“You Don't Know How It Feels To Be Me”

You don't know how it feels
You don't know how it feels to be me

When I hear that Tom Petty song I always think… “That’s so true, you don’t know how I feel!”

There is so many article writing about being trans but none of them can come close to knowing how it feels each morning waking up being trans. I know for me there never is a moment in my life when I didn’t feel trans. I don’t care how many trans women say that they are a woman, just by making that statement disproves what they just said because they had to affirm that they are a woman.

No matter how hard you deny it we all still have a unique past, a unique history.

Okay this leads me to an Editor Note in Psychotherapy Networker, their current issue is devoted to gender dysphoria and this paragraph stood out for me.

There’s no comfort in faking it, because something as pervasive as gender really can’t be faked. And there’s no escape—except a doomed attempt to constantly and unrelentingly hide the truth and pretend to be what one isn’t. But people can’t forever fake being something or someone they’re not, and the costs for kids who are forbidden to be genuinely themselves, who are often expelled from their own homes, are almost unimaginable loneliness and pain. There’s a reason for the shocking suicide attempt rate among gender-nonconforming people.

I faked it my entire life up until I transitioned. I lived a life that wasn’t really me, I hung out with gearheads, but I was not really a gearhead but it was a good place to hide. I went into electronics because that also was a good place to hide; I could lose myself in troubleshooting a problem. The world around me didn’t exist and in some ways I do that now with photography but I don’t have to hide now in a masculine world to hide my shameful secret I can just be myself.

This issue’s exploration of the experience of being transgender may seem quite radical to many readers—after all, even the term transgender was unknown to most people until a scant decade or so ago. And yet, talking to the parents and children in the families who agreed to share their stories with us, it began to dawn on me that maybe all this transgender stuff isn’t so foreign after all. In fact, human nature—whatever that is—is far more varied and complex than the age-old, rigid, binary division that HE/SHE would suggest. Indeed, maybe our ideas of what’s “natural” don’t need to be completely junked—they’re just due for a tune-up.

I just want to be me, I don’t want understanding, I don’t want anything from you expect to be a person, I don’t want to be a trans person, I just want to be treated like a person. I don’t want a label across my forehead that says trans, if any label has to be attacked to my forehead just let it say “Diana.”