A Simple Hug After a Lifetime of Gender Denial

The profound impact of human touch

I find myself surrounded by a depth of emotions that had been so muted by a lifetime of gender denial. Joy, pain, tears, and smiles are all felt with a new level of multi-dimensionality. It has been a long path of discovery.

It all started with a simple call.

I had started having panic attacks, one finally dangerously close to the end of a platform of a NYC subway station. I contemplated stepping in front of an oncoming train. I know it sounds so dramatic right now, but it was a thought that in a moment that could have been spontaneously and irreversibly acted on.

It scared the hell out of me.

But it forced me into taking the right action, finding a therapist. As we all know, finding anything or anyone that is reliable on the internet can be a seemingly impossible mission but I needed help. I couldn’t share that need with the most important people in my life. They would never understand.

I didn’t.

I was alone and on my own.

I started looking for a therapist online. It was a new experience for me. I had never needed one in 61 years but then again, I never, ever contemplated suicide, so it was a new world, one of the many new experiences to come.

…and I had no clue.

I found a therapist who seemed a close match for me. Her name was Molly. She was to become the single most important advocate in my transgender life. In what I thought would be a “one and done” first therapy meeting, turned into a multiyear emotional journey that would permanently and irreversibly change my life.

After meeting with her and then with another psychiatrist, a psychologist and endocrinologist, supplemented with my own panic-driven internet searches, it was conclusively decided that I was suffering from gender dysphoria, and that I was, in fact, transgender.

I was wired female.

Cue head exploding then cue it again.

After months of continued therapy with Molly, I tested the diagnosis with a seemingly endless list of challenges. They included:

Maybe I am just a guy with a fetish? Nope

Maybe I have a hormone problem and should just take some more testosterone? A “nope” from Molly and every other professional.

Maybe there is a drug that could cure me? Nope

Maybe I can control and repress it? Nope

Maybe it will go away? Nope

Maybe I am not transgender? Nope (After sincerely repeating this questions over many, many months, it became a personal joke between us once I stopped denying what was blatantly obvious…)

Maybe I don’t need to transition*? Nope

Now to be clear, Molly never said “nope”. She just patiently listened to me ask my questions and then watched as my actions answered each question naturally over time. If I repeated the question again later, she would simply give me her quiet knowing smile that said “Really? Are you still going to try and deny it?”

Which, stubbornly, I continued to do.

Years later she would confirm to me that she has never met anyone who had so exhaustedly tried to find any possible way to escape from admitting I was a transgender female.

Which brings me to “the” hug.

Parallel to my continual therapy and personal online analysis I started to go to a transgender stylist and do a series of makeovers. I needed to prove I was really just an ugly man in a dress trying convince himself that he was a “woman”. After a few months of continued “convincing’ at the stylist, I finally worked up the nerve to walk the 20 minute walk from the stylist to my therapy session through the busy streets of New York as Emma.

I made the brief journey without any issue other than my own fear of being burned at the stake by a crowd of righteously zealous, gender binary citizens for the crime of my gender heresy. I even survived the scrutiny of fellow passengers in the close quarters of the crowded elevator to Molly’s office.

I had made it to her waiting room alive.

Right on time Molly came in to escort me back to her office for our session but, strangely, she didn’t see me. I was literally standing was right in front of her. Her eyes rotated around the room looking at the other people in the room and then, finally, she saw “me”!

First the look was one of shock, followed by a very happy, beaming smile, until finally she asked very softly: “Can I hug you?”.

I felt my heart leap in my chest.

My answer was a joyous “Yes!”

It was the first time I had ever gotten a hug as Emma and she so needed that hug. She needed to be found and recognized. She needed to be seen. She had been a prisoner for so long.

It was a wonderful, soul-satisfying hug. It touched my soul.

I will take the sweetness of that hug to my grave.

Emma Holiday

Dedicated to my incredible therapist, Molly. I couldn’t have done it without you. With all my heart.

*How someone transitions and whether they completely transition is so personal. There are as many variations and answers as there are transgender individuals.

Thank you for reading my work.

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Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.

My writing has three specific goals:

1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts, so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand, and I need to accept myself to move forward.

2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.

3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted, and treated as a normal person. We are.