Trans Realization - Trauma
27 November, 2022
This is a short peice about what I finally realized was the cause of me not being able to accept I was trans for so long. This was originally written up as a series of posts on Mastodon, with a little bit of further editing for here. Content warning: This document has strong language, some topics of sexually explicit nature, as well as religious discussion and talk of depression and suicide.I think I might have realized why the huge disconnect for me, why I couldn't accept I was trans for so long, and why it literally took me reading my entire childhood medical record and seeing it filled with signs of dysphoria from beginning to end.
It was an event in my late childhood completely traumatized me and made me afraid of sharing anything.
When I was 11, near the beginning of sixth grade, there was an event. I came home and had a big mark on my neck that looked like a bite or a hickey. I was unaware of it being there when I went home. One file here in my childhood medical record was being taken to the doctor for this. "Patient was bit by someone on shoulder. He won't tell who did it." is what this medical file record says.
Things with my family were pretty normal at the time, albeit somewhat complicated. On the lower end of income, although not abject poverty and we did have food and stuff. My father had a head injury before I was born, and he had a problem with a delayed ability to control his anger. He never actually hurt anyone, because he could eventually get control, but his initial reacions would be in an anger that unaware people on the outside wouldn't understand looking in. So between stuff with him, and various other problems betwen my parents at keeping the house tidy and easy to have visitors over, there was always this air of having to make sure to hide any misperceptions of something being worse then they actually were from the outside world.
Or else CPS would come and take us away.
When I was 9, my youngest brother was born, with a physical disability. That made things so much harder, finances stretched much further, added so much further stress to everything. When I was 10, I had a psych eval with the closest thing I ever got to a diagnosis of gender dysphoria as a child: "continuing difficulty socially, frequently sad mood, a degree of anhedonia, difficulty with sleep, emerging anxiety with concerns regarding harm befalling family."
When this happened at 11, I was taken to the doctors. I was paraded to talk to police. I was taken to talk to someone in the neighborhood who was a professional psychiatrist. They all wanted to be helpful and let me confide in them without worry about any kind of physical abuse - or worse, sexual abuse - that my parents were giving me. But I couldn't answer their questions. I couldn't do what these suddenly scary adults wanted. I did not know where that hickey mark came from, but i absolutely 100% without a doubt KNEW that my parents had NOTHING to do with it! And I could not get that across to any of them! Finally by the end of the day they let me go back home. But I had been fucking terrified, because that ever present threat of CPS thinking something was wrong was then a VERY REAL threat of them REALLY thinking something was wrong, and coming and taking everyone away.
And it seemed that just finally broke me entirely. I was too afraid of losing my beloved family, who really did not do anything wrong here. So I had to not let anything out anymore. Bury it all, bury everything. Bury any and all thoughts that things weren't right with myself. Completely deny any of the times I had before (and had after, because that didn't go away of course) dressed in girl clothes. One time after that my mother caught me snooping through something in the house, and instead of just getting up and walking away and getting no punishment other than a terse "stop that", I risked punishment because I was wearing white dress stockings on under my shorts and she absolutely could not know that I was crossdressing. I could never talk to anyone about any kind of discomfort I was feeling, so that nobody would ever think it was bad parenting and take me a way and put me in foster care. Everyone knew that if you were in foster care, things were bad for you as a child. Because you would be stuck with just random familes that didn't actually care about you.That little girl was terrified, and wove a web around her egg and bound it with chains.
As I went through teens, in junior high and high school, just because of shifting due to both puberty and the setting, the nature of things changed. It then was idle fantasies of being a girl. Thoughts from overhearing random conversations in class. A Sailor Moon fanfic I wrote that I had been turned into a girl. But since I had buried what happened so deeply, I only remembered sporadic events from childhood, not the feelings associated with them anymore. It was a cold, impersonal fantasy. Ironically, I had friends in high school who later came out as trans as well, and that made everything worse. Backed by their similar feelings, I really didn't think these thoughts were out of the ordinary. Everybody wished they were the other gender from time to time, I had the other accounts from other people confirming it, so there was nothing that was unusual about my thoughts anymore.
So by the time I was first actually introduced to the concept of being transgender, from someone I met who was in trans as well in early 2006, I was so disconnected from it that I thought it started in my teenage years. The random events during childhood meant nothing, just a child being a child. Over those next few years, where that other trans woman became my friend, I based everything on her own experiences. Her childhood was MUCH worse, and she had depression and had been suicidal before transitioning. So when she finally told me I might be trans, and I replied "nope, no gender dysphoria here", I had genuinely believed it. Because I didn't have major depression, nor suicidal thoughts.
But most importantly, my experience was not the same as her. I didn't feel like I was a woman, I just kind of wished I was. This was just idle fantasy, nothing impactful on my life. And it had started as a teenager.
Thirteen years between then and this year. Thirteen years of me having other friends coming out as trans, making new trans friends, and learning and sharing information about it with various people, but I was not trans myself. The joke of 'still cis tho' was very real, because I couldn't be trans. I was "on the border of being trans", I could even admit, and would say that if my childhood had been different then maybe I would be trans too. Genuinely, I knew it didn't work like that. I told others that. My logic to myself was absolutely illogical, childhood trauma causing someone to be trans is a bullshit idea, and there was no way I would ever try and suggest anyone else who was trans that they weren't "trans enough" to be trans.
But it was different for myself. I was not the same as anyone else. There was no way I could be trans, I am cis.
Early this year, one of my best friends' partner came out as trans. And she had a really rough time of it initially. And so I jumped to the rescue, the "cis" elder trans that had a lot of answers and resources to reach others for help and advice as well. The initial major rough patch was overcome, and they were able to start moving forward. My friend deep dove into research to understand her partner, and would share to me different things she would learn about being trans and trans experiences. Her partner? She and I just started sharing trans memes with each other, as I began to finally get her to open up and talk to me as well after years of barely getting her to say anything. In the first month she said more to me than the nearly ten years I had known her beforehand.Things were going to be just fine with them, I finally was confident of, and there was no reason to worry anymore.
Between the research, and the memes, cracks began to form. Things beyond just my idle fantasies that were obviously my problems. Memes about things that are very specifically the top of my list of existential dysphorias. And the more this went, the more of the real me underneath it all came out in conversations with peoeple, and the more people actually could spot and plainly point out my egg behavior, the more pissed off I was getting. Because I wasn'y an egg. Because I was still cis. Stop calling me an egg.
The real egg was still wrapped in chains, remember.
My friend then linked me this thing that was going around Tumblr and Twitter at the time. And this was the biggest of all, the number one point I could not refute no matter what.
Fact number one, presented in all of its Red Truth glory: I do not - I cannot socialize as a male.
My mind raced for a few days trying to justify this. I eventually wrote up a weird definition of being somewhat a woman mentally but being "okay" with being a guy otherwise. Because I still "wasn't trans", I didn't want to transition or anything. Partially, as I was justifying to myself as one of the key other points of my dysphoria was sadness of not being able to have children, because I didn't think transitioning would be enough. I didn't want to go partway to just never achieve what it was impossible to fully attain. I was going to send it this explanation to my friend, but she was busy with work at the time I wrote it up, so I bounced it off a trans friendly Discord I'm in first, for proofreading and thoughts. One of the other members suggested maybe I was non-binary. It wasn't something I had considered yet, mainly because my only exposure to anything non-binary had been the really out there all-gender-be-damned types, and this, with a suggestion that wasn't the right one, had been my first time being exposed to any 'mundane' non-binary types.
A few days of research later, I found demigirl non-binary. It made sense, so I identified as it. I could still be that "male" that I believed I was, while being able to accept that I was still partially female. And for a month I had been fine just accepting that, and moving on with life knowing I was a demigirl without doing anything else. All the while the egg continued to crack. It became harder and harder to justify. Yet I couldn't accept anything else, I couldn't make that step of accepting the truth.
Then it finally happened. Only by sheer abject luck. On 5 May, I was going through my medical records looking for my ADHD diagnosis, to try and get back on meds because my ability to cope on my own was getting worse. It had been something my best friend had been dealing with all of this while too, in the midst of her partner coming out as trans, she had received her first diagnosis of ADHD as an adult after a long and arduous process, and the meds she was put on made an amazing difference in her life. And I could see from her improvement that I really was not keeping up myself the way I could in my twenties, It was really a good idea for me to get back on them again. I hadn't been on them since middle of High School, and didn't want to go through a re-evaluation process like she had to do, so hopefully if I presented my old diagnosis, that would be good enough to add it onto the file and start giving me perscriptions. Easy enough mission, of course. I have the full paper copy of all my childhood records from my pediatrician's office, from when they digitized everything and asked if I wanted to keep it or if they should discard it. I just had to open it up, pull out that ADHD diagnosis, that's it. I hadn't really looked at it before, it just sat in my fireproof safe ever since I got it. But I did remember seeing it there when I initially got it, and finding some amusement at something or other I read in that evaluation before. Opening it up, it looked like it was oldest first, so I just needed to look through the beginning pages to find it, because it was while I was young.
It wasn't there.
Puzzled, I started going through pages one by one. Maybe I could take other pages in that mentioned my prescription to my doctor? Not as good as the diagnosis, but still. Everything else was in proper date order, other than the missing ADHD diagnosis, so it's not like I dropped it at some point and everythnig was mixed up. So I'm not sure where it went now, and was looking for alternatives to be good enough. Luckily, every clinic visit I did they took notes of not only whatever the particular visit was for, but also my overall physical state, the meds I was taking at the time of that visit...
...As well as a brief evaluation of mental state.Completely unexpectedly, I had wandered into a full record of gender dysphoria as a child, from beginning to end.
Lately I've been describing my experience as of dominos being slowly set up to eventually finally realize I was trans, in the next few years possibly, until suddenly someone came and kicked them over all at once. That's what happened that night. From beginning to end, random mental states that back then nobody understood, and vaguely just gave up and wrote off as maybe having something to do with ADHD or maybe something else Autism Spectrum Disorder like Aspergers, but now much more clearly read properly as what they were. Gender dysphoria. With my ADHD diagnosis tucked in the very end of the file, for some reason, I did finally have that to submit to my doctor. But it was done all the way back at age 6, with a paragraph there of my gender non-conforming behavior in there as well, even.
That was it. That was the only thing that could make me accept I was trans, was finally realizing I had it as a child as well. And it wasn't something I figured out on my own. But it wasn't somebody just telling me I was trans either, to just be in loud denial of it, which is where the whole concept of trans eggs came from to begin with, and the Egg Prime Directive along with it. This was a much different situation. Because wasn't just something I could refute of someone else telling me, It was literally my own medical history. Out of the blue, completely unexpectedly. If I did get the inkling to think that okay maybe I should look at my old medical records to see if there was something in there, then I might have been much better prepared for this. But nope, it's not what I was after at all, and yet it was at the forefront of my mind with everything going on with my friends. Suddenly I had medical evidence that I was trans right from the start. Plopped right down in front of me. I didn't need this right now. I didn't want this right now. Are we really doing it?! Now?! Right here?! Yes. Right here, right now. This was happening. and I had no choice in the matter.
And I had one HELL of an existential crisis from it. Mind racing over that night, the next day, the next night again, and finally leading to a full on panic attack on +2 days, leading me to being obsessive and disconnected for a while. Whether I wanted it or not, everything was changed by this. But it changed my mind about everything, and decided to transition. Over time I got my balance again. And actually starting HRT helped a lot more with my mental state in general beyond just that, with the biggest breakthrough finally reaizing that I actually did have depression, but of the anhedonia variety, and I had just tragically made everything in my bedroom black and dark because it wasn't a "guy" thing to have bright and pastels and pink and so I just designed to not make anyone - myself included - question anything otherwise. And one complete redesign of my workspaces later, concidentally finishing up right on Trans Day of Visibility, led me to finally really opening up about this to my larger, more extended circle of friends and family.
But it took so much to process this, to be able to put everything back in order again. Everything about who I was had been tacked on to those chains around my egg completely arbitrarily. When that chain suddenly was ripped out of place, everything had fallen to the ground in chaos. They are all definitely still me, nothing actually changed about me. But I was in complete disharmony with myself, with the chaotic obsessive thoughts of all of this making it really hard to put everything back to normal. Am I completely back to old normal now, in the sense of how I could act while I was blissfully denying I had a problem at all? Not entirely. but close. Much better than the first few months, absolutely.
Going into NaNoWriMo for this year, I had a specific plan of continuing a story I had been working on ever since last November, which had given me the first real motivation for gamedev I had since before 2019. But partway through that derailed, as this story had become very much an actual piece of LGBTQ+ fiction, because I had realized earlier this year that one of my main characters, a character that always felt "unfinished" to me, was also a trans egg. And a random thought of "what if" as I was driving one morning turned into half of my 50k words for the month being an AU where I explored the idea of what if she was able to figure herself out a lot earlier. While her own character devleopment is diffrent, and younger childhood experiences I both wrote now and had already written in the past were not really the same as my own, I had been over the years been writing a lot more of myself into her than I ever realized up until I wrote that, and that's helped me figure out a lot more of this stuff about myself too. That writing this month was about facing that trauma for that charcter. And it's spun off a larger story which is another character who's connected to her dealing with his own trauma. With the overall theme of my writing this month being about trauma, breakdowns, and insecurities, it had been greatly cathartic, able to work through my own thoughts and confusion and figure out myself, through writing these characters. And finally be able to process my own trauma and the source of it.
On the greater whole, too, it had always been present, interwoven with this story. And so very closely related to this character that was an egg. Around the time I was first suggested to be trans, but before it actually came, perhaps sensing it coming I had written a magical item to use in my lore stories. It was a gender swapping item, but had a very bad caveat: in what was 100% a subconscious self-transphobic defensive trauma decision, it was written with lore that it could not be used by anyone that was trans, or it would lead them to committing suicide. It had always been there in the list, and I occasionally entertained thoughts of using it. But last year, before NaNoWriMo even, I started toying with the idea of using it on all my main characters in different AU situations. And when I got to experimenting with that egg character with it, it felt not only right, but perfect, and it let me fill in gaps with both hers and another charcter's story. Through the freshly trans friend this year's experiences, I had realiezd that this charcter was in fact trans, and so then I had to solve the problem of this magic item. Because it definitely cannot exist anymore as it had, So I altered the logic. Kept the effective end result the same, because it's important to the story and the way people perceive it, but the reasoning for the side effect changed. A workaround was created, a way to allow it to be usable by someone who was trans without breaking their mind. The self-transphobia was slowly breaking down. And that the of the latest domino that was placed in the line before it was kicked over, written on 03 May. Which is why I say I felt maybe slowly I was getting there to eventually finally accept it anwyay, before everything was upended at once.
On that same 05 May night I saw that page about that incident at 11, amidst all the reading through the documents desparately hoping to find what I was reading was wrong and maybe it was just a blip and the next page would say nope nevermind we were wrong about the dysphoria. And I remembered that event and that night happening. And it was the first thing I sent to my friend before any of the other things I sent as I was looking at that file, because I had acutally told her vaguely of that experience at some point in the past as well. It had actually been almost exactly one year earlier, 07 May of 2021, as I read back to it now. Was exactly one year earlier, if you go from the day of my panic attack where I finally admitted I was trans. And, ironically, it was in a discussion about the topic of gender, no less! And specifically some dumb allegation that males are incapable of feeling mental trauma, not some types of emotions in general. That brought back to mind that event from when I was 11, for probably the first time I had thought about it since soon after it happened. But I wasn't ready to face it properly then, not in 2021 nor in 2022. Only this time, I had no choice but to. Because that's when the chain had shattered. And it took this long, fallign apart, putting myself back together, and using writing as an outlet to bring myself to the topic of trauma to finally recognize at the time that it was why the chain was there to begin with.
So I'm deifinitely on a lot more solid footing than I had been. Nearly have my shit together, and my head on straight so I can get back to doing the other things I need to do with my life that this sudden existential crisis had caused an upheaval with.But it took a lot to get here. And to finally connect that it was that single event was why this all happened to begin with.
As for the hickey itself? I had as a kid figured out a few days later it was just a stupid ass rubber popper toy a friend had that he was playing with, after he left a similar mark on his arm and my arm as well from the suction sticking it on and leaving it again. Back when they didn't have the choking hazard breathing hole.
So I GUESS the tl;dr is:
My entire life was ruined by a stupid fucking 90s kids fad.
Not sure if I should Red Truth that one as well, it's late now and I don't remeber all the stipulations.