My first crazy long trans diary entry shared

[Roz]

—– Forwarded message —–

<b>From:</b> R H <[email protected]>

<b>To:</b> R H <[email protected]>

<b>Sent:</b> Saturday, 25 September 2021, 00:41:08 BST

<b>Subject:</b> Diary 24/9/21

Warning: This post contains a rude quote paraphrased from the film “Deadpool”. Apologies in advance if you read on.

 

Its also really long so you might not want to bother unless you’re really bored.

There is also discussion of sex, so please read no further if that would cause you to be offended. It is a very personal entry which some people may be able to relate to and the reason it’s here is for me to ask for supportive feedback or advice if you feel or have felt the same at the start of your transition. You, dear anonymous readers, are the only people I feel I can say these things to, in order to get them off my chest. My therapist recommended keeping a private diary for this but diaries are meant to be read IMO. 

Dear Diary

I am a trans female with terrible internal transphobia. Surely not! I’m ashamed of it but that isn’t helping me get rid of it. I know it sounds stupid and self-pitying but I feel selfish and feel like maybe I’m a bad person for being transgender and transsexual when there are so many other people suffering worse in the world and people dying of Covid. Life could be a hell of a lot worse but that’s actually small consolation. One of my nurse colleagues died of Covid in our ICU this week. Doesn’t that put it into perspective? I didn’t know her well but everyone is demoralised and it’s grim to be working in ICU. I’m so glad I don’t normally work there and I have nothing but admiration for my colleagues who do. My wife was more sympathetic to me recently but we mostly don’t talk about it. I’m going for a walk with her tomorrow morning, just the two of us and I’m hoping to talk more with her then. We’re on a weekend away for the bank holiday weekend. I’m really struggling to accept that I’m transgender. I realise that’s what I am but absurdly I feel like some sort of criminal or deviant and it’s breaking my heart and my spirit. Deep down I think I’m actually quite a good person really but I can’t help feeling that conflicts entirely with what I want to do to myself to transition. I think it’s just my own transphobia but knowing that irritatingly doesn’t help me. I desperately want to transition but I’m just so scared of the public display of that process knowing how so many people won’t accept or understand my need to do that. Sometimes I am convinced that I’m ready to tell people and just get on with it and then I back out of that. I have very little respect for my own attitude here. I just can’t work out how to balance meeting my own needs with not hurting or alienating the people around me. I’m scared I’ll never work that out and am doomed to be miserable until I die. How melodramatic of me I know but it’s the painful truth. I don’t impress myself or others with this attitude. In fact I don’t love myself. As a new, very good friend and mentor here pointed out to me – How can anyone else love me if I don’t even like myself? As the blind old lady said to Deadpool in the film of the same name “I can’t hear you with that pity ___ in your mouth”. I hear her saying that to me, justifiably.

I’m now on a maximum dose of an antidepressant and I don’t feel like I’m depressed really. I just don’t see how tablets are going to change me wanting to transition or make me feel better about not transitioning. But if I do transition, then it has been made clear to me that that I’ll need to get divorced as my wife won’t accept it. I also need to come out and present as female at work which for an introvert like myself is such an intimidating thought. But maybe it wouldn’t be as hard as I imagine because I absolutely love presenting as female in private so why wouldn’t I love the freedom to do that publicly? And then I feel I should just be quiet, forget all this and be grateful I’m not dying of Covid or have another serious medical problem. Round and round in circles I go, you know?  If your life partner is like mine they’ll not want to talk about it because they’ll be scared of losing you and being alone when they thought they had someone to be with for life companionship. They might feel angry, cheated and betrayed. My wife and I have never been especially emotionally close to

my eternal regret and through no fault of her own she is not an affectionate person. Unfortunately, along with realising I’m transgender I’ve realised I do actually need a life partner who is very affectionate (I’m categorically not referring to sex here) and can love and nurture me, accepting me as I am. It might be too late for that but I feel I should try for happiness like that in life before my life ends. But then that’s very selfish of me isn’t it? And I’ve committed myself to a path by getting married and having kids so should I not just stay quiet and do what’s best for them? Plenty of trans people have done just that in the past. Is it admirable or is it weak to be miserable for the benefit of others? I’ve heard people argue for both viewpoints.

As things stand:

I want to be female

I want to transition including GRS

I am anxious and depressed

I’m confused as to whether the anxiety and depression is the cause or the result of gender dysphoria. My wife gives me the impression that she thinks that the dysphoria is the result of anxiety and depression. I feel the opposite is true but my wife asked me if I think I am well enough to decide that? She implies that I am not and I have no way to objectively assess whether that’s true or not. After all, I am anxious and depressed. Perhaps she is right. These doubts are not helping me feel less anxious or depressed though.  Whether she means to or not she appears to be saying that she does not believe me. My wife also said I was “very suggestible” when I told her I thought I had gender dysphoria. That really hurt me. Its new knowledge for my wife of course but I have been living with these feelings for as long as I can remember. To be made feel like I have been “talked into” thinking I’m transgender when I was at my most vulnerable coming out to her was very painful.

I can see why transgender people in the past just meekly accepted that they were mentally ill when they were told that they were. That’s because, in fact, they were mentally unwell with anxiety and depression. It’s a catch 22 situation here is it not?

But what I know in my own mind is that I have wanted to be female long before I was depressed or anxious. This makes me think that my dysphoria is causing my mental health problems. Then my brain says to me “That’s if being transgender and having gender dysphoria is indeed a real phenomenon in your case and not just a fetish, phase or mental health disorder in and of itself”. I don’t believe that obviously but sadly there are plenty of people who hold strongly opposing views on that particular question. Many of such people I would be forced to interact with at work and socially on a daily basis as part of coming out as trans should I choose to do that.

Since age 9, at least, I have wanted to be female and have been cross dressing. I don’t like that term “cross dressing” for myself though as I feel it reinforces my own feelings of being abnormal and deviant in some way. Isn’t it just “dressing”? Is it internalised transphobia to feel it’s wrong for me to wear female clothes because I was AMAB? That’s hard for me to answer objectively from a personal/internal perspective but most people here told

me “yes”.

I’ve spent most of my daily life, every day, day-dreaming about being female and I’m utterly exhausted with it. It invades every day and every part of my life, diluting every experience and distracting me from every activity. As a teen, indulging my desire to be female got mixed up with sexual arousal further reinforcing the argument inside my own head of me being deviant or having a fetish.

And now, in my 40’s, is my loss of ability to cope with this daily internal mental warfare just a “mid-life crisis”? But cross-dressing in itself isn’t sexually arousing for me now and hasn’t been for a long time. It is relaxing and soothing. Except when I suddenly see a man in a dress in the mirror. In truth I don’t really care what clothes I have on if only I could be female. I’d greatly prefer female clothes, very much so, but if someone said I could be female but would have to wear male clothes I’d definitely accept that. I’d complain and wish it wasn’t so, but accept it I would.

If I could be accepted as a female and have female friends to just do female activities with, I believe I’d be happier. But am I deluded in that belief? How can I really know? My wife has also asked me that. And I can’t answer it with certainty. I can only say I believe that I would be happier.

I have said this before to people on TGH but I just don’t “get” male conversation. It’s rather dull and uninteresting to me, almost always, unless they open up and get personal but then I can’t reciprocate with being open and personal because I feel I have to hide who I am! This makes me feel trapped and socially isolated. If I try to be friends with cis women without telling them I’m transgender they think I’m either flirting, a gay male or being a creep. Those all feel like uncomfortable misrepresentation for me because that’s not how I see myself. It’s further adding to my feelings of social isolation and making me feel it’s futile to try to make friends with cis women who don’t know I’m transgender (which is all of them currently)

It’s also complicated by the fact that I’m attracted to women and so, in a small number of cases, if I were single I would indeed be flirting. But in my limited experience the likelihood of a cis woman being attracted to a pre-op trans female who presents as male, and them being ok with all that, seems as close to zero as makes no real difference.

I’m also scared that if I do transition I’ll just look ridiculous. I have so much admiration for my trans female peers who are not too worried about their looks. I’m ashamed to say I’m jealous of that attitude. I wish I could be like that but I can’t. No more than I can choose not to be trans. I’ve spent so long pretending to be stolidly male that I’m not sure I can even learn how to be convincingly female now. Even though I am convinced in myself that I am female and should have a female body, I am far from convinced I could “pass” as female. Let’s look at the problems here:

I’m terrible with makeup but I love it,  I’m clumsy but want to be graceful, I can’t dance and I wish I could, I can’t sing and I don’t like my voice at all, I don’t look female (I took a

million photos to get that profile picture satisfactory) I’m not particularly excited by hand-bags (although I do like nice shoes), I don’t really know nearly as much about fashion and social media/culture as a self-respecting woman should and I’m much more physically attracted to cis and trans women than cis-men with a couple of exceptions. I have never met any trans men in person so can’t comment yet on that. I hope to have the privilege of that before I die though.

I desperately want to look female, be socially treated as female, have female friends and be “one of the girls”, I want to have pretty hair and try all sorts of styles and colours, I want to paint my nails, be good at makeup, get pregnant and have a baby, be a mother, and stand up for women’s equality. I want rid of the hair on my body and rid of the male genitalia. But do I really have any right to change my body at the taxpayers expense? Or at all for that matter? Some will say Of course I do but I can’t convince myself of that yet.

And then to add further shame and embarrassment to it all, when I have sex I only want to be “female” in the act. I hate thinking of myself as a male during intercourse.

There is a current medical argument that trans women have a female brain as the result of variance in uterine hormone exposure. My wife says I don’t think like a female and she knows me best so how can I possibly have a “female” brain? Surely it’s more complicated than that though? Maybe I don’t have a female brain. Maybe I’m just insane, have a personality disorder, have enough features of OCD or autism to be the cause for my gender dysphoria?

The end result, where I find myself since June 2021: I don’t want to live like this any more but I don’t want to hurt my children by taking my own life and I have absolutely no plans to do anything like that. Pinky promise! I don’t want my “transgender” status to get my kids bullied at school as my wife says they will be. I happen to agree that’s a possibility though so I’m trapped again being unable to act on my personal wishes for now. What caring and utterly unselfish parent would really risk that?

And if I’m assessed by psychology and psychiatric teams and don’t get approved for treatment as a trans female what then? I’ll have publicly humiliated myself and my family for no benefit. So why do I feel I need someone who is a mental health professional to validate my transgender nature? Is it because I’m a doctor and I know that’s the process in the UK, those are the rules? It’s a 3 year wait at least to even be assessed. That’s another 3 years of my life wasted pretending to be something and someone I’m not in my opinion. At a point when I already feel I can’t live like this any longer. Plus, I’ll be older and at more risk from hormone and surgical complications when I’m 3 years older will I not? And less attractive to nee potential partners? And what if I have surgical complications and ruin my health and ability to earn money? Will I have terrible regret? What if the government changes the laws and transgender people are increasingly ostracised and persecuted? What if it becomes completely acceptable and I chose not to transition? Would I not be equally regretful in the reverse situation?

OMG I’m even boring myself now with this over-analysis! Time for bed. God you must be really bored if you read this far but huge thanks if you did🤗

This too shall pass! Roz x

• This topic was modified 2 years ago by 𝕋𝕖𝕣𝕣𝕚 𝔸𝕟𝕟𝕖🌸. Reason: one offensive word removed

[Timmie Sawyer]

I can relate to so many things you are talking about, and you are not wrong about a lot of what you are
saying, but you are also wrong about how you will be excepted.
I would love to talk to you more about this path that you want to go down.
I have written some articles and if you have time to look them up, it’s will be my turn to bore you, haha.
I was not bored at all, thank you for shearing.
Bigg Huggs

[Roz]

Hi Timmie. Thanks so much for taking the time to read my ramblings and to reply to them. I’d be delighted to read your articles and also to have the opportunity to listen to your thoughts at length. I’m going to search for your articles tonight as I’m assuming I’ll find them on TGH. Any and all advice is most welcome. Thanks again, big hugs,

Roz xx

[Timmie Sawyer]

RozH, I think if you search timmie sawyer we will find them.
thanks

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