Starting transition was the most
exciting time of my life. Everything that I had
ever wanted was coming true. For the first time
in my life I was being the person I really knew
myself to be - society saw me as male and all my
friends called me Jack. For the first 6 months,
I was on an incredible high!
Everything was exciting, from using the men's
toilet for the first time to having my
fortnightly injections.
However, after that initial high when life
settled down, I thought that I must have been
going crazy because a part of me was feeling
sad. I thought to myself - "you shouldn't feel
sad, you have wanted this your whole life."
So why was I feeling sad some of the time?
What was this sense of loss?
It has taken me a long time to completely
understand this sense of grief and loss. Even
though I never considered myself to be female,
it was still an identity that I carried for the
first 22 years of my life.
This female identity has a huge impact on my
life, it defined who I was, how people
interacted with me and how I was supposed to
interact with them. It defined my roles in
society - Daughter, Sister, Girlfriend,
Aunt, etc.
Even though these roles were not accurate for
me, they were still roles that meant
something.
Transition meant leaving behind these titles
and redefining my relationships and myself. My
mother stopped calling me 'her daughter' and
slowly started calling me 'her son'. My best
friend stopped referring to me as 'her
girlfriend' and slowly started to see me as a
male friend.
This was all great. I can't start to tell you
how good this felt. What I didn't expect was the
amount of change that happened within these
relationships. As the titles changed, so did the
things that we talked about, so did the rules.
Men and women talk about different things.
Women will talk to women about things that
they would never talk to men about. The more
masculine that I looked the greater the changes
became in our relationships.
My female friends gradually distanced
themselves emotionally. My family situation
changed and I was no longer permitted in the
kitchen with my sisters. I now had to go to the
pub with my brothers and father. (I was not
interested in the pub because I don't drink). In
trying to support me, the people around me
shoved me into even more rigid gender roles.
I was making new friends and these people saw
me as male. I was expected to know all of
society's rules about how men interact and
relate to each other. All of a sudden, I was
unsure of role and myself.
At the same time, there were changes
happening to my body.
The hormones were changing my voice - I
sounded different. Fat was redistributing around
my body, hair was growing (admittedly very
slowly). My clothes didn't fit me anymore, my
body was getting bigger and stronger and I was
learning to occupy space differently.
All of these changes were changes that I
wanted. All of these changes were part of
connecting my gender identity and physical body.
I was very excited about these changes but I was
also grieving because my world was changing.
There were things about being female that I
missed.
My friends were going out to Lesbian clubs
and I was no longer allowed to go. It was not
the lesbian bars that I missed but I was feeling
isolated and lonely by the exclusion. I have
never found the same sense of community as the
community that I was part of before
transition.
Even though I didn't feel right, I had a
sense of being part of something. I was involved
in Women's Rights and my decision to
transition excluded me from continuing to
participate in this form of activism.
I have had to redefine myself and find a new
community to which I belong.
I am sure that I am not the only transman,
ftm or man with a unique history who has felt
this sense of grief and loss. We all experience
huge amounts of change and it is normal to
experience some level of grief and loss with
change.
In my experience, it is important to
acknowledge the grief and giving yourself
permission to grieve. Just because you feel sad
more of the time doesn't mean that you have made
a mistake. It doesn't take anything away from
your journey.
