The joy I see in Grace's eyes when she is wearing what she feels comfortable in, feeling relaxed, happy and empowered. But I also know that as soon as Grace is put away physically, she will be again, unhappy at having to live a lie - live as Gary. The sparkle in Grace's eyes disappear and sadness returns.
Grace is not alone - not by far. There are thousands of transsexuals in the UK. I feel that there are many many more who are hidden, like Grace.
***********************
Sarah's Story:
“My name is Sarah Szabo, and I’m a twenty-two year old
transsexual,” goes a sentence that, not five years ago, I never thought I’d
ever say. Five years ago, I was a high school graduate on way to being a
college freshman. Also, a boy. My name was Josh, I had a beard, and I had a
secret. I was lugging around a weight that any closet-familiar queer kid likely
knows a thing or two about, that kind of smirking, “if-you-only-knew” knowledge
of the self, held close and very personal behind a cloudy facade. I’m a woman
and I know it, I’d think to myself. I wonder if I’m ever gonna tell anybody.
For transgender people, the closet isn’t so much a place you
hide in as a jail you’re stuck inside. It’s not just that you can’t have the
life experiences you want—your hormones feel wrong, your body looks wrong, your
clothes hang wrong, and you hate your haircut. It’s like there’s another You in
you, and if you’re closeted, your biggest wish for the longest time is that
they’ll simply go away. If you’re ostensibly a straight man, like I was, you
feel a little like a Dr. Jekyll-type doing your very best to snuff out a
persistent and annoyingly faggy Mr. Hyde.
This isn’t to belittle the experience of gays and lesbians,
who historically have been subjected to just as much persecution and
misunderstanding as a people could possibly be. But a distinction between the
gay experience and the trans experience needs to be made clear, especially in
the modern West, where many transsexuals, myself particularly, often feel
marginalized, even in social contexts that are ostensibly their safe places.
The LGB(t) community, if you will.
The biggest difference today between the coming-outs of
homosexuals and transsexuals is that only the latter group still feels an
overwhelming pressure to explain themselves. While being gay isn’t easy, the
definition is—”two men or two women in love.” No such luxury for the young
transgender kid, terrified out of their mind and facing questions from all
sides, with barely the bravery to answer. “Is it a sex thing?” “So you’re gay,
right?” This isn’t to mention the boundary-shattering obsession with genitalia.
“Pre-op or post-op,” I’ve literally been asked. Never answered. How about the
story of your junk first, jackass.
So it’s terrifying, coming out, needing to both reveal your
most tormented secrets and at the same time justify them to a roiling ocean of
your perplexed peers. Not to mention your family, who for all you know will
turn heel and show you the door forever over any misstep you may make, being so
crude as to flip the script on your gender at them like that. I’ve never cried
so much, nor been so scared to open my mouth in front of my mother as I was
when I came out. I waited til I was 18 to do it, deliberately, with a
harebrained notion that if I were to somehow be completely disowned, at least
I’d be a legal adult and therefore, I don’t know, magically capable of handling
it.
These fears would prove unfounded. Over the last four years,
my incredible parents have basically done the equivalent of bringing me the
moon and stars down from the sky, through all the things they’ve done for me.
They are amazing people, and I know I’m fortunate, but even they had troubles
grasping what it truly meant for them and me, the first time I told them, “I’m
a girl.” I knew they probably would. Also, I knew I’d have trouble saying the
words.
So I wrote a letter. I wrote a letter which I let everyone
in my life read for themselves, with words I’d spent weeks prior stitching out,
gently field testing them with two of my best and closest friends beforehand. I
based its contents off of scarce accounts of others’ experiences online,
watching for what was said most often, and doing my best to synthesize a
perfect version of a speech I’d only ever have one shot at.
A therapist—not mine, rather my grandmother’s, who I don’t
see too often—later said that the letter I wrote was the best example of a
trans-oriented coming-out letter she’d ever read, and sought my permission to
share it with other therapists, and patients; a kind of template for a task
that’s very hard to do. I don’t know if she ever did, but I know that she made
me want to. I’m sharing this now solely with the hope that doing so might make
the hardest moment of someone else’s life just the slightest bit easier.
A lot of powerful memories came up for me, revisiting this
letter—the way my mom cried and embraced me when she read the name I’d take;
the way my brother slowly sank to the floor as he read it, in the hall; the
overwhelming acceptance my fledgling college friends gave to me, the first
response I received being “Szabo, I have nothing but respect for you.” Mostly I
remember how happy I was, the moment it was public, eighteen years of fear,
giving way to a budding peace. My transition’s still my greatest triumph, and
when I see this letter, I see the trembling kid at the journey’s start,
completely unaware of what a good decision she was making, hoping like crazy
that she’d be okay. This letter is now for those whose journeys are still
beginning. I was stuck in the closet once—here’s what I used to break out.
With this letter, I came out to the world as a transgender
person on New Year’s Eve, 2008. To this day, it’s the only New Year’s
Resolution I’ve ever kept.
Sarah’s Coming Out Letter
12/31/08
To Everyone,
By the time that I finish writing this letter, I imagine
that I will have been working on it, on-and-off, for several days. I intend to
take great care with it, because what I want from the outset is for this letter
to preemptively explain away the things you may wish to know, and to answer the
questions you will want to ask. Regardless of my wishes and best intentions,
there will remain things that you do not know, and there will remain questions
that need asking. It’s just the nature of things, I guess, so I suppose all
that I’m wanting to say with this disclaimer is that I’m going to be trying as
hard as I can.
And the reason I’m taking so much care, putting so much
effort into making sure that what I say is what I really and truly want to say,
how I want it said, is because I am writing you all to tell you that I am a
transgendered human being.
This is… not as jarring of a proclamation to me as it
probably is to you. If you saw this coming, that’s great! I didn’t really try
to hide it. If not, please stick with me for at least a few pages so that I can
try and explain some things.
All my life, I have felt wrong. And I do mean all my life.
Since before most of you knew me, since before I could even put a full
definition to what gender even was. I have always felt off in my own body, as
though the world I expected and desired did not sync at all with what was
happening around me, happening to me.
I have the brain of a female. In all likelihood it is
biological, caused during fetal formation by little more than a slightly “off”
series of hormonal developments. My mind is a girl’s, but it’s in the body of a
boy, and it has been this way for the entirety of my existence, regardless of
how I’ve been raised or how my worldly experiences have influenced me.
Imagine for a second here what that would be like. Imagine
you, a girl or boy, in the opposite body, and unable to do anything about it.
You see the world as a guy or girl, but have to live as a girl or guy, pushed
along by societal current, tradition, and bare survival instinct into positions
and identities that are increasingly uncomfortable to you, unpalatable to you.
Everything about your existence is laced with lies, and it feels like there’s
nothing that you can do about it.
This is how it is for me. This is how it’s always been for
me. If you’ve always seen me as a Herculean pillar of masculinity, then I guess
it just means I’m a good faker. I’m sorry if this makes you feel betrayed, or
wronged. That’s never what I wanted to do.
For years I felt that there was nothing I could do about
what I felt, and so for years I didn’t intend to do anything about it.
Unsurprisingly, this did not work. Transsexuality, I have found, is not a habit
you can break, a mindset you can force your way out of, or something you can
treat with psychotherapy or drugs. It is a genetic construction that will
never, ever change.
But as it turns out, there is something that can be done
about it. I’ve always known it was a possibility, but until now I’ve been too
terrified to make it a reality. It took time, it took lots of time, for me to
build up the courage to admit to myself that it would be a mistake to continue
living as a male, and to understand that any apprehensions that I had about
doing anything to solve my problems were very much outweighed by the problems
themselves, and the implications that they would have on my well- being for the
rest of my life.
So I’m doing something about it, and I’m transitioning from
male to female. It’s the only cure for my condition, and I am more than happy
to take it on.
Here’s what this means. It means that soon, I will no longer
be living as or identifying as a male. It means that I will be undergoing
hormone replacement therapy to cancel out my body’s male hormones with female
ones. It means that I will be physically developing as a female. It means that
I will be a female.
It means that I will stop following male fashion trends, and
will begin to dress as a female. It means that I will no longer be speaking
with that booming bass voice of mine. It means that I’m going to spend lots of
money to hire a professional to shoot my facial hair to death with a laser.
It means that I will be undergoing a long and tedious
process to shift every bit of identification related to me to reflect my female
identity, which will of course include a change of name. Soon enough, my name
will be legally changed to Sarah—the name my parents would have given me had I
been born a girl.
But above all of the rest, this is the part I want people to
understand the most. This is the part where I’m going to be emphatic, where I’m
going to be angry, and where I’m probably going to cry a little.
This is the part where I want to make clear that this is not
a choice. I am not deciding to become a girl. This is me allowing myself to be
who I am, and it is the only route that I can take, because I am done lying
about who I am. In transitioning from male to female, I am going to become a
second-class citizen in the eyes of many people. I am going to be opening
myself up to discrimination and hate. I am going to lose my right to marry. I
am going to jeopardize my likelihood of finding a life partner who accepts me.
I am going to jeopardize my job security. I am opening myself up to abandonment
and rejection by family and friends. I am diving headfirst into what is really
a whole world of social trouble, and it is not something that I would choose to
do. I’m going to go into debt hundreds of times due to medical bills, and this
is not something that I would choose to do.
This is the next step of my life, of my existence and of my
development as a human being, and this was always going to happen, because it
was never my choice.
Coming to grips with this has been an absurdly hard process,
and it has constantly sent me into depression and loneliness. Nearly every
personal problem that I’ve had over the course of my life, I can trace back
almost certainly to repressed questions of gender identity. Making myself
realize it and embrace it took years, and even after that—basically all through
high school—the fear and uncertainty of what to do about it made me miserable.
I never told anyone. I lied about what made me sad, or I
just didn’t say. Coming out and actually telling someone “I’m transgendered”
was a prospect far, far too scary to even consider. Instead I sank inside
myself, jealous of people more brave than me and all full of self-pity, and
it’s all because I was too scared to just tell anyone that there was something
wrong with me. It took being completely low, down, and beaten for me to finally
tell my best friend. It was a year after that before I told anyone else. After
that person, a couple of weeks to tell another. Despite how scary it was all
those times, and despite how scary it still is, it gets easier, and that’s why
now I’m able to close my eyes, hold my breath, and send this to all of
you—something that a year ago I wasn’t sure I’d ever do.
So before this letter, I told only a few people about my
transsexuality—a few of the people closest and most trusted to me, people who I
love and people who I felt cared about me enough for me to feel comfortable
using them as test subjects in my little revelation. My conversations with them
have guided me through the writing of this letter, and have helped me to find
what I need to say with it. I want to thank them for letting me cry on them,
for holding me, for propping me up and helping me through my very first steps.
My talks with them gave me the courage and the confidence to go forward. Thanks
so much for helping me, and accepting me, and making me believe that others
would accept me too.
I’m writing this letter to everyone in my life so that you
all can know what I’m going through, because I feel like it would be unfair for
you to not know. I know you didn’t ask for me to spill my heart out like this,
and I know it may be annoying to even hear it. I don’t expect you to write me
with encouragement, give me three cheers or to be my support group. I just
don’t want to give people the wrong impression of me anymore, and this letter
is my first step in showing you how I really am. If this means you don’t want
me around anymore, that’s okay. I really do understand. If you don’t want to
speak to me anymore at all, that’s okay too. Some of you are more on the
fringes of my life and probably wouldn’t be saying much to me anyway, and will
probably just brush this off as a strange occurrence involving a strange person
you met once. And that too is okay.
I can’t ask for acceptance from everyone. I don’t even
really expect it. I just want everyone to know.
For the near future, know that my transition is underway
right now. Things will be changing about my dress, my mannerisms, my voice, my
looks – but keep in mind that beneath it all I’m still the same person. Same
likes, same dislikes, same jokes, same taste. I know it’s going to be strange,
I know it’s going to be different, and I know most of you have never had to go
through this before. It’s okay, I haven’t either. I know there will be awkward
situations. I know I’ll be accidentally called Josh and referred to as a male,
and I know it will feel weird having to correct yourself when it comes to these
things. I expect it, and I’m fine with it. I also expect questions, lots and
lots of questions, and I want them to be asked without fear. I’m an
understanding person, and I understand how weird this might be for some of you,
and I want to minimize that as much as I can—for everyone’s sake.
I’m writing this to all of my friends and acquaintances new
and old, but it is the people that I’ve known the longest that this will probably
affect the most. People who I’ve known since freshman year of high school, or
even before, who have seen me grow as a person and seen me change many times in
many different ways, but never this much. I do feel like I should say sorry to
you for keeping this a secret for so long, for building up a wall between us
that I led you to believe didn’t exist. I’m not sorry for who I am, but I am
sorry for who I made you believe I was.
Again, all I can do is ask for your understanding—but if I
don’t receive it, I’ll probably live. Since coming to terms with all of this,
I’m already a happier person. I am taking my short life into my own hands, and
I’m going to live it the way that I deserve to live it. I refuse to go on
acting as I’ve felt the world would like me to.
This is my story, and I’m going to write myself the way I
want to be.
Love and peace to all of ya.
No comments:
Post a Comment