Trans-Gender

Don’t become a Trans woman!

You shouldn’t become a Trans-Woman unless you are willing to deal with all that it comes with and understand what it truly means to transition.

I highly recommend that you should NOT become a Trans-Woman, and I specifically mean only a Trans-Woman as I have little knowledge of Trans-Men. I truly mean it with all my heart, because becoming a Woman is not for those who wish to take on a simple task. It is the hardest decision you will ever have to make, and if you do you need to be prepared for what is about to come, and trust me many of what I am about to tell you will happen.

Now bear in mind that I am not saying you can’t become a Trans-woman, only that you shouldn’t become a trans-woman unless you have no doubt in your mind that is who you are and what you want. Becoming a Woman has so many unforeseen things that most people are just not aware of when they claim to be a Trans-Woman and what that actually entails. I have become a woman and with that, I accepted everything that has come with being a woman, but while it did come at a great loss, it also came with a great benefit. Becoming a Woman is something that you have to really want, something you want no matter the outcome, no matter the suffering you — WILL — go through. If you are not willing to go through this, it will likely stop your transition, or make you decide to not transition at all.

Coming Out

In the beginning, the very first and hardest thing is coming out and telling everyone or even a selected few. Typically this starts with your parents or very close friends. You don’t know how they will react, some may be supportive which is always nice, but with the way Media has smeared Trans-Woman so badly, you can likely count on it not going well.

Typically parents will be disgruntled with you and possibly try to convince you that you are perfect about who you are, and if that isn’t enough, depending on your age might even attempt to force you to not transition. Not all parents will be this way but it seems to be a large number of parents that feel this way.

Your Friends and family will have different views and likely will not feel the same way that you do, likely ignoring you, caring little for your feelings, and just not accepting your choice. This happens often, but this is typically the initial response when you start telling people. While there are people who accept you and your transition, please don’t expect it from anyone, even the ones who initially say they accept you.

Misgendering

As you are trying to change who you are and feeling good about the process, you will start to notice that being misgendered is extremely common in early stages; about 4 years. You will constantly deal with trying to correct someone who calls you he/him and telling them it's she/her. The frustration will be very annoying to you as this becomes a constant thing even after having someone corrected a million times.

Parents will likely still introduce you to everyone as their son, and pass off your change as anything but a phase that you're going through. Depending on your parent, this could last a very long time. It has been nearly 6 years, and my own father still misgender me in front of his friends. This makes things very awkward for me, as it will likely do for you, and I pass well at this point in my life.

Your Name Change

At some point in your transition you will start changing your name, and all the people that once called you by your previous name, the Deadname will continue to deadname you. This is a learned thing, even though it is respectful to call you by your new name many suffer the ability to address you by your new name. Also, depending on their supportive nature, identifying you by your name might be even harder if they are unsupportive.

Everyone from your school, your workplace, friends, and family will all have to adjust to your new name, and it is not as easy for them to do this as you would hope. If they have known your deadname, it will likely be a continuous problem. Especially if they tell stories about when you and they did this or that, their memory will recall your previous name, and that's how the story will play out. Only those whom you introduced to newly as your current chosen name will remember you as that person.

Physical changes

There is a whole lot of information that I can go into on this subject but I am going to keep this simple. As your body takes on the woman form and you shed the skin and features of your previous manly body things will start to change. People will stare at you for how you look, not passing for nearly 2 to 4 years, and sometimes even a lifetime. Not everyone has a perfect transition and that just comes with change.

There will be experiences in your body that will give people a biased decision on how you look, and while there are some that will accept it, the majority of the population is against changing into a woman. You may get to the point of people pointing fingers, mumbling things under their breath and even being rude to you directly. This does tend to fade more as you progress further into transition, but those 2–4 years that you have to endure will be very hard.

Loss

Be prepared for the hardest thing you ever experienced, because I think this truly takes the cake when you experience loss. I can say that this will happen to everyone, but I can practically promise you that you will experience loss in one way or another. This loss will bring you to your knees and hit you so very hard especially if you have elevated estrogen in your body.

What do I mean by loss? I mean exactly that you will lose many of your friends as your transition progresses as they will reject who you have become, siding with religious beliefs or other objectifying reasons to not associate with you anymore. They will sometimes stop talking to you or completely disappear from your life, but it will often start off slowly as they stop hanging out as often or just drop off completely instantly at some point in your transition.

You will have your family basically doing the same thing, many of them not wanting to hang around you and if they have to, you will slowly start to feel like you're that child in the corner that no one wants to talk to anymore. A lot of times they just have no care in the world about your feelings and will cut ties with you. If they stick around and are unsportive they will continue to pressure you into not changing time and time again.

You run the risk of losing your mother, your father, or both because of your transition. Even going as far as abandonment, threatened, and disowned. Family is strange and parents are no different, and if they don’t understand, they will take drastic measures. Sometimes they think it's to help force you out of your conviction of transition, sometimes it's because they don’t see you as their child anymore. Other times it could be any number of reasons.

So in my reference, I have my mother who is the only one who has learned to accept me after the transition, and out of nearly 40 friends I still had prior, I have Zero left from the pre-transition era. I have all my family that I had who knew me and stayed in contact with me, now gone, and will not talk with me. Especially leaving me with nothing but my mother out of all my family on both sides. That said, I have made new friends as a woman, and life has changed.

Male Privilege

As a trans-woman, you will begin to notice lots of little things that change from being a male to becoming a wonderful woman, and that's Male privilege. Don’t think for one second that you're going to change and that you are going to keep this privilege because I can say without a shadow of a doubt that it will fade, it will lose its benefits. The more others see you as non-existent in early stages to being seen completely as a woman later in transition, those male privilege will vanish without a trace.

While this should be an entire article of its own, losing your male privilege will have drastic effects on your overall life. You will begin to lose recognition in your job, often overlooked by your male coworker even if you did all the work yourself. Males will slowly begin to talk over you even if you are talking. Your ideas and suggestions will be looked at and accepted and then disregarded if another person who is male suggests something better. You will begin to be perceived as a woman, which is great for your transition but doing so will reduce your voice in the community. Males tend to just have a larger voice in the community than women. When you are doing something, men will often try to explain it to you as if you know nothing and are stupid, even if it's your specialized field. — Still don’t understand that — You will be looked at as an object and not someone often respected.

That's not to say that women can’t have a strong voice, it's just that males will almost always have the upper hand. No matter what you are trying to do, that is sadly just how society is and hasn’t changed much.

Paycheck

Becoming a Trans-woman you will often be paid less for your work. The average woman earns about 80% of what a male salary would be in the exact same field even if the woman has the upper hand in knowledge. Your pay will forever be lower than your male counterpart just because you are a woman.

During your early stages of transition, finding jobs and maintaining them are going to be hard, unless the workforce supports transition, which due to all the laws getting worse, you're going to have some additional difficulties. In addition, depending on the job that you are applying for, if a man applies for the same job with a similar skill set, you could be overlooked for that job.

So while you are transitioning, you have to give up that extra pay, and often its not by choice because people just don’t want to pay women what they are worth. I guess this would come back to that male privilege again, but it is just honest truth.

Hate/Discrimination

Be prepared for a barrage of hate and discrimination for who you are becoming. Even after you have successfully made a change and transition even years later you will still have a possible target on your back. However, in the early stages of transitioning you will be hated by so many people, made fun of, and discriminated against on so many levels, it will shock you how bad it can get. Like I don’t even know if there really is a way to describe how bad the hate and discrimination are, but it is on par with how bad people treated people of color in the 60’s. “Please forgive the comparison”

What I want you to understand is the amount of discrimination and hate that you will have to endure is going to be tremendous, especially as the world creates more and more Anti-Trans laws to take away our rights. You have to understand that becoming a Trans-woman could literally cause you to lose your rights, your dignity, or your life. There is just no true way of explaining just how bad the hate and discrimination you are going to experience as it varies across the board, but there will be some somewhere.

Medication

Like many people who have medication that they have to take, you too will have a continuous dose of medication that you will need for the rest of your life of Estrogen. You will need this from the day you get on HRT till the day you die no matter the surgeries that you get. This is the most basic, but if you don’t have insurance it could cost you a pretty penny and without it, you could be forced into a de-transition because of lack of medication, not a personal decision.

Conclusion

I am sure there are many more reasons that hopefully some other people have experienced can comment on, but these are many of the choices that will affect you becoming a Trans-woman. So do I recommend becoming a Trans-Woman, NO you shouldn’t. Please don’t become a Trans-woman for social pressure or anything else except your true desire and feelings of being a woman. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, because it is not something you take lightly.

However, For those who fully understand what you are getting into and those who wish to take on the world as a woman, enduring the hard pains and suffering that you have to go through to be a woman I recommend that you should transition. Transition to being a woman was the greatest thing I — “COULD HAVE EVER DONE” — and it did not matter the problems, the pain, or the suffering, it was worth everything to me. Being a woman was who I was meant to be and I gave up everything to be female. This was still the best choice I have ever made in my entire life.

IT WAS WORTH IT FOR ME!!!