It’ll be four years ago this February that I sat my wife down and told her I was questioning my gender identity.
I’d known since I was 6 years old that something wasn’t quite right. I didn’t understand why I was separated from the other girls in that small Catholic school of mine. I just wanted to dress, play, and act like one of them. I felt like one of them. I was forced to wear a boys uniform, walk, talk, and act a certain way. To play my part. It wasn’t too long after until I fell in line.
Sure, I made friends, I adapted. I learned to hide what I was feeling quickly. I had to.
But those feelings never went away. I grew up with an existential sense of inadequacy and discomfort that now clearly was gender dysphoria wreaking havoc on me.
I spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years not understanding why I could never shake this constant, overbearing sense that something was wrong.
When I had learned what the word “transgender” was, I couldn’t get my hands on enough content for it. I looked for it in secret. I would scroll through TV guides, documentaries, movies, books, anything I could get a hold of to learn more. I hoped I could find someone who felt the same way I did, and was shocked to find out they didn’t just feel the same way, they did something about it.
I didn’t even know you could do something about this.
That’s great for them, but I could never do that. I don’t need to go that far. This will go away, right? Plus, what would my parents think? What would my friends think? I’m not old enough, I don’t even know where I would start.
So, I started to do what I could to forget about it. I stayed busy. I was always with friends, playing video games until I nearly passed out in my computer chair, eating atrociously unhealthy foods. Anything to escape and distract myself from what I was feeling.
Fast forward a few more years. I’m in my early 20’s, working a job I can barely bring myself to care about enough to show up, and these feelings are too strong to ignore. I remember sitting in my little Jeep at the time and finally admitting to myself I’m Transgender.
That’s the source of this, and while it was so painfully obvious in retrospect, when you spend years in denial and distraction, it’s easy to think otherwise.
Now that I was out to myself, I didn’t know what that meant for my future. I didn’t know what that meant for my career, my marriage, my friendships, my family. It was all just so overwhelming.
I remember driving home and thinking about what was next. I saw my entire future crumbling right in front of me. Divorce, being the black sheep of the family, losing my friends and any support group I could possibly have around me.
So, I did what many other trans folks do—I hid even more. I proceeded to grow my beard out to the longest it’d ever been. I got involved in stereotypically masculine hobbies—shooting, archery, and later martial arts. I dressed in baggier clothes. Wore camo like some fucking extra on Duck Dynasty. I ran right back into the closet and went even deeper. I almost found Narnia at one point.
But despite all the years of running, it all came to a head in February of 2020. I couldn’t bear to hide it another day. I called a therapist and made an appointment for the following week, and later that same day, I told my wife. If we were going to have children, she needed to know before, not after.
To say I was terrified would be an understatement. I wish I could’ve checked my heart rate at the time, because my heart was beating faster than it had during some sparring sessions.
Her response was one I could’ve only dreamt of. She said she would stand by me, and she wanted to make a plan to move to a more accepting city.
There were a lot of tears and a lot of questions, and I welcomed all of it.
I started making plans for laser hair removal and getting things together to change my name. The speed everything was moving along even gave me a bit of whiplash, but worse so was how jarring it was for my wife.
On top of that, I knew that taking hormones would hurt my chances of having children, so between these two things, I decided I’d just put a stop to all of it.
This was what I guess you could call my purgatory phase. I was out, but I wasn’t doing anything about it. That was difficult, but worth it. Shortly after, we were pregnant with our first daughter. Within six months of our first daughter being born, we were pregnant with our second.
And so now that puts me where I am now. I have two toddlers, we’re in a new city, and I have finally, after all these years, taken the first steps towards transition.
My first laser hair removal appointment was just yesterday. I’ll write more about that later. But most importantly, the first step has been taken, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
In this blog I intend to write about my experiences through this, and tell a bit more of my story, as well as give a little commentary on the political climate that we unfortunately have to deal with.
I don’t know who this blog will help, but even if for just one person it gives you the sense of belonging that I always craved, to just know that you’re not alone, then it would make this all worth it.
See you next time.