Trans Dreams Can Come True
Logan’s Corner writing prompt response: Queer trans dreams and fantasies
A common theme that seems to repeat itself over and over again for the transgender people I talk to is the common wish many of us shared as children, that somehow, magically we would be transformed into a girl or into a boy. It could be a fairy god person with their magic wand or divine intervention or a genie or a magic elixir; somehow it just happens.
If you are transgender, how many nights did you lie in bed and just wish?
I did regularly and I thought nothing of it. I just wanted to be a girl. I know, based on my earliest memories, that I started very young, specifically at the point when it became clear through my parents and the world around me that I wasn’t a girl, I was a “boy” and that was that. Before that moment, I really wasn’t aware of my gender but I knew my best friend was a girl and we liked playing dolls together.
I would spend the rest of my life having the same dream theme. The difference was as I got older my gender change would happen because of an accident, like a bolt of lightning, something else over which I had no control. My adult dreams eliminated my guilt…it wasn’t my fault; therefore, it would be ok with everyone in my life.
The perfect guilt-free transition.
For me, I was able to bury my desire so deep that, when I did dream about being a girl, I just dismissed it as a personality defect that was my private problem. I built an amazing deep and impenetrable defensive wall.
I never understood gender. I never questioned mine. I was male and that was it. I believed that I was the man that my wife married. My desire was a dream like fantasizing about catching the winning football touchdown pass in the Super Bowl.
It was never going to be real…until it became very real in my life four years ago.
No magic wand or bolt of lightning, just an explosion of this “alien” female gender into my life that was suddenly demanding my absolute attention. It set off a massive dose of fear, anger, shame, guilt and an extra dash of panic.
For the first time in my life, I was losing control. I felt like I was drowning.
In desperation, I started therapy. I then started a crash course on sex and gender, while I began the most devastating reassessment of every aspect of my life from my birth to date. Eventually with the help of my therapist, new friends on transgender help-sites and my own deep analysis and research, I started to build my own “magic wand.”
It was the combination of therapy and female hormones.
They caused my lifetime of repression to begin to melt away. I began to breathe, really breath and then I started to feel ok. Suddenly, it all started to make sense.
I am transgender and I am ok.
I am still a work in progress but, at long last, my fairy tale can come true.
Maybe I can have a happy ending after all.
Emma Holiday
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