Trans Realization - About Me
05 June, 2022
This is a collection of all the things I realized about myself when I came out as transgender. All of the signs of it that I can recall that I had ignored, my actual path of denial before finally accepting it, and so on. Content warning: This document has some topics of sexually explicit nature, as well as religious discussion and talk of depression and suicide
For anyone else that is trans or questioning, please don't try and compare your experiences to mine as some kind of actual measurement. I had a friend say to me "youre so trans it makes me question myself sometimes" after reading this, and that's absolutely not my itention here. This is simply all of the various gender dysphoria and things I only now really recognize as signs of it, that I never had never connected until I finally realized I was trans myself.
Childhood
I don’t remember a lot of my childhood on the conscious level, generally. Not that it’s really repressed or anything, but just by consequence of the division in my life between elementary school and junior high, where I had switched to going to school on the other side of the valley. There’s just a huge natural wall from how completely different my elementary days were from my secondary school days were So my overall memory is kind of spotty and I’m not sure how much the thought of being a girl may have dominated my thoughts. But I do remember some things, the most of which I remember is media that exposed me to the idea of being a girl or changing gender. In my house ther were some weird old kids’ games books, and I remember one of them having some personality quizzes that would assign you a gender, and the idea of the personality things from there that would be girl things kind of fascinated me. I remember some book for children that had a main plot point that if you kissed your elbow – an action that is physically impossible, though I did try it out anyway – it would change you into the opposite gender. Also there was one of the original Star Trek episodes, which my elementary school had the book adaptations of, where Kirk was body-swapped by an ex-girlfriend of his who wanted to steal his life. I also remember playing a game with my cousin at his place, a text roguelike of some sort, where our character came into a trap that changed our character from male to female. My cousin had found it kind of gross and thought it sucked, but I found it kind of an interesting idea.
I did a lot of reading as a kid, because I liked to read. And one thing I do remember doing is disassociating from my body and putting myself in the position of the main character from the books. And the biggest thing here would be if the character was written to be ambiguous, to let the reader of either gender imagine themselves as the main character, as some children’s fiction is written. I would self-insert to the character, but interpret the character as a girl instead of a boy. I can most vividly remember one particular book, a Goosebumps book, that I was reading in fifth grade sitting in the classroom doing this, where the character had a gender neutral name and was written to be ambiguous like that. I completely immersed myself in reading the book, imagining myself as the character as a girl, imagining and feeling the minor body horror things that the book was describing because of something with the plot which I don’t really actually remember, but it was very vivid the feeling in my mind.
I can remember interacting with both boys and girls, but it was always the friendships with girls that were more prominent to me. From at my youngest in elementary school, I had been attached to other girls in ways that I really didn’t process at the time, but fit as a part of gender dysphoria called gender envy. My closest friends in early elementary school - kindergarten and first grade - were girls that had moved away and it made me sad that they were gone. And in my last years of elementary school, my closest friends were a group of like three or four other girls – though it’s been so long to remember when all of the ones I can think of were in the group and when not - that I spent most of my recess free time with. There was also an instance in between elementary school and jr high, as well. I had gone on a week long school sponsored camping thing. There was a friend I had made there that I thought was a girl when I originally met him, but he was a boy that just looked like a girl. I can remember having some envy for him for actually being able to be just mistaken for a girl like that, as well as being much more flexible like a girl than I was.
Another thing both in elementary school and Jr High, that I can remember and never could process, is body shame. Particularly in being topless, this I have read is a very common thing with trans feminine individuals particularly. I’ve not read much on this particular thing, so I’m not sure if it’s rooted in the cultural expectation that women shouldn’t be topless or something else, but that was a thing that always bothered me. I’ve been both very skinny and very fat in my life at different points, and that’s been no bearing on it at all, either, I was skinny as a child and didn’t like it even then. When I would go swimming, trying to take lessons in the summer when I was about ten or eleven, I was really uncomfortable with being out in the open without a shirt on, and would try to swim with a shirt on as much as I could get away with. I always wished I could actually wear one-piece swimsuits like girls could wear, and was unhappy at the pool in general because I both couldn’t wear one, and also had to go without my shirt. And through Jr High and High School, I was really, really self conscious about changing in the school locker rooms with other people around, and felt like I would rather die then shower in them, I was deathly afraid of being seen by other guys in the lockers. Even as an adult that’s not really gone away, and when I was attending the gym before the covid pandemic, I would try and pick the most out of the way spot in the locker room where I would be the least viewed by anyone, or try and go when the fewest people would be around.
When I got to Jr High, I don’t think exactly that the idea of being a girl was as much in my conscious thought, as the beginnings of puberty and the testosterone might have pushed aside – or led me to actively push aside to try and accept just being male – the thoughts about being a girl for a while. That’s not to say that I didn’t have any of the thoughts, just I don’t remember as much. I do remember - which possibly could have a sign from my subconscious that something was different about me with the only scientific evidence it could find - being strangely fixated on the genetics of sex in 7th grade, as we were learning about the less common arrangements of sex chromosomes, such as XXX, XXY, and XYY, and being completely fascinated at the idea that there even were other possibilities to begin with. I do remember being interested in some of the girls’ fashion in my school, but it wasn’t necessarily the normal clothes, but the more showy outfits that the dance team in my school wore. Around this time, for a little while I would actually borrow my sister’s dresses and things to try on around the house, before my growth spurt began pushing me out of the realm of her clothes fitting me, and when that wasn’t an option anymore, I had actually I remember stealing some spare clothes from some girl’s locker, taking them home, and wearing them in secret. Along with this, I vaguely recall I had a slight teen girl type ‘boy band’ phase along with that, where, while not the type of music I would listen to normally, while I was wearing girl clothes I would fantasize about the lyrics of Backstreet Boys and Savage Garden songs in the perspective of a girl
I had some female friends in Jr High, but not close ones as I had in elementary school, and while I was making some more male friends, a part of me had began feeling lonely by the natural separation that puberty brought between me and the girls in my school that kept me from being able to be friends with them like I had been in elementary school. I do remember one instance, in eight grade, where I had overheard some conversation between a guy and a girl in one of my classes, where they were making a deal of some sort for the guy to have like twenty minutes to do whatever he wanted with the girl, and I remember imagining for the rest of that day that I could like swap bodies with her so that I would be the one he was performing those sexual actions on, just so the girl who sounded unsure in this conversation wouldn’t have to go through it and possibly be hurt herself. And one other thing that I do remember, though, completely without realizing it at the time, is acting like a girl with some of the boys I associated with. Acting like a schoolgirl with a crush while I would find any kind of excuse to interact with them. Not all of them, but some of them that my female mind had decided I was attracted to. I don’t remember anyone commenting about it, but it’s kind of a wonder that people didn’t just guess that I was gay from how I remember acting.
High School is when I for sure remember it starting to come back at a more persistent conscious level. It had began to be present in my mind again, and as I had really begun to get into fiction writing in the middle of Jr High, something I had dabbled with in elementary school days but was really starting to come into, it began to take over my thoughts in a writing sense. That’s where I had begun to actually think about being a girl consciously, with writing myself as one, as I began to develop female personas in my writing.
Leanne
The first of the female personas I had created was Leanne. Leanne was a character I used for writings, as a person connected with myself in some way. When I first made her, I had in my head a Sailor Moon fanfic, where I had traveled to Sailor Moon universe. I retain almost nothing of what that fanfic was, since it wasn’t ever written down, just something that ran in my head, but I do remember at some point that I had turned into a woman for some reason, and had become a sailor scout, for a fictional planet, taking the planet name from a sci-fi game I played at the time. And the name I used for that female body, because I apparently had to enroll in high school with the rest of the sailor scouts, was Leanne.
For the next decade or so, as I did other writing in fanfic form, Leanne would reappear in one form or another. Always connected to me, as these fanfics were all written in a self-insert form since they were stories running in my head. A couple other ones where I had been transformed into a woman temporarily, before turning back. Another one, involving travel to parallel universes like the early 90s series Sliders, had her as my double in one parallel universe. One story, a Pokemon fanfic that I had actually publicly published for a number of years, she didn’t even exist as a real person. Instead she was a fake trainer registration that my self-insert character used, as a convenient excuse when being confronted snooping around the villain teams gathering intel. She was ‘Leanne of the North’, a gym leader from a non-existent gym but with valid government registration, that my character was interim leader of in her absence. One hundred percent she was me.
Leanne persisted, although as I began to make less and less fanfics and more original content, she subsided. At one point, in the extended universe content for Spiral Island’s greater story, I had even written a part where James had lost his memory and turned into a woman, but at the time I wrote it since he still was using my name, then the woman he turned into was therefore Leanne. But I had dropped that plot long long ago. For a while Leanne slumbered, and I didn’t use her, as fan fiction became firmly something in my head to test and develop ideas before writing them into some other story. Sometime in the last couple years, I did finally bring Leanne back once more, in the current story that runs through my head. This time she reappeared as a Miqo’te woman, as an alternate body I needed to be able to accomplish a mission where I needed a different body. Then from that story, she persisted as just an alternate form I would switch to every so often, including a long stretch where I had been stuck as Leanne for a while from an accidental pregnancy (as I guess I decided the transformation magic was disabled for safety when there was pregnancy hormone present). All of this latest Leanne being still before I ever realized I was actually trans, mind you.
Adulthood
As I exited high school, and entered adulthood, I was not even eighteen. My closest friend from school was a fair amount older than me, as I was the bottom of my class for age, with the age bracket change happening just a few weeks after my birthday. At the time in the LDS church, men wouldn’t go on a mission until the age of nineteen, which left me more than a year before I was supposed to be able to go on one. In the mean time, I had ended up getting a job and working full time.
My first paying job, while living at home with no expenses, ended up with me having a lot of disposable income suddenly. And I spent a lot of it on various anime and manga. And specifically, it was more girly series: magical girl stories, shoujou romance, and the like. As well as the biggest Japanese gender bend media of the time, Ranma 1/2. A manga all about a guy who through magical means turns into a girl, and is comfortable being a girl. There was also various webcomics and other things I had started getting into at the time too, also generally about magically turning into a girl, with the character not always necessarily being accepting of it, or maybe disliking it at first but coming to accept it.
In that first year out of high school, for a short time I had a girlfriend. It was the first steady relationship I had of this type: talking to her on the phone a bunch, going out with her on dates to the mall and theatre, then as well going out to her place and spending time with her there. I had enjoyed very much the romantic aspect of this… But when she had wanted to make it a sexual relationship, that’s where it had unraveled. I had become very uncomfortable with it, and broken it off at the time. And while I had actually stopped dating her at that point, my mind had continued to imagine where it would go from there, starting from a dream and then continuing in conscious thought for a little while… Only at this point the roles were reversed. Now I was the girl in the relationship in my dream and imagination, and the girl I had been dating was now a guy. At the time, I didn’t really process why I had been so uncomfortable with it. It wasn’t just religious belief, I had felt that much was sure, there was more to it then that. Some of it was maybe a vague fear from the fact that she was younger than me, with her being sixteen while I was eighteen and over that perceived barrier of the age of consent, although that’s not the way Utah law is anyway. So for a while I had just perceived myself to be in practice asexual, based on this experience. Only now I realize it must have been different, and it was the idea of being a male in a sexual relationship was what I had a problem with.
I had also started getting involved in Pokemon organization, at first staffing as judge roles, then later moving into administrative roles. I had a lot of social anxiety as I went into adulthood, which I realized later was because of the expectation of having to act male, without really realizing it. It stressed and bothered me whenever I had to go out into a public function, especially if I was meeting people, where I had to interact with people, because I had to put on an act. But with Pokemon I never felt that way. I always felt comfortable working Pokemon events, and it wasn’t until earlier this year that I had realized why. I had a private conversation with the organizer of Salt Lake regionals this year after the event was over, the first large event since covid pandemic started, and among the things that we brought up was some of the policy changes to make transgender players more welcome feeling. And she mentioned an interaction she observed at one large event years ago, between a transgender staff member and a young child. The child looked at them, a little confused apparently, and asked the staff member if they were a boy or a girl. And the staff member replied “I’m a judge.”
And that’s it, that’s why I never felt uncomfortable at Pokemon events. Because I didn’t have to be there trying to act like a male. I had a job to do there. I was a judge, or I was a scorekeeper, or I was an usher or whatever it was I was doing. I was on the tournament staff, acting as part of the body of the event, and not as myself. So I didn’t have to worry about how a player or parent perceived me as an individual, because it was my job to make sure what I was projecting was representative of the tournament as a whole.
Exelia
The second female persona I had created and been using was my online gaming one: Exelia. I originally created Exelia in 2004, when I started playing the MMO FFXI. When I originally made Exelia, I had nothing in mind other than this was the character I was playing online. From what I understand, for some trans people before they realize they are trans, they play a character opposite then their gender at birth, because of it being their ideal. For others, they try and force themselves to play character the same as their assigned gender, to live in denial of their thoughts. Neither of them had really crossed my mind consciously, I just always played with female characters in games of there was an option and thought nothing more of it. Instead, what ended up happening pretty early on was that Exelia had become separated from me, sort of. She came into existence in my subconscious as a separate person, starting with a dream I had with her in it. In that dream, which occurred shortly after my computer had crashed from trying to repair a bad XI install and I had to reinstall the operating system, Exelia had appeared as a separate person to me, expressing frustration that because I hadn’t taken action on fixing the game yet, she couldn’t return to Vana’diel, the world of the FFXI.
That was, perhaps, the point where I made the biggest mistake for this being an awakening for me, and things had been thrown off for me on that regard. Rather than viewing her as an aspect of myself, a female identity and body for my mind that could live independently from the view people have of me in the real world of being male, who was then angry and frustrated at being unable to freely exist anymore since I was dragging my feet reinstalling the game, I had taken Exelia as someone else who I connected to. From there on, I had treated Exelia as another person, and my playing of the games I used her for was me viewing into her life. And despite many other dreams over the years where I had been Exelia in the dream, both in the worlds of Vana’diel and later Etheirys once I moved to playing FFXIV, as well as dreaming that I was Exelia as a regular woman in our real world, in my mind I had always kept Exelia separate. Kept her at a distance. That I was living and watching her life in these games, controlling her while I was the one playing, and when I was logged out she was left to her own devices. But that didn’t ever change how I acted when I was playing the games, when I was the one controlling Exelia. I was still myself, and I always acted like myself when I played the games. And… That, interestingly in retrospect, wasn’t as a man.
In the past, playing both XI and XIV, I had never shied away from admitting my gender when I was asked. In the XI days more particularly, it wasn’t as common for women to play in online games. Or if they did, they would more likely play a male character to hide behind, so as to avoid unwanted advances and harassment by men. Either way, it was expected that most likely a female character would have a male player behind it. In XIV, the player population is pretty close to equal, though with higher numbers of male players, but is significantly more balanced compared to other online games which are still much higher ratio male dominant. But since I was just myself, it interestingly just confused people. I’ve had multiple people tell me over the years, both in XI and XIV, that they couldn’t tell whether I was a male or female player, and they had to just outright ask me after a long time of interacting and not being sure. Because I didn’t act blatantly female, or rather act as a man pretending to be a woman trying to suck up to other players to get free stuff, I just was myself. Since mentally I am a woman, that’s what was coming across. And I’d never really had any problem with people misgendering me as a woman even when I told them otherwise, either. As much from my character being female, as it was I myself didn’t have a problem with it. One year, during the summer in XI I was in a chat group that was mostly high school kids on summer vacation. They all called me ‘grandma’, which really the only thing that bothered me about that wasn’t the female identifier at all, but the fact that they considered me that old, even though I was not even 21 yet myself that year.
Exelia was also consciously on my mind, too. As a separate person, I had used her in a couple novels I had written, basing her on how both how I perceived her as a separate person, and how I played her myself in the games. I had also made a male character for one story that was meant to be counterpart to her, which I then used in a D&D campaign but unfortunately ever ending up bringing her into that campaign as well. But then also there was fanfiction. Particulary with Exelia was the isekai. Every so often over the years, someone would post online, usually on Reddit as that is the biggest FFXIV community I participate in, the prompt of what if you suddenly woke up in Etheirys. Each time one of those would get posted, I would get some new idea of that. A few times I would get isekai’d in my male body. Sometimes that would result in me turning into a woman by some magical means later, sometimes not. But then there was also the ones where I’d wake up as Exelia instead. My mind in Exelia’s body. Those ones ran the longest, typically. And in the longest of all of them, the story in my mind was that I had claimed to be Exelia’s twin sister, who had come to look for her in her absence.
Gloria Antonov was that character. A sort of offshoot of the name etymology I had found when learning Exelia was a real name that might be tied to the hymn ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’, Gloria ended up being the name I used in this story to be Exelia’s twin sister. Woke up suddenly, almost not even realizing that anything was different at first, because by complete chance at the time I saw that thread I had my in-game house in XIV to have a room that was identical to my real world bedroom. In this story I was now in the Warrior of Light’s body, but had no idea how to use any of her powers. I told a couple people she was close with in the Scions my real story, but to not panic the public we couldn’t reveal that Exelia had just been replaced, so I claimed to be her twin sister Gloria who came to look for her. This story didn’t really have much of a plot beyond that, just things I did as Gloria. I got some assistance from the Scions to get access to ancient technology for research, fell into a relationship with one of them through this escort interaction, and ended up getting pregnant. Eventually in this fantasy the goddess Hydaelyn showed up with a copy of Exelia’s body with her in it, so I could live permanently in Etheirys as Gloria and raise a family.
I couldn’t even keep Exelia separate from me, in the end. I tried to, and ended up just becoming Exelia’s twin instead, as Gloria. Exelia is, and always was, me, a facet of me that I couldn’t present in the real world as a male, living online in the only environment where I could completely act like a woman as what really is natural to me.
Adulthood
As I had continued on through adulthood, the thoughts of being a girl had always been there. I had continued being deeply invested in media about magical gender bending, going much more into the negative aspect of pornographic. It had become like a fetish addiction, I thought. There was a theory at the time – which has been disproven since – of a thing called autogynephilia. I found that one day, figured okay that sounded like what that attraction to it was, and just shoved it off to the side. Tried to get it out of my mind. I didn’t really want it there, I didn’t want to think about it. When I laid down at night, while waiting to go to sleep while my mind was still active, stories would run through my head, escaping from the real world. Sometimes they were stories where I was being myself as male or playing another male character. But just as often they would be stories where I was a female character, and even the ones that I was playing a male would eventually be turned into a female character through some means or another. So eventually, I began to get more and more into writing to try and shove it out of my mind.
In about 2010, I stared getting into NaNoWriMo. I had heard about it years before but my schedule was never free to do it during November, but then I finally had a free month to try it. It was rather liberating. Just writing and writing, not really thinking. So much writing and so fast, there wasn’t really time to dwell on the thought of being a woman, and none of my novel topics were about that. But that was only during the actual act of writing itself. The thoughts don’t stop. They never stop. Once I was done writing for the day, and was relaxing, then they would come back, returning back to whatever the separate story in my head was unrelated to the story I was writing. Or I would then relax and unwind by going off to read more comics and stories about gender swapping, to relax from the writing session so I could be fresh for the next one. Always there, ever present. Despite using writing to try and push the thoughts away, they really didn’t help either.
I wasn’t really a stranger to the idea of being transgender at this time. Somewhere around 2005-2006, I made friends with a transgender woman through online, who to keep anonymity we’ll call Alice (I will use the placeholder names from cryptography discussions for everyone in this article). That was my first time being exposed to even the idea of actually being able to change from assigned gender at birth. From late-2008 to mid-2009, I had worked graveyard shift at my job, while coincidentally Alice also worked at a graveyard shift during that time. Lots of downtime in our jobs meant that we were in a lot of contact with each other. I got to know a lot more about her, her transition, various things about it. And I told her a lot more about these things about myself. And she had began telling me, from all the way back then, that what I had were transgender thoughts and problems. For the longest time, though, I denied it. Ignored it. Brushed off what she told me as not actually me being trans, saying that yeah sure maybe I was leaning on the edge of where other people would be trans, but no, I wasn’t myself. I must have frustrated her to no end, as she watched for more than a decade as I blatantly denied every joke, implication, and even outright telling me that I am trans.
Wasn’t even just her, either, although with her being trans herself there’s definitely more weight to it. But there was other people too, during my twenties, that had also told me I seemed trans in various ways of describing it, such as one time in work a coworker friend telling me I seemed like I was a lesbian in a man’s body. It had always just confused me, more than anything, that apparently I was giving off some vibe that other people picked up on but I seemingly wasn’t picking up on myself.
That vibe, perhaps, also led into another thing I can recall too. In 2009, my team got laid off, from basic level up through the top of management. The account manager decided to hold a barbecue at her place as a sendoff for everyone. Then, a few months later, she wanted to hold another one as a kind of reunion thing. I showed up, maybe one other person from my work who was a guy showed up… And a bunch of her friends from her LARPing group. So it was like five or six women there, as well as me and some other guy. Since it didn’t at all become the work reunion type thing she wanted, it just ended up being girl talk with her LARPer friends, talking about a lot of just female topics in general. Then after an hour or two they kind of realized oh wait there are guys here too, and were like wondering if they were making us uncomfortable with the topics they were talking about. The other guy, who had been sitting kind of the edge of the conversation, had been looking pretty uncomfortable the whole time and said as much. I… really wasn’t. I really didn’t have much to contribute to the conversation, being neither versed in those female topics nor in LARPing, so I had been sitting there quiet too, but it wasn’t because of being uncomfortable. I was perfectly fine there in that conversation.
There was another thing, too, which was more abstract. I am very tall, at six feet. In general, I am taller than most of the population, and when I’m anywhere I’m likely the tallest person there. But I’ve always had this weird kind of disconnect from that in my head. I don’t feel tall. I have to actively remind myself that I am tall. I always picture myself as having conversations looking up at people, even when I know for sure that they’re much shorter than me in real life and actually look down to them if we are both standing facing each other. I just kind of am uncomfortable being tall, like I should be shorter. My whole family’s tall, though, with my sister and father both taller than me, and my mother is just a couple inches shorter than me. So I wasn’t going to get out of being tall in any case, even if I was born as a cis woman. I’ve always tended to play characters in games short, though, for that reason. Exelia particularly, in MMO’s, I always make as short as possible, because that just feels more correct, somehow.
Another significant event happened near the end of 2016, when a close friend of mine died. I’ve written a separate blog entry about that, and so I’m not going to go into the detail about that itself here, but instead specifically my reaction on the very next day. I had tried to go to work after his death, tried to act like normal. Tried to act what was ‘expected’ of how a man would handle this emotionally. Even with the fact that, much to my father’s credit, I wasn’t raised particularly that men shouldn’t show emotion, like others of my generation were. He absolutely would cry, be sad, and so forth about things, and so I was able to. But even though I could from how I was raised, there was still the social aspect that men really don’t cry. And I could not hold that up. The more I tried the worse I felt that next day, and so I ended up leaving early. In the middle of a party at work, with a potluck for my team. I could not be there anymore, I left work, so I was no longer in public and could stop acting like a man. I walked back to my car, and began bawling as I called my mother to tell her what happened. There was no holding back the scared girl inside who’s whole world just came crashing down after losing her best friend, at that point she needed to come out. I had ended up going out to my mom’s place, she told me a place to go watch nature even in the bleak of winter as it was, and I cried and we talked for an hour or two, until I could regain the expected male control back.
Denials
There’s a number of things that go into my denying I was trans for so long, it’s not really any one specific thing. At least part of it is religious, I will not deny that. Whether other people don’t believe in religion, or believe about the specifics of mine, doesn’t matter to me, first of all. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, whether they believe in religion or not at all, and I’m not here to try and make any kind of argument otherwise in this article, simply talk and explain about my own beliefs and where I feel they fit in with this topic. What I believe myself is all that matters here. But to very oversimplify things about the LDS faith, our beliefs are that the spirit of a person existed before mortal life, will persist after mortal life, and gender is an actual immutable part of this and the plan for eternal life, which requires both men and women in complementary partnerships. And being transgender doesn’t really fit in this idea… Not exactly. In the past, as I understand, it might have been that transgender individuals were kicked out of the church. That is not the case now, the policies had changed more recently. Which I will come back to later, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
But the religious aspect wasn’t the biggest reason I had denied I was actually trans, it really was a secondary reasoning. For me, it was primarily more of a psychological aspect thing. What I saw, what I perceived, and what I thought I understood about gender dysphoria was vastly incomplete. I had a long-set belief, perhaps from just the stories I’d hear that were biased, that one of the most major symptoms of gender dysphoria was depression and suicidal thoughts. I’ve known people that did have depression, and were suicidal. I have very directly not ever been suicidal, and I never really had depression either. Not in what I had perceived of depression in the other people I knew with it, which was the lack of ability to do much of anything. To not even get out of bed for long periods of time. I had an employee that worked for me once, who had depression and, much as we tried to keep him on, he ended up getting fired because he just couldn’t ever show up to work for long periods of time because of it. I never had anything like that, so how could what I have be gender dysphoria?
To a lesser extent too, there was also a perception of just how growing up was in relation to that too, tied to the mental health that leads to the depression and suicide. I felt that my childhood had been pretty good, my parents were caring. I lived a pretty good young life, our family being somewhat poor aside. The experiences I was hearing about from other transgender people was as much about their own mental health, the depression and suicidal thoughts that I mentioned before, as it was their upbringing. Troubled houses, abusive family members, and so on and so forth. There was that perception too, my life wasn’t troubled enough to need to try and change myself. It seemed like those that were trans were people who were going through the effort to change and improve their lives, but nothing about mine ever seemed like it was bad enough to need changing.
And so for the longest time I had kept in denial about it. I kept apprised of things in the trans community as I could, keeping track of news and being worried to death for all my trans friends when there was bad news of things that may negatively affect them. But I never felt that it was something that I was, or needed to be, because my incorrect perception of what gender dysphoria was made me miss all the other signs of it that I actually did have.
Discovery
The tale of my discovery actually comes from helping someone else transition. To give two new aliases here, Grace is a friend of mine through FFXIV who came out as a trans woman in February of this year. Her partner, Heidi, is a cis woman, who is actually one of my closest friends and has been for a long time, as I’ve known both of them since soon after FFXIV A Realm Reborn was released. When Grace came out, drunk late in the night, Heidi had come to me having an initial crisis over this. Understandable, of course, as they had been a couple for a long time, and this was seeming to blindside her, and made her take a long hard look at herself and her relationship. Heidi came to me for help and advice in how to process this, and I had gotten some advice from Alice, another friend who is cis and married to a trans man, and a couple other communities I am in with trans people for some initial advice to give Heidi. That seemed to help, she got over the first hurdle in this, and began to process and absorb this change in their relationship.
One of Heidi’s specialties is research. She will deep dive into a topic to try and understand it as much as she can. And now, with this as the topic of her mind now, she began diving into understanding Grace’s mind on this, and transgender topics as a greater whole. And working to understand one of the most amazing things that came from this: Grace, who had always been a heavy drinker, suddenly had stopped drinking. Now that she was out, a huge weight had been lifted from her, and she didn’t even have the desire to drink since she was finally out. And so Heidi researched. She would read modern research on the topic, she would read people’s stories and experiences on Reddit. And as she was doing this, she would link them to me, and we would talk back and forth. While I was meanwhile passing on various tips that Alice gave me to pass on to Grace. Along the way, with the various things she found and linked me to, was the first thing that began to put cracks in my perception.
It was a story chain on Tumblr. It started with the account from a trans man, who was stepping into the much colder world of how male socialization works. Some of it was about the way modern society expects men to act socially, but reading over the account had made me realize the first real thing that couldn’t deny, in any way shape or form: I do not act like a male socially. Not in the way that trans man’s tale described. I do, and always have, because of how I socialized in elementary school, socialize like a female. With this first step, over the next few days I had begun to actually formulate that there was a difference between my mental and physical states. On that same day Heidi was having that crisis processing Grace, she had also asked me “are you a girl inside the same way, kinda?”, as she was one of the ones that directly had to ask me in XIV years ago whether I was a male or female player, because she absolutely couldn’t tell. So I wrote up a small thing, trying to explain the differences between my mental and physical states so I could send it to her, at the time going with the idea that physically I was male and mentally was somewhat female.
I had put that thing in a couple other places I had gone to for advice for her before, too. And one of the people there had suggested maybe I look at nonbinary things too, and even suggested one that it sounded like to them, although for me I didn’t agree with that one. But I hadn’t ever actually considered nonbinary before that. The only exposure I have to that had, admittedly, been a trans acquaintance I know through Twitter, who identifies as nonbinary, but always posts what are post-humanistic nonbinary things. The, to put it in Grace’s words, “I wish I was an eldritch horror, devoid of perceivable matter” nonbinary types, so I was completely unaware of the other more mundane nonbinary classifications. But from following a link to a nonbinary wiki of a bunch of them, I ended up finding one that actually seemed to be a good fit for this description I had written up: I found the demigirl nonbinary.
For the longest time, I had been insisting I was cis, because – while in denial of being trans as I explained above – I had always seen trans as a binary that I wasn’t fitting with. But finding the demigirl nonbinary state, which I felt was perfect, had also brought with it the idea of being trans as a side door too that I was willing to accept: since any state of not being assigned gender at birth, by definition, was a transgender classification, identifying as enby now was by definition making me trans, even if it was as I felt only technically one. At that time, I also didn’t see myself necessarily caring about changing that. Since my nonbinary definition was only accepting the perception of my state, mentally female but physically male, without still understanding any of the gender dysphoria I was burdened with, I felt at that point that was good enough didn’t actually make any more progression from there for a little while. But the cracks were starting to form, and the twisted woven web that kept all of this buried was starting to come unraveled.
One of the comments that Heidi read and shared with me before had come back into my mind. It was a comment from some trans woman of “I always wanted to be pregnant but I dont want kids”, which her reaction – from having gone through pregnancy herself in the past and not really enjoying it – had been a confusion of why anyone would want to. But as I had been reading the trans meme threads to find content to send to Grace, and occasionally replying in a few, I had seen something from someone wanting to be pregnant themselves. And it stuck in my mind for the better part of a day, as I began to analyze the fantasies that ran through my head. More and more frequently in the last five or so years, that’s where things had gone to in my head. Pregnancy. Thoughts about pregnancy, content about pregnancy, over and over, it had risen to the secondary most prominent topic of content I was consuming, behind gender swap content itself. And that’s when I really found the core of things: this wasn’t just a thing, this wasn’t just a fetish, this was the genuine desire. My desire. This is what I had wanted, more than anything in my life. I wanted to be a mother. I wanted to be able to be pregnant and raise kids. It must have been growing more and more prominent in recent years because I’m approaching forty years old, with a biological clock for a body I don’t actually have the parts to accomplish silently ticking away and keeping it more and more present in my mind.
I know I had thought of this when I was younger. I couldn’t pinpoint where and when I finally gave up, but at some point when I was younger I definitely must have decided that my desire could never be fulfilled. That magic to turn me into the girl I wanted to be didn’t exist, that medically it was impossible for me to ever be able to have a child, and that I had sadly given up and began burying this. It must have been so much earlier, since I couldn’t tell you when it was for sure. But I must have realized it was impossible, and just sadly relented in being male being something I could never change. And even at this point, when I made that realization, I still didn’t think I was interested in changing that. In actually transitioning, because trying to do so would be something that would still be only halfway to what I actually want.
But that was the turning point. Once I found that core, everything started to unravel. I started remembering things I hadn’t thought of in a long time, the things I wrote about higher up in my childhood, recognizing the actual other gender dysphoria I had. I never had depression, no. But I did have a deep anhedonia. A general murkiness of life being okay, but not really overly great, in retrospect. I had been surviving, and heavily invested in video games as much to pass the time as to feel some kind of enjoyment through the general anhedonia, and just that.
Covid pandemic, ironically, had been the best for me in a while. Despite being immensely afraid of catching covid, I had been perfectly fine with the isolation as my work moved to remote. People didn’t have to see me. I didn’t have to interact with people in person. Because I had never really been comfortable with my body, I had not really taken a lot of care of it. Over the time from getting out of high school, my weight had crept up, until I was nearly 400 lbs in weight. It wasn’t the weight itself that particularly got me to turn it around, it was the embarrassment of getting on a plane in 2013 and needing a seatbelt extender because I couldn’t fit it. I had managed to get it down some, floating above 300, for a while, but still didn’t care about my appearance. Covid isolation meant that eyes were finally off of me, and I could focus on myself. In that first year since lockdown started, I lost around 130 lbs, getting down to just 200. Then unrelated stresses and family trouble led me to stress eating some and go back up a little bit, but I had, for the first time in a long time, felt my appearance was acceptable. Although still not really right, as I still want to lose a lot more weight as well so wasn’t where I wanted to be entirely, I had felt that I was presentable enough and I wanted to get into cosplaying once pandemic ended. And with it, crossplaying in female costumes was something I had been considering. I had even bought a sewing machine, intended in the beginning to be able to alter my special Pokemon staff shirts to my new smaller size from my weight loss, but maybe to make other clothes too… And immediately what I had gotten it, there had been this weird ‘I can make dresses’ impulse, as a memory of a comic I had read more than a decade earlier came to mind, where the comic artist had been selling merch at a convention and some short woman had bought their largest size T-shirt and said she was going to make a dress out of it, and then had shown up at another convention to show that she actually had.
Things were starting to click together. The general unhappiness with my body and my presentation was a gender dysphoria thing. Ever since I had gotten out of high school I would grow out my hair longer, hating it short. There were a couple excuses I would use to justify it, originally claiming that I wanted to grow it out just to donate it, though that never ended up happening. I also have a physical reaction whenever anyone brings scissors or clippers toward the back of my head or neck, as it sets nerves all in my head and all down my back on flight alert, making it extremely uncomfortable to go through. So to avoid it, I eventually would only cut it once in the year. I would cut it back in the summer, just because of how hot it is, and always ask for barber to leave a few inches so it wasn’t, I realize, appearing to be a male haircut. And they would always get it wrong, cut it too short, and I would be unhappy until it grew out more. My mother never really commented much on me growing it out, other than vague threats that if I didn’t care for it then she would let my young cousins style it freely at the family reunions, which never was a threat that actually bothered me. And she even said at multiple times she would be willing to cut it for me instead, since the barbers would always get it wrong, although I never went through with that just because of how much of a travel and arranging time to do that it was.
In addition to head hair, there was also facial hair. For years I had just let it grow out, not wanting to take the effort to make it neat, because I didn’t really care about it either way. I would grow it out for a while, until it began getting in the way, then shave it all off to let it start over. But in 2020, I also coincidentally started having some kind of pollen allergies for the first time in my life. And it would get caught in my beard, then get on my skin later and give me rashes. I started going clean shaven just as a matter of trying to avoid that pollen build up, but, as I was losing weight, I had actually liked how I looked more while clean shaven. In fact, between the allergies and actually not completely hating my look while clean shaven, I had almost been considering getting laser hair removal before any of this started coming out, just to not have to deal with it anymore.
Even with this starting to click into place, though, I was hesitant to do anything more. Heidi had suggested to me that she never felt my male body fit my mind anyway, that she thought perhaps I should be more androgynous. She had suggested maybe I look at just testosterone blocking, if not actually going the other way and getting female hormones, but I didn’t really think it was a good idea worth pursuing. From what I understand, having low of all hormones is bad as well. I’ve got a friend that is a cis male but had very low testosterone, and always had a myriad of health issues because of it, that once he finally had that diagnosed and began on testosterone therapy, actually improved his health significantly. On top of that, the preventative I take for my migraines has a pretty long laundry list of interactions with the most common testosterone blocker, and I figured since I’d rather live okay but not in pain, than live happier on the path of transitioning – although not able to get to where I actually want to be since there’s still not the medical technology to give me the ability to have children – but then more in pain from my chronic migraines.
Cracking
It had been about a month since I first had decided to identify as nonbinary when it all came to a full head. It happened as I was looking through childhood medical records. As an introduction to this, I also have ADHD, and took medicine for it through to the beginning of high school, at which point I quit simply because of - through entirely my own fault - not being able to often have breakfast as I commuted to school, which taking the particular med I had been taking was very bad to do without food. I was constantly in pain in school due to the lack of food with it, and just quit because I didn’t want to be anymore. After that I had kind of coasted, coping with it on my own fairly well through my twenties, until my chronic migraines started coming back when I was in my thirties and that made it start to be harder to cope, but as I watched a friend who recently got diagnosed with ADHD for the first time and got meds for it, and how much it had improved her adult life, I got convinced that maybe getting back on ADHD meds would help in the places I had been just kind of coasting.
I have in my possession, from when they digitized all the files and were discarding them, the entire complete physical medical record that my pediatrician’s office kept. Every doctor’s visit, every hospital visit, every procedure, and every psychiatric evaluation. I had opened up the file, going from the beginning as it was chronological order, looking for the ADHD diagnosis, so I could pull the file and take it to my doctor to see if that was good enough to be prescribed again instead of having to go through an entire new evaluation. But the ADHD assessment wasn’t in the right place, it was instead stuck back at the end for some reason. As I flipped through the pages trying to find it, I read what was there to try and find any document relating to the diagnosis to take to my doctor.
The intake records from ordinary doctor’s visits all had various things in them about my state on each check-in, both physical and mental. And there was page after page of things being… Not exactly right. Then I came to a document from when I was 10 years old, an actual formal psychiatric evaluation. Which had the following initial assessment: “The interview with the mother and child identifies a child who reports continuing difficulty socially, frequently sad mood, a degree of anhedonia, difficulty with initiation of sleep, weekends where he feels tired, and emerging anxiety with concerns regarding harm befalling family, and a rather hypochondriacle style.”
I had called up my mother as I was going through these files, because she had said something about not being able to find the initial diagnosis when my doctor had last looked for it. Perhaps because they were going through it in chronological order as well, since it was all the way at the end. But something else she said during that conversation had really stuck with me as I was reading all these comments of my mental state, and reading some of them aloud to her. She said, quote, ‘that’s just a sign that there was something different going on in your brain, and they just didn’t understand it back then.’
Holy hell what an understatement that was.
Suddenly everything had completely changed. This wasn’t just autogynephilia, an idle fetish from my teens and adulthood. These were actual gender dysphoria symptoms, which I had been having since I was a much younger child. Laid right here in my medical documents. And since I was born in 1985, that meant I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s, before the research and information about gender dysphoria really existed, along with the scientific backing of transgenderism that there is nowadays in general. My pediatrician had always figured that there was more to it than just ADHD, his guess being possibly Asperger’s as well, but couldn’t get any psychiatrists to further evaluate. Even if he could, it likely wouldn't have found it back then, due to that lack of research. To quote another conversation with my mother, from a few weeks after this when talking with her about when I stopped taking my meds as a teen, it was ‘at the age where I was starting to figure what didn’t really fit’, and that was her guess as to why I stopped taking the meds, apparently either forgetting or I just didn’t really tell her clearly enough that it was because of the physical pain I had stopped. Well no, things definitely didn’t fit, but it wasn’t the ADHD meds that didn’t fit…
This was the point I couldn’t deny things anymore. And everything finally came to click together. I was absolutely trans, there was zero denying this anymore. I couldn’t. Not with everything now together, this physical evidence that I had mental health issues from it since I was young, and all the things that I had started remembering ever since that realization about wanting to be a mother. My mind is female, there’s not even any question about this. My brain wiring is not that of a male. My body does not match how my mind is, and that’s given me distress for my entire life.
In the terms of what term the the trans community uses to refer to this event, as the equivalent of 'coming out of the closet' that is used for gay peoeple, I had cracked. After living so long as an egg, I had broken through that eggshell and emerged into the world, completely looking at things in a way that I hadn't ever been able to view them before. To borrow a line from the original Matrix - a movie that had been, as the Wachowskis had talked about later on after both of them had come out as transgender themselves, written both conscious and subconsciously as a huge trans metaphor - suddenly everything looked different because I had "never used [my eyes] before".
So.. where did that leave me? I had finally realized – finally accepted – what Alice had been telling me about myself since before 2010. What I had never been ready and willing to accept. The mental health reasons that I thought I didn’t have were all spelled out plainly. So the only thing now conflicting was my own religious beliefs… Or were they?
I don’t know when exactly, but sometime in the last five years, the LDS church’s policies on transgender individuals changed, both internally and with messaging and resources for the public. On Reddit, on the most neutral of the LDS subreddits I followed, where the moderation team keeps strict vigilance to allow both members, ex-members, and nonmembers to have free and civil discussions as much as possible, there was a topic about LGBT+ members roughly every one or two weeks. I had started watching and noticing it more when Grace had come out, since helping her was on the forefront of my mind, and so I had actually gone and read the policy from the church handbook to see what it was like. And it’s very different now, much more accepting. First and foremost is policy that everyone should treat members and nonmembers alike “with sensitivity, kindness, compassion, and an abundance of Christlike love.” Everyone is welcome to participate in church and church activities, and not to be left to feel unwelcome.
There are a couple restrictions that the church has in its policies, unfortunately, if a person decides to transition, whether it medically or socially. They are restrictions to temple attendance, and Priesthood office and exercising. Transgender individuals, both MtF and FtM aren’t allowed to do either. And holding certain callings is also restricted, which it doesn’t elaborate on, but I suspect also being Priesthood-related callings. But other callings are approved, and people can update their membership records with their preferred name and pronouns to have them used in church. It was a lot more welcoming than I had expected, based on what I had heard it used to be. Much nicer place, although not enough I can understand for everyone. But the most curious thing to me, was the unsaid implications.
"The Church does not take a position on the causes of people identifying as transgender,” the policy reads. And another line in it is this: "Some children, youth, and adults are prescribed hormone therapy by a licensed medical professional to ease gender dysphoria or reduce suicidal thoughts. Before a person begins such therapy, it is important that he or she (and the parents of a minor) understands the potential risks and benefits." Risks and benefits, to add some emphasis. Even with the restrictions, the policy is absolutely accepting of what is needed for treating someone with gender dysphoria so they can function in the world. There’s a very interesting, unspoken implication with the wording of the policy like this. Church policy is not changed in the belief of the roles of men and women together in the eternities. For the purpose of mortal existence, the policy says currently, that’s taken to be a person’s assigned gender at birth. But there’s also the unspoken possibility, which I had been seen brought up time and again in the threads on Reddit whenever this topic came up, that a person’s spiritual gender could be different. That for transgender individuals, the source of their gender dysphoria could be that the spirit could actually be in the wrong body.
I’ve seen some rather interesting things on how sex works, biologically. We always assume it’s a simple binary, XX genes make a female, XY genes make a male. But it turns out that it’s not that at all, what it is one specific gene that’s usually on the Y chromosome. SRY, that’s the master gene for all things male. And that gene doesn’t have to live on Y. It can fall off, and it can jump elsewhere. So it’s possible to have a biologically male person who is XX, with SRY attached to one of their X chromosomes, it functions perfectly fine from there. And it’s also possible to have a biologically female person with XY, if SRY fell off their Y chromosome and just didn’t go anywhere else. In addition to that, there’s also other hormonal things. All of that is determined during the fetal growth stage, it can’t happen later. If there’s a hormone imbalance, or hormone intolerance, then the body simply grows a different way, because it doesn’t have the right hormones to grow according to correct instruction. There’s not that much significant scientific research on this, of course, simply due to how small a percentage of the population is transgender, but this is I believe the most prevailing theory right now for people who were showing signs of being transgender from very young, that during fetal development their brain development didn’t match their genital development due to hormone level or hormone intolerance differences at those stages of growth. Which from very young it has been for me, and even was in my initial ADHD assessment at six years old, with a whole paragraph of gender non-conforming behavior and preferences that was just glazed over because the research about this didn’t exist back then.
So to bring it back to the theology for a moment, that goes from just one possibility to actually two with how LDS beliefs are: either my spirit is male, as is my body even though my mind does not match that in function for whatever reason led to the miswiring in development, or my spirit actually is female, and for whatever reason in fetal development my body didn’t completely develop as one but did develop as transgender, and for what I needed out of mortal life it was decided my female spirit needed to be in this AMAB transgender body rather than a cis female one. And I’m willing to really accept either. For the life of me I sure hope that it is the latter, to find out in the next life that I am actually female, but in LDS beliefs even if that’s not the case, then there’s the belief that during resurrection into an eternal body, it will fix the issues that are giving me gender dysphoria. But here in mortal life, neither of those possibilities actually matter. What matters is what I do here, where it already is spelled out that it’s perfectly fine within the church to transition as a treatment for the gender dysphoria I face to treat my mental health issues. Which I very much do have, as I finally did start to recognize. Sure I’ve got some restrictions. I can’t exercise the Priesthood anymore. But that was a thing too, from when I had been granted it at twelve years old, and each addition onto it that comes through teen years and into adulthood, all of that had felt kind of wrong for me to have to begin with. That I shouldn’t even have it and use it.
And the temple restriction is a thing, sure. A very important one in the church. But at the same time I hadn’t been worthy of attending it to begin with. Not once in my adult life. As I had gone down the misunderstanding of this, mismanaging it as autogynephilia, it had become a pornography addiction that started in my teens that I had never been able to shake, despite trying to follow programs and resources on trying to quit it. Because I never understood that it was actually a gender dysphoria thing, I didn’t have the root of it so nothing would ever work to try and get rid of the addiction, which hadn’t really been about the porn at all, but the escapism of imagining myself in a woman’s role in a sexual setting. Something that, much like with Grace and her alcoholism, actually did go away as I finally came out and accepting of myself as trans. So now I’m in a position that I can work towards being temple worthy, but only now I’m restricted by policy.And I think that’s actually a much better position to be in, so I’m fine with living with that restriction. Trying to do otherwise, to hide myself away so that I can follow the letter of the rule to being allowed, will just lead me back to not being worthy again, as those addictive needs come back, which I will go more into a little later. So I’m fine with accepting that rule. Maybe it will change in my lifetime, maybe it won’t and my temple work will have to be done by proxy by someone else after my death. Who knows, but it will get done eventually.
Which brings me to another thing that had come to mind about this as well, thinking of role in the LDS church. Perhaps there is some work I am meant to be doing, as an active transgender woman, that simply the church wasn’t ready for in the past. If I had actually accepted this before, and been kicked out of the church for it, I may not have come back for a while – or even at all – once the policy changed to how it is now, just because of resentment toward the church for it. So perhaps things weren’t put into place in the right order, so to speak, for me to finally figure this out, while the policy was still the old, less welcoming one.
So religious beliefs and mental health beliefs are both now in agreement with my being trans and proceeding with me getting treatment as such. That was the turning point. I spent that night after that conversation with my mother unable to sleep, in a full existential crisis now of holy crap I’m a woman, and changing my entire outlook on it. Now I want to transition, absolutely, as far as I can go. Especially with hormone therapy, comparing it to the before step where I was hesitant just thinking of it as a maybe nice thing but my concern was my migraine medicine, understanding now that this isn’t just a mental thing alone but an actual physiological thing being transgender, and hormone therapy actually is the treatment to resolve that, brings me to a completely different peace with this now. I trust the science, and my religious beliefs also make important emphasis on trusting science too. Because, even with how scary it is right now for being transgender, particulary in the US with attempts by conservatives to marginalize and destroy the transgender population, my outlook on it is completely different now. I have the chance now, for the first time in my thirty six years of life, to actually be me. To not just hide in the shells and shadows of acting like a male which gives me great anxiety, to not be weighed down by the crutches and vices that I had been using to sort-of-manage the dysphoria, but actually finally be myself. Full, one hundred percent levels, which I had never been at before. And the idea is so liberating.
Like I said above, this realization had completely changed my outlook on things, and especially on my porn addiction. Pretty much it’s gone now, disappearing along with coming out as trans on Twitter. I had read a few things about it, what people were terming ‘euphoria boners’. A phenomenon where the body feels excitement and happiness from the thought of being female, and simply because of male body wiring that gets translated into an erection. Long, long ago, that’s what started it all. Not understanding that, misinterpreting that as arousal without the gender euphoria behind it, and thinking that’s what was happening, I was getting aroused at the thought of being a woman. But no, it never was that, was it? The pornography was just masking what it really was. For the longest time, too, it wasn’t even the actual pornography itself actually giving me arousal. Many times, actually watching porn wouldn’t really do anything for me, or trying to just get off from imagination without porn with myself in the role of a male. It’s only when I had actually imagined myself in the role of a woman that ever got any reaction from me, and I wanted to try and get my mind off of things for a while by masturbating, I couldn’t get anything unless I actually imagined myself as a woman.
And, really, the way pornography is designed, as a general rule doesn’t really give me much. Or rather, the way porn for men is designed. From what I understand from just porn industry things, and actual developer connections I have that produce adult games, for men the porn market is all about visuals, pictures and videos that are entirely male centric and male fantasy fulfilling. But with women, porn is more generally a thing about imagination and story, and more realistic depictions of relationships. Erotic literature, romance, and the like is more overall what women consume. More so, even, than men do their porn, it seems, with according to one article I’m seeing from 2012, it was reported that the romance/erotica market, which over 90% of the consumers according to that report were women, had even higher revenue numbers than the visual porn market for men pulled in. And… That’s kind of where I was always drawn to. Be it in manga, written stories, or interactive fiction, the way I had consumed pornography was always much more in line with a woman. And a lot of what I was drawn to basically directly was transgender fiction. Transformations from a man into a woman is especially a huge market for independent authors in Japan, and a lot of manga and stories and games exists with it as the central theme. All in all, this is both why I thought this was just a fetish thing for a long time, and the primary example of why it was not: my mind is female, trapped in a male body, and I had been for years giving it a way to escape that grim reality in at least the occasional short periods of time, in the only way that my subconscious had found to tell me this.
So now that I understand the why, and have accepted that I am a woman, that desire to fill that gap with porn has almost completely gone away. And now that I know that it was always the happiness of picturing myself as a woman that thought brought with it, translated by my body into an erection, I don’t have the primal need to actually see that erection to it’s conclusion now. Just as with Grace and her alcoholism, coming out and accepting I am trans has eliminated the need for a vice to try and cope with it and hide it away. But I’m not going to say it has completely gone away, because I have noticed it creeping back after long periods of having to act like a male. More specifically, I had traveled out of town for a Pokemon event within a few weeks of realizing I was trans. And I already established that the Pokemon events themselves aren’t dysphoric for me, but since I wasn’t actually out to anyone yet, everything else about that trip was. The airports and flights to and from, the people I interacted with in the city I was in, and even the other staff members I was sharing the room with: even though I have known them for a very long time, since I was not yet out I had to act like nothing was different and that was giving me more stress. When I did get finally back home from the trip, once I was alone, I had the urge to get lost in pornography again just to kind of reset my mind back to normal female once more.
Medical technology has changed, too. There is even the possibility that I can actually have children on the horizon, although unfortunately it might also not be until I’m too old to be approved for it. There’s experiments going on now with transplanting uterus into trans women, but that seems to have a lot of complications to it still and sounds pretty scary right now to be an early trial like that. But it seems we’re also on the cusp of growing clone organs – something that will revolutionize the transplant scene as a whole – and all that would need to be done is grow a clone uterus so that it wouldn’t be rejected.
Another thing I had realized with this, was actually an orientation thing. As I mentioned before, I had basically figured myself to be asexual, because of the experience I had with one girlfriend soon after high school. But I never would have considered myself aromantic. I dated a few more girls over the years, up until the body image levels got even worse and I let my weight balloon, at which point I couldn’t even imagine trying to date with how fat I had looked. But but there was a whole lot more I began to unravel. Remembering when I was in school and acting like a schoolgirl with a crush. Remembering times when I had actually felt inexplicable jealousy when some of my friends would get into a relationship with a woman. Realizing that one of the reasons I had been absolutely heartbroken when one of my closest friends died some years ago was that I had been completely in love with him, had long wished and dreamed and imagined that I was a woman specifically that I could be in a relationship with him, and there was now a hole in my heart with him gone. I probably had fallen for him from when I very first met him, because it was my active and deliberate action to drag him into my circle of friends and have the rest of them be friends with him too.
I was a confused, sometimes outgoing sometimes shy girl attracted to other men this whole time, not just attracted to women. Asexual, or at least seemingly under how I was assuming from before, but biromantic. Just like everything else, I wasn’t really processing this consciously in the past. My imagination had always been filled with straight relationships when I was a girl in them, but when it came to reality I never got any arousal from men. Because I wasn’t attracted to men at the same time I was considering that I was a man myself. In fact, I always had gotten kind of uppity too at the implication of being a gay man, if that idea ever came up from even just jokes about having male roommates sharing living costs with instead of living by myself, and I actually finally realized why: because the thought in my mind of being a gay man is like an even higher level of manliness beyond just a man by itself. I’m not a man at all, and so I very much was against the idea of being considered to be even more manly than I already was stuck with being.
Most interesting, and maybe a bit ironic, of all of this, is actually thinking back to my writing. Like I had said before, I had tried deep diving into NaNoWriMo to push these thoughts out of my head. But as I think back over them, there’s still a lot of things all through them that I had written subconsciously, either directly on topics for myself or indirectly a trans allegory. Second year I did it was transhumanistic entirely, with a character with a sickly body finding a way to digitize their mind and live a new life in a virtual world. Next year after that I had a character who had significant self esteem issues over the fact that she was infertile and unable to have children even though she desperately wanted to be a mother. Next was another book with transhumanist themes and technology to reincarnate the mind into a new body. Then yet another transhumanist book with nonhuman creatures trying to gain human forms. And that’s just the fast written stories. I also realized that the biggest project of mine, the universe I’ve been writing and refining stories for games ever since my first year of high school, is a huge trans allegory itself, being at it’s core about characters that are being forced by societal expectation to be people other than themselves, and the detriment to their mental health because of it. Over twenty years of writing this!
And within that as well was also some internalized self-transphobia, with a magic item in that big scenario I had come up with in conversation with Alice long ago that magically gender swaps people that encounter it, but I had always written as transphobic and driving anyone that tried using it on purpose to suicide. For NaNoWriMo this last year I had written a new segment of that main story, which featured a couple of the male characters having accidentally encountered it and being transformed into a woman. Then in the last month or so I had realized that one of those characters, which had been a main character ever since the beginning, had really never felt ‘complete’ in their characterization overall, but I realized I had actually coded in a way that being closeted trans could explain it. So I decided to make that explicitly canon, which led to writing a new segment with a few of the characters pondering the nature of that magic object. And in the end, I had finally reanalyzed that magic object itself, with characters having a conversation that maybe they had it all wrong and it isn’t transphobic, instead trying to be helpful but just not completely in control of it’s power which led to the mental health issues for people trying to deliberately use it. This new writing, recontextualizing a magic object that I had set the way it was for some fourteen years, happened only a few days before I had finally accepted being trans myself.
Acceptance
So here we are now. Thirty six years old, and I finally have realized and accepted that I’m trans. After a long, long time of these symptoms that I’d just been ignoring, and outright denying it when anyone else trying to tell me otherwise.
Perhaps ironically, after a blog entry I wrote about my name just a little over a year ago, here I am now ready to change it. But because the name is just as important to me – perhaps more than ever in the context of being trans now – I don’t actually want to change it, unlike perhaps a lot of the trans community. With so much judgement and hatred of trans individuals, ‘God is my judge’ as the meaning of my name, a God that absolutely loving and accepting of exactly who I am, is absolutely important to me. It’s not dead to me, but as it is it’s not really a name that fits being a woman, since it is gendered. So I will go with the feminine version. Danielle. Despite ending that blog entry assessing that my name is not Danielle, since that really was more of a thing about the lack of respect from that teacher than anything. I am actually perfectly fine with Danielle. As a trial, I changed my name on Twitter to that, as well as my account on my laptop. “Welcome, Danielle”, it says when I log in, and this pleases me.
Although that still leaves Leanne. I had always had a thought – and joke before I realized that I actually was trans – that Leanne would be the name that I would use if I actually were trans. But now that I have realized I was trans, and decided to go with the feminine version of my name. So I decided instead to use Leanne as a middle name. Seemed fitting as well, since when I was trying to separate the character in Spiral Island from myself I had given him my middle name as his first name. Using Leanne as a middle name now is a good trade for not using James, as I don’t have the same kind of strong impression of tie to it as I do my first name, so James can be the character I made him as I separated him off from being myself to being his own person.
Dreams
I’m sticking this one at the end, because it doesn’t really fit into the flow of the rest of this, but it is kind of an interesting observance and I wanted to have it in here. I mentioned a few instances already, but there’s also a whole additional thing with dreams in general. I tend to quite often remember a lot of details from my dreams, and always have since childhood. It had always been a source of story inspiration for me, so I would try to keep track of them, eventually starting a dream journal in 2015.
While I’ve not been consistent with it, so not every one is written down because sometimes I didn’t have enough details to feel like taking effort to write them down was really useful, there is a lot of times where I had dreamed I was a woman. From pretty extreme settings to completely mundane ordinary life ones, I decided to go through it and look and there’s a lot in there that I didn’t even remember consciously, only being able to remember a few of them. It’s not every dream, sure. But it’s… Almost assuredly much higher than the normal amount for a cis person, that’s for sure.
Going from oldest to newest in the log, of all the dreams where I was a woman or transformed into one, we have: in XIV as Exelia meeting up with some guy doing graphics work on the game and crushing on him, real world as Exelia working with some detective on some case with a school and having a problem with the detective’s cleanliness, male me doing renovations on a clothing shop and releasing a virus that made everyone in the shop swap genders and have to be quarantined, living as some woman who’s job is storm chaser trying to get data on tornadoes, one that was basically just a sex dream where I was a young woman losing her virginity, one where I was a high school girl having just trouble finding money to buy lunch because my backpack and purse went missing, one in XIV as Exelia with Gaius Baelsar propositioning her (the second dream of this nature I can recall, both of which were from before he returned into the game’s story without his helmet and it was revealed that he’s actually really attractive).
One dream where I was a guy but had to go do something dressed as a woman, and was possibly starting to be trans, and my sister was helping me do makeup and hair styling and stuff so I could be passing. There was one where I happened to be meeting up with someone I know on Twitter that is trans and meeting up with her well into her transition and she looked fully passing (I believe at this time this person had only just come out as trans within maybe a few months earlier), where I was a woman myself in the dream but no note beyond that whether cis woman or trans. One really long dream where I was a guy for most of it, but then suddenly turned into a woman while on vacation and had to contact my manager about policies for returning to work as a different gender. One that was just like pretty normal approximation of when I was still living at home before I moved out except I was a girl and that affected my day’s activities, one where I was a woman doing investigations of some kidnappings and sex crimes on the deep web but getting caught and abducted myself, another one I had started as male and randomly turned into a woman that is kind of hard for me to even understand reading it, but it had gone into some kind of RPG video game system thing and I ended up class changing into a princess. Another dream with almost no details other than myself and some other people all transformed into women, one where I was some random man who turned into a woman by magic of a dragon so the dragon could turn into human and have a relationship and not really caring about turning back into a man again. One where a couple of my friends found a video tape that could swap a persons sex when watching it and they tried getting me to watch it, but something happened so I avoided it, only to then encounter some other magic item in the same dream that would turn me into a pregnant woman instead.
One dream where at the end of Jr High I had gotten sick and hospitalized, and when I woke up I had somehow become younger and identical to my sister, and so then began to live as her twin sister, with some help from the government over the unusual medical case to alter records so that we were born as twins. One dream where I was a high school girl playing basketball in gym class, and while playing some guys football lands near me and after some passing back and forth he goes off and me and the other girls are talking about how he could go pro, then later the dream flashed forward ten years and I had married him, but because of injury he never did play professionally. A dream where I was younger and living at home as a male, but then suddenly turned into a magical girl, then wandering out into my house to find that the rest of my family were frozen, and I had to leave and go find the cause of what happened. Another dream where I was in XIV as Exelia, and trying to figure out some glitch that had triggered to use some emote that isn’t normally available. One where I was a high school girl again, trying to get to school on time, but my carpool’s driver didn’t want to leave until after school was started, so I had to try and get an Uber to get to school. One where I was a woman going to Pokemon World Championships as a volunteer, and being made the second to the lead in charge of the volunteers, then getting abducted and sold as a slave on some casino boat. One where I was a teenage girl staying at a hotel with my mom, and my clothes disappeared while I was busy changing them, as well as having to deal with a mistimed period.
A dream which happened in the middle of my weight loss in early covid where I was completely sugar free and sugar was invading all my dreams, where I was a woman in a mall trying to buy some pie from a pie store, but the line was too long so I left to come back later, but when I went back they were out of the pie I wanted, so I headed to my hotel room where a couple guys there had some pie they were offering me but it wasn’t the flavor I wanted either. A dream where I was Exelia in XIV hanging out in my housing district with my neighbors, then went to go home to find some woman there, who was apparently renting my basement and forgot her keys so I had to let her in. Then another one where I was in real life as Exelia – but as an Au Ra woman rather than a human one as the character usually is – attending a wedding that my entire mom’s side and everyone in the procession formation was supposed to be wearing matching outfits, I was meant to be wearing the male clothing but meant to be standing with the women in the formation. Another dream where I was at some convention as a male, with a man and woman I know, some monster shows up and some can of something the monster is carrying explodes and hits the woman and I, swapping both of our sexes, and then someone asks me if I want to go by a different name while we’re trying to figure it out and I tell them to call me Leanne. Then another dream where I was at some convention center as a male, go to use the restroom but it’s absolutely filthy, and decide to just magically will myself to transform into a woman just so hopefully the women’s restroom is in better condition.
And then finally, like a week before that full existential crisis of realizing how trans I actually am, I had a dream that I had started taking HRT. Woke up from that one kind of confused and laughing, as if that were a real possibility that would ever happen.