Alice
Member
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2020
- Messages
- 17
I tried to post this before but it ended up being too long a post. So this time I will seek to break things down into manageable sections but in the same thread.
My eventual coming out was actually my second attempt. My first attempt was back when I was 24-years-old and it didn't go so well. So I will do a quick recap of that.
I've struggled with sometimes severe gender dysphoria all my life. I am one of the trans people who actually did stand in the kitchen for hours with a kitchen knife trying to pluck up the courage to be rid of that thing between my legs - on more than once occasion. I knew that I was 'different' from the age of 2 when I was at playgroup playing with a toy car. There was a toy garage and a boy of the same age who was playing with the cars. He wanted all the cars to himself and I had this single purple beachbuggy type car with rounded body work and a flower on the bonnet. He wanted it and started having a tantrum because I had it. I looked up for some adult help and I saw a girl with a push chair in one hand, a doll in the other, wearing a dress and tights. My memory is quite clear on some things but on this bit it is a little faulty because I see her with a ponytail and at that age no girl has hair long enough for a ponytail, so I may be confusing my memory with another one or the adult supervisor had a ponytail. But I couldn't understand why I wasn't the same as her and why people were treating me like a boy when I should be like her. That was my first awakening that there was a difference between the genders and my first questioning of my own gender. There were many many more incidents throughout my childhood and my teens were particularly difficult but I kept it very secret. I knew from an early age that I had to keep this secret. There was an effeminate boy on my street who liked playing with the girls and every time my father saw him, he would call him a 'puffta' or a 'sissy' and tell my that I don't want to be one of those freaks. My Grandmother would repeatedly tell me that she only liked boys and didn't like girls (much to my sister's distress). I had no fiction books because fairy tales were for fairies - but my sister had all the fairy tale books. I had lots of toy soldiers, a train set that never got played with, a scalatrix (sp?) that never got played with. I spent most of my time playing with lego, drawing, or dressing up my Action man. All my soldiers were Nazi Germans. My father's politics are far right and he is extremely racist and used to go gay bashing with his friends, boasting that he had been charged with GBH from beating up a 'puffta'. - Even if someone guessed that I was 'different' and offered me an opportunity to express myself, I resisted it with a passion. So I had a teacher who brought in some Victorian women's clothing and talked about how boys used to wear dresses in those days and allowed me to try them on, encouraged me to get involved in drama and put makeup on me for the school plays - I avoided drama because I was terrified that my father would find out I wore makeup for it. A baby sitter offered to put makeup on me and allow me to wear one of my sister's nighties but I resisted because I was terrified my sister would tell my parents... and she did... and that was the last we ever saw of that babysitter. She left one of her cassette tapes and I listened to them everyday until I discovered my own music taste.
I was bullied a lot at high school and I took up pen pal writing. I had pen pals all over the world but one particular friend I had been writing to for 9 years every other week, who lived in Mauritius. When I was 24, I eventually plucked up the courage to tell her that I had these feelings. I actually kept a copy of the letter I wrote her, which is unusual. In it I wrote that I felt like I was being torn apart inside that part of me wanted to be a macho Viking type warrior and the other half desperately needed to be a feminine woman. She wrote back telling me not to become a woman. But my dysphoria just wouldn't settle back down. In the past, it was like the sea, it came in at hide tide, but then went back out again and I got bad dysphoria about 2 months of the year and manageable dysphoria for the rest. But this time for 6 months it was really bad.
I used to do karate in town and at the bottom of the street was a place for transvestites called Transformations. There was no internet like today then, there was an internet but it wasn't so easily accessible like now. I had no idea where to look for help. So one day I plucked up the courage to go to Transformations. I didn't have a clue what I was doing so just went to the counter and asked them to make me a woman. They gave me a make over which cost a lot of money in those days, half a week's wage for me. They put a long blonde wig on me, had me change my clothes and wear all these padded undergarments, and then put my makeup on with a trowel. When they finished I felt completely fake and when I looked in the mirror, I felt looked like a pantomime dame/drag queen. It wasn't me. So I thought that I mustn't be trans after all and that what I suffered was something else entirely. And I went back into the closet and suffered in silence once more.
I developed a coping mechanism whereby I told myself repeatedly that gender is a social construct and that it is all just in my head. I knew that the dysphoria tide would go back out again and I just needed to suffer in silence until low tide once more and I could cope with it. That worked for the next 22 years. But eventually my island of masculinity was destroyed by a tidal wave of dysphoria and that's when I started dealing with my gender dysphoria properly... and I will post about that and how I eventually came out to the world later.
My eventual coming out was actually my second attempt. My first attempt was back when I was 24-years-old and it didn't go so well. So I will do a quick recap of that.
I've struggled with sometimes severe gender dysphoria all my life. I am one of the trans people who actually did stand in the kitchen for hours with a kitchen knife trying to pluck up the courage to be rid of that thing between my legs - on more than once occasion. I knew that I was 'different' from the age of 2 when I was at playgroup playing with a toy car. There was a toy garage and a boy of the same age who was playing with the cars. He wanted all the cars to himself and I had this single purple beachbuggy type car with rounded body work and a flower on the bonnet. He wanted it and started having a tantrum because I had it. I looked up for some adult help and I saw a girl with a push chair in one hand, a doll in the other, wearing a dress and tights. My memory is quite clear on some things but on this bit it is a little faulty because I see her with a ponytail and at that age no girl has hair long enough for a ponytail, so I may be confusing my memory with another one or the adult supervisor had a ponytail. But I couldn't understand why I wasn't the same as her and why people were treating me like a boy when I should be like her. That was my first awakening that there was a difference between the genders and my first questioning of my own gender. There were many many more incidents throughout my childhood and my teens were particularly difficult but I kept it very secret. I knew from an early age that I had to keep this secret. There was an effeminate boy on my street who liked playing with the girls and every time my father saw him, he would call him a 'puffta' or a 'sissy' and tell my that I don't want to be one of those freaks. My Grandmother would repeatedly tell me that she only liked boys and didn't like girls (much to my sister's distress). I had no fiction books because fairy tales were for fairies - but my sister had all the fairy tale books. I had lots of toy soldiers, a train set that never got played with, a scalatrix (sp?) that never got played with. I spent most of my time playing with lego, drawing, or dressing up my Action man. All my soldiers were Nazi Germans. My father's politics are far right and he is extremely racist and used to go gay bashing with his friends, boasting that he had been charged with GBH from beating up a 'puffta'. - Even if someone guessed that I was 'different' and offered me an opportunity to express myself, I resisted it with a passion. So I had a teacher who brought in some Victorian women's clothing and talked about how boys used to wear dresses in those days and allowed me to try them on, encouraged me to get involved in drama and put makeup on me for the school plays - I avoided drama because I was terrified that my father would find out I wore makeup for it. A baby sitter offered to put makeup on me and allow me to wear one of my sister's nighties but I resisted because I was terrified my sister would tell my parents... and she did... and that was the last we ever saw of that babysitter. She left one of her cassette tapes and I listened to them everyday until I discovered my own music taste.
I was bullied a lot at high school and I took up pen pal writing. I had pen pals all over the world but one particular friend I had been writing to for 9 years every other week, who lived in Mauritius. When I was 24, I eventually plucked up the courage to tell her that I had these feelings. I actually kept a copy of the letter I wrote her, which is unusual. In it I wrote that I felt like I was being torn apart inside that part of me wanted to be a macho Viking type warrior and the other half desperately needed to be a feminine woman. She wrote back telling me not to become a woman. But my dysphoria just wouldn't settle back down. In the past, it was like the sea, it came in at hide tide, but then went back out again and I got bad dysphoria about 2 months of the year and manageable dysphoria for the rest. But this time for 6 months it was really bad.
I used to do karate in town and at the bottom of the street was a place for transvestites called Transformations. There was no internet like today then, there was an internet but it wasn't so easily accessible like now. I had no idea where to look for help. So one day I plucked up the courage to go to Transformations. I didn't have a clue what I was doing so just went to the counter and asked them to make me a woman. They gave me a make over which cost a lot of money in those days, half a week's wage for me. They put a long blonde wig on me, had me change my clothes and wear all these padded undergarments, and then put my makeup on with a trowel. When they finished I felt completely fake and when I looked in the mirror, I felt looked like a pantomime dame/drag queen. It wasn't me. So I thought that I mustn't be trans after all and that what I suffered was something else entirely. And I went back into the closet and suffered in silence once more.
I developed a coping mechanism whereby I told myself repeatedly that gender is a social construct and that it is all just in my head. I knew that the dysphoria tide would go back out again and I just needed to suffer in silence until low tide once more and I could cope with it. That worked for the next 22 years. But eventually my island of masculinity was destroyed by a tidal wave of dysphoria and that's when I started dealing with my gender dysphoria properly... and I will post about that and how I eventually came out to the world later.
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