My Transgender Manifesto III

Renewing My Commitment to Me

I wanted to celebrate my 300th article here on Medium and the fourth year of my gender rebirth at the same time. They both represent a growth of a spirit in me that I never knew I had.

I am a better person for it.

In October, 2018 I started my HRT therapy. I began taking estrogen to increase my female hormone level and spironolactone to suppress my male one. It turned out that testosterone was “poisoning” my brain circuits and by increasing my female hormonal level I suddenly felt a peace and clarity I had never had felt before.

It felt right.

So, wow 300 articles…

I started writing because I needed a forum to express what I felt, thought and was experiencing. I was in the middle of the most profound experience of my life and I had no one in my life with whom to share it with. It was outside their need or desire to understand. At 6o years of age I discovered I was living the wrong gender. How do you rationalize that concept? How do you understand that for your entire life every aspect of your gender expression was entirely wrong? How can you even begin to accept that reality? If you can’t, how can the ones you love, who know and experience your life with you, understand and accept something so alien and so hated and rejected by society?

I needed to process a lot of stuff.

Writing seemed to help me. Suddenly along the way I found out that my writing was helping people on the same transgender journey. In addition, I was shocked to read that my writing was helping the cisgender parents, partners and friends who wanted to support and be a part of lives of the people who were transgender that they truly loved. They recognized that transgender people were the innocent victims of a misguided society’s attack based on ignorance and hate.

I am still humble that my words have been of any value anyone other than myself. I sometimes feel that my writing is just a selfish need for my own personal validation. My Manifesto was in many ways written as a defense against my harshest critic, me.

After 300 articles I wonder what else I can say, but honestly, I thought that at 200 articles. Fortunately, you all get to choose whether I am worth reading or not. At least I haven’t attracted any hate mail….yet.

I originally wrote this over three years ago when I was struggling against one of the lowest points of my life. Two years earlier I was suffering a deep psychological pain of such intensity that I even contemplated suicide to find relief. Instead, I sought professional help and I can’t say enough about my therapist, Molly. She saved me. But in spite of her and the diagnosis of three additional medical and mental professionals that confirmed the same diagnosis, I stubbornly refused to believe that I was wired a female inside a male body. I continued my own extensive research and scathing self analysis for another year until, exhausted, my heart and soul only confirmed the original professional diagnosis.

I was transgender and I was suffering from gender dysphoria.

I have continued over the last three years to try to deny and then to unsuccessfully suppress the truth of being transgender. The brutal emotional pain of gender dysphoria refused to allow me to get away with it.

I’m glad.

My transgender journey is far from over but most of my battle is with the social rejection and hate that I was raised with, not the rejection and hate that was trapped inside my soul. Sometimes that emotional infection tries to make a comeback but I remember my Manifesto and my soul begins to breath again.

I hope you feel the same free air that it creates for me every time I read it.

My Transgender Manifesto

-I will no longer be ashamed of being transgender.

-I will no longer feel any guilt nor will I let anyone make me feel guilty. This is not a choice for me. They can choose to leave me but I can’t. It is who and what I am. Everyone else will need to accept it.

-I will change whatever I need to feel like me. It is not vanity, I need to be able to finally see me.

-I will stop being mean to myself. I am a good person and I deserve to be treated better by me.

-I will like myself. I have so many good qualities. I need to see them and value them.

-I will do all I can to help everyone in my life understand. Society has kept them as blind has it has kept me about the truth of what being transgender is.

-I will laugh. Transition can be fun if I am willing to laugh at myself and see the humor that transitioning is bringing to my life.

-I will not internalize the haters or the ignorant.

-I will fight for acceptance. I am worthy and I bring worth to the world.

-I will not be bullied.

-I will expect to be treated equally and with respect. This is not negotiable.

-I will accept my imperfections.

-I will be happy. I waited a lifetime to get here.

-I will have joy and will share it with anyone who will let me.

Dedicated to all my transgender, LGBTQ and cisgender friends who helped me get here. I found out I am never alone.

Emma Holiday

Thank you for reading my work.

Please also read:

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.