Transgender diary: Even though it is still me, in many ways I am not the same person anymore

Re-connecting with my ex-girlfriends

Even though an ex is an ex, there is no structural reason for that to be the case.  It just was that it no longer made sense to be friends.  It might have hurt one or the other of us.  Mostly me.  In fact, always me.  Why?

Because I’ve never been a leaver.  Never been a cheat.  And even when she left because she didn’t feel my love strongly enough, that was not because it wasn’t there, it was just that I might not have shown it enough.  I have learned that buried emotion is often a bed-mate of those with ADD.  We bury what is too intense.

And I am definitely intense.  I do everything with gusto and passion.  I don’t know any other way to be.  And I feel that sometimes for others it is too much.  I don’t mean anything by it, it just is.

I’d be curious to know whether F2M trans people on hormones feel the same as I do, even if we are but two ships passing with different lands ahead.  As someone who feels her femininity unfolding before her in new ways every day, this aspect feels very important and real.  Social connection.

It is not that I am different, that the motivations or even the sense of self has changed.  If anything, I feel more ‘me’ than ever.  Our ‘self’ is very adaptive.  It becomes who we are as we become it.  It is a bit of an aside, but my trans sisters who are ahead of me on their physical journeys describe waking up after surgery to their neo-vaginas and discovering that it already feels ‘right’.  I know this.  I can already feel what it will feel like to look in the mirror and to see that change.

As a man, it wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in other people, or even that I was shy, it was just that I didn’t feel compelled to talk to people.  We are conditioned in the professional world to network, and yes, I was apparently good at it.  But there is something which seems self-serving to me about that…that we approach meeting people with a goal of establishing a connection to figure out how we might help one another, or more likely, how this person can help me, just doesn’t feel right.  And one of the very curious parts of my life right now is that the less I do this, the more relevant the people who come into my life are.  The more random and beautiful my connections seem to be.

As a trans woman, I want to talk to people.  I say ‘hi’ with a big smile to the people on my street.  I talk to shopkeepers.  I talk to taxi drivers.  I talk to people in the line at the store.  I just gab away.  Not because of anything to say, but because of the human connection.  I am told that this is female.  I am also told that intense socialising is also teenager.  I guess I should not be surprised as my hormones are those of an early-stage pubescent girl.  And yes, I feel Spring Fever all the time.

One of the by-products of this desire to connect has been one of rekindling friendships.  Drawing back to me all the people of my life who have been friends or positive acquaintances for some time.  And I have relished speaking to my friends and coming out to them one-by-one.  It is true that I don’t want them to hear of it through the gossip mill, but rather from my own mouth.  And this is  like soul food…it is feeding and nourishing me, and giving me something to look forward to.

Once upon a time I worked at the tender age of 20 in a very high-end NYC store that belonged to a very glamourous family member.  Soap started at $25.  Sheets and towels were more than several month’s wages.  One day a random PhD student walked in and started chatting with me.  We went on a date, several dates, but never gelled in that way.  She was lovely, and we stayed friends.  Very randomly, and many years later, she was doing work on her thesis in Rome, where I was working at the time, a fact which she could not have known.  We met over dinner and she told me of her work, of the Italian poet she was writing about.

This poet had been the young daughter of an anti-fascist during the Second World War.  For their safety, the family patriarch took the family to France in the closing years of the war, but one night, as they waited on a railway siding outside of Nice, some Italian fascists boarded the train and executed the entire family.  She was four years old at the time, and survived by curling up into a little ball under the seats, behind the lifeless body of one of her siblings.

It was an incredible story.  This girl went on to become one of Italy’s great modern poets.

Over dinner with Italian friends the weekend after I had seen her, I related this incredible story.  After dinner, my host, an Italian gentleman pulled me aside and had a discrete word.  He said, “that story you told, it was my grandfather who was accused of organizing the hit.  He was tried as a fascist but was acquitted.  It is best you not mention it again.  Thank you.”

Life is strange.  The threads of connection are so tight.  I am reminded by this little vignette of discovering that one of my group members in business school, had a hideous ancestral connection to me—and one which I believe he has never been nor is likely to ever become aware of.  My business school prides itself on putting groups together who are destined to come into conflict.  Your group is your group for the duration of the program, because they believe that learning to deal with one another is a part of the growth we need to do at business school.  Anyway, on paper, this individual and I had no reason to object to each other.  And in truth it was only later that I discovered that there was a real reason for me hating him.  I don’t hate many people, but just being near him, from the very beginning, made my hair stand on end.  I discovered that he was a direct descendant of the person who led the slaughter of my mother’s ancestral people.  We were the ones who got away.

As I have contemplated re-connection with various people, and sifted through friendships and acquaintances, former colleagues, treasured bosses, old friends going back as far as grade school, I am struck by the joy it brings, about how they all seem so happy for me, but most of all, that they don’t often seem surprised.  “I would have never guessed, but in retrospect, it all makes sense.”  That is more or less what they all say.

I just reached out to the woman who took my virginity.  What a silly expression “take my virginity” is.  But she was seminal, no pun intended, to my life.  I was sixteen.  It was in the basement of her palatial home, the summer before she left for college.  She was the, to my eyes, the prettiest girl in her class.  The night she met me, oddly enough, we were rattling around in the back of a friend’s VW bus as we drove over to a girl in my class’s house who was my size and a good enough friend to lend me one of her skirts…I dressed in the back, and this girl who I had not met before did my makeup. I can still see the bemused expression on her face as I changed.  We went to Rocky Horror Picture Show.  

That would have been my true first public experience of real cross-dressing. Not that I would have called it that, or even felt it was that. It was more like being surreptitiously me.  I was in the habit, however, of wearing harem pants and other items that were of ambiguous gender long before that. It was also a weird evening because I was groped and pinched repeatedly, and because I was whistled at and catcalled at.  I am not boasting, but the two of them were gorgeous, and well, I did not look like a guy in a dress.  We talked after about how men are.

It wasn’t long after that we began making out and doing everything together.  She had a wonderful muscle car.  I had a beat-up old Datsun that had road signs as floorboards because the original had rusted out.  She was slumming it to be with me.  My friend said my car was like a tin can with a great stereo inside, and it was true, the stereo cost 2x what the car cost.

She gave me knickers, and my little sister and one of her friends watched us through the window of my porch door as we made out and frolicked on the bed—we heard them giggle before covering the window.  She gave me a garter belt that was given to her by her old BF who wanted her back.  It was a slutty black lace thing.  “You’ll probably get more use out of this than I will,” she said knowingly.

Later, when she left for college (she was older than me), I was sad and missed her. We wrote lot’s of letters to each other. I still have them.  When I went to visit her, she broke my heart. She invited me to where she was living and there was a boy there, and they had obviously just come from bed. I left immediately in tears. Why couldn’t she have found another way to tell me? I know I seem fragile, but I’m not. When people protect me, “its for the best,” they say, it is really for themselves.  I had applied to go to the same school, and later got in, but by then it was too late.  I saw her at the beginning of a college tour which saw an attractive woman on the Amtrak train encourage me to lay my head on her and fall asleep, and who then took this as the opportunity to empty my wallet (she did leave me a dollar which was nice).  I discovered this to my embarrassment when my sibling who lent me their car had to pay to fill the tank with gas as I had no money left.  Thank goodness for siblings and ATM machines.

But after my heart broke, it began to rain, and felt uncommonly dark, and I went to visit a friend at another school, who had also dated her before me (most of my friends were older), and in whose room I stayed for two days talking while it rained outside and I never visited the school that he was at. I thought what a miserable school, always dark, always raining, and I associated it with heart break. But when I got in, I accepted, and attended.

Ironically, so did she.  After attempting suicide, taking a year off, she transferred to the same school, now behind me by one year.  I wasn’t ready to befriend her.  And I didn’t see her more than once again.  Her suicide attempt was the result of something I didn’t know about other than very vaguely that things were not all right in her home.  What happened to trigger her attempt was that her father, a prominent person in the US, was caught for having molested many young women.  It transpired that he had raped his daughter.

I know now that three of the most important women in my dating and love life and evolution have been women raped.  I would say that they find solace in me, only that I know that it is frightfully commonplace.

Someone, somehow, told me recently that she had a restraining order placed on her former husband with whom she has had a daughter.  I knew him growing up.  He always had bad energy.  I came to hate him.  My first true girlfriend, my first love, puppy love, left me for him.  He tried to do it again when I dated this one.  And weirdly, his sister tried to sleep with me after sleeping with two of my other family members (many years apart).  Odd and entangled.  I was so disappointed for her, but now that I know that she has discovered the truth about the river of filth which flows through him, I feel she is safe, for herself.

I thought of her running.  So, I tracked her down and found that our one mutual friend is a very dear and understanding and cherished human.  I let her know of my transition, and she wrote back to say that she has only beautiful memories of our contact, gentle, sweet, innocent memories.  Me too.  And I feel that connecting once again to such a person is connecting to a part of me that lies as much in the future as it does in the past.

Because all of my ex-girlfriends have known me for what I am, for what I was even then, there is real joy in coming out to them. Real joy. The lack of surprise, the warmth, tastes so good. They are instant, deep, female friendships. They are the most accepting of my sisters.

And you know what? All of my ex-girlfriends, all of them, have been party to this. They are the midwives to my transition. Every one of them. And they know it. And every one of them has been more than accepting. Every one of them has stepped into being my sister.