tran·scend·ence: My Favorite Transgender Word

Beyond normal limits or boundaries

Transcendence is, “the existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level”*. Another definition I also like is ,“the quality of being able to go beyond normal limits or boundaries”.**

Transcendence absolutely captures the transgender experience.

Discovering that you are transgender launches you on such a profound journey of personal exploration that I have nothing else to compare it to. It strips you of all of the certainty and safety of the presumptions on which your life relies on and challenges the very basic elements of who you think you are. It is a spiritual journey like no other. You enter an eruptive crucible of absolute turmoil and you are alone with it entirely inside your head. It’s a very tough place to dwell in without a friend or a guidebook, leaving you with no anchor to hold on to.

It is the ultimate internal space walk. There is no emotional gravity to hold you in place.

Your sense of orientation is totally gone. Up is down, left is right. In is out. The old rules don’t apply any more.

There is no functioning compass to guide you through the fog that enshrouds your every day life as you look simply for yourself.

There is no map. You are writing your own as you chart your own course. Dead-ends and wrong turns seem to multiply in the beginning but as your journey continues, each step seems more firmer and certain.

Slowly, you begin to find your way and then you learn you are not alone. The journey becomes a little easier.

Another word that comes to mind about the transgender journey is “mystical”: “Something that is mystical involves spiritual powers and influences that most people do not understand.”**

The phrase “…that most people do not understand.” is a massive understatement. It takes an immense effort for us to understand and it is happening to us. Those around us have no clue what we are going through and those that try to understand, struggle. It is outside their experience.

Gender is who you believe you are versus your physical sex assigned at birth. Mother Nature is not binary after all.

Once you accept this fact, you begin to realize that your body is an only a container for your gender, for your soul, for your spirit. Once you realize that, your body becomes more malleable than you thought. You can actually change it to match your internal sense of self.

And that is a key thing, you become, through all your painful experiences, much more aware of self, who you are, not who you have been told you are.

That is a profound experience, self-realization, not social definition.

Hopefully you survive this incredible journey. Hopefully your scars heal without you being crippled in the process. Hopefully you find the joy of self that has been waiting for you your entire life, the joy of knowing your soul on so many new dimensions.

I hope that the immense pressures that we suffer for being transgender allows each of us to know the individual strength and beauty we have inside each of us.

Know that brilliant sparkling light that surrounds us is the joy we now possess now and forever and that we are so willing to share with others if they choose.

We have already chosen.

Emma Holiday

*https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/

**https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/transcendence

Thank you for reading my work.

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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.