The Inescapable and the Enjoyable

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I knew from a very early age that I was a girl; even before I could consciously formulate it as a statement, something in me knew. It was an inescapable fact, something that I just knew in more or less the same way that I always knew that I had to breathe air. It wasn't something I ever asked for or actively wanted. It was just another attribute that was just there, like my left-handedness or the breasts that started growing as I entered puberty. Independently of whether I asked for it or not, it was always a part of me.

Part of the attribute of being female was the fundamental need to live in a way that affirmed that part of my identity, rather than denying it and forcing myself into niches that I was neither inclined nor able to fit into. This need, like the knowledge it grew out of, was something that just was there. Like any other need, its essence was to be fulfilled, regardless of whether or not fulfilling it seemed like something I would like. Like it or not, it was a basic, inescapable need.

When your teeth reach a certain degree of dilapidation, you need to get a root canal. However, I have yet to meet anyone who claimed to have liked the experience.

You just do it in order to avoid the potentially worse consequences of not doing it.

And so it was with transition. After twenty years, I reached a point at which I knew that there was nothing more to be done with my life as it was. I had long put up with the ever-cycling crescendo and decrescendo of the baseline groan in my mind, never letting me forget that my life was wrong, false. What I needed to do couldn't have been clearer.

Five years later, I am filled every day with wonderment at the fact that, apart from being inescapable, my transition, my life as a woman, is also enjoyable. In all the years that I thought about it, needed it, longed for it, I had never once entertained the idea that I might like it. Perhaps it was too outlandish a thought to consider after years of a life that was anything but enjoyable. Perhaps it was due to the fact that, being raised as a boy, I had had the idea quite well drilled into me that becoming or being treated like a girl was an indignity of the first order. What I do know, is that it never crossed my mind even once that it would feel good.

But it does.

After years of enduring my life, now I find myself reveling in it. And that feeling continues to increase the longer I'm on oestrogen. I love the little things. I delight in the new softness of my skin, and in the way touch has become such a powerful sensation, capable of producing positive ecstacy at times. I love how my features have softened, and how now, instead of a prematurely old burned-out man, the mirror shows me a vivacious, basically happy young woman who actually looks rather young for her age. As I've felt my mind becoming steadily more and more feminine, I've reveled in that, too. I savour every new feeling, even the difficult ones, and every new sense. Where I once had rather superficial friendships where I spared no effort to avoid my true self being perceived, I now have deep, caring, intimate relationships, built on the understanding that we can tell each other literally about everything.

Just as surprisingly, I find myself right at home in the new world that I find myself in. It's a world where people don't seem somewhat wary and disconcerted by me. A world where small children I don't even know smile at me and say hi, and where I find myself thoroughly melted every time that happens. Even the men seem transformed in this new place. The men I knew before always seemed like complete jackasses. The incessant macho locker-room drivel they expected me to participate in, with the constant bragging of real, imagined, past, and future sexual exploits, always made me vaguely sick, even more so because I had to avoid the appearance of not being fully enthralled by the proceedings. Not so the men in my life now. I am experiencing a whole new side of men. The men in my life seem always to soften a little around me. They lose a lot of the annoying macho crap, and acquire a gentleness I never knew men were capable of. They hold doors open for me, amongst other sweet gestures, and, instead of weird high-fiving rituals, I get kisses on the cheek.

It's also a world where I have to be much more careful at night. Apparently I look rather less intimidating now. Like most women I know, I've had my share of night-time creeps and sociopaths who assume (incorrectly, I hope, though I haven't had to do a definitive test) I'll be an easy mark. A world where I am acutely conscious of my own vulnerability in a way I never was before. As my muscle mass has steadily decreased, I've become increasingly aware that just about everyone I have to be concerned about at night will be significantly stronger than I am.

Even the things that suck in this new world somehow seem more fitting, less grating than my life before. Somehow, despite ranging from unpleasant to downright unsettling, they are not accompanied by the undertone of not being mine, of being for someone else that I wasn't.

Being male, or having a lot of testosterone, it seems, is like driving down the street in a car, a big humvee monstruosity that could survive a collision with a solid concrete wall. In my life as a woman, I find I feel more as if I'm on a motorcycle. Smaller, more manoevrable, and with no doubt that the consequences of a collision will be devastating.

But I can feel the wind in my hair.