Pool of Mauve

Starting to understand that I’m transgender was more difficult than I imagine. As I didn’t question my gender until I was twenty-seven. Or at least as far as I remember it was when I was twenty-seven. Maybe it was a bit sooner than that. But my memories are sort of failing me.

My whole body didn’t feel wrong as more just didn’t really seem like it should be. In the sense that it should be different. When I was younger, I wanted to have breasts. Big breasts as I thought that was normal. I know that it’s stupid to think that wanting giant boobs as a child is normal. But I really thought it was normal because of everyone that I lived with not correcting me. Or anything like that.

Growing up I never thought anything was wrong. Not in the gender-sense. But I did go through a brief phase of ‘Not Like Other Girls’ that I find extremely funny. How much better I thought I was than other girls. I wasn’t. I think life humbled that thought out of me. And I grew up quite a bit since I was in that age group.

For a while, I was feeling weirder and worse. Not like the person that I wanted to be. But I never let myself linger on it. Sure, I met trans people, and I advocated for them. Especially people who were calling trans women just men that felt like women. That did and still pisses me off to no end. Mostly this one person on a forum who claimed I was a cisgender man. I mean I am a man. But not a cisgender one that allegedly had no right to ‘women’s topics’. She said she wasn’t a transphobe because she believed that trans people deserved rights.

Just outside of women’s rights.

Whatever. I started to understand my feelings a lot better when I moved to Tumblr. I started finding more and more people that felt like I did. Who had various feelings that I had when I was younger. It isn’t the best place for transitioning. Not nowadays. Thanks to the shit that Tumblr just allows users to say about trans women. Or the various people that think trans men are either man-lite that should be infantilized. Treated like little babies that are just so soft and sweet.

Or treated like we’re some kind of monster. One that’s abusive just because we identify as masculine. Which was something that made me hesitant to identify as a trans man. The amount of people saying how horrible that trans men are. That testosterone makes you angry, hairy, fat, and ugly. That we’ll also be bald on top of it. Balding oddly enough was another thing that scared me to be a trans man.

The whole binding being seen as a rib breaker.

It made me feel that transitioning to be a trans man was wrong. But I found myself slowly able to accept myself through Tumblr. And writing other trans men. It wasn’t perfect but it helped me get a chance. See myself in these characters when I couldn’t be the man I wanted to be. Letting them be the outlet for all the feelings that I was having and didn’t allow myself to express. Being a trans man and being a lot of different things. It made me feel so much better when I let them be what I wanted.

Transition to be what I wanted.

I started allowing myself to have he/him pronouns. And came out to another trans person two years ago. My favorite person and still my favorite person. I won’t write out her name here because I want to respect her privacy. Since she knows who she is. Also, I just think writing her name here is sort of doxing her.

Anyways. I started this process back in Maine. Where I don’t think I was as safe as I thought I was. Since quite a few of my co-workers were and probably are Trump supporters. And the way they spoke about them made me uncomfortable. They acted like trans people were some kind of a plague. It was something I was terrified of when I was working in that place. I just hid myself from their sight. Telling my mom that I was trans in that state. So, I had one ally.

I also told my brother but that’s another story.

I’ve spent these past almost six years transitioning. Buying chest binders. Male clothes and male scented items. It alleviated how wrong I was feeling. Along with journaling these feelings in Dollar General notebooks.

It felt like I was drowning in the person that I thought I was. And the person that I wanted to be. Thrown headfirst into raging waters with currents too strong for me to be able to stand. Yet I somehow managed to get myself up and above the tides. Finding someone that I had thought I had been. Was someone that I wasn’t.

That the ‘girl’ that drowned was really me. A man. It was like I melted the ‘feminine’ self off of me. Turning myself more masculine and real. Not the pink girl that I thought I had been before I came out. But I suppose a mauve guy. It’s something that I feel really ties who I am as a person.

Mauve.

Sure, that’s still a shade of pink. And I know that pink is feminine. But I don’t see it that way. I see it as me in an odd sense. It is my favorite color. Mauve is one of my favorite colors. Pink guy trying to be myself. Even if it’s weird. Even if it’s odd. I’m not drowning in a sea of pink. Pretending to be a girl. I’m sitting in a pool of mauve being the man that I’ve wanted to be.

Well, slowly turning into the man that I’ve wanted to be. My body isn’t quite there yet. But my mind is forming from the mush it had been. To the solid male that I had always been.