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dolariGrowing Up Trans Chapters:
Preschool - http://jenndolari.livejournal.com/2238402.html
Elementary School - http://jenndolari.livejournal.com/2238626.html
The Nightmare of Fifth Grade (NSFW, and a bit TMI) - http://jenndolari.livejournal.com/2238939.html
Middle School - http://jenndolari.livejournal.com/2239155.html
I entered high school in a deep funk. I'd no longer qualified for my honors classes having flunked them multiple times (moving to the next grade by sheer force of will in summer school). My depression was a deep stabbing wound that was destroying my school career, slowly but surely.
But on a more personal front, I had information on what I needed about my condition. Seeing the Encyclopedia Brittanica article was an eye opener for me. At this point, I finally had an idea what was wrong with me. The whole reason I was confused by boy critters, and felt seperated from girls was I was Transgendered. It wasn't that I was a boy. It was that I was a girl in a boy's body.
It was about this time the girl in the mirror's name changed. Jacqueline was the transvesitie labelled named. Now that I knew what I was, it didn't feel right. My new name became Marlene. A female version of my own given name. The girl in the mirror was becoming more and more...me.
With a little more resarch that sexual reassignment surgery and hormone replacement therapy were options available to help me with it. But I wasn't sure what to do or how to go about doing it.
And how do you tell your parents?
Exploring myself as trans was as easy as writing about it.
In 1986, back in 6th grade, I learned I could write. In 1987, I learned that I could draw. I'd started writing a gigantic story in 86, about a man who learned the secret of immortality through cloning. It was beginning to sprawl into a massively long epic story and at this point was only spanning from the 1970s to 2000s.
At the end of Chapter Three (which is it's own book, now) our hero dies trying to blow up a cloning plant. But it's not completely destroyed, and his friends realize they still need him. He does have his own cloning machine, an older model, that can only read X chromosomes. He has X and Y. So they find another woman nearby who was also killed in the explosion. They take her back as well.
With both our hero and the woman on ice to try and preserve anything they can still use, they pour over the notes and information about how to clone the woman and how to transfer his mind into hers. That way, our hero lives, as a woman, for a few chapters. He takes on the name Jennifer. That's going to be very important, soon.
The first half of Chapter 4, was him dealing with his new body.
At this point in my life, I started getting to know more and more female friends, mainly because I hung out with the geeks, and geek girls were not only rare, they were wanting to get in with other geeks. I'd made one good friend named Rachel who was a senior when I was a freshman, and she was interested in my comics and writing. I took advantage of that situation and told her what our hero was going through, and if she'd help me out figuring out what differences he'd have to learn to deal with. And the secondary result, which I didn't tell her, was that I would know what the differences are.
But other than the obvious ones (periods, breasts, genitalia) there wasn't much more they could tell me more. There wasn't a frame of reference between us to make a real comparison (females don't generally have specific perspectives on what's different living in a male body (and vice versa) cause...well...they don't live in one). She helped as much as she could, but it wasn't as much as I'd liked. So I looked elsewhere where there WAS a frame of reference.
Anatomy books are jerks. They show you all the anatomical differences between men and women, present it matter of factly, and don't take your own feelings into consideration. Reading about all the little differences in anatomy just made me feel more and more alienated. I knew women had wider hips, but it wasn't till I read about anatomy that I realized it made them even WALK different. They had breasts, but I didn't realized they move around a LOT. But there were so many other differences. In jaw size, foot shape, torso-to-leg ratio, thickness of hair, posture, softness of skin, body hair.
By the end of all that research, I knew what I needed for the story...but I felt like I'd been steamrolled emotionally. So much was different, and so much couldn't be changed that I was devastated. The girl in the mirror was never so far away...and the girl in the mirror could never really BE a girl in the end. Too much was different.
In the first draft, out hero was transferred into his new body, and while not happy about it, learned to deal, setting up the second half, which would have been finishing up the job he started in chapter three. He would be stuck in that body at the end of the chapter, as I didn't know where we'd go from there.
Reading the anatomy books had crushed me, and taught me the differences may be insurmountable. Surgery and hormones could fix the majority of becoming a female, but wouldn't fix fused bones, or gigantic body mass, or missing organs.
In subsequent drafts, our hero finished up the job at the very beginning, and dealt with his new body at the end. But this time, he HATED where he was. Sometimes violently. This wasn't him, and nothing he could do could convince others otherwise, because of the body he lived in. On top of that, all the differences I'd learned about bothered the hero. And each one was a just another pebble in his shoe. It eventually drove him to near suicide.
I was on a spiral that took me to a psychiatrist.
My grades had become frighteningly bad, my mood was sour, and hygiene was horrible. I'd stopped trying to be the girl in the mirror, and with it, I'd stopped caring about everything. It alarmed my parents so much that I was sent to a psychiatrist. I told him pretty much everything about how I was feeling EXCEPT about being trans. That was my secret. Still, he managed to get something, pinging on gender issues by saying that I really didn't have a male figure in my life as I grew up (Dad was always out doing his best to make a living for us, leaving me to be raised by my Mom and various babysitters).
As a note - I have never blamed my Dad for anything that's happened to me. He was busy keeping us fed, and I'm okay with that. And when he could spend time with us, it was wonderful.
Just being able to talk about some of the things I was going through, about my depression and issues with making friends (I didn't make many male friends, because I wanted female ones, and I didn't make many female friends because they always thought I was just trying to get them interested in being a couple), was enough to get me stable again. My grades didn't improve, really, but more because of struggling to catch up on the years I missed. Thing is, we didn't tackle the main problem - me being trans. Which meant, while I felt better, thing weren't actually solved.
Sophomore year, thinking that I'd be better off not thinking of the girl in the mirror and my lack of ever being able to be her, I went into what's called by most trans-folk, a "purge." This is where I specifically denied that I was trans, did what I could to be the person I looked like, and generally just tried to not be a girl.
Most male-to-female transfolk go into something I call "hypermasculinity." They become MANLY MEN. Weight training, big beards, massive over compensation to the point of being jerks. Because we're not really men...we're displaying what we think is right. I never did that though. I pretty much remained myself, just without the CD or trying to make more female friends.
It was rough, especially with all these friends around me who were women that I didn't toss away. The envy feeling would rise, and I'd swallow it down, since I did appreciate their company even while trying hard not to think that I was one of them. Putting all my rage into the hero character, who still named himself Jennifer once he changed genders, helped keep me even. Chapter five became part of a quest to get himself back into a clone of his old body. All my bile and vitriol continued to pour into his character-as-a-woman even in this chapter.
Didn't help my grades one whit, and it was back to Summer School to make sure I moved into my Junior Year.
And then one day, I had an epiphany.
I was reading through the drafts of Chapter 4 and 5 to plan out Chapter 6, when I realized this character Jennifer I was writing was simply a gender reversed ME. I hadn't swallowed down all my feelings about being a girl and conquered them - I was simply redirecting them, reversing the polarity of the gender flow, and throwing them into this character. It was all there, right in front of me, plain as day. The girl in the mirror was now the boy in the text.
This wasn't going to just go away. I decided that summer, I had to do what I had to do.
Preschool - http://jenndolari.livejournal.com/2238402.html
Elementary School - http://jenndolari.livejournal.com/2238626.html
The Nightmare of Fifth Grade (NSFW, and a bit TMI) - http://jenndolari.livejournal.com/2238939.html
Middle School - http://jenndolari.livejournal.com/2239155.html
I entered high school in a deep funk. I'd no longer qualified for my honors classes having flunked them multiple times (moving to the next grade by sheer force of will in summer school). My depression was a deep stabbing wound that was destroying my school career, slowly but surely.
But on a more personal front, I had information on what I needed about my condition. Seeing the Encyclopedia Brittanica article was an eye opener for me. At this point, I finally had an idea what was wrong with me. The whole reason I was confused by boy critters, and felt seperated from girls was I was Transgendered. It wasn't that I was a boy. It was that I was a girl in a boy's body.
It was about this time the girl in the mirror's name changed. Jacqueline was the transvesitie labelled named. Now that I knew what I was, it didn't feel right. My new name became Marlene. A female version of my own given name. The girl in the mirror was becoming more and more...me.
With a little more resarch that sexual reassignment surgery and hormone replacement therapy were options available to help me with it. But I wasn't sure what to do or how to go about doing it.
And how do you tell your parents?
Exploring myself as trans was as easy as writing about it.
In 1986, back in 6th grade, I learned I could write. In 1987, I learned that I could draw. I'd started writing a gigantic story in 86, about a man who learned the secret of immortality through cloning. It was beginning to sprawl into a massively long epic story and at this point was only spanning from the 1970s to 2000s.
At the end of Chapter Three (which is it's own book, now) our hero dies trying to blow up a cloning plant. But it's not completely destroyed, and his friends realize they still need him. He does have his own cloning machine, an older model, that can only read X chromosomes. He has X and Y. So they find another woman nearby who was also killed in the explosion. They take her back as well.
With both our hero and the woman on ice to try and preserve anything they can still use, they pour over the notes and information about how to clone the woman and how to transfer his mind into hers. That way, our hero lives, as a woman, for a few chapters. He takes on the name Jennifer. That's going to be very important, soon.
The first half of Chapter 4, was him dealing with his new body.
At this point in my life, I started getting to know more and more female friends, mainly because I hung out with the geeks, and geek girls were not only rare, they were wanting to get in with other geeks. I'd made one good friend named Rachel who was a senior when I was a freshman, and she was interested in my comics and writing. I took advantage of that situation and told her what our hero was going through, and if she'd help me out figuring out what differences he'd have to learn to deal with. And the secondary result, which I didn't tell her, was that I would know what the differences are.
But other than the obvious ones (periods, breasts, genitalia) there wasn't much more they could tell me more. There wasn't a frame of reference between us to make a real comparison (females don't generally have specific perspectives on what's different living in a male body (and vice versa) cause...well...they don't live in one). She helped as much as she could, but it wasn't as much as I'd liked. So I looked elsewhere where there WAS a frame of reference.
Anatomy books are jerks. They show you all the anatomical differences between men and women, present it matter of factly, and don't take your own feelings into consideration. Reading about all the little differences in anatomy just made me feel more and more alienated. I knew women had wider hips, but it wasn't till I read about anatomy that I realized it made them even WALK different. They had breasts, but I didn't realized they move around a LOT. But there were so many other differences. In jaw size, foot shape, torso-to-leg ratio, thickness of hair, posture, softness of skin, body hair.
By the end of all that research, I knew what I needed for the story...but I felt like I'd been steamrolled emotionally. So much was different, and so much couldn't be changed that I was devastated. The girl in the mirror was never so far away...and the girl in the mirror could never really BE a girl in the end. Too much was different.
In the first draft, out hero was transferred into his new body, and while not happy about it, learned to deal, setting up the second half, which would have been finishing up the job he started in chapter three. He would be stuck in that body at the end of the chapter, as I didn't know where we'd go from there.
Reading the anatomy books had crushed me, and taught me the differences may be insurmountable. Surgery and hormones could fix the majority of becoming a female, but wouldn't fix fused bones, or gigantic body mass, or missing organs.
In subsequent drafts, our hero finished up the job at the very beginning, and dealt with his new body at the end. But this time, he HATED where he was. Sometimes violently. This wasn't him, and nothing he could do could convince others otherwise, because of the body he lived in. On top of that, all the differences I'd learned about bothered the hero. And each one was a just another pebble in his shoe. It eventually drove him to near suicide.
I was on a spiral that took me to a psychiatrist.
My grades had become frighteningly bad, my mood was sour, and hygiene was horrible. I'd stopped trying to be the girl in the mirror, and with it, I'd stopped caring about everything. It alarmed my parents so much that I was sent to a psychiatrist. I told him pretty much everything about how I was feeling EXCEPT about being trans. That was my secret. Still, he managed to get something, pinging on gender issues by saying that I really didn't have a male figure in my life as I grew up (Dad was always out doing his best to make a living for us, leaving me to be raised by my Mom and various babysitters).
As a note - I have never blamed my Dad for anything that's happened to me. He was busy keeping us fed, and I'm okay with that. And when he could spend time with us, it was wonderful.
Just being able to talk about some of the things I was going through, about my depression and issues with making friends (I didn't make many male friends, because I wanted female ones, and I didn't make many female friends because they always thought I was just trying to get them interested in being a couple), was enough to get me stable again. My grades didn't improve, really, but more because of struggling to catch up on the years I missed. Thing is, we didn't tackle the main problem - me being trans. Which meant, while I felt better, thing weren't actually solved.
Sophomore year, thinking that I'd be better off not thinking of the girl in the mirror and my lack of ever being able to be her, I went into what's called by most trans-folk, a "purge." This is where I specifically denied that I was trans, did what I could to be the person I looked like, and generally just tried to not be a girl.
Most male-to-female transfolk go into something I call "hypermasculinity." They become MANLY MEN. Weight training, big beards, massive over compensation to the point of being jerks. Because we're not really men...we're displaying what we think is right. I never did that though. I pretty much remained myself, just without the CD or trying to make more female friends.
It was rough, especially with all these friends around me who were women that I didn't toss away. The envy feeling would rise, and I'd swallow it down, since I did appreciate their company even while trying hard not to think that I was one of them. Putting all my rage into the hero character, who still named himself Jennifer once he changed genders, helped keep me even. Chapter five became part of a quest to get himself back into a clone of his old body. All my bile and vitriol continued to pour into his character-as-a-woman even in this chapter.
Didn't help my grades one whit, and it was back to Summer School to make sure I moved into my Junior Year.
And then one day, I had an epiphany.
I was reading through the drafts of Chapter 4 and 5 to plan out Chapter 6, when I realized this character Jennifer I was writing was simply a gender reversed ME. I hadn't swallowed down all my feelings about being a girl and conquered them - I was simply redirecting them, reversing the polarity of the gender flow, and throwing them into this character. It was all there, right in front of me, plain as day. The girl in the mirror was now the boy in the text.
This wasn't going to just go away. I decided that summer, I had to do what I had to do.
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no subject
Date: 2011-10-17 01:20 am (UTC)My grades had become frighteningly bad, my mood was sour, and hygiene was horrible. I'd stopped trying to be the girl in the mirror, and with it, I'd stopped caring about everything. It alarmed my parents so much that I was sent to a psychiatrist. I told him pretty much everything about how I was feeling EXCEPT about being trans. That was my secret.
Wow, this sounds very familiar. The difference being, the psychiatrists not really seeming to talk about anything useful at all regarding my depression. Hell, I still don't really know why I was depressed, at least I don't remember it any more than I can remember a fading dream. I just remember seeing some doctor for a half hour twice a week, being put on more and more medication, and my mom having to take a second job to pay for it all, which did not help my mental state in the least.
My grades... didn't seem to fare as well as yours.