My Gender Journey Keeps On Keeping On
On coming out as transgender, losing my brothers, and learning I’m intersex
It took me until I was forty-five to gather enough courage to come out as transgender. To let go of the “safe” place where I was just a woman who had a raging hatred of herself. Forty-five years to venture into the scary depths of not knowing what would happen if I were to transition. I knew my whole life, that I was not a girl. But feeling that I had any options to address that matter was another story. For most of my life, I was trying to make the woman thing work because I didn’t think I had any options. I absolutely could NOT transition. It would mean I’d never see my family again. And I had not a single figure on my radar that was what I was. I was completely alone.
When I was still obscured by female traits, every day felt like waking up from a multi-year coma in someone else’s body. Like what it must be like to wake from a face transplant surgery. I mean, literally, you are wearing someone else. In my case, this other person’s body was a gender that made no sense to me. A body with MASSIVE tits and childbearing hips and, “Oh, Lord,” the thighs!
Outwardly, I appeared female, yet I didn’t feel that way inside. I was a boy. I was a man. And unless I was drunk or making myself oblivious by other means…
