An Incoherent Ramble About Full-Time, Dysphoria, Depression, and Our Society

[teeganjane]

Is it at all weird that I am waiting to go "full-time" for so long?

I see people all over YouTube who are dressing ultra-fem before HRT and even in the first few months. For these people, dressing feminine was probably always part of their daily lives. To me, while I like coming off as "feminine," I am not a "girly girl." I'm kind of middle ground

Comments

[ashlayne]

I have an Aussie friend who is almost on the other end of transitioning. She's been presenting as fem for a while, and looks very good. She recently got approved for surgery.

You know how she did it?

When she went into her last therapy session before surgery, she was dressed in jeans and a (somewhat fem) tee. Her therapist asked her why she didn't dress ultra-femme for the appointment. She replied, "I'm dressing how most girls dress. A lot of women my age don't dress to the nines every day. I wanted to be comfortable."

Her therapist only smiled and made a note in her file.

The moral of the story is, when it comes to presenting in public, you have to be confident in yourself before others will be confident in you. When you choose to present in public, you should be confident of your image and comfortable with it, whether it's tomboy or ultra-femme.

[teeganjane]

Yeah, I think that really goes for everyone, trans or not. One needs to be confident of your image. I've never had that. I've approximated it, but I've never been fully confident in who I am.

I feel like I'm making the steps necessary to achieve that confidence, one step at a time, but sometimes I get tripped out over how everyone else is doing it, and then I stop and go, "Hey, am I doing this right?"

In the end, of course, to "do this right" means to do it in a way that makes yourself happy, and not in any other way. Everyone is unique, and that's okay. I'm feeling better after that ramble; I guess I just needed a quickie vent.

[ashlayne]

Completely understandable, and that's what places like your journal are there for.

Hell, I've had problems with my self-image since I was a kid, and I've never had gender identity issues. ;) (Sexual identity ones, sure, but those came later.)

[chainofhabit]

My mother outed me as 'gay' as a teenager when she discovered who I was dating. Considering it was another trans individual who does not identify as male or female it was kind of difficult to explain myself out of that reputation.

Over the past few years I've been struggling with my own identity, both gender-wise and sexuality-wise and I find that the reality of the situation is that my leanings are more towards being physically heterosexual.

Which basically means in order to come out to my mother, I would have to sit her down and say 'you're wrong about me liking X, but instead of that making me straight it makes me gay.'

Unfortunately that gets the reaction from people that if you're 'straight' before transitioning, why change it and become gay?

Point being, it's not about society, it's about us as individuals. How we're comfortable, and who we want to be. Which is a hard balance to make when what we want to be is accepted by society that tells us we're supposed to be a, b and c.

But it is supposed to be about who you are.

[teeganjane]

"Unfortunately that gets the reaction from people that if you're 'straight' before transitioning, why change it and become gay?"

This is a funny kind of faux-paradox that some people simply can't wrap their brain around. I mean, let alone people not being able to comprehend the concept of one transitioning to the opposite gender, the separation of gender identity from sexual identity seems like an even bigger leap of common sense for people like this.