Body & Soul: My Transgender A-Duh Moments

Pure ignorance in motion

Have you ever had one of those “a-duh” moments when something so obvious was so outside your consciousness that you smack yourself in the forehead and yell “A-DUH” when you discover that shocking realization makes you feel stupid for not seeing it sooner?

You are, after all, so, so smart you think, as you laughingly mock yourself.

My entire transgender experience has been exactly like that. I have lived through a regular stream of “a-duh” moments. To discover that you are transgender at 61 years of age is a testament to the power of Nurture in the “Nurture or Nature” argument. How I was raised allowed a massive wall to be built around my Nature. Arguably, my biological sex and a flood of testosterone also threw some additional bricks on the jail cell wall in support of Nurture.

For 61 years I thought that being male was my identity. It was who I was and who I lived as. It was who the world saw me and how I was accepted in my social circles. It seemed so right but…

We had it all wrong.

The depth of my ignorance, which had made the bricks of my denial so thick, is so shocking to me even now as when I did each “a-duh” as I started this startling discovery.

My “a-duhs” were every one of the clearly female actions and thoughts that occurred throughout my life. From an early age I wished I could be a ballerina, something I never shared with anyone until it came out in therapy. I was too ashamed and afraid to tell anyone. I secretly always favored the women’s fashion pages over the sport pages. I loved going to the dentist so I could read Cosmo. I would always take the indirect route in a department store through the ladies’ section and I would look longingly (but quickly so I wasn’t “that” creepy guy) at the makeup stools and all the makeup choices. I loved all the shoes. I loved the everyday fashion show I got to see going and coming from work. I naturally gravitated to the women at social events and parties. Since I loved to dance and could, it made me popular with women. I got the reputation as “harmless” because women trusted me but I was undoubtedly not gay because I always dated women and I clearly had no interest in men. Many gays tried and failed. I truly had no interest in men. It may seem confusing now but I ignored it and just lived the life that was given to me.

Pure ignorance in motion.

The list of “a-duhs” goes on and on. Yet even now I continue to try to disregard the clear evidence of my female gender in defense of my cisgender male up-bringing. My defensive wall has been totally breached but I am still hiding in the keep of my male castle.

Nurture has done a remarkable job but it is losing its grip on me. By my Nature I am female. It is who I am, my body is not. It is my true gender identity. I feel it is my essence, it is my heart.

Flesh is not your soul.

Your soul is the part of you that makes you who you are. It is the part of a person that has no reality but defines our thoughts and personality, who we are from the inside, not the outside. It is our core around which our body is wrapped.

You can argue that our soul is really just how our particular brain is wired. Freud can analyze everything I think and do. You can even argue that we truly don’t have free will but at the end of the day, I know that my gender is female.

I just know it.

For me that is a valid statement of fact. There is a resonance that I feel deeply reverberate within me that has been missing all my life when I say it.

My body does not define me but it is the image that I project for myself and for those around me. Now I know it is not the image of my soul. Why should I not seek the true reflection of it by making physical changes to make my body match? What makes my physical presentation so sacrosanct that I am locked in an image that fails to present me as I feel I am?

The severity of my gender dysphoria is a testament to the power of my sense of gender. It has overwhelmed my desire to not change and create the massive complications that this change will cause in my life.

Yet I feel compelled to do so by my heart, my soul, my Freudian ID or my lack of free will if you choose. I can’t spend the rest of my life justifying what simply feels so right to do.

My “a-duhs” keep piling up and my forehead is getting way too sore.

Emma Holiday

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.

Thank you for reading my work.

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