Gorilla in a Tutu

I discovered I was transgender at 62 years of age.

Gender dysphoria had become so painful that I considered suicide for the first time in my life. Under therapy, I began to realize that physically transitioning may become a very real reality for me.

It scared the hell out of me.

All my life a man stared back at me in the mirror. I shaved my face every day. I was a guy’s guy in every way…but one.

I wasn’t a guy.

As I wrestled with this new sense of reality, I feared that I was going to become a freak, to myself, to my family and friends, and to the world at large.

I could never pass.

I live in New York City and went to high school in the East Village. I was exposed at an early age to men who tried to dress as women. In the 1970’s, they were cross-dressers, drag queens and musicians. At the time I couldn’t conceive that a man could become a real woman. Societal bias and my gender ignorance made it a conceptual impossibility. Transgender wasn’t even abstract public thought at the time.

Now at 62 years of age, I had to contemplate that reality and apply it to me. When I started to spend time on on-line transgender support sites, my initial reaction to the photos of people trying to transition and pass, was transphobic and predictable. I rejected the person and the gender they identified with. I did not see women at all, just men in makeup and outlandish female outfits, sometimes in poses that made me cringe.

I didn’t see their beauty yet.

Over time I began to recognize the pain in their faces as they tried to be in the mirror what they felt in their souls. Society and Nature had conspired to play a cruel joke on them…and, as it turned out, on me.

In my first attempts at beauty all I saw was a gorilla in a tutu, a mockery of the ballerina I once wished I could be as a child. A 62-year-old male face is not a great starting palette on which to try and find the woman inside and the beauty outside. I took for granted the lifetime of skill and talent that cis women have with makeup and looks. I felt clumsy. It felt like so alien. I couldn’t see the woman.

Who was I kidding?

I wasn’t a woman!

I started to have sympathy for those people I had mocked earlier. Who was I to judge?

I had truly learned what it was like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes and they really hurt.

There is a lot to physical beauty and to feeling beautiful inside. I now know to be more kind in my judgements, both to myself and to others.

We are all fighting our own personal battles. So be extra kind.

You never know when you are going to need it.

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.

Please also read: