My First Time in the Stonewall Inn
As a gender refugee leaving a life raft
In response to the Prism & Pen prompt, here is my Pride story:
Two years ago during Gay Pride Month in New York City, which happened to be the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, I stepped into the Stonewall Inn for the first time. I had so many thoughts and sensations. I had stepped out of 63 years of cisgender experience and I felt like an immigrant leaving a life raft into a new world.
I was a gender refugee.
Earlier that year I had finally, grudgingly, accepted that I was transgender. It was a titanic task. After 60 years of societal male programming, surging testosterone and massive walls of denial created to survive in a binary world, my gender exploded into my life.
I had no clue and the fury of my confusion and my internal rejection had me contemplate suicide for the first time in my life. I was smart enough to finally seek professional help before those thoughts went any further.
Counseling saved my life.
I learned that I was suffering from gender dysphoria. I was female in a male body. Over the next year or so, I was able to put together the pieces of my gender jig saw puzzle. The resulting picture was clear and conclusive, I was transgender.
That reality rocked my world and continues to do so. It is the most profound thing that ever occurred to me in my life. I watched as 62 years of the façade that had wrapped itself so snuggly around my life, dissolved. It left me emotionally raw and naked. Try as I might, there was no place to hide.
Truth has a way of stripping away convenient fictions.
I was supportive of my gay and lesbian friends but I never thought that I would ever wind up actually being one of the initials of LGBTQ.
Wow, I was trans ...
My world definitely shifted. I felt differently. I tried to capture my thoughts on paper. I started to post them here. I reached out to the transgender community and LGBTQ world and found out I was not alone. I was surrounded by some of the most courageous and generously caring people I had ever met.
My transgender heart was growing.
So during the 2019 LGBTQ Pride Month I had a professional meeting with one off my clients at his business in Greenwich Village. He was proudly gay. He had been my client for years and we had a great relationship. After the meeting was over, we were chatting and I felt this overwhelming need to tell him I was transgender. He became only one of five people who knew. His reaction was instantaneous. He threw his arms around me and just hugged me. It was a simple gesture that meant a lot to me.
When I left his office, I had so many thoughts running through my mind but, the one that stands out was, I had shared my truth and it felt great. It was just a very small step on a very treacherous path but it made me feel good in a way that I really needed to feel.
It was at that moment that I needed to celebrate. I was only blocks away from the Stonewall and I knew what I had to do. I went there to have a celebratory drink and I wasn’t even aware that it was Pride Month. Until that point it was just a Wednesday afternoon to me.
By the time I reached the Stonewall Inn I had connected the dots. I had chosen to come out, in a very small way, to my first, non-family member and it happened during Pride Month.
It felt so right.
When I entered the tavern I wasn’t greeted with cheers and hardy handshakes. No one yelled “Norm!”. There was a diverse crowd of people, each in their own conversations but I didn’t care. I had crossed the threshold doorway of the Stonewall Inn.
I was the “T” of LGBTQ and there was no going back!
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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