The Real Me
I have tried to peg when my battle with gender dysphoria actually began. It still seems so new to me but it’s clearly not. Like measuring our epochs with B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, Latin for “in the year of the Lord” referring to the birth of Jesus Christ), I have divided my life into Pre-Awareness and Post-Awareness periods.
I probably should explain what I mean by “awareness”. As a baby boomer, sex and gender was always the same thing. Everyone accepted that as fact, except it never was. The conceptual difference was an intellectual intangibility. It lacked the necessary language and words to give it the required conceptual dimensionality.
Fortunately, human intellectual drive and its endless curiosity, ultimately challenges every aspect of our experience. Questions push for answers. Words create theories. Finally, proven theories become facts. Eventually society begins to accept the facts and absorb them into the common social fabric. For Humanity it is an endless process.
We no longer believe the world is flat.
During my life time, this process took up the challenge of gender and sex. At some point, proven theories demonstrated that sex is one’s biological genitalia and chromosomal make up. Gender is something wired into the pre-natal brain of an unborn child. As my life continued, theories created new words as they sought to define a world that didn’t exist in society’s consciousness before. Gender suddenly became a much more complex concept. Definition of the new words became critical as each step of analysis sought to tie each of the words into concrete concept and, finally, into a string of facts.
In my pre-awareness period, the lack of language supported my on-going ignorance. I was a reflection of the world that raised me. At some point in my 60th year my awareness began to grow. Society was beginning to grapple with new scientific facts regarding sex and gender. The media began to share these new facts with the world.
As with any new set scientific facts that challenge the existing status quo (the existing state of affairs, especially regarding social or political issues), there is a general rejection of these facts.
This has happened so many times in our history. For example, Galileo’s theory of a sun-center solar system was so rejected by the Catholic Church that Galileo was convicted of heresy and placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. It took the Church 300 years to finally accept the facts of his theory.
The reality that gender can be entirely different than the biological sex for some individuals is now experiencing the same ignorant rejection of fact as Galileo’s sun-centered solar system. It is not surprising that the strongest rejection is by traditional, institutionalized religious authorities.
My awareness of the difference sex and gender began to grow as my ignorance began to melt away. The facts were starting to connect disparate historical data points in my life.
Suddenly it was very personal and my subconscious hit the alarm bell.
Then it hit critical mass.
The panic attacks started. I never had one before. For some reason, they chose the moment when I was standing on a subway platform. They are hard to describe. They are intense, overwhelming and uncontrollable. For the first time in my life, I considered suicide. Subway trains pulling into the station offered an easy exit. Fortunately, my desire for life was much more powerful but the strength of the multiple panic attacks within one week convinced me to finally seek help.
My awareness accelerated from there so I guess that my awareness was triggered by the panic attacks and became more defined by my therapy. I had successfully ignored gender dysphoria all my life until, in final desperation, my subconscious triggered my panic attacks as a last-ditch effort to make me aware that something was very wrong.
It worked.
Three years later I have started to put my pieces together. The real me is a female inside a male wrapper. To say it has shocked me is an understatement but it finally answered “What’s wrong with me?” Simply, nothing. I am transgender and I am happy to be the real me. Every day that thought brings me joy.
At the same time, it has brought change, confusion and upheaval to everyone in my life.
Welcome to my own personal Darwinian petri dish.
Emma Holiday
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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.
