Simply Compelled by a Deep Need

Compelled: “drive forcibly”.

Need: “circumstances in which something is necessary, or that require some course of action; necessity.”

A reader who responded to one of my writings said that those who are transgender are “simply compelled by a deep need” to transition. As I read that I felt it resonate inside me.

What still astounds me is how deep this intense sense of need is for me. I have been unconsciously fighting this need for most of my life and consciously fighting it for the last four years.

I don’t want to be transgender. I truly don’t.

And not because I am transphobic but because this awakening of my gender is a major complication that I don’t need at this stage in my life. I wish it would just go away.

But of course, it doesn’t.

Believe me I have tried everything. My therapist can vouch for the tenacity of my denial and my seemingly endless list of objections. Even now I am still fighting being transgender and transitioning but with ever-weakening enthusiasm, conviction and strength.

And this fight has been grossly unfair. For all the energy I have put in to fighting being transgender, gender dysphoria has absorbed it all and just simply thrown it back in my face.

I am exhausted and my power to fight is dwindling. Yet I pathetically continue.

I have written a number of times about my “soft transition”. That has been my negotiating technique with gender dysphoria. It sounds like this: “If I do “this”, will you leave me alone.” My “this” list started out very small.

“I will just meet one time with a therapist”: Three years later, we meet once a week.

“I will just buy this one feminine item.”: many dresses, skirts, blouses, shoes and a purge or two later.

“I will just go for one professional make over to test it out.”: fourteen makeovers later.

“I will give in to my fashion interest and open a Pinterest account.”

“I will watch a few make up how-to’s YouTube.”

Now it is impossible to deny I am transgender and my list is totally checked off. There is nothing left to negotiate.

Enter the “hard transition” list, permanent gender transition.

The required surgeries and the radical changes to my life style and social interactions are massively enough but the hardest part of this transition is the forced transition being placed on my family who gain nothing but loss if I follow through.

I am grappling with the selfish need to transition and the selfish needs of a life-long relationship. They both want something of me, basically all of me and I can’t satisfy both.

An immoveable object meeting an irresistible force. Between a rock and a hard place. An emotional Pyrrhic victory.

I have never been selfish on a level that transitioning requires. It tears me apart.

As I battle the need to transition, my family is an innocent casualty of this on-going battle. They deserve better and I can’t make it better.

They are not “acceptable losses” as the military usually dismisses unexpected death and destruction to achieve a goal.

These are the people that I love.

I am still trying desperately to negotiate a lifelong truce with my gender dysphoria to spare my family the pain of fully transitioning but I feel the sharp, unforgiving cutlass of gender dysphoria sticking me in the back as it prods me along, inch by inch, to the end of a plank. I can’t seem to get the dysphoria to listen. To make matters worse the dysphoria seems to have hired beautiful sirens in the water below calling for me to jump in and to finally be at gender peace. To complete the picture, I hear the screams of pain and anguish from my family on the plank behind me.

I hate the drama. I really just want it all to stop.

But not to worry, the plank is not that long and gender dysphoria continues to jab me in the back.

The end is near. I hope the water isn’t cold.

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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