History of the World (Mine)

It will become clear if you read all of this blog that I am biologically female.  I have no interest in hiding it at this point, double Ds will do that to a person.  Even though I'm very certainly transgendered, and eventually I will change my physical form to ease the dysphoria, I don't feel like I need to hide who I was.  As of this writing, I am 28 years old, and I have lived as a girl and woman for most of those years.

I'm changing some names around, for the decency factor.  

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I was born in California, into a hippie household.  At one and a half years, my family moved to Washington state, in pursuit of jobs and houses.  I grew up in a small, one-story house with my mom and dad and the various animals we kept.  My life was as thrilling as any child's, full of bugs and kites and swings and adventures in the park.  There was a plum tree that I loved to climb, and eat the plums that had warmed in the summer sun, perching on one of the two big branches that spread like arms.  We had a deck and we could watch the Blue Angels fly against a backdrop of mountains in the summertime.  I was freckled and wild and I loved ponies more than anything ever.  Instead of a sandbox, my parents gave me a dirt pile, in which I carved canyons and mountains, and flattened meadows for my toys to romp in, and made rivers with the hose.

Our house was amazing.  The floor of the den was multicolored, short, uncomfortable carpeting with hopscotch and chess boards and parcheesi boards printed on it.  My room was carpeted in light, sky blue shag, with dark red velvet curtains and white walls.  I had an alphabet poster that had Fox as the X, and a giant cat face poster.  The kitchen was Yellow and Orange and Avocado.  Our mailbox was painted like a zebra, and the first few years of my life were spent being driven about in a rainbow painted Volkswagen Beetle.  There were roach clips hanging in the kitchen, decorated with beads and feathers and upside down medicine cups, the kind that come with cough medicine.  

My earliest memory is just before my fourth birthday.  I remember vividly telling my father that it was my 'fourth birthday eve'.  I was in the bathtub, and I had colored soap crayons and I was making a mess with water all over the floor.  My dad worked, my mom worked sometimes too.  I remember a few babysitters, but nothing shocking happened.  There's the usual gamut of naked baby pictures, naked child pictures, child with dogs, child with friends, child with random petting zoo beasts.  There was little pink or blue to be found in my house.  My favorite stuffed animal was a bear named Lady Snuggles.  She is a dark brown Gund bear, with a V of white on her chest, and I loved her.  I love her still.  She still has a place of honor on my opposite pillow.

I grew up in this hippie house without feeling like a little girl.  I didn't feel much like a little boy, either, but when I was playing with the neighbors, I was always the daddy.  

In my youth, my best friend was named Miranda.  I always thought she was beautiful.  We shared a love for ponies that led to a love for each other, like children love, without thought and without impurity.  Every weekend we could spare we would spend galloping around the house, whinnying and making up elaborate stories centered around our horse toys or ourselves.  One night, when I was 8 or 9, she was sleeping on my floor, and I spent an hour crying, thinking of how much I loved her.  I should have known then.  

I never grew up thinking that men with men and women with women were bad.  I had a wonderful great uncle that had a partner.  I never thought twice about it, and my family never gave me cause to.  I never wondered overly about simple matters like love.  If I, who had been told I was a girl, could love my best friend, who was a girl, why couldn't my uncle love a boy?  I reserved my judgement for those who didn't think ponies were cool.  

I was home schooled from 5th grade through 9th grade.  I spent my days doing homework, then going out and building weapons and training the dogs and cats to do tricks.  

When I was 14, two important things happened.  Star Wars, and the Trip.

First, with the help of my friend Katie, I discovered Star Wars and it changed the course of my life.  It changed the games Miranda and I played.  We were no longer horses, we were people, doing things that people do.  Falling in love, fighting epic battles, being scoundrels and Jedi, and shooting up the Empire.  The way Han and Leia's first kiss played out made my stomach turn somersaults, but I never imagined I was Leia.  I was always, always Han.  

The Trip wasn't just any camping adventure.  My family purchased a fifth wheel trailer and a large Ford F150, and my mother planned out a trip across the nation.  We were gone 13 months.  At the end of the trip, I had been to every state in the country with the exception of Hawaii.  I became a much better friend with my mom, and on a rainy day in Cooperstown, NY, my mom and dad told me they were getting a divorce.  I wasn't devastated, really.  I was sad.  But my parents are fair people, and they let me ask my questions and rant and rail and didn't deviate.  It always seemed that they regarded each other with love laced with faint exasperation, so a little less love and a little more exasperation wasn't a huge change for me.  

I met a lot of people during the Trip, and religiously wrote letters to my friends at home.  THIS WAS BEFORE THE INTERNET WAS A THING, U GUYZ.  We had Dial Up, if we were lucky, and a cell phone was unheard of!  I had to write letters, BY HAND, and send them, WITH STAMPS!  My friends sent their letters to my father, who forwarded them to us whenever we had a few days in one place.  Mom's jobs during the trip were "Drive" and "Pay" and my jobs were "Hitch" and "Level".  Some days we fought forever.  Other days we had a great time laughing together.  

When I got home, things had changed a little.  Miranda was taller, prettier, and I was taller, and... well, prettier, if you like strong jawlines and mullets.  Not my proudest hairstyle.  I went back to public school.  Naturally, as I had missed out on the merciless mockery of middle school, the bullies had to work overtime to catch up.  Instead of dressing like a 'normal' girl, I tended towards baggy clothes.  Jeans that had once belonged to boys.  

I wasn't committed to the choice in clothes, and in my efforts to fit in and figure out who I was, I gave girly clothes a try.  It wasn't bad, aside from occasionally being uncomfortable, so I went with it.  The bullies were less of a problem, anyway.  I cut off my mullet and went with a more conventional girly chin-length style.  I started wearing makeup, sometimes.  I went to the mall.  I talked about boys.  

Meanwhile, my weekends were still spent with Miranda, playing elaborate games of make believe and loving her more every day.  Star Wars passed (though we still loved it) and we got into Pokemon.  We loved the villians, Jesse and James, and our group of friends put together a signing event in character at a local theater when they aired the Pokemon movie.  Miranda was Jesse.  I was James.  Each and every one of our friends believed with all their hearts that James and Jesse were lovers, including Miranda and I.  We started having "in character" parties.  I reveled in being a man, even for an hour or two a night.  It was freeing, and I felt more comfortable with my chest bound than I ever had without.  

The parties started having the effect that one would expect on two people who were pretending to be secret lovers.  The affectations, the secretive glances, the flustered protests we put on to amuse our friends started becoming true.  We weren't just Jesse and James at the parties any more.  It became a game for us.  We would wake each other in the night with conversations held in character, that became less fictional the more time went by.  

One night, we passed out on a fold out couch together, watching TV.  When we woke in the morning it was light, and the house was empty except for us two.  I poked her in the ribs.  She growled the name 'James'.   I cringed back, but only playfully and tickled her.  She was tremendously ticklish.  A scuffle commenced, but I used my superior size to pin her to the couch.  Chest to chest, the moment stretched out, and I leaned in and pressed a kiss to her lips.  My stomach flipped, and before it could escalate to something besides friendly affection, I pulled back.  She was breathless, panting, and had clearly been startled by the advance.  I leaned in again, this time kissing her slightly more firmly, and she responded.  Hands in my hair, passionate, incredible kisses.  

That was the start of something amazing.  But the most important thing about it was that I was not in a lesbian relationship.  I wasn't a woman.  At no point was my femininity acknowledged.  She would touch me like she would a man.  Go down on me like she would a man.  I would touch her like she was a woman.  Put my fingers in her, simulate male orgasm.  It was pretend and it wasn't.  We shared a bed on the weekends.  As soon as we'd graduated, we went from sharing a bed on weekends to sharing a bed on every night we could.  We couldn't get enough of each other.  

I remember at one party, she slipped a note into my hand.  I have forgotten the exact wording.  I threw the note away in a fit of anger.  I wish I had kept it.  "Were we alone, I would kiss you and kiss you until your cries for mercy echoed to the stars" was the right sort of sentiment.  I pulled her aside and into her room, pinning her against the door and let her ravage away.  It was romantic, passionate, my heart and body ached for her.  Cliche as it seems, it was exactly what I have missed in so many relationships since then.

I don't think I deserved all of what I got.  I've written about Samara on another blog, and I don't want to waste much breath on her in this one.  But she took what was a good relationship and turned it sour.  She told me that I was a dirty lesbian, a rapist, a molester.  The thought that I was a woman in a relationship with a woman turned me upside down.  It was a fantasy world, I thought, there would be no way I could ever live as a man, or love as a man.  No one else would ever understand like Miranda.  

So I spent eight years trying to be a 'normal' girl.  I spent a lot of time and energy on shaking the title of 'rapist' from my emotional scarring.  It's still there, still makes me go sick to my stomach.  I had relationships with men that ended poorly.  Here and there I had a girlfriend, but nothing long term.  Finally I started something with my friend Jon.  We were good friends, in and out of the relationship, but there was always something that bothered me about the way he treated me.  My logical mind told me, time and time again, that I was being unreasonable and that he treated me perfectly well.  

I couldn't take it any more, just recently.  I broke up with him in mid-March.  On April 11th, 2011, at 11:38pm, I realized I was quite soundly transgendered.  In the last two weeks I've been doing research, finding out all I can on the topic, and understanding more and more about it.  It makes too much sense to ignore.  I broke up with him because he treated me like a lady.  

If I had continued on any longer without realizing it, I may have reached the point of hurting myself within a year.  I had constant, horrible depression that wasn't made any better by any kind of therapy or medication.  I couldn't focus on school or work.  My room, my life, my world was a mess, falling apart.  I was beginning to suffer from panic attacks more and more frequently, over less and less.  I couldn't share any emotions with anyone.  I didn't trust anyone.  My shell of 'normal girl' was so fragile that anyone could break it open, leaving me vulnerable to the agony of self-exploration.

The words 'gender dysphoria' and some research on it led me to realize that was the name for my malaise.  I found some resources and acquired some personal accounts.  I've been reading, madly, and everything I read cements into place what I am more.  I am gender dysphoric.  I am transgendered.  The T in LGBT.  Some day, I will live as a man, full time.  In the meantime, I will continue to study, I will write, I will record my doubts and my changes and my concerns and my rather harsh opinion on bottom surgery.  Maybe someday, I will have a companion who doesn't mind the fact that the wrapping paper doesn't match the goods inside.  

I will still love ponies.  I will still be the person I've grown into over the last 28 years.  But I will be a stronger, more confident, happier person.