Coming Out Trans: The Not So "Ah Hah" Moment

It was a Thursday at 1:57 P.M. in early June. The heat would beg to quarrel with the assessment that it was not yet even technically summer yet as would I. Several times a week I’d find myself in my “office-on-wheels” and drowning in only the kind of oppressive heat that a black car with leather interior could provide. Yet, the dealings that typically occur in my car welcomed the hot with welcome, sweat-dampened arms. Living in a 900 square foot apartment with four other adults and a child meant that I had to go seeking less-than traditional methods for phone calls or matters of privacy and my 2012 Ford Focus had become an unlikely oasis. It had become a place that shelters me as I make giant, yet cautious leaps into building my future and the life that I had only dreamed possible for myself. Yet, it had also become a place which housed me in my most vulnerable and terrified. All too often did I find myself climbing into that sun-baked heat box and nervously shivering myself into doing things that almost froze me in fear. Unlike many in the midst of deep anxiety, I find my body temperature drops to near extremity. Like a fat, old house cat seeking a good window to nap under, I am forced to seek conditions in which mere mortals cannot even breathe in to coax myself down from chattering molars.

It was a big day for me. I’d made the appointment over a month prior and found myself counting down the days until I was in the literal hot seat. What would be asked? How would I perform? Was I good enough for even this? I jokingly had suggested that this would be the only test I wouldn’t fear failure but that was a travesty in itself. Fortunately, the accession of telehealth had provided me with a more comfortable medium than the traditional trip to psychiatrists and therapists. Gone were the days of crayon-spotted waiting room walls and uncomfortable wicker chairs that spot so many of the therapy offices of my youth. I am still not certain what “cottage core” has inspired in mental health professionals but it all does very little for an urban kid’s limbic system but I fear that to be a topic for another day. It was on my terms and my schedule, especially welcome as a night-shifter with a rotating schedule. I had returned to therapy about a month prior and found myself lucky enough to score a great therapist right off the bat. Yet, this appointment sill loomed larger than life. This time, I had one session, hardly compromising of an hour, to explain and assure that I had spent my years co-existing with a condition. One that did more existing than I most days and that would not see me succeed in happiness until I could ease its symptoms.

Disfunction, thy name is gender dysphoria!

To look back in the rearview and see where it began for me is to roll back the film tape to a place before I even began recording. As the first child of my fashion-loving, 23 year old mother; there were certain things expected of me from birth. I was to become her doll and subject to the many horrors that this included. It was all big, poofy dresses from the gate. Pink on pink with large bows taped unceremoniously to my forehead when the lack of hair otherwise might make this feat difficult. She had a great deal of fun with me as her accessory. I even remember somewhere in my late teens looking in my closet and finding a surplus of unused, untouched dresses still bearing the price-tag. My parents, my grandparents and even the greater part of my extended family had been hoping for a girl and they had thought they hit the lottery. Even in utero, I had proven myself duplicitous and amiable in their whims and revealed myself early on. Cue the spending spree for frilly baby socks!

For my parents, having a girl was a clean slate. Not to say that they would have loved me any less should I have aligned biologically with my inner sense but I know my upbringing would have proven different. I already had an older half-brother as my father had a son already 11 years old by the time of my arrival. My brother had proven to be a bit much in his “boyishness” for my family. That is violent, aggressive, manipulative and mentally unstable with a proclivity towards criminality that extends to him to this day. Life certainly has not been easy for him and I do my best to keep mindful of this everyday when I reflect upon the trauma of growing up under such a powerful presence. It is an ever delicate balancing act to see his struggles while allowing him responsibility for how that came down the pike on me.

However, the matter of the fact is that my father’s teenage relationship had bore him a son and had fallen apart in my brother’s early childhood. Thus, my father had not been with his mother for approximately 7 years before my parents had met and subsequently gotten married. Both sides had moved on but my brother’s mother was apt to attempting to return to my father anytime her live-in relationships disintegrated. This created a difficult power vacuum for my father and grandparents who were prone to a delicate balancing act for my brother’s accord. Simply stated, they wanted the boy to have his mother in his life but this often meant that she would be living her life with another man and my father would be left hanging in the balance. My brother was subject to his mother’s invariable set of moods and actions which had him left on my father’s welcome doorstep. Yet, even without being the dominant parental force in his life, she was present enough to pull the strings in a war of favorites that him and I have never recovered from. It was a battle that was decided for me before I was even born and I now represented the physical embodiment of the broken link between our father and his eldest child.

Even before I was born, the stage was set for a battle of the ages. My brother’s mother was prone to spreading rumors or attempting to poison the wells. From claiming my mother had H.I.V. or was the mother of her younger brother and even threatening to have a hit taken out on her life. My mother was left feeling like she was under constant surveillance and had offered to step aside to allow my father to be with the mother of his first child. My father and my grandmother both had intervened, explaining clearly that he did not wish to be with her but that these were the games that she played, dangerous as they may be. My mother, left unsure of what to do, was susceptible to a great amount of abuse that was to become my inheritance. She’d even had the back windshield of her car smashed out at an early prenatal doctors appointment when she wasn’t even sure how someone could know she was there unless she was being followed.

In that way, I had always felt that being born biologically female, spared me the worst of my brother’s ill-treatment. As a girl, I could only wear my father’s last name and was like to go on one day, get married and leave it all behind. In this highly sexist and irrational view that was adopted, I would get to be my father’s golden child and be moderately liked by my grandparents but never inherit the castle. What castle, you may ask? Good question, I’m still trying to figure out what fortune exactly was being protected besides the mark of our family’s love and our last name. However, I did not go without my traumas for my crimes against him. My greatest offense of all was being born in the first place. In the sickest irony, I was welcomed as what I never truly was. The walls of my parents and grandparents’ hearts were already being built block-by-block by each violent and bad experience my brother had put them through. Dealing with so much of his own trauma, my family as a whole was sadly ill-equipped to jump to action. His actions only drew them closer to me with my “nonthreatening” sex and nature. The further he pushed them, the closer they got to me and the higher the stakes of danger in my life.

As a child, some of my earliest memories revolved around my warm, teddy-bear of a grandfather. As a hard-nosed, harder-working World War II veteran, my grandfather was highly respected and cherished for all that he was. As he should have been as he was so much. He was my hero then and still is. Yet, by the time I came around, my grandfather was advancing in years. He had become a father at the age of 41 and my own father had me at 30 and was already in his seventies. He was slowing down and his demeanor had changed. Having once had no time for the business of children and idleness, he suddenly had nothing but time after a stroke. I got to see a much different side of my grandfather. While I would have loved to see the man as the heroic figure I was raised on, I would not trade my experiences for all the world. I was “Pop-Pop’s little girl” and prone to sitting on his lap with him, watching TV and feeding the dog “cheesy-bits” (otherwise known as Cheez-its) much to my grandmother’s chagrin. He was my partner in mischief and relished in asking me to do the things that would likely get any other child in trouble. During the long months of summer when I was off school and my parents were working, we would take our afternoon naps together. There in his unfathomably big California King, he’d ask me to jump on the bed beside him and he’d laugh with utter joy knowing my grandmother could say nothing. He’d tell me one day he was going to get me a Cadillac with a racing stripe and I didn’t know what that meant but I believed it. By about 7, I had already perfected the artform of getting him a Schaffer from the fridge. With a thumb to his lips and his pinky extended, he’d tilt his head back and give the call. I’d nod and retreat to the kitchen where it was my task to sneak open the bottom drawer of the old, 1970’s refrigerator. This was no easy task for anyone who knows those fridge drawers but I’d manage to return with the goods. He’d put the beer down in the space between his recliner and the wall and take his sips when my grandmother wasn’t looking.

Yet, for every positive childhood memory, I feel as if I paid for them 20 fold at the hands of my brother. The ever watchful, spiteful guardian. Even now to look back upon these things with him would be greeted with indifference. My grandparents might have loved me as much as they could, but they loved him more. That was always the balance upon which I stood and what was pressed into me. The physical abuse was reminder enough but the emotional abuse is what stays with me today. The feelings as if I do not belong and that my family truly does not care about me at all is what persists. The idea that I am not my father’s child has made me walk through my life like a virtual-orphan. I cannot trust that m parents really do love me. By no lacking on my fathers part who will remind me, often tearfully anytime I need the assurance, that I am loved and his and I will always be his. Though to no avail, I do often find myself wondering if it will ever truly stick. Will I ever actually believe what is right in front of me? Not with the seeds of doubt that were planted in me before I could understand the politics of it all. Yet, that is a much longer article for a much longer day.

Though I was a girl for all intents and purposes, to see me in those days was to understand that being called a girl was all that was “girl” about me. In matters of dress, I was wearing my brother’s old hand-me-downs and graphic t-shirts. Once I gained autonomy over what I wore, my mother understood my hard boundaries; No dresses, no pink. I was agreeable to all matters of cat-sweaters and black, tight-like pants. I liked the light-up shoes with the day’s hottest cartoon and I loathed the grooming process that came with my hair. The upkeep of a curly mane of hair was an unfair act of genetics thrust upon me and wasted on me. My poor mother would be forced to run the 4k in attempt to get a brush through it but I found my father’s matter of styling more than acceptable. As a young and early fan of Elvis Presley, he’d slick my hair back on my head after a bath and that was truly the only time I’d let my hair be touched. I was winning no fashion-points in kindergarten but it was uniquely my own.

I fell into the stereotypical masculine activities that all the boys were into. I liked watching WWE Wrestling, baseball, hockey and football with the most adamant Philadelphia sports fan I knew; my old man. From very young, I understood that my options were limited. I was born here and these were my teams and this has remained my creed and a source of generational bonding. My dad often told me “you can be anything you want in this life, unless it’s a stripper or a Dallas Cowboys fan.” Fortunately, we’re safe on both counts. My friends were all boys and I stuck out like a sore thumb as the rough-and-tumble kind of kid I was in my neighborhood. Yet, my parents were never anything less than accommodating and so they have always been all my life. If I ever made them sweat, they have never shown it. My mother, though incredibly laid back all through my childhood, held two things sacred. Being one of five children and one of only two girls, she was left to a limited pool of the quint-essential girl toys. My mother’s father could not and would not allow his girls to play with their brothers toys. She can recall, with shocking clarity, her great distress at not being able to play with her brother’s G.I. Joes and the “cooler” toys and how bad she wished to play with them. Although she was young when she had me, my mother had a very clear vision of what she would tolerate when it came to her children on the gender binary. I would play with what I wanted. If I asked for Rescue Heroes for Christmas, then that was what appeared under the tree that morning. She’d allow for no subtle passes at birthday parties when the attempts to slide in a barbie here and there may have been tempting. It was my choice and as it was for my little sister who fell onto the other side of the binary while being raised just the same. There were never any attempts for either of us to be crafted or pushed to one place or another. I suppose it's in that way that I never understood the complexities of gender and the world I was to enter that was utterly ruled by it.