Transgender

I am loath to make any pronouncements about how to 'define' being transgender, but because I'm in a perturbed and annoyed mood this afternoon, I'm going to break my own rule. I'm going to do this based on my own experience.

Please be aware of that proviso: this is 𝗠𝗬 𝗘𝗫𝗣𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗘𝗡𝗖𝗘 𝗢𝗡𝗟𝗬 and cannot be used as a generic rule. Nevertheless, I'd be surprised if others didn't identify with at least some of it.

I was born transgender.

However, that needs careful explanation. There was no such word as 'transgender' back in 1955, or anything like it throughout my childhood and adolescence. If I had access to information (which I didn't), I could have probably discovered such words as 'transsexual' or 'transvestite'. The kind of thing you find in medical books, but not in the average Geordie household in the 1960s. I was always aware that I was different in some subtle but person-defining way. I preferred the company of girls, avoided 'male activities' (football... achhhh!), was a very sensitive and emotionally aware kid, and loved the look and feel of how girls and women dressed, etc. This sense was all-pervading. It was also deeply unsettling for me. I had no way of describing it to anyone. There were no adequate terms. Not yet.

In my teens I very secretly collected women's clothes. I thought of myself as a shameful thing. But ironically, even though I now knew the relevant terms, it felt safer to just see myself as 'pervy' rather than admit to that fatal concept of being 'trans'. That final admission took decades. I was 53 when I came out.

That initial sense of being different I characterise as being very akin to someone who is left-handed. They don't 'know' they are left-handed; they simply 'are'. There is no need for a left-handed person to justify themselves to anyone. It's not something they want or desire. They don't intend to be left-handed. They don't wake up one day and say "𝘵𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘐'𝘮 𝘨𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘢 𝘣𝘦 𝘢 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘱𝘢𝘸". It's something they are.

It's the same with being transgender.

You can't 'want' to be trans' or want to be a woman or man. There's no 'being in the wrong body'. As far as nature is concerned, you ARE in the right body; it's just that there's a mismatch between nervous and cortical circuitry and the rest of bodily morphology. There is no error. The error is in the society around you that vociferously DEMANDS that you conform to the norms of the current culture. For those who fight this disjunction, it is like being constantly told to use your right hand, or else you'll be ostracised. Ironically, of course, this actually did happen to lefties at one time. Nowadays it happens to trans' people instead.

There is no set path for a person who has this innate difference. There is no Rule by which anyone can describe the solution to your life needs and path. Perhaps you can manage your life as a closeted person. Perhaps you think of yourself as a part-time cross-dresser. Perhaps you revise your life by stepping outside the cultural gender binary. Or perhaps your morphological chaos (often termed dysphoria) is so powerful that only body modification can bring some modicum of peace. The path is not set. It is down to you.

For me, the path was simply living a life that gave me contentment and final resolution of that nagging 'pain' I'd had since birth. Being Bea and not Bob was catastrophic to my carefully constructed male life. But at the end, I felt like a coward for pretending so hard. It wasn't a lie. It was coping.

[To be continued... at some point].