On being "miserable" [trigger warning: dysphoria]

Jan 07

On being “miserable” [trigger warning: dysphoria]

oh hey look I’m writing about gender again

So I was at this FTM support group the other night, and while confidentiality prevents me from recounting too much of the conversation, someone was wondering how they know whether they really need to transition. And he brought up the question of whether people had been miserable before they transitioned, and a bunch of people immediately jumped in and were like “Oh I was MISERABLE”. Thankfully someone else pointed out that you don’t have to be miserable to transition, but that whole paradigm still bugs me.

Yes, a lot of trans* people are miserable before and sometimes while they transition. Rip-off-my-skin, can’t-live-another-day-like-this miserable. Anyone who’d deny that is a damn fool.

I’ve had those moments, especially during my periods (and thank god those are gone now). But mostly, it was like this: I was living okay as female. I ignored my physical being most of the time and just lived in my head a lot, which was fine because I’m a nerdy introvert anyway. I stayed home most of the time because I didn’t want to shave my legs or put on a bra. When I did go out I wore baggie black t-shirts, and while I wore girls’ jeans, I wore them “guy-style” so they sagged at the crotch. I thought the issue was sensory, and that it was the tightness and cling that bothered me. When I had to go somewhere, like work or class, I’d grudgingly drag myself through the process of putting on a bra and fixing my hair and makeup. My self-esteem suffered, not because I wasn’t “pretty”, but because I thought of myself as lazy and unkempt. As for my name and pronouns, I’d hated my name since childhood but hadn’t known why. Pronouns never bothered me, I had no emotional investment in them one way or another.

So I was pretty okay drifting along like that, but I definitely wasn’t doing anything close to loving myself. And I could never feel like an adult, because I was supposed to be becoming a woman, and woman just wasn’t happening. And it wasn’t a matter of gender roles; I was totally into taking care of kids and interior decorating and all sorts of “traditional woman” things. But the idea of womanhood nevertheless made me want to scream.

And so it wasn’t really that I was miserable about being female - I didn’t even realize that was the problem. But then when I started being exposed to trans guys in real life - not just the media, where they were always hyper-macho Dudely Dudes(TM) - I saw something shiny that I wanted to move toward. I’d watch transition videos and feel this deep jealousy. For me, transition wasn’t about moving from abject misery to being okay. It was more like moving from a job to a calling.

And that is valid. If you feel like being female is your job, but being male is your calling, that is enough reason to be male. If you’re surviving just fine as one gender, but you could thrive as another, then it’s worth making the change. It sounds cheesy, but you deserve to really shine, and the world will benefit from your light.

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4 months ago