I'm FtM, a transman. Like many here, I look at gender as a continuum. I've known many interesting androgynous people, intersex people, androgynous asexual people and the whole rich variety of human personality.
On a scale where 00 is male and 99 is female, I rolled the 00. I was never capable of pretending to be female. My abuser told me that I "turned into a monster" at age three.
From then on, I was isolated completely. No one understood or believed a single thing I said. They took away my trucks and kept giving me these stupid baby dolls that my sister wanted. I gave them all to her. Around age four I made the biggest decision of my life. That was when I decided to become a science fiction/fantasy writer, make up stories and put them in print. Being a writer is the lifeline that kept me from killing myself time and again.
As a child I was disconfirmed by every human being in my world. Parents, teachers, priests, nuns, other children, I was treated like a monster. Every one of them expected me to feel things I didn't, do things I hated, ignore anything I liked, want what I didn't want, think what I believed was inherently wrong.
If gender didn't matter and was all psychological or social, I would have been accepted by at least some of those people. It's not. It's physical, there is a level of identity awareness that can fall anywhere on the spectrum. I tried several times to create an androgynous role. I fell flat on my face, what happened was that I played with labels and went on being who I am.
I have no special understanding of women's thoughts, feelings or nature by way of plumbing. I'm just that male and my body didn't fit. There are other things wrong with my body too. My right leg is 3cm shorter, my back is as crooked as a sidewinder and I have fibromyalgia along with stress induced asthma.
I've had a hard life. I'm 56 now and didn't get surgery till I was 50. I had no money for it. I got diagnosed in 1979 by Dr. Pomeroy at the Institute for Human Sexuality in San Francisco. I lived as male without benefit of surgery from that day on. Even though I didn't pass well at first, I made sense to people. No one picked on me any more. No one stared at me as if I just crawled out from under a rock.
I lost my hormones when I moved to Chicago to "get a better job." So I didn't even have that. I know now that contributed to a lot of the pain I had - when I have my hormones a literal pain goes away. It's like walking around with a major headache you haven't noticed yet, only all over my body. It can be ignored but it impairs me.
I got my surgical reassignment in 2006 and shortly after that, my legal change. Last week I finally heard back from Minnesota - they corrected my birth cerctificate. I'm legal now. I can finally vote, get a job or a driver's license, get a passport to leave the country. I still don't have a right to marry anywhere in the USA, there's some question as to whether I could marry anyone at all.
I moved back to San Francisco on August 1st. I missed my city every moment that I was gone. Coming home to San Francisco surprised me. When I first got here I had this wonderful thrill, this total excitement and feeling of adventure. Now that feeling's different - a strange new feeling of homecoming.
It's all familiar. Everything about it feels right as if I was born here. It's not exotic. It feels normal and everywhere else I've lived was foreign and strange, including New Orleans.
I never had a home. I didn't understand homesickness - even though I had it for thirty years. I didn't understand why I needed to live in San Francisco so much - why other places like Seattle didn't appeal to me. Everything cool about New Orleans does exist in other places, although with the weather I can see that SF is actually the best place for me physically too - here the weather doesn't set off my fibro the way real weather does in other places.
That's not why it's home though.
It's home because this is the place where I joined the human race. It's where a clerk at a McDonalds looked at me and said "Here's your food, Sir" without anything odd about it. This is where I got out of hell.
I would fit the cultural male role if I weren't so progressive and so much of an intellectual. Has anyone noticed that intellectuals get de-sexed? A guy wearing glasses who reads too much is Effeminate, not manly. A gal wearing glasses who reads too much is Masculine, not feminine. "Intellectual" is the third gender if you listen to the traditional ideas on gender.
Of course the cisgender intellectuals somehow manage to meet and marry and have kids anyway. The big difference is they buy a large library of kids books for their spawn.
Cultural gender stereotypes are not the same thing as gender identity. I know many cisgender women who are seriously into sports. They tend to find mates who love their favorite teams and get into it in a big way.
So one of the things I'm doing in this life is exploring alternative masculine roles - how to express my identity in a feminist-friendly way. I think of women as my equals. I think the class difference between men and women is just wrong. My whole outlook on life is "I'll be me and you be you."
Some years ago when Xena was still on the air, I saw an episode where she was up against a powerful demon. They cast an attractive blonde actress for the demon and had a deep-voiced male actor doing the demon's dialogue while she lipsynced. The demon had simple male-anger dialogue like "I will destroy you" and so on - nothing subtle, just brute male anger. A lot of it he was challenging Xena to clobber him in a typical male bluster before a dominance fight.
That made me see why I was so hated and feared. My voice was that deep after a couple of years of hormones. Even before my voice changed, when I was a child with a kid-voice, that's how I came off to people.
From the moment I made the social change and started using a male name, people stopped fearing me. They think of me as cool, a nice guy, okay, normal. It was all of the most normal reactions I had to anything that gave me the most trouble, because people's world view shattered at the fact of my existence.
Various cisgender women have asked me if I thought they were transgender too, just because they got gender-bashed over football fandom or assertiveness at work or ambition or whatever. I always tell them the same thing - you'd know, you'd know if it's worth pursuing it either. I think there are a larger number of genuinely androgynous people than most would imagine.
My identity doesn't rest in conservative values. I don't believe in them. There are a lot of contradictions and there's massive injustice over so many things that I can't swallow any of it.
That leaves me looking at who I am and thinking I need to help redefine gender roles, something more gradual and inclusive that does leave a "non-gender" option in clothing and custom and social signals.
The reason it took so long for me to finish transition is economic. Most of my disabilities have been there all my life, including fibromyalgia symptoms. It takes me five times the body energy to do anything than someone symmetrical. If I stay on my feet too long I throw my back and wind up with weeks of bed rest. I could not earn enough to pay for my treatment out of pocket.
I finally got it because I got a lucky tumor. It almost killed me, but my surgeons were great - they listed both reasons for my surgeries on the hospital records so I had no problem with getting my legal change once it was done. I am still angry with this country over the fact it has no public health system.
I should not have lost more than half of my life to an untreated medical condition so unlivable that I was tempted to kill myself at least once a month. That I adapted to it and survived does not negate the real risk of suicide that I faced. I survived but so many others kill themselves, can't take one more day of it, just die.
We need a real public health system and it needs to cover SRS as medically necessary treatment including cosmetic surgery. They don't say it's not necessary cosmetic surgery if someone's face gets burned off and they don't have a nose, that guy's nose job gets covered. That's what SRS is to those who need it.
That some individuals don't want surgery is up to them - anyone can actually refuse a medical treatment they don't want. If it was whether to get a pacemaker, the law wouldn't require someone to get it if they didn't want something artificial in their bodies.
I was afraid to make this post. I've been living stealth since my daughter moved the family to Arkansas and was mostly stealth online too. I know a few people in this community. Nonny gave me a link to this thread and I read the first couple of pages without realizing how long it was.
I have to be out about it. The fear is that people will treat me different - will assume untrue things about me, like some level of androgyny that just isn't there or some special knowledge of women's issues. Gender identity is real. For me it's something as physical and extreme as my bones. For others it may be more of a choice.
To me that's like looking at gay people and bi people. Gay people just are gay, that's how they're wired. Bi people aren't as hard wired and can choose to be gay. If they decide to be monogamous and stay faithful, then wow, it collapsed on the choice and they're gay if they married gay. That some people can choose doesn't mean that everyone chooses.
I wouldn't wish my childhood on my worst enemy. I'm still not sure how I lived to legal age, except that the hope of treatment was still there on some level and I hadn't published a science fiction book yet. I held on to my writing as a sacred duty, a promise to self. I know why it had to be Science Fiction too.
Dangerous Visions anthologies had stories with transgender people in them and transgender acceptance. That and in the old days, female SF writers took male pseudonyms - so writing SF was a way that I could be myself and use my real name instead of the wrong label my parents saddled me with.
So there it is. I'm out. I'm nervous as a cat at a dog show because I don't know most of you, but I'm out now. It was the right thing to do.