You probably don't know this, but I'm a transgender person who hasn't really been able to come out in real life without being shut down by my parents or whatever due to the fear (and, unfortunately, sometimes the manifestations) of persecution from all angles. I'm also bisexual (which I haven't revealed either) but that will be revealed alongside my 'abnormal' gender identity in due course. I've been feeling this way (and, in retrospect, displaying the signs) for a pretty long time, and it's pretty torturous to deal with. I have contemplated suicide more than once and have slipped into spiralling periods of depression even more often. But I promised 'story time', didn't I?
After some thorough reading and reflections on my past, I can safely say I've been exhibiting signs of having an alternate gender identity for an extremely long time. When I was smaller, almost all the socialisation I did (lol) was with girls, and I had to be goaded by parents and staff at my (Catholic) primary school to mix in with boys. I eventually did, in a sense, but I didn't feel right with them, and never really have felt comfortable in a situation where the only people around me (or most people around me) are male. I'd always ask for more femininely-oriented toys in shops (which were normally refused by my parents). If we were asked to line up in gender-segregated partitions, I'd go to the girls line before hastily being removed and placed in the 'right' area. Sometimes I'd even see how female-oriented clothing looked on me at shops! This was not received well by my parents, needless to say...
The first dreams I can remember where I was a girl were ones in Year 3, which I only remember because I recounted them to my mother in great detail, who was a little bit taken aback but never really said any more about them, although I probably had many more beforehand. I've been a girl in all the dreams I'm able to recall since then. In Year 4, I broke off from the group of boys I wasn't enjoying the closest friendship with and hung around with a group girls for the rest of the year. It really allowed me to bring out the feminine side of me which had been repressed over time by my parents, peers and teachers alike, and I enjoyed myself much more than I had been for a while.
Alas, all good things must come to an end: a sizeable majority of these girls left at the end of the year to go to greener pastures, and I was left quite destitute. I crawled back to my group of boys, but something had changed: I was no longer content to be forcibly disallowed to express myself. As the year went on, I acted increasingly feminine, completely disregarding the gender expectations subliminally placed on me by my 'group' and would start to quip quite often to one or two of them: 'I wish I was a girl.' In October 2009, something snapped. That was it. I wasn't taking this shit anymore. I would be as open as I humanly could.
So I sent an e-mail out to my peers (any I could find):
The plea at the end of the e-mail was fruitless. I took such an incredible amount of shit from a bunch of 10 and 11-year olds (usually boys, but sometimes genuinely confused girls) who either had no idea what I was talking about or just thought I was some kind of freak. This actually went completely over the teacher's heads (because nobody was really yielding to my request) until November 2009, where a girl I thought I could have trusted (and had told a lot more than the average person) stood up, right in the middle of class, and said these exact words, louder than ever:
"You still wanna be a girl?"
I burst into tears and was escorted to the front office, where I was forced to explain to them everything that had gone down (and give them the backstory in turn.) I was taken back to class after the staff there had extracted all the information from me. I was still in tears, and the class was in a state in dead silence for the remainder of the lesson.
I got home that afternoon. All was quiet on the Western front. At about 7:30 that night, my father told me he wanted me to come into his bedroom. I obliged, curious as to what he wanted. It wasn't pretty. He spent a full hour explaining to me that he had been notified that I was saying that '[you] wanted to be a girl' and attempted to goad me back into the never-before-seen world of being cisgender by saying that 'being a boy [was] better than being a girl ... [you're] just going through "puberty blues", they'll pass eventually', and some more things I don't particularly wish to divulge. I was so frightened by this reaction - this angry, cold-blooded outburst - that I withdrew into a shell and didn't associate with or speak to anyone (other than in passing) for the remainder of the year.
2009 was one of the worst years of my life. But it eventually ended.
In Year 6, almost all had been forgotten among my peers! No one remembered that I was a 'fucking freak'! I took this as the opportunity to gladly agree with anybody who would say to me, as if they were reminiscing on something that they just couldn't remember, 'you're like a girl in a boy's body, huh?' I was extremely outwardly effeminate this year and was once again wholly accepted by the girls. I was relentlessly bullied by a small group of boys for my behaviour, however: by now people knew what homosexuality was and these boys would gladly jeer that I was a 'poof' or a '(BAN ME PLEASE)'. This eventually got to me, after I tried so hard to ignore it, and after a flood of tears, they were punished and didn't go near me for the rest of the year.
Alas, this was the end of my co-educational primary school days. I was now going to be going to an all-boys Anglican school! What fun!
Having heard some whispers about my new school and the attitudes of the students there, I resigned myself to attempting to masquerade as cisgender: I was cut off from the girls I could once proudly call my comrades and was now being thrust into a pool of males I didn't know a skerrick about. Unfortunately, I was eaten alive by dysphoria very quickly and by April 2011 I had had enough. I made a desperate ploy to come out to my parents by shoving a note that explained my 'issues' under my bed, but it was intercepted by my father and I was rebuked once again. My father was a lot cooler and calmer this time, attempting to reason with me as if I was just expressing a dumb opinion. Due to being in a 1-on-1 situation with my father, who can get very intimidating, I resigned myself to shutting myself down, and I forced myself to continue acting as cisgender for the remainder of the year, even on the Internet; I was so frightened that I would be persecuted for my 'difference' that I identified as male on the web, which was quite difficult for me to do.
By the end of that year, I had worked out that, for a myriad of reasons, there was no way I could continue at that school: I was being savagely bullied and I hadn't made friends in the year I had been there. I left at the end of the year and was placed in a Catholic school... which was also single-sex.
This time, I decided that it would be important for my emotional and mental welfare to put on as convincing a cisgender impression as I could, so I repressed all and any feminine traits that may have been bubbling to the surface. It was extremely hard work, and I slipped sometimes (raising eyebrows), but something different was happening: I was making acquaintances. I could not control the uncontrollable, however. In September 2012, I was feeling extremely depressed, angry and borderline-suicidal when I came across a story in a magazine that was related to transgender issues. I read it. I read it again. I read it a third time.
It clicked that attempting to repress ALL feelings that were remotely effeminate, even my internally feminine feelings, was not going to do me any good. It would just do me harm. I lowered my guard a bit and began letting my internally feminine feelings flood back in while still repressing my external feminine feelings. This was slightly less taxing, but still extremely stressful. It was also around this time that I confessed to a handful of Smogonites that I was transgender, but I wasn't out of the closet yet. By and large, I continued to identify as male, which was an utter pain and something I never should have done.
This charade continued until late January 2013, where one of the most supportive people to enter my life so far came out of the shadows and, once I had mustered up the courage to tell her everything, immediately helped me with a huge milestone: transitioning over the Internet. Over the next few weeks, I had my Pokemon Showdown! voiced account changed, I had my Smogon name changed, I began using Aurora on IRC once and for all and I was finally able to be fully open about myself... somewhere.
Smogon may not be real life, but it's full of people that are so much nicer and just... better than anybody I'd be liable to meet in the outside world.
In May 2013, I decided I was ready to come out to my parents, so I penned a 600 word note and left it under my bedsheets. My mother picked it up this time. You'd think the reaction would be a little bit better than that of my father's (which is what I was hoping for), but my mother was so reluctant and forthright with me about how 'severe the consequences of such a change would be [to you and me and your family]' that I burst into tears - I wasn't even able to get my opinion through because the barrage from my mother was so overwhelming and overpowering. It was horrible, but I did not give up on myself. I knew that I would eventually succeed in making myself heard.
This brings me to now. I've been feeling more dysphoric than ever in the past couple of months, and I've been having suicidal thoughts as of late because it seems as if puberty is deciding to catch up with me at the worst possible time (although nothing substantial has happened yet, I'm seeing the warning signs of bad, bad things). Yesterday, all the students in my grade received a Personal Reflection sheet, where we had to list three issues we were experiencing in our lives. Upon finishing, the sheets would go to the teacher who administrates issues within our grade. I decided that this would be my time to come out (and my only feasible opportunity for a while), so I wrote as MY three issues:
1. I'm gender dysphoric
2. I hate being stuck in this shell (I know that's cliche)
3. See above
That's going to be read by that teacher at some point. I'm confident this ploy to come out will succeed, because I'm quite sure that the school counsellor will be consulted before any word goes to my parents, so I can tell the school counsellor about my issues first and she can act as an intermediary between my parents and myself, who I will still undoubtedly have issues with talking about this.
Let's just see how I go in the long run.
