Why Do I Need to Transition?
Discovering late in life that I am transgender has created an endless series of questions that I never would have thought of five years ago when I believed, innocently, that I was a typical cisgender male. I was torn between the very rational reasons not to transition, and an internal, inexplicable need to transition.
What am I seeking to derive from transition?
Why can’t I find contentment in who I am now?
Why do I need to go through such a drastic change to feel content and at peace?
At the time, I didn’t understand how transition could be anything more than just physical. My mind was defining my world by sex not gender.
While my confusion and unhappiness grew, I realized I would find no answers by only thinking. To find answers, I needed to try something different than I was already doing. I decided to move forward without reconciling it all. I hoped that as I moved through the various elements of transitioning, it would provide me with answers and I could make decisions that would give me peace.
Through the course of my transition I naturally learned that it is much more than just a physical process. There are more significant psychological and social changes that occur. Changes that, at least for me, brought a majority of the positive effects.
I started to understand gender, my gender.
It became clearer as I started HRT. It seemed to sharpen the blurred edges of my thought of who I am and helped me redefine many experiences in my lifetime that I had dismissed in order to exist and survive as a “cisgender” male. I learned, felt and finally understood I wasn’t. I started to accept it.
The realization of my gender was, to grossly understate it, absolutely shocked to me. The knowledge that I was a female gender in a biologically male body has been for me the most profound experience of my life. My head exploded initially with confusion, doubt and fear. What did this mean to me and to the family, friends and world around me?
It caused me to panic. It caused me to reject the facts. It caused me endless rounds of anger and frustration at the unfairness of it all.
I asked: “Why me?”
Eventually, the answer for me became: “It is what it is and it’s not going away. Now deal with it.”
So, I did. I continued with HRT and asked myself every day: “When will it be enough? Why can’t I be content with this new knowledge of who I am? How would changing my body bring happiness?”
So now I am two years of HRT and on the verge of taking steps to physically align my body with my gender and I still ask over and over again: “Why do I need to transition?”
The only answer I come up with is this, I need to be me. I need to be me against the world that raised me, the wishes of family and friends who can’t understand and accept that need and my need to accept that it is what I need to be at peace with any hope for real joy and happiness.
It is very simply, my truth.
Emma Holiday
Please also read:
I have tied all of my stories to the above thread.
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 simply be understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.
