The Gender Outlier

A short story of Denial, Fear, Transgender Acceptance and Soviet Military Intervention

Prologue

High above the earth the orbit of a Soviet Cold War era satellite began to decay. Directly below it a businessman slowly descended the stairs of a NYC subway station. Neither is aware of the other. The world would become aware of them both. Sadly, no one will ever know the name of the third person involved.

The Story

Tom stopped walking along the subway platform and leaned against the support column. He felt his eyes tear up and sensed another round of panic attacks. They started a week ago.

The panic was in his head and people passed without noticing anything wrong, just another middle-aged white guy in a suit. But to Tom everything was wrong. In his 61 years he rarely cried or even teared up and he never had panic attacks.

This was the third time in a week. He had no idea why.

He needed to find someone to help him and this was absolutely shocking to him. Everyone came to him for solutions. It was even what he did for a living. He never needed help himself, ever.

He was on alien ground.

The train roared in. It sounded louder than normal. Tom sat heavily on the train bench and as the doors closed, he closed his eyes to get some control back. After three train stops he felt his breath come back and by the fourth he was able to open his eyes again and function.

But he knew something was wrong, very wrong.

He walked into his office, closed his door and rubbed his forehead. It was time to do something but he had no clue. There was no one he could talk to and he had no idea what to do.

Turning to the source of every solution, true or false, Tom turned on his computer.

He needed to find a solution. He started to google.

Breach in the Wall of Denial

Tom had felt the change start a year before.

All his life he was able to suppress what he thought was an alien female element that invaded his thoughts. It always seemed to be there, popping up at different times and always inexplicably.

It didn’t stop him from living his life and socially engaging with his friends but it always felt like his approach to things seemed to be a little different from those around him. Growing up, he played football, baseball and basketball. He was definitely competitive but he didn’t share the intense passion for every element of sports that the other guys seemed to have. Although he felt tough, he never felt the pull to be macho. It seemed so foreign to him.

He loved seeing girls in ballet outfits and was extremely jealous of them. He wanted to be them. He loved the seemingly effortless way they hugged and laughed and fixed each other’s hair. He loved the way their braids looked.

He kept this all to himself. He recognized early in his life that this was NOT something he could share with anyone. He walled it all up in a secret place inside him.

As he got ready to leave for college, he tried to convince himself that he would finally grow out of it.

He didn’t and was beginning to realize that he never would.

His life changed when he met his future wife. He felt the instant attraction and it was mutual. They quickly became a couple and as time progress Tom began to mentally rearrange his life around her, thinking of marriage and having children. It felt great and he knew that was what he wanted more than anything.

And so, it happened.

They married, bought a house and had children. Everyone was happy.

Time passed.

Eventually, the youngest child was finally due to graduate from college at the end of the year. They lived in a great house in the city and had a very comfortable vacation house on the beach within easy driving distance of their home. They had a really cool dog; their respective families didn’t stress them out too much and their friends seemed to fit their needs.

They seemed all set…until Tom turned 60.

The concept shook him to the core. He had been busy, so busy that the passage of time, and his life flowed unnoticed. Time wasn’t on his list of concerns. But then, suddenly he turned 60 and time mattered.

The birthday came and went, suitably celebrated with festivity and classic age-tainted humor. Tom had a fun day… but the lingering shock of the passage of time remained.

The following year was filled with discussions of retirement. Tom had no idea what he wanted to do next. He hated golf.

He continued to work with no formal plans to retire. The world continued as is and his secret also continued in its periodic, controlled way. It was still his secret.

Everyone would continue to be happy. Until…

Atlas Falls

His lifetime control mechanisms were beginning to fail and Tom never saw it coming.

The sudden emotional panic attacks started.

First one, then another, then a series of them. Tom was terrified for the first time in his life. Was he having a nervous breakdown? Where was this coming from? They were getting more frequent. He was losing control. He finally recognized he needed help. He needed a professional.

He made an appointment with a psychologist who also specialized sexual issues. He had a fetish and he just needed to square it away.

No big deal. He met with a therapist. He figured one or two meetings at the most and he would be all set.

Tom swore an oath to himself that in order for the therapy to effective in any way for him, he was going to be absolutely honest and completely forthcoming with the therapist.

He was… and then everything came pouring out in a torrent of deeply repressed, emotional hidden thoughts.

Somewhere in the third meeting after all of these secrets that he had so successfully hidden from himself began to connect. A totally different definition of himself suddenly emerged: he was “she”.

WTF!

The third meeting turned into a fourth and then a fifth. The dots really started to connect and it totally scared Tom beyond anything else in his life. The therapist said that he had he had gender dysphoria; he was transgender. The scariest part was it made total sense….but

WTF!

What could he do to stop this? What was the cure? He wasn’t Bruce Jenner. He laughed with all the other guys when Bruce became Caitlyn. He heard all the wives angrily agree: “How could he be female without ever having a period and cramps?” Tom felt like the floor had dropped out of his entire life.

WTF!!!!!!

Enter Intense Anguish & Shame

All his life, Tom had the strength and control to make the hard decisions and be the person that everyone else could rely and lean on. He solved everyone’s problems but there was no one around to help him solve this one.

He was not prepared for the intense anguish and pain this revelation created. It was extreme and inescapable.

He felt like he was trapped in an emotional prison cell, alone with his worst critic, himself. How could he hurt everyone he loved? What would everyone else say? Why now?

“Ohmygod, this will destroy my entire life!”

He was not going to let that happen. He was strong enough to shove it all back in the emotional box and wall it up again. He was tough. His family deserved this control, this protection. It would be done.

…but his therapist knew better. The fact that Tom went to every scheduled appointment and filled in the time gap with endless emails and periodic emergency meetings told her, regardless of Tom’s protests, he was changing. He was honest enough with himself, in spite of his total rejection of transitioning, that he was suffering from gender dysphoria. It was telling him something was wrong, very wrong.

Although he knew it was all true, he hated very fact that it all resonated with his soul.

But he was not giving up. He would find a better solution to transitioning. There had to be one. He would find it.

He had spent a lifetime protecting his family now he had to protect them from himself.

They deserved better.

“Fighters Wait for the Bell and Come Out Fighting”

“In this corner, the challenger, a female, hard-wired brain and in that corner, with layers of male hormones, male socialization, gender programming and personal denial, Tom. Place your bets Ladies and Gentlemen.”

Tom realized he wasn’t alone with his thoughts. Quietly “she” started whispering in his head. She used truth as her favorite weapon.

“It’s ok Tom. Being transgender doesn’t make you a bad person.”

“So what if you have a female part of your personality. It makes you a better person.”

“Hey did you see those cute shoes on that girl?”…..

WTF???

Slowly Tom recognized that there was a part of him that totally liked thinking as her. …

WTF???

It seemed at each meeting with his therapist, with each moment of growing acceptance of his gender dysphoria (he still hated to say transgender. He couldn’t accept that yet) this female voice seemed to get louder, demanding more and more attention.

And she was sneaky.

Taking the subway, walking the streets, reading advertisements or just watching TV, Tom became more aware of women’s fashion and he liked it.

“See”, she said “Isn’t this fun?”

It was.

Then Tom would mentally push it way and get angry. He tried to clear his head and re-commit to walling away this feminine intruder.

But she was relentless and sometimes her attacks were ruthless. She smelled blood. Tom was exhausted but he wasn’t going down….yet.

Desperately seeking Katie

Every waking moment was spent in endless internal turmoil, Tom battled with “her”. Out of sheer frustration he finally gave her a name (or did she name herself), “Katie”.

He understood he wasn’t suffering from a split personality, he just needed to name this emerging female side of himself and he always thought Katie was a great girl’s name (he had only sons).

So, Katie joined the party and she wanted more attention.

Tom felt like he had entered the theater of the absurd. He began mocking himself and arguing against the bizarre reality of what he was trying to accept.

“How could I be a woman?” Followed by “What makes you a woman?” Followed next by “What is a woman?” and ending with “WTF!!!”

He had just entered the torturous world of trying to define gender. He quickly discovered that it was like picking up mercury with a fishing net. The psychiatric world seemed to run away from the question. “What gender to you think you are?” seemed to be the answer. Reinforced with “trust the process to be your true self.”

Tom had just met his first two horsemen, anger and denial. He had no clue the rodeo had only just begun.

Enter the Final Three Horsemen of Tom’s Gender Apocalypse: Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance

So, Tom moved on to BARGAINING.

He had his GP doctor do a hormonal test to see if that was the fault.

Nope it wasn’t.

Tom tried to convince himself that he was strong enough to suck it up and push Katie back into the box.

Well Katie was having none of that.

He tried to find a way to co-exist with Katie by buying men’s running tights “for the cold winter” and buying women’s knee socks because “they were more comfortable to wear”.

Katie wasn’t buying into any of it. She wanted more.

Tom then just tried to ignored her.

When he met with the therapist and told her his strategy, the twinkle in her eye told him she wasn’t buy it either.

Tom was not giving up. There had to be a solution but not the one that Katie was shoving him to. He had been in control too long to let Katie ruin his life.

But Katie was a relentless bitch.

She knew all of his weaknesses. She knew most of all that he truly wanted to transition. Nothing was going to get in her way.

Unfortunately, Katie still underestimated Tom’s love for his family and his total willingness to suffer for them.

But Katie was patient and she knew how to play three moves ahead. Tom would methodically test his resolve by pushing himself down each step of transition. He had to prove to himself that he was making the right decision. He was putting himself constantly to the test.

He was going to see if he could pass for a woman and if not then he would stop.

Katie was playing Tom well.

Tom decided it was time to bargain.

Tom had found a woman who specialized in helping males transitioning to female. She was a stylist who did makeup and found the right styles to feminize males. A visit to her would answer the question: was he really pretty?

He needed to know if he had any chance of passing otherwise, he needed to just stop. Male to female transition was inescapably all about looks. He recognized the vanity of his desire. To be the woman Tom wanted to be, he had to look like a woman. It was a superficial definition of gender but it was key to his acceptance of the woman inside.

He needed a convincing outside wrapper.

Katie was nervous. She knew there was a lot at stake for her. For once Katie and Tom were on the same side. Tom needed the ultimate answer and Katie just wanted to be pretty.

The date was set.

Tom showed up with Katie and she wouldn’t shut up the entire walk over to the studio:

“Look at her makeup.”

“Isn’t that a cute jacket.”

“We should buy a pair of shoes like that.”

“I wish we had a figure like that.”

“Are you as scared as I am?”

“What if people see that we are a man in drag?”

And finally, “what if we are ugly???”

Tom was secretly counting on it.

But in the end Tom totally lost. He actually looked pretty amazing. The photos taken at the session confirmed it. They were pretty.

Katie was ecstatic but Tom became massively depress. He had met the Third Horseman.

Entire the Fourth Horseman

Tom had counted on failure but reveled in the knowledge that he could pass, only to sink into depression recognizing he really could. The slope just got more slippery. He now had less places to hide. The wall that controlled Katie were weakening.

He felt desperate and increasingly more depressed. He couldn’t give in. He could keep fighting but Katie was wearing Tom down. His swinging punches failed to even land once on Katie as she danced around the ring.

Tom was praying for the bell to ring. He needed a few moments to recover in the corner.

But Katie wasn’t giving him a chance. She was winding up to deliver the knockout blow. Tom saw it coming.

A Now Enter the Final Horseman

Tom had finally surrendered. He knew the at that he had to accept the need to transition. He would start hormonal treatments. He would start facial electrolysis. He would contact transgender surgeons for plans face and genital surgery. He was going to transition. Katie was jubilant.

She had won the war for his heart, mind and soul. She was going to finally be in charge. Everyone would know her name.

But, as Tom fought back against his decision to transition in one final act of male gender defiance and before Katie could respond, a former Soviet military satellite that had be circling the Earth for four decades had begun its re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere, its orbit in its final stages of decay.

It accelerated at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour and struck Tom and Katie vaporizing them both instantly, rendering moot all of Tom’s gender concerns in less than the blink of an eye.

Problem solved.

“And so, Ladies and Gentlemen Denial Wins in the Tenth and Deciding Round.”

The End

I wrote this for myself at the very beginning of my gender dysphoria explosion three years ago. It was one of many vents that I needed at the loneliest moment of my life during my greatest fear of transitioning. I hope you have a laugh. I did as I wrote it.

Emma Holiday

Please also read:

I have tied all of my stories to the above thread.

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.