there was no love lost. I put the VU in Amsterdam on hold. I made inquiries about FFS at various clinics, and actually took some photos of my face. It did me no good, I cried for three days after doing that. It was a really stupid thing to do. There was a chap in Leerdam who did FFS. I made a telephone call and spoke to his secretary. To do it here in Holland would be great, just down the road for me. I went, and felt terrified, with reason for when I arrived I was ushered into the X-ray room and “done”. I was not at my best when I met the surgeon, who immediately put me at my ease, or what was left of it! Like most Dutch, he was firm, direct and gentle. Just the way I like things to be. He put his hands to my face, a little like a blind person will, not intrusively but sensing what is there beneath the skin. He confirmed all my fears, but said he would be prepared to operate. It would be the most expensive thing I have ever done!
He phoned me the next weekend to suggest a date in February, and could I meet him in Spain? I replied that he worked in Leerdam, didn’t he? Suffice it to say I travelled down there and three months later I am on the point of getting myself a deed-poll signed on my next trip to the UK. The result is not exceptional, but it is way beyond anything I could have imagined possible, way beyond my dreams. It is enough to confirm my gender, and that is more than enough for me! Okay I say that the result is not exceptional, but that is hardly his fault: he had to work with what was there, after all, and on a limited budget. (Like most English I have been able to acquire the female modulation to my voice with some degree of ease, unlike most Dutch).
I can only say that thirty years is a long time to wait to start your life properly.
What do I advise? Transitioning will never be easy, but taken in small steps and given a few years, it will progress naturally and sensibly. You will lose almost everything you value, because you will change just about everything that you are! It is certainly not for the faint hearted amongst us. There are always ways out should you need, if you are young enough, the world is not as set as it is for someone who is older, and the choices made are more easy to undo if that is your need: you need to be absolutely honest with yourself. At my age, there is only one choice left, and that is transition, I have spent too many years needing this.
In short, if on a scale of one to ten, if your score is under twenty-five I would think very, very hard about transitioning at all. I am trying to say that if you have a choice, then don’t. This is for those who have no option but to transition. If you understand my words, you will know either way.
And how do I feel? Honestly, I feel utterly ordinary. It did come as something of a shock! To have all those years of depression and anxiety and waste and regrets that are cleared out of your system does not leave you much. But I have a home which is still a little untidy where the spring cleaning needs wrapping up, with work clothes that smell of oak shavings, and a black bicycle.
And had there been the opportunity of Mermaids when I was young? I would have leapt at it, grabbed it with both hands and probably my feet as well. I wish you all good luck, but take care that you achieve what you really need to achieve.
