Musings from my everyday life...

I s transition for trans people inevitable? Well I would say that depends. I do think that some form of baseline needs to be arrived at where you are comfortable with the method of treating your gender dysphoria. Viewed in that sense, transition is what you need it to mean. All of life is a transition process where we hopefully improve our knowledge of ourselves. If that progression leads you to a medical transition then that is what you should do. Outside pressure should not form part of the formula but instead it should be a highly personal journey of self discovery. Things improved for me when I removed the guardrails and remained open to any option. The elimination of taboos allowed me to examine all possibilities with a more objective eye. I continue to remain open today.

 

 

Reading countless webpages and blogs over the years helped convince me even more that Harry Benjamin was on to something with his less than perfect SOS scale. Even a casual sampling of these testaments showed me the diverging focus and interests of trans people and how close or distant from the idea of medical transition they were. On one end perhaps the married crossdresser and the yearly photoshoot and on the other the high intensity transsexual. They were easier to place but more nebulous were those in the middle some of whom seemed to progress on that scale as time went on.  That 6-type benchmarking matters less to me now than it once did but the idea of a spectrum became entrenched in my mind all the more so when we began to see clear parallels among genetic females who also ranged from tomboy through transgender man. I haven't diverged from my thinking since and likely won't until I see evidence to the contrary.

I have wondered whether it is preferable to heal your own psyche versus being guided by a therapist. I am still on the fence on both approaches as I find inconveniences and benefits in both. One of the dangers of seeking help is finding the wrong specialist and then being even unintentionally goaded onto a path which doesn't suit you. One thing is for certain: doing it yourself takes longer but what I liked about it is that I was able to be certain of each step as it had been pondered over for quite some time. The other problem with therapists is that many are not well versed in trans issues. One of the gender therapists I was sporadically seeing wanted me in her group sessions because she wanted my input with her transsexual patients. I was flattered but I declined because I was afraid of groupthink and didn't yet trust my ability to resist embarking on a medical transition I was still marinating over in my mind. Interestingly I am now more than ever convinced that they are s

C isgender women of my generation were just as indoctrinated as cisgender men and hence when it came to gender roles they were hard pressed to process what happened when they unwittingly married a trans person. That divulging of information could have been akin to getting hit by a freight train and I have nothing but sympathy for them because I have often imagined the roles being reversed and how I would handle it. It must have been even harder when that information was divulged well into the marriage and paralleled the self discovery of the trans person themselves. That was my scenario. This is why I feel that trans people are better off on their own unless they happen upon someone who loves them fully for who they are; no preconditions on identity. Plus, if the trans person is more on the transsexual side of the spectrum, there could be serious psychological consequences to suppression. Here, man-loving (androphilic) transsexuals who are aligned in both identity and sexual orientatio