Five Questions Meme
COMMENT and ask and I will think up some questions for you too! I do not guarantee that they will be good questions, however.
seishun asked me:
1. How long have you known you were trans? How has it affected your life?
That's a tricky question to answer. I had no clear concept of being trans or identifying as female or anything like that in childhood, but there were subconscious feelings of being female. For example, I always had the feeling that I was going into the wrong bathroom when I went to the boys' room. A lot of trans people talk about how they preferred to play with kids of the gender they later transitioned to, but I pretty much kept to myself, not playing with boys or girls. I didn't really have a concept of identity at all. I vaguely seem to remember thinking I'd grow up female, but I can't really remember. I do remember that when puberty hit, I was traumatized by the changes that occurred. The genital growth, the body hair, the overall masculinization. I think a lot of the emotional trauma, too, was related to testosterone. I lost touch with my emotions to an extent. I envied my female classmates. I buried these feelings, but they still sometimes came up. Like, I tended to identify more with individual girls/women than boys/men, and preferred to hang out with them. In retrospect, this partially-suppressed feelings of femininity probably explains a certain anecdote from several years ago. A group of female friends whom I was hanging out with decided to do something. I forget which. I asked if I could join them, only to be told "Oh, sorry, this is a girls-only thing ..." I was really badly hurt by that, and, at the time, perplexed at the strength of my reaction. Why did it hurt so bad? Why wasn't it just a mild disappointment, perhaps a bit of embarrassment that I hadn't realized it was just girls? Why was I so devastated at being turned down? Now, I think it might've been that I was being explicitly put in the "male" category. There were other hints, a tendency to side with women in arguments, feeling more comfortable around women, etc. It was actually only a few years ago that I started to think about gender identity consciously. Looking through my archives, the first time I posted (on a filtered post) about a genderqueer identity was April 19, 2008. I don't think it was very long before then that I had come to that conclusion myself. May 4 of last year I wrote a filtered post saying I had started to think that I might be transgendered. That was when I started looking into it more seriously, reading books and so forth. I came to accept it that month, and a few months later came out to my friends list. Sometimes it still amazes me how quickly I went from accepting it to myself to actually moving towards transition.
Wow, that was a long answer! ^_^
2. How has your family reacted to you being trans, or do they know yet?
Some of my family knows. They responded pretty well. I came out last September.
3. Describe your CD collection (or iTunes library). You don't have to list every album, I'm looking for styles of music you like, or if there are particular bands so much you have *EVERY*thing they ever released.
Eclectic. ^_^
4. Where did you grow up?
Pensacola, Florida
5. What do you do for a living, and what is the most rewarding aspect of your job?
I work for DHL Global, sorting mail. It's an okay job. Decent pay and benefits.
seishun asked me:
1. How long have you known you were trans? How has it affected your life?
That's a tricky question to answer. I had no clear concept of being trans or identifying as female or anything like that in childhood, but there were subconscious feelings of being female. For example, I always had the feeling that I was going into the wrong bathroom when I went to the boys' room. A lot of trans people talk about how they preferred to play with kids of the gender they later transitioned to, but I pretty much kept to myself, not playing with boys or girls. I didn't really have a concept of identity at all. I vaguely seem to remember thinking I'd grow up female, but I can't really remember. I do remember that when puberty hit, I was traumatized by the changes that occurred. The genital growth, the body hair, the overall masculinization. I think a lot of the emotional trauma, too, was related to testosterone. I lost touch with my emotions to an extent. I envied my female classmates. I buried these feelings, but they still sometimes came up. Like, I tended to identify more with individual girls/women than boys/men, and preferred to hang out with them. In retrospect, this partially-suppressed feelings of femininity probably explains a certain anecdote from several years ago. A group of female friends whom I was hanging out with decided to do something. I forget which. I asked if I could join them, only to be told "Oh, sorry, this is a girls-only thing ..." I was really badly hurt by that, and, at the time, perplexed at the strength of my reaction. Why did it hurt so bad? Why wasn't it just a mild disappointment, perhaps a bit of embarrassment that I hadn't realized it was just girls? Why was I so devastated at being turned down? Now, I think it might've been that I was being explicitly put in the "male" category. There were other hints, a tendency to side with women in arguments, feeling more comfortable around women, etc. It was actually only a few years ago that I started to think about gender identity consciously. Looking through my archives, the first time I posted (on a filtered post) about a genderqueer identity was April 19, 2008. I don't think it was very long before then that I had come to that conclusion myself. May 4 of last year I wrote a filtered post saying I had started to think that I might be transgendered. That was when I started looking into it more seriously, reading books and so forth. I came to accept it that month, and a few months later came out to my friends list. Sometimes it still amazes me how quickly I went from accepting it to myself to actually moving towards transition.
Wow, that was a long answer! ^_^
2. How has your family reacted to you being trans, or do they know yet?
Some of my family knows. They responded pretty well. I came out last September.
3. Describe your CD collection (or iTunes library). You don't have to list every album, I'm looking for styles of music you like, or if there are particular bands so much you have *EVERY*thing they ever released.
Eclectic. ^_^
4. Where did you grow up?
Pensacola, Florida
5. What do you do for a living, and what is the most rewarding aspect of your job?
I work for DHL Global, sorting mail. It's an okay job. Decent pay and benefits.