My Story Part 15 – Life On A Roller Coaster

The roller coaster ride began for me, back in the fifties when I first started questioning my gender and it has never stopped. As I mentioned before I remember crying myself to sleep wanting to wake up a girl, back then I did not any sense of guilt. However, in my early teen years I started to develop low self-esteem, because of the pressures that society places on people who do not conform to the societal norms. Many transgender people, crossdressers or transsexual go through purging where they throw out all their clothes of the opposite gender, promising never to do crossdress again. I think that we all at an early age begin to pick-up social clues on what society expects from us and one of those expectations is to dress in gender conforming clothing and that is our source of the guilt and the ride in the roller coaster.

In one of my classes I had to write a paper on a chapter in Aronson’s book, The Social Animal the chapter that I chose was on conforming, I wrote this on why I chose that chapter,

It was a toss up between the chapter on Conformity and Prejudice, both of them affect me personally but I chose Conformity because it is about us, not what is done to us. Even though the Trans-community does have its prejudices, we are more a victim of prejudice. However, conformity is something that all of us in the trans-community have in common that we have to overcome in ourselves in order to be whole. It is the fear of what will our family say or what will the neighbors say or what will…. the list just keeps going on and on, every time we walk out of the house we face the results of non-conforming. The social pressures to conform builds up in us until we reach a point where we say, “Screw You World” and are able to break the hold that the desire to conform has on us.

It is that guilt that creates the roller coaster. Several times, I came close to being caught and each time that happen, I went into a depression and I vowed never to dress again. When I did start dressing again, it pushed me deeper into depression. I had always thought that if my family or friends found out, they would disown me and I would be cut off from the world. Because the guilt, we become secretive and learn to tell little white lies. One of the lies that we tell is to ourselves, that we can stop any time that we want. Another lie that I told myself was all it would take to stop is love, that if I found a woman that I loved I could stop crossdressing. I think that many of us in the LGBT community think the same thing and that is how we end up in disastrous relationships. Well for me it never worked, I think that the women that I dated felt that I was holding something of me back.

Later on in the paper for my class, I wrote this about how knowing about conformity would help me in my field,

There is tremendous pressure when you reach the point in your journey where you have to come out to your family; I know when I came to that point I felt a betrayal to my family. I felt that I had let them down in some way in not living up to their expectation and I still feel that way at times. Many of the members were in fear that they would be found out by their loved ones; they are not so much victim of prejudice but more victims of not conforming to society’s norms.
The field of my concentration is Community Organization and understanding conformity will help in trying to change society’s view of gender variant persons. By organizing grassroots political action coalition to help chance the laws to be more trans-friendly, we also can educate the community at large to the needs of the trans-community and maybe change society to become more accepting.

When I was growing up, the only way that transgender people were portrayed in the media was as crazies and people living in the fringes of society. The Christine Jorgensen’s and the Renee Richards’ of the world were portrayed as a novelties and someone to be the butt of jokes, but now there are positive roll models for those who are growing up today. They can find success stories all over the internet. Maybe the child of today will not have to live on that roller coaster.