It has been a semester, well perhaps a year, of true
self-discovery. I began my journey to
becoming Aaron just over a year ago.
When I started I had no idea what a ride I was in for. I had heard lots about the physical and
emotional changes that going on hormones would create. But, some of the changes that testosterone
produced in me were never mentioned by other transmen, or at least were so
infrequently discussed that I had never heard of them. What I began to realize is that I am growing
up, FINALLY. I am finding my voice in
this world and even though sometimes the words aren’t there, when they are the
message is loud and clear. I am finding
my way, my path, and my self-actualized epiphany; in short, I’m finding
myself.
I’ve spent years in therapy, some of which was merely
self-reflection, trying to figure out where things went ‘wrong’ in my
life. There was a time when I was a
happy, well-adjusted, little person. Of
course, I was 5 at the time so it isn’t like I ever made it to adulthood with
my idea of self intact. Somewhere in
there I lost a part of myself and I always wanted to know where and how I could
find that point and start over. I wanted
to relive my life as it was meant to be lived.
But, there was a fatal flaw in my theory, I had made the assumption that
I was ever on the right path. I started
life as a physical girl, but I was never really a girl. The wrong path in my life began the moment
they put that little F on my birth certificate.
From that day on I was forced by parents, convention, society, media, or
whatever to be someone I was never meant to be.
I am a boy, but I have a vagina, ovaries and breasts. I grew up and was socialized as a female. I did everything I could to play the part of
Ellen to keep the world that surrounded me happy. But, I never felt any of it. I was insulated and isolated from the world
around me because I couldn’t allow myself to experience life the way I was
meant to and I acted as though I did so that I would fit in. Puberty was non-existent, not that the
biological puberty didn’t happen, it did, but the mental aspects of it never
seemed to occur. I faked my way through
it. I dated boys. I went to proms. I had sex.
I got married. I wanted to
die. Living a lie hurts to the core.
There were no words in my vocabulary that could explain to
anyone what I was feeling, what I had been feeling since I was tiny. Even if the words existed, no one would have
understood. Being transgender is not
something that anyone who isn’t transgender can really ‘get’. Those who care can empathize, but never truly
understand what it is like. I’ve spent
most of the past 12 years or more trying to find an analogy that would
successfully convey the feeling. I’m not
convinced that it doesn’t really exist.
Gender is something that is so much a part of each of us that it often
suffices as an identity. Because most
people are born with their mental gender matching their physical sex they can’t
understand how someone could be any other way.
The way you live your life fits with the functioning of your genitals,
your hormones, your desires, etc. In the
case of the transgendered individual, sex and gender don’t match. And because of that, things just don’t make
sense. Your body fits one picture, your
brain fits another. One of my
girlfriends took me shopping once and put me in a dress. Her reaction was “you look like a boy in a
dress”, but when I tried on a suit it was just the opposite “you look like a
girl in a suit”. That was how I felt
about everything in my life.
It still amazes me how much that discontinuity affected
everything else. Because I was living
the gendered lie I somehow had no clue what my sexuality was, I had no clue
what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wasn’t even certain that I would ever
grow up. I made plans and goals that
could be accomplished by the time I was 20.
When I lived to 21 I wasn’t at all sure what I was supposed to do. While there are probably many people out
there that will claim that my gender identity had nothing to do with my
inability to find my path and my voice at a younger age, I feel it is
completely justified. There is a way
that we are socialized growing up that seems to point us in the path we are
meant to go. (That is a severe
generalization and far from accurate, but it is the best I’ve got at the
moment). When your body and your brain
are at odds, and completely opposite ends of the spectrum, it is impossible to
figure out the details in the middle.
You can’t experience the evolution from child to adult the same way
because you are too busy focusing on how to survive and make sense of this
disconnect.
When I started testosterone last April I feel that I finally
entered puberty and began to grow up.
Finally the world around me started making sense (well, as much sense as
a dysfunctional world can make). It was
like the light came on in a dark room and I could suddenly find the pieces of
the puzzle that I had been missing for 20 years. I suddenly had boundaries, edges that allowed
me to fill in the missing aspects of my personality. I had an image of what I could become. Finally I had me as something to work with, a
tangible piece of clay to mold and not some ethereal vision created by the
world outside that I had to try to fit in to.
And it wasn’t a slow process either. It took one shot of the essential T and I
suddenly began to feel at home in my own skin.
Nothing visible had changed, but just the presence of the hormone in my
system seemed to make all the difference.
That too is impossible to describe.
Unlike a lot of other transmen that I know my gender dysphoria was not
centered on the physical appearance of my body.
Not that there weren’t days that I didn’t look in the mirror and shudder
at the sight of me, there were plenty of those.
(I once explained it to a friend of mine as being the reason I only have
one mirror in my house, and I can only see myself from the shoulders up. It helps eliminate the dissonance and allowed
me to just ignore the physical) The only
problem was that no one else could ignore the physical as well as I did. While I maintain that I’m not transitioning
so that I can have “things” or “male privilege” I am transitioning so that the people I come
into contact with will see me for who I am and treat me accordingly. When I realized that was the case I began to
wonder if perhaps I really needed to transition or if the strict gender roles supported
in the pervasive dichotomy just needed to change or at least be more
flexible. But, I will never know the
answer to that question. It can’t be
answered because, unfortunately, the dichotomy isn’t going to change in my
lifetime and aside from that I can’t retroactively change my past in order to
change my present. I am on the path that
I am on and that’s just the way it is.
In the classes that I have taken this semester there has
been much discussion surrounding gender as a social construct or whether gender
is biologically determined. I think it
is both. The gender that each human
chooses is likely predetermined by biology.
It isn’t as simple as what is between your legs when you are born or
what your chromosomes show if you have them tested. I’m not a biologist, but I’ve heard theories
about androgen baths win utero, or not getting enough estrogen or
whatever. My guess is that is probably
accurate. Time and science with either
prove or disprove that. However, gender
as we experience in our daily lives is indeed a social construct. What is considered masculine and feminine is
determined by society at large. Whether
I am within the bounds set up by society is what determines how I am
socialized, stigmatized, stereotyped and sorted. That is how we experience gender, and that is
how we perform gender in relation to the world around us. If what is going on between our ears is the
same as what society tells us we should be doing then we are good. Otherwise, we are deviant.
The future for each of us remains unwritten, I have many
desires and dreams now that I have begun my journey down the path to full
transition. So many things have changed
for me. Physically, I had originally
been prepared to keep the breasts, ovaries, vagina, etc. Now I’m not so sure. Those aspects of my physical body continue to
feel incongruous to my mental awareness.
The finances still aren’t there to cover the physical transformation, if
it is meant to be, it will happen. Aside
from that I have an educational path in front of me. I want to work with kids and their families
who don’t experience their gender or their sexuality in the traditional
heteronormative binary. Had that sort of
resource been available when I was a child trying to figure out my life perhaps
I wouldn’t have had to endure the years of pain, depression and anxiety that I
went through. But, again, you can’t
change the past and I am who I am in part because of my past. But, there is so much more. I’m working with several friends to either
piece together a book or a documentary about the trans experience and the
beauty of trans bodies. Maybe both. I am going to work diligently on my blog site
over the summer and turn it into more than just ‘my story’, but make it more of
an way to come to understand gender, weave your way through the maze of
transition (if desired) and just general commentary on being trans in a binary
world. I am going to become an
activist. I’m not certain how, I’m not
certain when, but I know that is part of what is to come. I’ve been silent for too long. The words are forming. I’m finding my voice. And when I speak the world will hear. They might not like what I have to say, they
may misinterpret and misconstrue, but they will hear.
This is who I am, this is who I am becoming. I am Aaron Christopher.
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