Understanding a Lifetime of Heart Aches: The Transgender Heart

My heart survived but it still confused me

When you know personal pain and suffering it generally opens up your heart to the suffering of others. All my life I have felt what I thought was an abnormal sensitivity to their pain.

It conflicted with the male world I was raised in. It punished weakness, and kindness. By the seventh grade, I was tired of being the nice kid, I began to physically fighting back. I got pretty good at it. Nothing like the power of righteous anger. I had years of practice with an older brother who bullied me until I grew big enough. Even then I didn’t extract revenge on him. It wasn’t in me. i wasn’t wired for it.

I just moved on.

My teenage years were filled with violence. I’m not proud but I was always defending myself and I never backed down unless there was a gun. Brooklyn was rough in the 1960’s and 70’s. Put The Warriors, Saturday Night Fever, The Lords of Flatbush and The Wanders in a movie blender and you get the point. I actually worked in Coney Island for a couple of summers during that time and my co-workers/friends were members of street gangs like The Black Spades, Savage Skulls and Homicide Inc.

Enough said.

It was not a world for a guy who wanted to be a girl.

Once I got into my third year of college I outgrew the need for violence. I outgrew my raging hormonal imbalance. I changed my social circle. But even during that violent period I still felt this deep sense of empathy. It just needed careful buffering to survive.

Being called a “fag” back then was the ultimate insult and always led to a violent confrontation. You had to fight otherwise the name stuck, then you had real troubles.

I was Brooklyn working-class born and trained.

What a homophobically sad world to grow up in. If being gay was the kiss of death, imagine if you tried to explain the desire to be a girl? I have wondered all these years later how many of those guys were repressing their gay or transgender thoughts and desires?

It must generated a lot of painful repression and a lot of violence for them and others.

All that time my heart would feel the pain of others. Strangely my personal pain wasn’t as important to me. I was “guy-trained”.

“Suck it up!”

My childhood role model, John Wayne, required a fist fight in every one of his romcom movies. His characters were never allowed to wallow in emotions for too long. A good gun or fist fight balanced out that emotional weakness. I mean, look at the iconic Irish love story, The Quiet Man. Not only does he have an epic fist fight with his brother-in-law to the delight of the entire community, an elderly lady offering “here’s a good stick to beat the lovely lady”, John Wayne was able to fit in the famously climactic spanking scene of Maureen O’Hara. Maureen even claimed that she was black and blue for a week after that scene.

Ah, what a real man you were John Wayne.

That was true male sensitivity in the world that I grew up in.

In spite of all that, my heart survived but it still confused me. I would cry alone with some of the sadness I felt for others. I would let anyone ever see it.

Show no weakness. Don’t act like a girl.

My life continued in that pattern. Empathy was allowed, but only in a manly way. No tears just a gentle hug for women and a firm bear hug for men at funerals, “bro hugs” after excessively drinking and only after 1 am when there was no chance of meeting a girl.

Then I hit 60.

Like a pot of water left to boil for too long, gender dysphoria literally exploded into my life. I had no idea it was happening. My ignorance was so deeply rooted in my psyche that the extreme pain and confusion it caused drove me to thoughts of suicide and finally therapy.

Gender dysphoria was the final warning bell that something was wrong.

I finally did the unmanly thing.

I asked for help.

Therapy saved my life by releasing me from my life-long captivity in a male cage. I was wired female and she demanded to be allowed to not only feel emotions but to show emotions as well. Four years of hormone therapy finally corrected the male testosterone over-dose that was poisoning my female wired brain.

Thankfully I heeded the warning of gender dysphoria. Thankfully I now understand that I have always been transgender.

So now I understand my transgender heart. It truly made my entire life experience make sense. It has finally given me the peace of understanding and acceptance.

My heart no longer operates in a John Wayne black and white world.

It now operates in Technicolor.

Emma Holiday

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.