So, I'm really, really confused about my gender identity and have a very hard time finding anyone I can relate to. I'm trying to figure out what gender I'm supposed to be, and have been reading a lot of articles and blog posts from transgender authors talking about their own experiences, where they talk about how they feel like a man/woman trapped in the wrong bodies and have always known what they gender they truly were, but that's never really been how I feel. Then I figured, if I can't find people like me, maybe they'll come to me if I ask. Hence this post. All I need is someone who can identify patterns or something in my life story and help me understand what's going on in my head. Here goes. Sorry if it gets long and boring. I'll be very grateful to anyone who can get through the whole story and give me some good advice.
Unlike a lot of the transsexual people I've heard about, I had a mostly normal childhood. I say "mostly" because I have mild autism spectrum disorder, which made it difficult for me to have a normal social life. That said, I was normal on the gender front. I played with toy trucks and dinosaurs and not once expressed a need to play with girl toys or wear female clothes. I didn't have a lot of friends, but the few I had were boys. I guess I differed from the other boys in that I never had any interest in sports and was utterly terrible at them, but that doesn't have much to do with gender. In the later stages of childhood, I slowly distanced myself from what could be considered masculine. I developed an interest in video games, which were my main interest for a good part of my life and sort of distracted me from anything gender-specific. I guess ignoring all "male" activities in favor of one singular focus could easily be attributed to my ASD and not have anything to do with gender, especially since I also didn't have any interest in anything feminine. Point is, I ended up being kind of agender from a fairly young age, even though I didn't notice it at the time.
Things started getting weird somewhere around puberty. Even though it was less than a decade ago, that time of my life is kind of a blur in my memory, so I can't really say exactly when or in what order all of this happened. I'll try to break it down in a logical way to make it easier to read, but understand that all of that is a jumbled mess that happened simultaneously. During adolescence, I started noticing that I wasn't like the other guys. I didn't share their interests or their behaviors. I often felt like they were somewhat immature and shallow. Possibly due to my ASD, I was very withdrawn and spent a lot of time alone with my thoughts. My mind is very analytical and creative, so I could spend hours sitting there, looking like I wasn't doing anything, while actually mentally solving logical problems or creating entire fictional worlds. I thought about a lot of things, some of them quite serious. Meanwhile, the other guys just seemed to do dumb stuff and talk about things that didn't interest me at all. The thing is, I didn't feel like I belonged with the girls either. To me, it seemed that they were just doing the feminine equivalents of what the guys were doing, and that didn't interest me either.
Puberty usually means you start being attracted to... well, whatever gender you're attracted to. Not for me. I never actually felt sexual attraction to girls. My family thought I might be gay for a while, but quickly realized that couldn't be the case, since I never showed any interest in boys either. I guess you could say I'm asexual. As the other boys became interested in girls, it added yet another thing to the pile of reasons I felt I wasn't one of them.
So, until now, it seems like I'm just agender and asexual, but here's where it gets weird: somewhere around the time puberty started, I began fantasizing about being a girl. I don't really know what prompted it, or when it first happened, but I asked myself what my life would be like as a girl and that question never left my mind afterwards. I thought about it all the time, looked at girls and wondered what it would be like to be them. For a while, I read transgender fiction on the internet (you know, the kind where a guy gets transformed into a girl) and even wrote some. I briefly thought about crossdressing, but didn't do it because I felt like it wouldn't satisfy me. Now here's the part that confuses me: I've never felt like I was a girl. That's something transgender people often talk about, how they instinctively know what gender they're supposed to be. To me, it was more like curiosity. I wasn't a girl, but I desperately wanted to know what it was like to be one.
Now, I just have no idea what I'm supposed to be. I don't feel female, but I don't feel male either. I sometimes feel uncomfortable with my body's male characteristics. My fantasies of being female have never left my mind, and make it harder for me to concentrate on anything else. I often feel sad and stressed out for no reason, and have recently started having breakdowns where some days, completely out of the blue, I'd just start feeling panicked and sad and just needed to go home as fast as possible, lay down in bed and cry. I frequently think that maybe I am meant to be a girl and should transition, and then I invariably go back to feeling somewhat okay with my gender and not feeling like I should be a girl, while never feeling truly comfortable with myself. I always switch back and forth between these two "modes", sometimes several times a day. Whenever I think that should just go ahead and transition, I end up getting scared. What if I'm wrong? What if it doesn't help me? What if I start the process, then I realize I wasn't supposed to be a girl and just end up being even more unhappy? I just don't know what gender I am, and I don't know what to do about it.
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