How Does It Make Any Sense?

When your brain is hard-wired female, but your body develops male

I grew up in a strict binary world where transgender people didn’t exist.

Yet, inexplicably, here I am. How does that make any sense?

Four years ago, I was a “normal” male with all the typical male attributes, thoughts and desires. I had always felt a female pull but my sense of being male was strong and pervasive for 60 years.

What explains this new extraordinary need to change from being a man to becoming a woman?

I am not going to debate what is a woman. It is an argument that never ends. How do you identify women based on reproductive organs when some women are born without ovaries or rely on XX chromosomes when some women are born with a Y chromosome yet still have fully functioning female reproductive organs?

I am a trans woman, a woman that is internally gendered female, encased inside a male body… Now let’s move on.

I am not a scientist. I am transgender and I have been dealing with increasingly painful gender dysphoria for the last three years.

It has taken three years of therapy, blood tests, medical examinations, extensive personal research and deep self-analysis to come to my understanding of being transgender and dealing with gender dysphoria.

In the beginning I thought I had a mental issue, a simple fetish for woman’s clothes. When I hit my 61st birthday, what I thought was a fetish had, in fact, morphed into something else but I didn’t have a clue into what. The intensity of that sensation of disconnect, that something was wrong, created a building feeling of mental pain and anguish that I had never felt in my entire life. I had started to contemplate suicide.

Out of desperation I did something else that I had never done before in my life, I sought professional help.

In my ignorance I truly thought that that one therapy meeting and I would be OK. Two years later I am still working through therapy.

After three years of my own experience and extensive research, here is my hypothesis based on what I have learned so far from reputable sources. During my embryonic development, my brain was hardwired female gender and my body developed sexually, male. There are many explanations why that happened but, for the purposes of my hypothesis I am assuming it is an accepted scientific fact.

It just happened.

“I think my increasing emotional anguish was a direct result of the chemical disharmony between my brain and body.”

For the majority of the last three years I assumed that gender dysphoria (GD) was the source of my problem. I was wrong. I believe, based on what I have read and personally experienced, GD was the outward manifestation of the in-congruence between a hardwired female brain and testosterone-fed male body. I think my increasing emotional anguish was a direct result of the chemical disharmony between my brain and body. My brain recognized that the hormones flooding the body were wrong based on its gender wiring and GD was its attempt to make me aware that there was a problem. Sort of like the red light on your car’s dashboard flashing to let you know you have engine problems.

So why did it take 60 years for GD to finally manifest itself sufficiently to create the crisis?

Here is my opinion. I believe that relying on the physical fact that I had a male body, supported by strict binary socialization on all levels during my lifetime and reinforced by my body producing normal levels of male testosterone, a wall of denial was created that allowed me to overcome the female wiring of my brain. Although there were periodic episodes of female expression, I was able to block my female wiring and suppress GD for 60 years.

What triggered it now?

My thought is that the massive wall of denial built over a lifetime eroded over time until it essentially began to collapse. My GD pain has been increasing in direct proportion to that wall’s continued collapse. The natural desire to be the gender that I was hardwired is the driving force behind transitioning the physical body I was born in. It is driving me to accept that, in spite of a male body, binary socialization and male testosterone, I am female.

Why else would I be willing to have electrolysis to remove facial hair, potentially destroy family relationships and lifetime friendships, eliminate 64 years of societal security and, oh yeah, have my male genitals removed and replaced with a vagina that will require additional lifetime maintenance.

It makes sense if that is what you must to do to have any chance to be happy and live in peace with yourself.

It makes sense if you are transgender.