Hello, I'm in my early 20s and AMAB. I have no idea what I'm doing. I've been stuck in my head, repeating the same questions in perpetuity, with no-one else to talk to, for the past month or so. In just that time, I think I've convinced/unconvinced myself I'm some variety of trans over 50 times at least. And it always ends the same, a moment of joy, then fear, then doubt. Never denial, it's like I actually want to be trans, and that in itself is making me give pause to the whole idea of it. I can construct a narrative spanning my life that leads me to the conclusion that I'm trans, but a lot of the time I just don't "feel" it, and I get the feeling that I'm letting my poor mental health either get in the way of things or cause me to fabricate this whole ordeal altogether. I guess I just need to say something to someone, and to ask for help?
For context, the "narrative":
(very long and personal, some of it more relevant to mental-health than gender-issues):
(I'm still not sure if it was the right thing to type all of this)
(also some slurs and stuff on suicidal thoughts)
I was born with a unisex name, but always thought it sounded feminine. I got teased for this in early childhood, and was a very shy kid. I felt jealous of the girls with similar names to mine, as they never seemed as worried as I was when our names were first called for school attendance at the start of a new class. I remember someone once asking me "are you a boy or a girl?", and my response being "I was a girl, but now I'm a boy" — I got laughed at for that, and that memory has resurfaced so many times throughout my life as something that made me feel ashamed.
I did typical "boy things" as a young kid in elementary school; I had a love for dinosaurs and knights and dragons, played with toy cars and action figures, got into competitive sports, played violent video games, watched shounen anime, played with bugs and climbed trees and spent a lot of time outside. The only "girly" things I ever really got into were cartoons and kids shows directed at girls, though I always felt a bit guilty watching them. I also felt a stigma associating myself with the girls at school, even though it felt genuinely nice when-ever I had the opportunity to do something with them.
When middle school and puberty hit though, my mental health and behaviour changed drastically. I was super emotional and sad all the time. I couldn't make any friends without my one pre-established friend making friends with them first. I dropped sports entirely, doubled down on anime and video games (as that was what my friends were into), and got really into drawing (mostly androgynous looking anime-like sketches). I remember feeling super uncomfortable with the changes in my body. I stopped wearing shorts because hair started growing on my legs; I avoided the changing rooms for gym class, opting to wear sweat pants and an easy-to-remove hoodie all the time in order to make it look like I had changed; and I outright refused to participate in the swim-class section of gym because I didn't want to take off my shirt. I also remember thinking "why would anyone want to look like a boy?, I mean, girls look so much better." I grew my hair out as much as I was allowed to and had a sort of emo phase. I also had to take a fashions class in my first year, and during that class one of the girls commented on my "cute" voice — my response out of insecurity was to fake a "deep" voice for the rest of middle-school. I hated that fake voice so much that during high school I'd constantly play with my voice and accents, settling for something feminine/childish at home and something ever-shifting at school and in public.
I generally just wanted a fresh start during high school, and felt that I should start thinking more about academics. My best subject was mathematics, so I made the decision to put all of my focus into the sciences, abandoning art, music, fiction, self-image, and as much as I could, emotions. I wore super plain clothes and cut my hair very economically. I avoided social contact as much as possible and stopped making new friends. I totally blocked out the more expressive side of humanities from my mind, saying things to my friends like "it's fiction; it never happened; it doesn't matter." I even froze up and wrote absolutely nothing down for my first two English finals (but still passed... somehow?). However, in my final year, after feeling good about my performance in the sciences, I felt like I should probably put some focus into the side of academics I was ignoring. This completely shattered the way I thought about things. Basically, I got really into a book for the first time ever, and I felt like a cloud had formed in my head, like I couldn't think clearly anymore. I felt like I had no identity, like I wasn't a real person, like something had to change.
I ended up getting into a good university for sciences, but dropped out at the end of the second semester. I was basically suffering from depression and going untreated; I lost all passion for the subject material, I was overworked and in almost complete social isolation, I had a lot of financial and health issues to deal with at home, and I spent up to three hours a day in public transportation doing nothing but thinking. I didn't think I'd make it to the end of the year, and as my friends all drifted away I had to find something else to keep me alive, to keep me emotionally connected to something. So I found something, and used it to escape reality.
In 2014 I got into the popular long-running science fiction franchise Doctor Who, and I absolutely devoured it, binging 50 years worth of material in less than a year. I literally thought of the Doctor and their (mostly female) companions as my friends, but simultaneously felt like this body-less universal observer, living a fiction through the eyes of the Doctor's companions. My all-time favourite companion is Clara Oswald, who is literally woven throughout Doctor Who mythos and who, after enduring great suffering, tries to emulate something more than what her natural biology would allow for, the Doctor. I no longer cared about who "I" was, I felt like I was nothing and everything at the same time, and I tried to stick to this unreality for as long as possible.
One of the few things I did for fun back in high school was watch YouTube videos; one of the groups I was a fan of had this big fan-art community, and this is where I first ran into the idea of gender-bending, which for some reason had particularly grabbed me. This came up again when I was watching Doctor Who. One of the most pure moments of joy for me when watching the show was when one of the main male villains was revealed to have returned as a woman (the main character, this villain, and their species have bodies that, upon death, "regenerate" into a new person, sharing the same memories, but with a slightly different personality). This is also around the same time I got into the show "Life on Mars," which introduced me to David Bowie's music, and to the "Life on Mars" music video, which had a big impact on me.
So I continued down the rabbit hole of Doctor Who and Who fandom, binging a thousand hours of audio drama, hundreds of comic strips, and a few dozen novels. I was particularly drawn to the super obscure and queer spin-offs like Iris Wildthyme. But through all of this I still didn't feel like "I" was a person, that I could interact with the world or even fandom directly. And then my dad died.
And then reality struck me. Depression came back, worse than ever. I got a full-time job in retail. My anxiety flared up and I went from being scared of people to hating people to hating myself for hating people. I felt emotionally drained all the time, and couldn't find the energy to read books or even listen to audiobooks anymore. But out of the blue, another moment of pure joy. Jodie Whittaker is the Thirteenth Doctor Who, a woman as the Doctor??? That's amazing! I love it!
Through all of this I'm basically totally unaware of trans issues beyond the things you see occasionally in the media, like bathroom laws and celebrities. However, around this time a prominent person in the Doctor Who community whose work I admire came out as a trans woman. And my immediate response was to run to the mirror and play with my hair. I thought "I couldn't possibly be a woman, no matter how much I'd like to be one, I'd be awful at it," but I also thought "I don't exactly think of myself as a man, either." Since then I've been passively more aware of trans issues and have come to think of myself as agender, without gender.
From this point forward I have this thought in the back of my mind that I could be a girl. I find myself actively relating more to female characters in fiction, and generally feeling repulsed by toxic masculinity. My favourite Star Trek character is Jadzia Dax, an incredibly confident woman who carries a symbiot (Dax) that previously belonged to a male host. And when Ezri Dax first appeared my heart broke because I felt like I literally just popped onto the screen. This super anxious and inexperienced person trying to live up to that incredible woman but still be her own person.
I got into Buffy the Vampire Slayer after finishing Star Trek, and this show just felt like a constant reminder of all the dumb choices I've made. Buffy's "coming out" as a Slayer scene hit me a lot harder than I thought it could. And when Tara first appeared on screen, I immediately went "this is me." I then proceeded to ship her with Willow. And this is something I generally don't do with myself regarding fictional characters. I've always thought of myself as aromantic and/or asexual, but for some reason thinking of myself as "her" made a relationship like that seem more possible?
At this point I'm following a lot more LGBTQ+ people on social media, and their super supportive comments, jokes, and info-dumps have made me much more aware of myself as a person, to the point where I'm starting to think of myself as non-binary rather than agender. I'm constantly looking at fiction and music with a potential trans reading in the back of my mind. But I'm still not expressing myself publicly or privately. I'm basically a robot at work, very anti-social, wearing the same sort of thing that I would have worn in high school. And I still feel that constant sense of dread, like I could live forever or die tomorrow and I'd be fine with it in either case. And this gets worse when I abstain from fiction and let reality grab a hold of me. After finishing Buffy, I feel like I need to stop what I'm doing and just think.
So, I just sort of drift about on the internet for a couple of months until via twitter I run into this Ezra Furman's music video called "I Want to be Your Girlfriend." And this cracks the fucking egg. I immediately think "I'm a fucking girl" and spiral into a research-binge, looking into HRT, GRS, how things are done locally, and finding myself on various trans subreddits all the fucking time. I can't stop thinking about it and it's starting to affect my anxiety at work. I hate my body hair, I hate my facial hair, I just generally hate my face, and I don't even want to think about going to a hairdresser anytime soon. I hate being called a "man" and I've never ever even thought of myself as a "man." I've thought of myself as a boy, as nothing, as agender, as non-binary, as a girl, maybe even as a woman, but never as "a man."
But this simultaneously feels like an obsession, like escapism to fill the void I drained of fiction. I start googling and find that this could just be OCD, and that completely kills me. Now I'm in total doubt, depression. And the cycle continues over and over again. I feel completely exhausted all the time, thinking through the narrative and the doubts again and again (maybe I just want to be trans because a lot of the people I admire are trans, for example). I'm also absolutely terrified. I live with my family and have little independence (not even a phone), and I'm terrified about transphobia. One person in my family thinks of trans women as "gay men" and another thinks of them as "traps." And retail's hard enough socially without going through public breast development. Plus I've heard some of my older co-workers joking about "men who think they're women" before.
I tried going to a doctor to get help with my depression, to see if medication would clear my thoughts, and initially it did. I went "yep, definitely trans" on the first day only to go "oh no, maybe I just have some undiagnosed mental disorder" on the second. I'm hoping I can see a therapist about my depression and anxiety by early next year, but I'm worried about bringing up the gender stuff on the initial visit due to all the doubt. At this point I'm also totally in limbo again about being a girl or even non-binary. I once again feel like I'm some genderless "nothing," someone who doesn't exist. I have no-one to come out to, I haven't had a close friend in years, or any friends at all in the past year. I can't even experiment with lipstick or nail polish, let alone make up or fashion (which totally overwhelms me at the moment). I'm stuck and my heart hurts and it's driving me up the wall. Sometimes I want to sleep forever and sometimes I just want to blurt everything out.
This is a lot. Probably too much. And maybe not the place to share it. But it's killing me and I just need to get it ouT!
Submitted December 11, 2019 at 09:36PM by 5892584 https://ift.tt/36oc5FR
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