How I knew I was trans
How did I know I was trans?
Well, it’s a terribly hard thing to put my finger on. A year ago, I had just learned the mental vocabulary for it. Six months ago, I finally accepted that those words could really apply to my lifelong feelings — and that I carried a lot more fear and shame about them than I thought my pridefully ‘open’ mind was actually capable of carrying.
Today, I can tell you without a second thought that I’m a male human being — in the same way that I can tell you I prefer vanilla ice cream over chocolate, or the color purple over the color red.
I just am, and I still marvel at how I didn’t just know (or admit that I knew) this from the very beginning. I’m also, admittedly, unreasonably impatient for the rest of the world to just know me as well, which seems objectively silly when I myself was in their scared and skeptical shoes for most of my life.
I suppose it goes to show you just how certain I am — if I can really risk sticking these words on this page like they own the place right now, without the slightest fear of taking them back later and feeling more than a little ridiculous.
That said, a better way to put it might be that I realized I was a man when I realized that “man” — whatever that might mean — was the gentle resting place where my soul didn’t have to try anymore.
It was the (mostly) physical, semi-envisioned (in one way or another, whether through childhood characters or just passing daydreams of the mundane and ordinary) form where my mind could just hold still and be okay. A body that, pre-medical intervention (for me anyway), defaulted to a phantom flat chest and a phantom relative firmness and a phantom lack of uterus and a phantom yes that thing and a phantom sense of…I don’t know, maleness?
Or maybe just a not-femaleness so visceral that it was absolutely binary.
Either way, that first dose of injectable testosterone hit my mind and gut with such a miraculous sucker-punch of congruence that I wondered where this chemical way of existing — as if tailor-made for the very grooves and receptors in my brain — had been all my life. I wondered if having the wrong such chemical cocktail was what caused me so much woe and pain and trying since the age of 11 — a trying to just relax and exist that was very hard to put my finger on, except that I know now, somehow, that I don’t have to do it anymore.
It’s an indescribable relief.
So, just as I can tell you that I love vanilla ice cream over chocolate (but, in all honesty, would prefer a slice of cake), and that I prefer the color purple over the color red — and that I would know this for sure if the first purple thing I saw was somehow seen at the ripe age of twenty-eight — well, I know I am a man.
I didn’t actually believe in souls before all this, but I think I’m finally seeing why people do.
