Where is My White Knight?

Definition of white knight: one that comes to the rescue of another

All my life I have been waiting for someone to save me. I know that sounds odd. It feels odd to write it here. It is something that I finally shared in therapy a year ago.

Let me explain what I mean.

I have always been an incurable romantic. All my life, mysteriously, I always seemed to identify with the female lead. I was even jealous of her. After 60 years the mystery has been finally solved, I am a transgender woman, simplistically a female gendered brain in a male gendered body.

Now it all makes sense.

I was operating under the delusion that I was cisgender male, that my biological sex and my sense of gender were both male. It took 60 years for my true gender to finally free itself from decades of male socialization and intense personal denial. For the last 6 years it has been a slugfest between my sex and my gender for control.

That battle continues to this day. I have written enough about it here on Medium to bore the most conscientious reader to tears. God knows I am tired of it too but from my earliest age, I kept hoping that someone would save me.

Save me from what you may ask?

Honestly, for all this time I didn’t know. It has just been a sensation that seemed to manifest itself in my thoughts from time to time. It always struck me as an odd sensation for a guy to feel. We don’t need anyone to save us, we’re tough guys…yeah right, but it always seemed to repeat itself with enough regularity to confuse me.

As someone who thought he was 100% male with fully toxic male qualities, looking for someone to save me never made any sense. I isolated that thought along with my life long fantasy that I wanted to be a girl and then bricked them up together and refused them the light of day.

Nobody was going to let her out. Not on my watch. I’m a guy.

…except she found her own way out. It took her 60 years to escape but she is tough and I realized I wasn’t the “guy” at all…

…and she refuses to go back in.

The world is stacked against her, including my male self. Now is the time I could use some rescuing because I just can’t seem to do it for myself. My gender doesn’t seem to have the strength to win and my male sex is too stubborn to quit.

Unlike the movies, there is no white knight charging in, so I will continue to struggle until, either out of exhaustion or necessity, my gender or my sex finally wins.

I wish they would just compromise…

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.