#he looks unusually cool here. he's faking it he's a big dummy

[mysticalcats]

foxglove foxglove foxglove

[dasklaus]

Big wall of text incoming.

This is going to be my first text post on tumblr.

Originally, this was a porn blog. I guess I'm just not that into porn. This is a feelings-dump because I currently have an excess of feelings.

I never talked much about trans issues, least of all about my own. Like many, I keep thinking I'm fake, not trans enough or just weird. That's what I tell people, too: don't mind the male name, I'm just weird about gender. Don't worry about it. I minimize being trans all the time - then again, I truly don't think about it that often. It seeps into my life in small ways, rarely big ones, and I can easily overlook it, distract myself, pretend it's not happening. It's why I haven't transitioned yet.

When I was a kid, I had bigger problems. I had difficulties forming connections with people - still have, to be honest - while desperately wishing for friends - still do, to be honest. I was bullied to varying degrees, changed schools a lot, and regularly got beaten by my older brother while my helpless parents had long patient talks with both of us that didn't change anything ever except made it clear to me that talks were supposed to help but the nice, peaceful environment I lived in just manifested in unusual ways or I just failed to experience it as peaceful. To not turn this into a sob story: I was, in hindsight, really bad at interacting with other kids (in the sense of being an ignorant, arrogant asshole) and didn't take any initiative in solving my own problems, expecting my nice, peaceful environment to manifest itself somehow.

I was raised pretty gender-neutral. My clothes were blue, I waded in lego and books and while I tried to get hobbies like the cool kids did, nothing stuck. As I didn't connect to others naturally and felt a profound otherness (which I mostly attribute to my poor yet snobbish upbringing, my giftedness and - arguably more importantly - my knowing about it), I tended to look for ways to be special, to not do the mainstream thing because I was different, therefore had to do everything differently. When my parents let me choose an instrument to learn I chose drums. Impracticability and long waiting lists took this off the table, so I went for harp. I have no idea what I was thinking.

Being trans feels like that: like a bad choice based on a childish way of looking at myself, on not knowing how to present myself. Like making things weirder for myself on purpose.

I didn't have any clear signs of tomboyishness. I was shy, prone to anger and despair, relentless argueing and both a huge slob and a lover of lists. This is, as far as I can tell, the whole picture - no hidden dreams or interests that put me clearly on the feminine or masculine side of how one might expect a child with strong gender expressions to behave. Gender expressions I did not do.

I vividly remember a neighbourhood friend (the only one that I had and that I adored and looked down on all at once) asking which super power I would like if I were to choose. I went for switching sex at will. Nowadays I'd probably say shape-shifting, but back then, while a lot of things seemed neat, they only appealed to me for money or fame (or advancing science - this was a factor in my appraisal process). This one was the one I wanted for myself, that I would still want even if I had to keep it a secret. This is the only memory I have that tells me something might've been up even way back.

There were some indicators later on that I use to reassure myself. I wanted to go as a man for Fasching (a yearly costume party at school in February) in seventh grade, did, and was mistaken for Charly Chaplin most of the day. There were girls dressed as cowboys, male superheroes and actually Charly Chaplin, and my feelings of specialness faded away, replaced with shame at my generic costume and bitter envy for the people who didn't seem to make anything out of wanting to be boys sometimes.

In eight grade, I started hanging out with the sixth-grade boys, who were closer in age to me, as I started school at five instead of six or seven. Among those kids, a favourite past-time was a kind of wrestling done sitting cross-legged on the ground, both fighters trying to wrestle the other one to the ground. I loved it. Physical contact in general made me nervous, but I took to consensual violence with ease. Being one of the boys, even just for short periods of time, was the best feeling I got out of that time. I changed schools not long after.

I also developed a malformed spine by hiding my growing breasts. I started to hate my body in a way that I had no way of ever fixing.

We went for an excursion to a LGBT resource center. I got hung up on the question of lesbian sex, having started entertaining penis-in-vagina type of fantasies recently that pointedly omitted my own body or presence but were abstract, voyeuristic in nature. Nothing I could imagine girls doing compared to the coming simultaneously while getting physically wrapped up in each other I envisioned. Nonetheless, when asked to sort ourselves into corners of the room based on things like whether or not we've ever been in love (I had not), wanted to have kids (I did, the idea being that I'd live with lots of self-made playmates who all loved me by design) or whether or not we could possibly see ourselves being anything other than hetero, I felt queer. Not necessarily attracted to girls, but queer. I don't remember if I dared go into the queer corner, or whether anyone else did.

In ninth grade, I both fell in love and got a new name. She was the prettiest girl in the world by far, all eyebrows and carefully cultivated elegance, a dark lady of profound thought and inspiration and style, older and wiser and cleverer than I could ever hope to become. I learned her time-table to randomly bump into her between classes, changed my elective course from physics to math to share a class with her and worshipped the ground she walked on. I had a mutual friend tell her about my feelings after she went for a year abroad to the US, to enable her to reject me from a safe distance, which she, of course, did.

My name got discovered in a wallet a classmate won at a biology competition. I've been telling this story for years but recently discovered it was false - the dummy license in it had the last name I chose as my pseudonym on it, but a different first name. I must have chosen that independently. I made my class call me that (male) first name, and even got some teachers on board. A kid in a parallel class we had some course I don't remember with asked me (once, but loudly) whether I'd have surgery. I confidently told him I would as soon as I was eighteen, four years down the line.

The catch is that, while this became common knowledge among the students, I never told anyone. I have, to this day, never actually explicitely come out as trans. I introduced myself with my chosen name, asking not to worry about it. I evaded the rare follow-up question about what it meant. I expressed discomfort at being grouped with girls, having finally found my place among the guys at the new school (if you want a number, my sixth one. Explaining that would take another post of this length). I never talked to my parents, though, nor a doctor. I never said "I want to be a guy" or "I am a guy", I just tried to be a guy best I could - not an especially macho or stereotypical guy, either, just a guy.

That year, we actually watched a documentary at school about trans people. The only thing I remember is a group of fat bearded men sitting around a table and one of them saying he wished he'd have known about this treatment and all this when he was fourteen. That struck a chord. Here I was, fourteen, and now I knew.

Knowing didn't help one bit.

Not knowing what to say, to whom, and how to say it, rightfully suspecting that the people around me didn't know any more than me, I wrote a letter to EMMA, a feminist publication we got at home. I figured they'd know stuff about sex and gender and what to do. They told me to wait and (I told them a bit about myself, including my love for astronomy) that girls can be astronauts, too. While I know fully well that this was meant well, it shattered my hopes of insight and qualified help. I didn't reach out again for more than ten years, when I finally applied for a legal name change (a process that took over four years but got approved recently).

In tenth grade, I developed a crush on a guy. As a large part of my legitimacy in my mind hinged on my attraction to women (the one women I was still very much attracted to simultaneously), this was a problem for me. Still, I made the effort of knocking on his door, stammer out some feelings and getting politely rejected, never having expected anything else.

I found an article about trans men in a magazine. Some were said to help themselves prior to hormonal transition with excessive exercising and anabolic drugs prescribed by their doctor. The next day, I went to the nearest pharmacy and asked for anabolics. The pharmacist took in my fourteen year old weak and tiny physique and started laughing so hard she could not talk. I left red-faced and have never since set foot in that pharmacy again, even though it's the one closest to my home.

Lots of things happened in the following years. After school, I kept the name on the internet and some circles, but didn't dare it in others. I became clinically depressed, mostly for isolation reasons and being generally broken, weird, particular and incompatible with many aspects of adult or even teenager life. I took years working out how to be a person, a work in progress that is less obvious nowadays and much easier, but still there. When the occasional trans thoughts and semi-annually late-night ftm research binges didn't disappear even when I got myself a bit more together, into a successful "hetero" relationship (my first and to this day only LTR) and into friendships who exclusively knew me under my birth name, I felt the growing need to do something about that. I started using my male name with new people and workplaces again. I applied for a name change, which required several visits with psychiatric experts, to whom I lied about my boyfriend, fearing his existence and hetero-ness would influence the verdict, but nothing else.

Being with a hetero man led me to consider hormone treatment as a far-away possibility at best, not for here and now in any case. Fear of being alone again and fear of making myself effectively undateable for no practical gain, fear of regret and fear of the irreversibility of some of the changes made me procrastinate and ignore the issue of where to go from here, long-term.

Now my name is approved, I feel none of the ambiguity and doubt I expected. I spent two weeks feeling nothing but happy about it, showing off my new ID at every opportunity, booking tickets in my new name, informing boss and colleagues, changing my email signature at work and not regretting anything at all. And I think to myself: onto the next step.

Which brings me to today. My euphoria made me call the clinic and make an appointment for hormone treatment (having gotten the necessary info from the experts mentioned earlier). More than a week later, I finally told my boyfriend, who has, so far, steadily ignored any and all gender issues, not caring and feeling enlightened for not caring. And he cannot imagine staying with me through this. And I cannot fault him for feeling that way.

I love him. Being in an open relationship, I'm free to love others, too, which one might think makes it easier, but it doesn't. He is not replaceable. To make matters worse, I just got rejected from the only person that ever made me consider breaking the rules of our open relationship, which hurts hurts hurts like hell but is not something I can really bitch about because I already have someone and wanting someone else is just greedy. We - my partner and I - had plans to marry (now legally a civil union in our case) (he has the prettiest last name in the world, also I want to be with him forever, also taxes and insurance).

I want to spend the rest of my life with him.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life as a woman.

There is no solution here.

What I really need right now is cuddles and for someone to tell me it will be alright, but I suspect it won't. I don't know how to deal with this.

Thanks for reading.