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Okay, this is going to be a lot of spam.... Some of it is something personal I want to say, some of it is just contemplations and my views on things related to it, not all of it coherent. But things I feel I need to say. If you're not interested, ignore it, but please, at least stay for the first bit. I'll make it (somewhat) short.
The other day I went to see Eddie Izzard's show Force Majeure. It was awesome, I had lots of fun, but for me it had an impact far deeper than just that. Why? Because he is one very charming person who is not afraid to show himself as he feels, as he really is. And be liked, very liked like that. It seems like I needed to see this with my own eyes. Everybody needs to be themselves.... most people do need at least a bit of courage for that. But for some, it is both more difficult and, in a way, because of that, more essential. Why? Because they're different, in ways which this society does not actually approve of.
I am transgender.
That's something like transsexual and not mandatorily transvestite. In fact, all three mean different things. What they have in common is the need to express oneself as a gender different from the one you've been assigned to at birth. Transgender in particular, I like to define as the discrepancy between the biological and the psychological gender in a given individual. Definitions vary. But a very essential bit, for me, is that it causes a vast, profound, everpresent and incredibly heavy inner conflict. It is there, it always has been, all my life. I do not know an existence without it. I have never had one, not in this life anyway.
In my case, I was assigned to be female. But I never felt as one. Never. As I kid I felt 100% male. Later on, life, experience, views, philosophies, physiology and inner conflicts gradually altered me and the way I feel. Now I feel like neither - and still definitely not female. So I wish to be perceived as a male, as I always have. Moreover, I insist on it. I'll explain things further on.
By the way, transgender is usually the T letter in LGBT. (Aww, come now LGBT haters.) So I'll talk about the T here because that's my personal perspective and what I'm more familiar with, too. But I mention it because a lot of what I'll say is, as much as I can tell, also in force for the other letters. So much about that.
So I'm going to talk about that. Some of my personal story, some of my feelings. Some of my insights. Some of the implications I see and feel or maybe only imagine, who knows. It's all about inner feeling and perspective, not so much objectivity.
If you are one of the people who dare to stigmatize those like me, I challenge you to stay and read, hear the other point of view which, perhaps, you have never actually considered. See whether your judgement is really right, challenge it. It might make it stronger.... or make you wiser.
Or else, if you're one of the people who sympathize with those like me and stand for their rights, then I invite you to stay because regardless of your open-mindedness and probably liberal views, I dare to say you can never truly understand - unless you feel it yourself. You can't really feel it if you're not one, but each new insight into the mind and soul of a person like that can bring you closer to that understanding. And that is part of the charm of being open-minded, isn't it?
For me, the point is that I am no longer afraid. I have been, for most of my life, consciously and not. Afraid, ashamed, feeling guilty, disdaining and hating myself. Not anymore. I wipe the fear away and wash away the rest along with it. Today, I will celebrate my own inner victory against this lifelong fear. You're welcome to join in the party with one little condition: having suffered with it all my life has made me sensitive. Sensitive makes me edgy. I'm prone to defend myself in any (verbal) means I deem necessary. So if you're looking for a fight or for straightening my messed up views, enter at your own risk.
By the way, if this sounds challenging, it's not by chance. I am not looking for support or advice. I am very clear with myself, I know what I am, I know what I want and I am happy with it. I am on the challenging side because that's how you overcome fear - by facing and challenging it. Like this, I am also not looking for any kind of approval from others. Part of the victory against fear is to no longer need that approval, because that need is a dependency and dependency feeds the fear. I am here to simply declare it, as part of my personal growth, battle and victory. And ramble some.... okay, ramble a lot, well, because I'm me.
So that was the main part, the rest is the rambling. Read on only if you're interested and/or have the time to spare.
___________________
First, I feel I need to raise a bit of general awareness on the problem at hand and its terminology. Speaking of terminology, do make the difference between sexual orientation and sexuality. Sexual orientation is what kind of partner you prefer for your sexual activities, while sexuality refers to your own inner perception of yourself. These two things may seem like two sides of the same thing, but they are in fact independent of each other and while both are related to sex, sexuality is also a trait of personality, it has its inner significance for the personality of every individual and its social interractions with others.
I'll proceed with my perspective on some basic questions on the problem.
It is a kind of sexuality, not a sexual orientation. Like I said, simply spoken, it is the case when the psychological and biological genders do not match. In other words, you are born with a normal, biologically male / female body, but for some reason you idetify yourself as the opposite sex. This is not a condition or a disorder. It is a type of personality just like "male" and "female" are, even if it has some implications of its own because of the discrepancy between body and mind. Most of those implications are, however, either generated or at least greatly harshened by society, I can tell it from the perspective of my own observation upon myself. In other words, if society had not exacted of me to be and treated me like the opposite sex to what I feel, the inner conflict I experience would have never become so violent and self-devastating. Just how devastating it has been throughout my life.... it would take a novel-sized writing to describe in its full detail.
Like all personalities however, transgender is also very variable. For some, I've heard, it's not so much of a problem, they live with it and are perhaps even happy. Some feel the sharp discomfort, but they find their ways to cope with it. To some the feeling is so unbearable that they cannot endure it. I am of the latter, even if I've endured and survived nearly 3 decades with it. I say survive and I mean it. Some feel so devastated by the inner conflict with their own bodies that they resort to the only way you can really get out of your body - death. I've been there too. At this point, hopefully, most people will realize that what I am talking about is serious and real. If something can result in suicide, it is obviously serious, not a whim, not an imaginary issue.
Here I'll also toss in that when I say a "male" or "female" personality, this is incredibly subjective. Personality does not really have a gender as a singular trait. It has a number of traits which we usually identify as either male or female. However, this is only a perception and as such it is subjective and varies by culture. This is important because it means that what you take for a given - that there are only men and women, on a psychological level is simply not true at all. There are people who are perceived as feminine and masculine by the given culture, but there are also all the varieties inbetween. In fact, gender is not a binary category even in the purely biological sense. What humans simplifiedly call "sex" is a whole complex of biological traits - they include genetic and molecular, physiological and anatomical features. Some of those traits (like the genome) are more or less binary. I say more or less because besides the XX and XY genotypes, there are also XXX, XYY, XXY and X0 - not quite binary, is it. The other traits, like hormonal levels, proportions and variation, development and function of reproductive structures, secondary sexual traits, can vary so much that speaking simply of "male" and "female" gender is really speaking about areas in a continuous spectrum which overlap in sophisticated ways. Like a friend of mine once said, there is no such thing as men and women. It's a continuum of different phenotypes and their variations.
Just as much as you are. They can be gay / lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, who-the-fuck-knows-what-sexual, anything you can think of. Any given combination is possible, just like with "normal people". I point that out because many people still seem to not completely understand the difference between sexuality and sexual orientation, which I mentioned already, and many still seem to interchange terms in an incorrect way or else assume that they are somehow dependent on each other and always go together in certain combinations. Well, they are not.
That last is actually a problem of sexual culture.
In my country, the problems of sexuality and sexual orientation are still to a great extent a social taboo. Yes, Bulgarians love telling dirty, preferrably sexist jokes, they dance in non-aesthetic ways to heavily vulgar songs in downgraded pubs and they swear a lot about fucking various family members of all manner of people and inanimate objects around them.... but that's about as far as the sexual culture of the prevalent share of them goes. Outside jokes, people tend to be rather conservative, let's put it this way, and even if they realize to a certain extent the need of tolerance, they prefer to keep the people in need of that tolerance at least at some distance away. That doesn't necessarily mean actual discrimination, but even when it doesn't it often means the kind of sneaky looks, whispers between fellow "normal people" and the air of "eh well, you're different and we're kinda cool with that, but you know, we're aware something's not exactly right with you". At best, 'cause it can go a lot worse, too. It's a matter of manly pride, I've discovered, being a fully true male apparently requires to be against the sexually "abnormal" even without a rational reason. In the case of females, I'm not clear on it at all, but maybe it's a way to be seen as a serious, respectable member of the otherwise manly society, or a kind of messed up emancipation, or I can speculate it's even about not being "one of them" and somehow demonstrate it, as a kind of modern time fairness and chastity.... even if those words sound truly bizarre in a society where being 18 and still virgin is already perceived as shameful (not that I approve of the whole virginity drama, trust me I really do not). In any case, words like gay, lesbian and transvestite (transgender and transsexual being almost completely unknown to these territories) are heavily loaded with a negative meaning because they are most usually utilized not as a descriptive for such people, but as a general insult valid for anyone. If these are not enough, we have other synonyms and their versions of our own making, which are even more negative. Because of that some liberal people here even call themselves liberasts - which is a merge between the word for liberal and the Bulgarian vulgar word for a gay, which is also quite a common and negative insult. I applaud that, even if I strongly doubt that the target group of that irony gets any of the message.
Now, I won't claim to be more liberal than I am. In some ways (like grammar) I'm a freakin nazi - those who know me will confirm. But I'm up for an argument with some other area's nazis, first - because I'm hypocritical like that, and second - because I believe I have very valid argumentation, and it is in fact important to me to defend the ground where I stand as all of this personally concerns me. This is about me finally declaring and standing my ground, so whether anyone else really cares or not, is not so important at this particular time.
Objectively speaking, generalizing a whole nation like I just did is far not liberal and in fact quite wrong. I mean logically wrong, not morally wrong because morality is a very fluid thing anyway, and "right" and "wrong" in this sense are categories I avoid using as a general principle. But logically it's wrong because people are different, clearly not all of them are like that. Maybe not even most of them are, my personal observation is too limited to tell for sure. I also may be factually wrong when I am assuming that the reaction to what I am will be negative from the majority of people - whether they will show it or not. So far that expectation has not justified itself, apparently I am lucky to move in an environment of rather open-minded people - either this or they just value me as a person highly enough to accept my queerities and even occasionally truly appreciate them. However, the apprehension is still there. The expectation of the negative reaction. You know why that is? Because it is better to expect a blow and not receive it than be hit completely unprepared. I've experienced both and I choose the first without a hesitation.
Here I'll take a turn to say that for one reason or another such a blow against my sexuality can actually be very painful and reach very deep. I'm not a psychologist in order to explain that in the correct terms, but I'll try in my own. Why is it so fucking horrible when someone does not accept my sexuality? Sexuality is a problem of sex, right? Chances are, I'm not gonna have sex with them negatively reacting people either way, chances are, I won't even ever want to. Rationally speaking, the only time when sexuality matters is when people wanna have sex with each other, so if this is not the case why bother? Because it is not really about sexuality. Yes, sex takes up a ridiculously huge part of the average human psyche, and yet to me it's totally not about that. Fine, you won't have sex with me if your life depended on it because I'm perceiving myself as the opposite sex to what you think I am. Awesome. I'm totally cool with that. In fact, I couldn't care less. But to me, your reluctance or complete refusal to accept my sexuality - that is to say, my inner perception of myself - also means that you do not acknowledge my personality as a whole for what it really is. You reject what I feel I am and instead you put me in a box in which I don't belong and in fact which I totally abhor (mostly because I've been wrongly stuffed in it all my life). My personality is very keen on being seen as what it feels like rather than what it physically looks like or what is was assigned to be at birth. I imagine that's not a trait unique to my personality alone. I imagine you wouldn't like it if I assign you to be a goose in my own view and treat you like you are indeed a goose. Actually it doesn't matter what you assign me to be, it's not a problem of it being this or that - it's a problem of it being wrong; the only thing that matters is that it is not what I truly am. Since it is not me, whatever you call me would be unacceptable, even though calling me female in particular is more of a problem simply because I'm fed up with it to the point of total abhorrence, both by society and my own innate inner conflict. So, when you don't accept when I say I am not female, you're not just refusing hypothetical sexual interactions which none of us is really interested into. In fact, you are rejecting my entire personality and crushing it into something it's not. That is, to me, completely intolerable. I can not emphasize that enough.
There is no one single universal answer to that. There are hypotheses only. Some of them are psychological and try to find the reasons in childhood and the formation of personality and sexuality as a part of it. Others are biological - they try to explain the transgender phenomenon with a variety of factors, including hormonal changes, problems in the embriogenesis, structural differences in the brain, genetic factors, etc. There is certain interesting data that has been found out. For example, in many transgender people certain parts of the brain have the size and structure of the biologically opposite sex, i.e. the gender as which they identify. For me, that kinda rules out the psychological hypothesis (which some might also wrongfully read as "you're imagining things") as a most probable cause. However, as far as I know, no hypothesis has managed to explain the whole variety of cases. This is probably due to the complexity of gender, especially on the psychological level. Besides, I believe transgender to be an unintentional collective for a sum of different things. What I mean by this is that people observe a given set of similar phenomena and they assume them to be variations of the same thing, while sometimes they can be similar results caused by very different, even completely unrelated causes. What I've read on the topic has left me with the impression this might be the case with the transgender.
Aside from scienece, some quite much older explanations are spiritual - they explain it with the simple idea that sometimes the spirit does not match the body. I am not prone to discard that idea even if the modern, strongly materialistic society tends to mock spirituality rather than try to understand and study it properly. It's unscientific, they say (which is mainly because science stubbornly refuses to look scientifically at it, but that's another topic). Be that as it may, well, as a transgender person, a whole damn lot of things in my life have been - and still are - very much unscientific. Very much unscientific, but nonetheless quite real.
Speaking of this older explanation, I should also point out something else:
I will include that because a lot of people might think it's one of those strange trends which came into being with the rise of liberalism. Call it a vogue, an attention hunt, a mania - and all those assumptions come with their own negativity and with the dangerous tendency to discard the transgender thing as a whim. The facts however are different. In truth, transgender, along with other things which some of you probably still take as "modern time whims" or even vogue, have been around for as long as there have been humans.... and probably long before. Transgender is actually nothing new. It has not been invented by the modern human gone liberal and therefore bizarre and/or seeking attention. It has been around since the ancient ages. In many ancient cultures the transgender people have been recognized as one or several genders of their own. In other words, these cultures didn't have men and women. They had men, women, transgender men, transgender women, perhaps some others too. In those cultures the transgender people were not stigmatized - to the contrary, they were respected, they were often seen as more spiritual and in many cultures they had the role of spiritual leaders or priests. Naturally so because people like us have a natural affinity for the spiritual. That's the simple consequence of having the feeling you don't match your own body since a child. If you have that feeling rooted deep within your being, at some point you begin to ask yourself questions. Why is it, where does it come from? Isn't it logical for a mind to match its body, i.e. for two aspects of the same being to match each other? Unless there is something more, unless the mind is not really part of the body. At that point you easily go spiritual. I did at quite a tender age, to be honest. Apparently so did the ancient transgender people like me - and the other people noticed and respected them for it.
In later times, however, the transgender were denigrated into something undesirable and profane. Not because all the transgender people suddenly became bad or wronged society somehow. No. Simply because cultures shifted. At some point the transgender people were stigmatized, the entire topic tabooed, people stopped talking about it and therefore stopped understanding and accepting it. Eventually the transgender people began to hide their true selves as a way to protect themselves from the rising prejudice and discrimination (which existed even if the term for it was still not invented). Of course, it didn't happen all of a sudden, it happened gradually, over generations, like all culture shifts do. Why did all of that happen, you may ask, why did the culture shift itself in such a direction? Well, it is entirely and completely because of the all-loving and profoundly humane christian religion. Yes, we can thank it for that along with many other awesome things it has done for civilization and culture. Why, if it is so humane, it stigmatized certain people and made their life so very miserable? The answer is simple. Because the very existence of such people does not fit into the xtian mythos. Apparently the correct response to that is not to change the mythos, which is far too sacred and much more valuable than human happiness and life, but to stigmatize said people and attempt to erase them from society. The underlying reasons for it are a bit deeper and more sophisticated. Remember when I mentioned that being transgender makes you start asking yourself questions? Sometimes it makes other people ask questions too. In xnity, I've noticed, that's generally an undesirable thing, asking questions. It provokes thinking and the attempt to find logical explanations to the phenomena observed in Nature. That is quite a bad thing when someone is trying to feed you poorly assembled lies to substitute logical thinking and grow a sheepishly good and obedient personality in you. You start asking questions, next you might as well find out just how ridiculous and illogical all of their mythos is! If that happens their control over you falls apart.
I'm tempted to ask, what kind of religion will proclaim to be humane while at the same time invalidate a number of human beings, not only transgender, for things they have never had a choice for? I mean, you don't go "oh, I'll defy their god now, I will be transgender". You are either born with it or it forms at a very, very early age. It's simply who you are. What kind of a religion dares to claim to be humane if it will stigmatize you for simply being who you are? Oh wait, it's actually part of its core structure, it was called "commandments" or "deadly sins" or something. Some shit stigmatizing virtually every natural drive in a human being. If they can do that, why not stigmatize a transgender like me? But it's a bit different too since that stigma is not because you're bad and do bad things to others, no. It's because you simply don't fit in their fucking mythos. Their fucking ridiculous mythos. Which claims to originate from an entity that supposedly created the world and its Nature, and yet apparently does not understand how said Nature works at all. I have figured, the alleged xtian god, in its profound wisdom, must have created things it cannot possibly fathom. Because it is the understanding of xnity that the transgender is something very unnatural, that is how they justify the stigma. Well, guess what? It is not. We didn't make it up, Nature did. Quite frankly, how can the way a person feels since early childhood be an unnatural thing? Who are YOU - AND your god - to tell me that MY personality is any less natural and authentic than yours? In fact, the only unnatural thing here is the idea that gender is binary, as I already pointed out. However, despite the abundance of scientific evidence that has been found for the non-binary nature of gender EVEN on biological level, most people still cling to that chimaera. That idea is one of a million ideas in the xtian religion which are downright artificial and show very clearly just how ridiculous is the belief that their god created this world. Unless it's a schezophrenic god, perhaps one of its personalities created the world, and another taught its populace its religion, which might be why said religion is full of so many false and idiotic claims. But I think I'm straying from the main topic. Which is transgender.
It takes bravery to stand outside the boxes of society, you know. Society doesn't like that. Never has. Like this, xnity is a very social religion
So, guess what, dear binary friends. I am not a woman. I am not a man.
I am transgender AND FUCKING PROUD with it. Transgender, to me that sounds proud.
But you'd better address me as a male because otherwise I go very aggressive.
Anyway, aside from my personal war against xnity, there's a lot of things on the personal front I want to say. It's built up in me for most of my life so I need to say it now, too. Of all the silly things I said until now, it all comes down to my own inner perception of myself. I am transgender, but why is this all so important now? The traditional stigmas of society are falling apart. A lot of people begin to accept that. Objectively speaking, it probably isn't important at all. What is important to any given person however, is not an objective thing. It's not objective at all.
I mentioned there are different hypotheses for the cause of people being transgender. Like I said, there are probably many different kinds of transgender, many causes leading to similar effects. There is no certain explanation for why it happens, so at least for the time being it is a matter of personal choice and logic which one you will consider to be more likely and valid for yourself. For those like me, it is also a matter of personal perspective and what has been valid for their own lifes. (I totally abhor psychologists who attempt to shove their own understanding down your throat and make you discard what you know and how you feel yourself. I've had that happen to me and trust me, it's downright WRONG.)
So, besides the spiritual explanation which is entirely true to me, as far as my own case is concerned, I prefer to stick to the biological hypotheses. Maybe a mistaken protein in embriogenesis. Maybe a genetic anomaly. Maybe fucking Chernobyl. It doesn't really matter. All I know is that I've had that feeling.... for as long as I can remember. The feeling something isn't right. The feeling that something is messed up, like, fundamentally messed up. At first it wasn't the body - because at first you're just a kid and kids are not too different from each other. It was clothes, the way they spoke to me, the way they treated and addressed me, how they expected me to behave, the games I was supposed to play, that kind of things. I should say most of the time my parents were not the ones putting that stress on me, they were always quite liberal. It was the rest of society. For some unfathomable reason everyone believed I was a girl, they spoke to me like to a girl and expected of me to behave like one. But I don't remember anyone ever asking me whether I really was a girl. Did they ask you? Did anyone come when you were a little kid to ask you: "Hey, do you feel like a boy or a girl.... or a sparrow perhaps?" They didn't come to me. I figure, most of the time they come to no one. They assign you, that's what they do. The moment you are being born. Judging by ONE. SINGLE. PHYSICAL. TRAIT. Which is whether you have a penis or not. Even that is not binary. Well, since they do just that, assign you, I figure for most of you, "normal people", you were just lucky that the presence / absence of a penis coincided more or less with your inner perception of what you are. Like this, most of the time the penis principle works, kinda. But sometimes, it does not at all. It did not for me. And I knew it since long before I could even understand what girls and boys are about at all.
I figure that on its own this wouldn't be so much of a problem. The main problem is not that they wrote the wrong letter, M or F, on my birth documentation. It is that they expect of me to live up to that M or F, regardless of how I feel about myself. They start stuffing you into their imaginary, artificial boxes since before you can talk and state an opinion, don't they. Even the first clothes they put on you are blue or pink, depending on what they assigned you to be. Later a lot of the things you will have to do - or not do - will depend on this. Some of these things are reasonable, because well biology, physiology, etc. Most of them however are not. The worst part is, you are forced to conform regardless of your opinion on the matter. Regrettably however, I consider myself to be more than just a reproductive organ with a body and perhaps a mind attached to it. I consider myself a person. I like to think of myself highly like that, I like that kind of self-flattery. Don't you?
So, the main problem is not being transgender on its own. It's the fact that society keeps stuffing you into the box which IT believes you have to be into, and to one such as myself that box is brutally unfitting. When I say 'brutally', I truly mean it. Because the implications of that inside of me are indeed brutal. They go into everything in me, they have seeped into every aspect of my personality, they've taken over every day of my life, they follow me everywhere I go, in everything I do, it never really goes away - because it is fucking painful. What may be normal to you to me is fucking disgusting, humiliating and like this awfully painful, because for some wild psychological reason being forced to be something you're not is fucking unbearable. The one thing I want is just to be myself, and personally I find that to be the most natural thing to desire. I have been denied that innate right from the day I was born and someone assigned me to the wrong gender. From then on, every day in my life I have had to play the role expected of me. I never did fit into that. But when you're a kid you don't know how to deal with not fitting in. Worse still, you don't know how to deal with your feelings. You start feeling something is wrong, people around you don't respond adequately to it, they are much more prone to force you into what they think you are than try to understand you and help you. But forcing you be what they think you are rather than what you really are, is denying you the right to be yourself since very fucking day one.
In my book, if you have not been denied that right since that early, you have no fucking right to tell me a thing. Because there is one thing which is most precious, the one unfailing pillar which you can always rely on - your own self. Which you take for totally granted. And I've always had the feeling I simply don't have it. Because of them stuffing me into their boxes. As a kid, I did not realize it's me not fitting in the box. It felt like me not fitting in myself. It still feels like that. Since as far back as I can remember my own body was not me, by extension my own self was not me, my own life was not mine. I started waiting for the next life since before I even understood what life and death are about. Because I figured there's no fixing what I feel. I cannot be what I feel in this body, therefore this simply can't be my body, this can't be my life. You cannot possibly imagine how painful that thought is, you cannot imagine the despair, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the feeling of being trapped. You cannot imagine what it does to a young mind.
But it doesn't end there, because besides surviving myself I had to survive society too. Ever since I was a tiny child I instinctively knew I had to hide my true self because apparently everyone expected something else from me. They called me a girl, and even to my young and unprejudiced mind it felt unthinkable to say otherwise openly. Maybe I said it once and they told me to never say that again. For some reason it always felt like I simply cannot say that. An idea like that cannot just generate itself in a kid's mind. Kids are open and they speak their mind. I was not, I never have been. Therefore somehow society made me believe that I cannot say it, I cannot express myself freely and therefore - that I cannot be myself, that I simply have to play the role it had chosen in my stead. So I put on the mask and played a role instead of living a life. A life I simply never had. For that reason everything that refers or is related to that role is a thorn in the wound. It has been, in every day of my life. There's so many thorns, digging deeper and deeper, all the time, every day, every time I hear my given name or someone speaks to me, every time I look at myself in a mirror. I fucking hate mirrors. I hate my given name. In a way, I hate my maternal language too because it's freakin full of gender-specific words. Since I was a child I deviced myself a manner of speaking by which I can avoid these words when I'm talking about myself. I simply cannot refer to myself as a female, it's fucking loathsome, I have to put a conscious endeavour in order to do it and I totally abhor it. Likewise, I cannot stand it when others refer to me like that. It may be nothing to them, but it's a whole lot to me - a whole lot of thorns in the wound. This is effectively an ongoing, lifelong trauma, that has kept digging in my psyche every day, in every conversation, in every activity, in every single experience in my life that has involved any other people. It builds up spite, hatred and wrath because people keep sticking more thorns in the wound, without even knowing. But what is worse, it builds up hatred and wrath for myself. Because my own body is the reason for all this. I used to not make the clear, conscious distinguishing between body and person. Your body, that's you. You don't slice yourself into different aspects, you just perceive yourself as a whole. At least I did. Later, much much later, I made that separation and began perceiving myself as separate aspects because that was the only way to not hate myself as a whole and just hate what bugs me. But it's still self-hatred you know. Everpresent. Profound. Unescapable. Perfectly unescapable because there is no back door in your body through which you can run away. You cannot leave it and go out in the woods for a change. You are stuck, completely STUCK. You cannot possibly imagine what that is like, you cannot possibly imagine the damage that does, the way it twists the mind since long before you can realize what the fuck is going on and why. One day I look at myself (not in the mirror because I fucking hate mirrors) and realize that this is what has built up, modified and defined my entire personality. It has seeped into everything I am, it has altered every tiny aspect of my mind. It has cut so deeply that there is probably not a single part of my mind that hasn't been impacted by it in some way. I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing, but it is as it is. It was never really up to choice.
And that, my friends, is why to me my sexuality is not only a matter of sex. That is the reason why rejecting my sexuality is rejecting my entire personality. Because this way you discard my right to be myself as well as all the suffering I've endured in my life because society has deprived me of that right without a trial or reason. Wasn't that right innate? I believe it has to be.
In the end of the day, it all comes down to the fact that society prefers to categorize and stigmatize rather than understand and accept the different. Everybody is different in their own ways. The problem is, some differences are okay. Others, society says, are not. But why would they not be if that doesn't hurt anyone? How can it hurt anyone really? I'm not forcing others be like me - I couldn't do that even if I wanted to. All I want is the right to be myself. All I demand from others is to give me that right. Or I'll just claim it, one way or another.
Now there are a few myths about transgender which I want to shatter.
No, it isn't. Nature is more variable than you can imagine. It's the binary idea of gender that is wrong and unnatural, as well as incredibly stupid. Gender is only binary in your mind. There are organisms in Nature with up to 500 different genders. What does your god have to say about that by the way? Or was it not aware that it also created those guys? Pity. But that's biology. Psychological gender is even more fluid and variable. In fact, psychological gender it's a continuum of a zillion of different states - male and female are only the theoretical extremes that don't virtually even occur. Turning the two extremes into a norm is quite artificial and irrational.
No, it won't. This is not contageous you know. This idea is exactly as ridiculous as assuming that talking to a man / woman about their sexual life will miraculously turn you into a man / woman if you are not one. Same for your kids. They won't become transgender just because someone told them there is such a thing. It can change their personality, indeed - it can make them more open-minded. Oh no, what a disaster.
Being transgender is not a choice. It is a matter of how you feel within. It is a perception of yourself. It is who and what you really are. It is not a tiny bit more of a choice than it is a choice for everyone else whether they feel a man or a woman - or a sparrow. The choice is only whether to hide it or show it to the world and express it, live up to it the way you feel. That is the choice.
In this, for most of my life I've stuck to the wrong choice - I've chosen to hide it, because I was afraid, for whatever reasons. Like I said, I want to put an end to that. To the fear - I want it gone. To the guilt and shame - fuck off, I refuse to feel guilt for something that was never my choice, something that was never my fault, and I also totally refuse to feel shame anymore because of society's idiocy, ignorance and prejudice. FUCK. OFF.
Likewise, because of all that and much more, for most of my life I have considered being transgender to be my curse. Understandably so since it has put me through more suffering and misery than anything else ever managed to. At first when I started realizing how it has changed my entire life and personality, that felt enormously depressing. It was like, "so not only my sexuality is messed up, everything I am and have become has been fucked up by it as well". However, later I began to realize: but there are things in myself that I like which are also a consequence of that. Like my self-awareness - because I spent all my life analysing myself in order to understand by what was "wrong" in me; like my intelligence - greatly developed by my endless questioning and looking for the reasons of it; like my different perspective and understanding of things - a result of me being different, being out of the box; like my imagination - a result of my endless running away from the unbearable reality; like my creativity - provoked by the need to escape as well as so much pain and frustration that needed to vent somehow; like my spiritual views and insight - that has been prevalent in transgender people since the ancient times. So yeah, being transgender has always been incredibly painful, it has always been a life of misery and suffering, at times it has been nothing short of traumatizing and it nearly killed me at one point. But in the end, it has made me into a personality I actually value. It made me different in a way I like, it made me special. I mean, everyone is different and everyone has something special to them, but a whole lot of people never find out how they are special and/or never develop it. I have. And I am very proud with it. The price of that has been high. But right now I prefer to think that it was worth it. I never had the choice of whether to go that way or not. I simply had to. I prefer to see the positive side now.
None of that, however, is a reason for me to stay as I am. I still feel the frustration and pain from being stuffed into a box that doesn't befit me. Of being trapped in a wrong body. I want that to be gone. Which is why I have decided to go through partial transgender surgery and finally start living up to my true self. Whatever anyone else thinks about that, is completely irrelevant. No one else has to live in my brain - hence, no one else has a say. That's my philosophy now.
Finally,
I know some of you will be totally cool with all that. Others, however, not. I cannot really tell what are the odds, but I have friends for whom I am certain will disown me as a friend the moment they learn I am transgender. I hope I'm wrong, I really, really hope I'm just mistaken, but I do have that feeling for some of you. So I'll directly ask: What. The. Hell. Seriously, I don't understand. What possible reason can YOU have to hate me over being transgender?
Maybe not everyone has really thought that through, but those like you are sort of underground dwellers, you thrive in the dark, in the shady place of society's lack or refusal of understanding. You don't have that understanding, but you don't really want it either. You're fine with being hated, which is something most of society cannot even fathom. That's a strength on its own, the power of independence. Because of that, tolerance to many of you is a cheesy word for something you simply don't practice. But it's not tolerance I am calling for. In my understanding, the greatest virtue and strength that you, the underground dwellers, have is the ability and courage to be yourselves right against society's pressure and dislike. You thrive in the shadow, even in the oppression of society, because this is where you can wage your battle for your own inner freedom. The freedom to be yourself. I am doing the same, but not only as a Satanist, but also as a transgender person. It'd be rather hypocritical of you to hold that against me since this is essentially the same thing, the rebellion against the norms and boxes of others in the name of being your own inner self and express it freely. I confess that as much as I strive to not care about whatever others think about it, I do care when those of my own faith stigmatize me - I care freakin big time. Why? Because being stigmatized by an enemy is one thing - but being stigmatized by an ally is much too different. I don't demand anyone sharing my sentiments. What I want is to not be treated in a prejudiced way by those who are of my own blood.
By the way, speaking of the boxes of society, I already said that, but I'll point it out again. The only reason why society nowadays frowns upon the transgender is fucking xnity. Aren't you Satanists? Aren't you against xnity? Aren't you supposed to not support it in any way - and especially when it goes against Nature and Freedom? Well, maybe not everyone understands it this way. But I feel personally offended by that lack of perspective.
Hail Lucifer.
Edit: As the story unravels, I wrote the entirety of it.
You can read it here, mind you, it's rather long:
The other day I went to see Eddie Izzard's show Force Majeure. It was awesome, I had lots of fun, but for me it had an impact far deeper than just that. Why? Because he is one very charming person who is not afraid to show himself as he feels, as he really is. And be liked, very liked like that. It seems like I needed to see this with my own eyes. Everybody needs to be themselves.... most people do need at least a bit of courage for that. But for some, it is both more difficult and, in a way, because of that, more essential. Why? Because they're different, in ways which this society does not actually approve of.
I am transgender.
That's something like transsexual and not mandatorily transvestite. In fact, all three mean different things. What they have in common is the need to express oneself as a gender different from the one you've been assigned to at birth. Transgender in particular, I like to define as the discrepancy between the biological and the psychological gender in a given individual. Definitions vary. But a very essential bit, for me, is that it causes a vast, profound, everpresent and incredibly heavy inner conflict. It is there, it always has been, all my life. I do not know an existence without it. I have never had one, not in this life anyway.
In my case, I was assigned to be female. But I never felt as one. Never. As I kid I felt 100% male. Later on, life, experience, views, philosophies, physiology and inner conflicts gradually altered me and the way I feel. Now I feel like neither - and still definitely not female. So I wish to be perceived as a male, as I always have. Moreover, I insist on it. I'll explain things further on.
By the way, transgender is usually the T letter in LGBT. (Aww, come now LGBT haters.) So I'll talk about the T here because that's my personal perspective and what I'm more familiar with, too. But I mention it because a lot of what I'll say is, as much as I can tell, also in force for the other letters. So much about that.
So I'm going to talk about that. Some of my personal story, some of my feelings. Some of my insights. Some of the implications I see and feel or maybe only imagine, who knows. It's all about inner feeling and perspective, not so much objectivity.
If you are one of the people who dare to stigmatize those like me, I challenge you to stay and read, hear the other point of view which, perhaps, you have never actually considered. See whether your judgement is really right, challenge it. It might make it stronger.... or make you wiser.
Or else, if you're one of the people who sympathize with those like me and stand for their rights, then I invite you to stay because regardless of your open-mindedness and probably liberal views, I dare to say you can never truly understand - unless you feel it yourself. You can't really feel it if you're not one, but each new insight into the mind and soul of a person like that can bring you closer to that understanding. And that is part of the charm of being open-minded, isn't it?
For me, the point is that I am no longer afraid. I have been, for most of my life, consciously and not. Afraid, ashamed, feeling guilty, disdaining and hating myself. Not anymore. I wipe the fear away and wash away the rest along with it. Today, I will celebrate my own inner victory against this lifelong fear. You're welcome to join in the party with one little condition: having suffered with it all my life has made me sensitive. Sensitive makes me edgy. I'm prone to defend myself in any (verbal) means I deem necessary. So if you're looking for a fight or for straightening my messed up views, enter at your own risk.
By the way, if this sounds challenging, it's not by chance. I am not looking for support or advice. I am very clear with myself, I know what I am, I know what I want and I am happy with it. I am on the challenging side because that's how you overcome fear - by facing and challenging it. Like this, I am also not looking for any kind of approval from others. Part of the victory against fear is to no longer need that approval, because that need is a dependency and dependency feeds the fear. I am here to simply declare it, as part of my personal growth, battle and victory. And ramble some.... okay, ramble a lot, well, because I'm me.
So that was the main part, the rest is the rambling. Read on only if you're interested and/or have the time to spare.
___________________
First, I feel I need to raise a bit of general awareness on the problem at hand and its terminology. Speaking of terminology, do make the difference between sexual orientation and sexuality. Sexual orientation is what kind of partner you prefer for your sexual activities, while sexuality refers to your own inner perception of yourself. These two things may seem like two sides of the same thing, but they are in fact independent of each other and while both are related to sex, sexuality is also a trait of personality, it has its inner significance for the personality of every individual and its social interractions with others.
I'll proceed with my perspective on some basic questions on the problem.
So, what is transgender?
It is a kind of sexuality, not a sexual orientation. Like I said, simply spoken, it is the case when the psychological and biological genders do not match. In other words, you are born with a normal, biologically male / female body, but for some reason you idetify yourself as the opposite sex. This is not a condition or a disorder. It is a type of personality just like "male" and "female" are, even if it has some implications of its own because of the discrepancy between body and mind. Most of those implications are, however, either generated or at least greatly harshened by society, I can tell it from the perspective of my own observation upon myself. In other words, if society had not exacted of me to be and treated me like the opposite sex to what I feel, the inner conflict I experience would have never become so violent and self-devastating. Just how devastating it has been throughout my life.... it would take a novel-sized writing to describe in its full detail.
Like all personalities however, transgender is also very variable. For some, I've heard, it's not so much of a problem, they live with it and are perhaps even happy. Some feel the sharp discomfort, but they find their ways to cope with it. To some the feeling is so unbearable that they cannot endure it. I am of the latter, even if I've endured and survived nearly 3 decades with it. I say survive and I mean it. Some feel so devastated by the inner conflict with their own bodies that they resort to the only way you can really get out of your body - death. I've been there too. At this point, hopefully, most people will realize that what I am talking about is serious and real. If something can result in suicide, it is obviously serious, not a whim, not an imaginary issue.
Here I'll also toss in that when I say a "male" or "female" personality, this is incredibly subjective. Personality does not really have a gender as a singular trait. It has a number of traits which we usually identify as either male or female. However, this is only a perception and as such it is subjective and varies by culture. This is important because it means that what you take for a given - that there are only men and women, on a psychological level is simply not true at all. There are people who are perceived as feminine and masculine by the given culture, but there are also all the varieties inbetween. In fact, gender is not a binary category even in the purely biological sense. What humans simplifiedly call "sex" is a whole complex of biological traits - they include genetic and molecular, physiological and anatomical features. Some of those traits (like the genome) are more or less binary. I say more or less because besides the XX and XY genotypes, there are also XXX, XYY, XXY and X0 - not quite binary, is it. The other traits, like hormonal levels, proportions and variation, development and function of reproductive structures, secondary sexual traits, can vary so much that speaking simply of "male" and "female" gender is really speaking about areas in a continuous spectrum which overlap in sophisticated ways. Like a friend of mine once said, there is no such thing as men and women. It's a continuum of different phenotypes and their variations.
Are transgender people gay?
Just as much as you are. They can be gay / lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, who-the-fuck-knows-what-sexual, anything you can think of. Any given combination is possible, just like with "normal people". I point that out because many people still seem to not completely understand the difference between sexuality and sexual orientation, which I mentioned already, and many still seem to interchange terms in an incorrect way or else assume that they are somehow dependent on each other and always go together in certain combinations. Well, they are not.
That last is actually a problem of sexual culture.
In my country, the problems of sexuality and sexual orientation are still to a great extent a social taboo. Yes, Bulgarians love telling dirty, preferrably sexist jokes, they dance in non-aesthetic ways to heavily vulgar songs in downgraded pubs and they swear a lot about fucking various family members of all manner of people and inanimate objects around them.... but that's about as far as the sexual culture of the prevalent share of them goes. Outside jokes, people tend to be rather conservative, let's put it this way, and even if they realize to a certain extent the need of tolerance, they prefer to keep the people in need of that tolerance at least at some distance away. That doesn't necessarily mean actual discrimination, but even when it doesn't it often means the kind of sneaky looks, whispers between fellow "normal people" and the air of "eh well, you're different and we're kinda cool with that, but you know, we're aware something's not exactly right with you". At best, 'cause it can go a lot worse, too. It's a matter of manly pride, I've discovered, being a fully true male apparently requires to be against the sexually "abnormal" even without a rational reason. In the case of females, I'm not clear on it at all, but maybe it's a way to be seen as a serious, respectable member of the otherwise manly society, or a kind of messed up emancipation, or I can speculate it's even about not being "one of them" and somehow demonstrate it, as a kind of modern time fairness and chastity.... even if those words sound truly bizarre in a society where being 18 and still virgin is already perceived as shameful (not that I approve of the whole virginity drama, trust me I really do not). In any case, words like gay, lesbian and transvestite (transgender and transsexual being almost completely unknown to these territories) are heavily loaded with a negative meaning because they are most usually utilized not as a descriptive for such people, but as a general insult valid for anyone. If these are not enough, we have other synonyms and their versions of our own making, which are even more negative. Because of that some liberal people here even call themselves liberasts - which is a merge between the word for liberal and the Bulgarian vulgar word for a gay, which is also quite a common and negative insult. I applaud that, even if I strongly doubt that the target group of that irony gets any of the message.
Now, I won't claim to be more liberal than I am. In some ways (like grammar) I'm a freakin nazi - those who know me will confirm. But I'm up for an argument with some other area's nazis, first - because I'm hypocritical like that, and second - because I believe I have very valid argumentation, and it is in fact important to me to defend the ground where I stand as all of this personally concerns me. This is about me finally declaring and standing my ground, so whether anyone else really cares or not, is not so important at this particular time.
Objectively speaking, generalizing a whole nation like I just did is far not liberal and in fact quite wrong. I mean logically wrong, not morally wrong because morality is a very fluid thing anyway, and "right" and "wrong" in this sense are categories I avoid using as a general principle. But logically it's wrong because people are different, clearly not all of them are like that. Maybe not even most of them are, my personal observation is too limited to tell for sure. I also may be factually wrong when I am assuming that the reaction to what I am will be negative from the majority of people - whether they will show it or not. So far that expectation has not justified itself, apparently I am lucky to move in an environment of rather open-minded people - either this or they just value me as a person highly enough to accept my queerities and even occasionally truly appreciate them. However, the apprehension is still there. The expectation of the negative reaction. You know why that is? Because it is better to expect a blow and not receive it than be hit completely unprepared. I've experienced both and I choose the first without a hesitation.
Here I'll take a turn to say that for one reason or another such a blow against my sexuality can actually be very painful and reach very deep. I'm not a psychologist in order to explain that in the correct terms, but I'll try in my own. Why is it so fucking horrible when someone does not accept my sexuality? Sexuality is a problem of sex, right? Chances are, I'm not gonna have sex with them negatively reacting people either way, chances are, I won't even ever want to. Rationally speaking, the only time when sexuality matters is when people wanna have sex with each other, so if this is not the case why bother? Because it is not really about sexuality. Yes, sex takes up a ridiculously huge part of the average human psyche, and yet to me it's totally not about that. Fine, you won't have sex with me if your life depended on it because I'm perceiving myself as the opposite sex to what you think I am. Awesome. I'm totally cool with that. In fact, I couldn't care less. But to me, your reluctance or complete refusal to accept my sexuality - that is to say, my inner perception of myself - also means that you do not acknowledge my personality as a whole for what it really is. You reject what I feel I am and instead you put me in a box in which I don't belong and in fact which I totally abhor (mostly because I've been wrongly stuffed in it all my life). My personality is very keen on being seen as what it feels like rather than what it physically looks like or what is was assigned to be at birth. I imagine that's not a trait unique to my personality alone. I imagine you wouldn't like it if I assign you to be a goose in my own view and treat you like you are indeed a goose. Actually it doesn't matter what you assign me to be, it's not a problem of it being this or that - it's a problem of it being wrong; the only thing that matters is that it is not what I truly am. Since it is not me, whatever you call me would be unacceptable, even though calling me female in particular is more of a problem simply because I'm fed up with it to the point of total abhorrence, both by society and my own innate inner conflict. So, when you don't accept when I say I am not female, you're not just refusing hypothetical sexual interactions which none of us is really interested into. In fact, you are rejecting my entire personality and crushing it into something it's not. That is, to me, completely intolerable. I can not emphasize that enough.
Why are some people transgender?
There is no one single universal answer to that. There are hypotheses only. Some of them are psychological and try to find the reasons in childhood and the formation of personality and sexuality as a part of it. Others are biological - they try to explain the transgender phenomenon with a variety of factors, including hormonal changes, problems in the embriogenesis, structural differences in the brain, genetic factors, etc. There is certain interesting data that has been found out. For example, in many transgender people certain parts of the brain have the size and structure of the biologically opposite sex, i.e. the gender as which they identify. For me, that kinda rules out the psychological hypothesis (which some might also wrongfully read as "you're imagining things") as a most probable cause. However, as far as I know, no hypothesis has managed to explain the whole variety of cases. This is probably due to the complexity of gender, especially on the psychological level. Besides, I believe transgender to be an unintentional collective for a sum of different things. What I mean by this is that people observe a given set of similar phenomena and they assume them to be variations of the same thing, while sometimes they can be similar results caused by very different, even completely unrelated causes. What I've read on the topic has left me with the impression this might be the case with the transgender.
Aside from scienece, some quite much older explanations are spiritual - they explain it with the simple idea that sometimes the spirit does not match the body. I am not prone to discard that idea even if the modern, strongly materialistic society tends to mock spirituality rather than try to understand and study it properly. It's unscientific, they say (which is mainly because science stubbornly refuses to look scientifically at it, but that's another topic). Be that as it may, well, as a transgender person, a whole damn lot of things in my life have been - and still are - very much unscientific. Very much unscientific, but nonetheless quite real.
Speaking of this older explanation, I should also point out something else:
Is transgender a new thing?
I will include that because a lot of people might think it's one of those strange trends which came into being with the rise of liberalism. Call it a vogue, an attention hunt, a mania - and all those assumptions come with their own negativity and with the dangerous tendency to discard the transgender thing as a whim. The facts however are different. In truth, transgender, along with other things which some of you probably still take as "modern time whims" or even vogue, have been around for as long as there have been humans.... and probably long before. Transgender is actually nothing new. It has not been invented by the modern human gone liberal and therefore bizarre and/or seeking attention. It has been around since the ancient ages. In many ancient cultures the transgender people have been recognized as one or several genders of their own. In other words, these cultures didn't have men and women. They had men, women, transgender men, transgender women, perhaps some others too. In those cultures the transgender people were not stigmatized - to the contrary, they were respected, they were often seen as more spiritual and in many cultures they had the role of spiritual leaders or priests. Naturally so because people like us have a natural affinity for the spiritual. That's the simple consequence of having the feeling you don't match your own body since a child. If you have that feeling rooted deep within your being, at some point you begin to ask yourself questions. Why is it, where does it come from? Isn't it logical for a mind to match its body, i.e. for two aspects of the same being to match each other? Unless there is something more, unless the mind is not really part of the body. At that point you easily go spiritual. I did at quite a tender age, to be honest. Apparently so did the ancient transgender people like me - and the other people noticed and respected them for it.
In later times, however, the transgender were denigrated into something undesirable and profane. Not because all the transgender people suddenly became bad or wronged society somehow. No. Simply because cultures shifted. At some point the transgender people were stigmatized, the entire topic tabooed, people stopped talking about it and therefore stopped understanding and accepting it. Eventually the transgender people began to hide their true selves as a way to protect themselves from the rising prejudice and discrimination (which existed even if the term for it was still not invented). Of course, it didn't happen all of a sudden, it happened gradually, over generations, like all culture shifts do. Why did all of that happen, you may ask, why did the culture shift itself in such a direction? Well, it is entirely and completely because of the all-loving and profoundly humane christian religion. Yes, we can thank it for that along with many other awesome things it has done for civilization and culture. Why, if it is so humane, it stigmatized certain people and made their life so very miserable? The answer is simple. Because the very existence of such people does not fit into the xtian mythos. Apparently the correct response to that is not to change the mythos, which is far too sacred and much more valuable than human happiness and life, but to stigmatize said people and attempt to erase them from society. The underlying reasons for it are a bit deeper and more sophisticated. Remember when I mentioned that being transgender makes you start asking yourself questions? Sometimes it makes other people ask questions too. In xnity, I've noticed, that's generally an undesirable thing, asking questions. It provokes thinking and the attempt to find logical explanations to the phenomena observed in Nature. That is quite a bad thing when someone is trying to feed you poorly assembled lies to substitute logical thinking and grow a sheepishly good and obedient personality in you. You start asking questions, next you might as well find out just how ridiculous and illogical all of their mythos is! If that happens their control over you falls apart.
I'm tempted to ask, what kind of religion will proclaim to be humane while at the same time invalidate a number of human beings, not only transgender, for things they have never had a choice for? I mean, you don't go "oh, I'll defy their god now, I will be transgender". You are either born with it or it forms at a very, very early age. It's simply who you are. What kind of a religion dares to claim to be humane if it will stigmatize you for simply being who you are? Oh wait, it's actually part of its core structure, it was called "commandments" or "deadly sins" or something. Some shit stigmatizing virtually every natural drive in a human being. If they can do that, why not stigmatize a transgender like me? But it's a bit different too since that stigma is not because you're bad and do bad things to others, no. It's because you simply don't fit in their fucking mythos. Their fucking ridiculous mythos. Which claims to originate from an entity that supposedly created the world and its Nature, and yet apparently does not understand how said Nature works at all. I have figured, the alleged xtian god, in its profound wisdom, must have created things it cannot possibly fathom. Because it is the understanding of xnity that the transgender is something very unnatural, that is how they justify the stigma. Well, guess what? It is not. We didn't make it up, Nature did. Quite frankly, how can the way a person feels since early childhood be an unnatural thing? Who are YOU - AND your god - to tell me that MY personality is any less natural and authentic than yours? In fact, the only unnatural thing here is the idea that gender is binary, as I already pointed out. However, despite the abundance of scientific evidence that has been found for the non-binary nature of gender EVEN on biological level, most people still cling to that chimaera. That idea is one of a million ideas in the xtian religion which are downright artificial and show very clearly just how ridiculous is the belief that their god created this world. Unless it's a schezophrenic god, perhaps one of its personalities created the world, and another taught its populace its religion, which might be why said religion is full of so many false and idiotic claims. But I think I'm straying from the main topic. Which is transgender.
It takes bravery to stand outside the boxes of society, you know. Society doesn't like that. Never has. Like this, xnity is a very social religion
So, guess what, dear binary friends. I am not a woman. I am not a man.
I am transgender AND FUCKING PROUD with it. Transgender, to me that sounds proud.
But you'd better address me as a male because otherwise I go very aggressive.
Anyway, aside from my personal war against xnity, there's a lot of things on the personal front I want to say. It's built up in me for most of my life so I need to say it now, too. Of all the silly things I said until now, it all comes down to my own inner perception of myself. I am transgender, but why is this all so important now? The traditional stigmas of society are falling apart. A lot of people begin to accept that. Objectively speaking, it probably isn't important at all. What is important to any given person however, is not an objective thing. It's not objective at all.
I mentioned there are different hypotheses for the cause of people being transgender. Like I said, there are probably many different kinds of transgender, many causes leading to similar effects. There is no certain explanation for why it happens, so at least for the time being it is a matter of personal choice and logic which one you will consider to be more likely and valid for yourself. For those like me, it is also a matter of personal perspective and what has been valid for their own lifes. (I totally abhor psychologists who attempt to shove their own understanding down your throat and make you discard what you know and how you feel yourself. I've had that happen to me and trust me, it's downright WRONG.)
So, besides the spiritual explanation which is entirely true to me, as far as my own case is concerned, I prefer to stick to the biological hypotheses. Maybe a mistaken protein in embriogenesis. Maybe a genetic anomaly. Maybe fucking Chernobyl. It doesn't really matter. All I know is that I've had that feeling.... for as long as I can remember. The feeling something isn't right. The feeling that something is messed up, like, fundamentally messed up. At first it wasn't the body - because at first you're just a kid and kids are not too different from each other. It was clothes, the way they spoke to me, the way they treated and addressed me, how they expected me to behave, the games I was supposed to play, that kind of things. I should say most of the time my parents were not the ones putting that stress on me, they were always quite liberal. It was the rest of society. For some unfathomable reason everyone believed I was a girl, they spoke to me like to a girl and expected of me to behave like one. But I don't remember anyone ever asking me whether I really was a girl. Did they ask you? Did anyone come when you were a little kid to ask you: "Hey, do you feel like a boy or a girl.... or a sparrow perhaps?" They didn't come to me. I figure, most of the time they come to no one. They assign you, that's what they do. The moment you are being born. Judging by ONE. SINGLE. PHYSICAL. TRAIT. Which is whether you have a penis or not. Even that is not binary. Well, since they do just that, assign you, I figure for most of you, "normal people", you were just lucky that the presence / absence of a penis coincided more or less with your inner perception of what you are. Like this, most of the time the penis principle works, kinda. But sometimes, it does not at all. It did not for me. And I knew it since long before I could even understand what girls and boys are about at all.
I figure that on its own this wouldn't be so much of a problem. The main problem is not that they wrote the wrong letter, M or F, on my birth documentation. It is that they expect of me to live up to that M or F, regardless of how I feel about myself. They start stuffing you into their imaginary, artificial boxes since before you can talk and state an opinion, don't they. Even the first clothes they put on you are blue or pink, depending on what they assigned you to be. Later a lot of the things you will have to do - or not do - will depend on this. Some of these things are reasonable, because well biology, physiology, etc. Most of them however are not. The worst part is, you are forced to conform regardless of your opinion on the matter. Regrettably however, I consider myself to be more than just a reproductive organ with a body and perhaps a mind attached to it. I consider myself a person. I like to think of myself highly like that, I like that kind of self-flattery. Don't you?
So, the main problem is not being transgender on its own. It's the fact that society keeps stuffing you into the box which IT believes you have to be into, and to one such as myself that box is brutally unfitting. When I say 'brutally', I truly mean it. Because the implications of that inside of me are indeed brutal. They go into everything in me, they have seeped into every aspect of my personality, they've taken over every day of my life, they follow me everywhere I go, in everything I do, it never really goes away - because it is fucking painful. What may be normal to you to me is fucking disgusting, humiliating and like this awfully painful, because for some wild psychological reason being forced to be something you're not is fucking unbearable. The one thing I want is just to be myself, and personally I find that to be the most natural thing to desire. I have been denied that innate right from the day I was born and someone assigned me to the wrong gender. From then on, every day in my life I have had to play the role expected of me. I never did fit into that. But when you're a kid you don't know how to deal with not fitting in. Worse still, you don't know how to deal with your feelings. You start feeling something is wrong, people around you don't respond adequately to it, they are much more prone to force you into what they think you are than try to understand you and help you. But forcing you be what they think you are rather than what you really are, is denying you the right to be yourself since very fucking day one.
In my book, if you have not been denied that right since that early, you have no fucking right to tell me a thing. Because there is one thing which is most precious, the one unfailing pillar which you can always rely on - your own self. Which you take for totally granted. And I've always had the feeling I simply don't have it. Because of them stuffing me into their boxes. As a kid, I did not realize it's me not fitting in the box. It felt like me not fitting in myself. It still feels like that. Since as far back as I can remember my own body was not me, by extension my own self was not me, my own life was not mine. I started waiting for the next life since before I even understood what life and death are about. Because I figured there's no fixing what I feel. I cannot be what I feel in this body, therefore this simply can't be my body, this can't be my life. You cannot possibly imagine how painful that thought is, you cannot imagine the despair, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the feeling of being trapped. You cannot imagine what it does to a young mind.
But it doesn't end there, because besides surviving myself I had to survive society too. Ever since I was a tiny child I instinctively knew I had to hide my true self because apparently everyone expected something else from me. They called me a girl, and even to my young and unprejudiced mind it felt unthinkable to say otherwise openly. Maybe I said it once and they told me to never say that again. For some reason it always felt like I simply cannot say that. An idea like that cannot just generate itself in a kid's mind. Kids are open and they speak their mind. I was not, I never have been. Therefore somehow society made me believe that I cannot say it, I cannot express myself freely and therefore - that I cannot be myself, that I simply have to play the role it had chosen in my stead. So I put on the mask and played a role instead of living a life. A life I simply never had. For that reason everything that refers or is related to that role is a thorn in the wound. It has been, in every day of my life. There's so many thorns, digging deeper and deeper, all the time, every day, every time I hear my given name or someone speaks to me, every time I look at myself in a mirror. I fucking hate mirrors. I hate my given name. In a way, I hate my maternal language too because it's freakin full of gender-specific words. Since I was a child I deviced myself a manner of speaking by which I can avoid these words when I'm talking about myself. I simply cannot refer to myself as a female, it's fucking loathsome, I have to put a conscious endeavour in order to do it and I totally abhor it. Likewise, I cannot stand it when others refer to me like that. It may be nothing to them, but it's a whole lot to me - a whole lot of thorns in the wound. This is effectively an ongoing, lifelong trauma, that has kept digging in my psyche every day, in every conversation, in every activity, in every single experience in my life that has involved any other people. It builds up spite, hatred and wrath because people keep sticking more thorns in the wound, without even knowing. But what is worse, it builds up hatred and wrath for myself. Because my own body is the reason for all this. I used to not make the clear, conscious distinguishing between body and person. Your body, that's you. You don't slice yourself into different aspects, you just perceive yourself as a whole. At least I did. Later, much much later, I made that separation and began perceiving myself as separate aspects because that was the only way to not hate myself as a whole and just hate what bugs me. But it's still self-hatred you know. Everpresent. Profound. Unescapable. Perfectly unescapable because there is no back door in your body through which you can run away. You cannot leave it and go out in the woods for a change. You are stuck, completely STUCK. You cannot possibly imagine what that is like, you cannot possibly imagine the damage that does, the way it twists the mind since long before you can realize what the fuck is going on and why. One day I look at myself (not in the mirror because I fucking hate mirrors) and realize that this is what has built up, modified and defined my entire personality. It has seeped into everything I am, it has altered every tiny aspect of my mind. It has cut so deeply that there is probably not a single part of my mind that hasn't been impacted by it in some way. I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing, but it is as it is. It was never really up to choice.
And that, my friends, is why to me my sexuality is not only a matter of sex. That is the reason why rejecting my sexuality is rejecting my entire personality. Because this way you discard my right to be myself as well as all the suffering I've endured in my life because society has deprived me of that right without a trial or reason. Wasn't that right innate? I believe it has to be.
In the end of the day, it all comes down to the fact that society prefers to categorize and stigmatize rather than understand and accept the different. Everybody is different in their own ways. The problem is, some differences are okay. Others, society says, are not. But why would they not be if that doesn't hurt anyone? How can it hurt anyone really? I'm not forcing others be like me - I couldn't do that even if I wanted to. All I want is the right to be myself. All I demand from others is to give me that right. Or I'll just claim it, one way or another.
Now there are a few myths about transgender which I want to shatter.
Transgender is wrong and unnatural.
No, it isn't. Nature is more variable than you can imagine. It's the binary idea of gender that is wrong and unnatural, as well as incredibly stupid. Gender is only binary in your mind. There are organisms in Nature with up to 500 different genders. What does your god have to say about that by the way? Or was it not aware that it also created those guys? Pity. But that's biology. Psychological gender is even more fluid and variable. In fact, psychological gender it's a continuum of a zillion of different states - male and female are only the theoretical extremes that don't virtually even occur. Turning the two extremes into a norm is quite artificial and irrational.
Talking about transgender is bad because it will make us / our kids go weird and turn transgender too.
No, it won't. This is not contageous you know. This idea is exactly as ridiculous as assuming that talking to a man / woman about their sexual life will miraculously turn you into a man / woman if you are not one. Same for your kids. They won't become transgender just because someone told them there is such a thing. It can change their personality, indeed - it can make them more open-minded. Oh no, what a disaster.
Transgender is a choice / some weird people who want to draw attention.
Being transgender is not a choice. It is a matter of how you feel within. It is a perception of yourself. It is who and what you really are. It is not a tiny bit more of a choice than it is a choice for everyone else whether they feel a man or a woman - or a sparrow. The choice is only whether to hide it or show it to the world and express it, live up to it the way you feel. That is the choice.
In this, for most of my life I've stuck to the wrong choice - I've chosen to hide it, because I was afraid, for whatever reasons. Like I said, I want to put an end to that. To the fear - I want it gone. To the guilt and shame - fuck off, I refuse to feel guilt for something that was never my choice, something that was never my fault, and I also totally refuse to feel shame anymore because of society's idiocy, ignorance and prejudice. FUCK. OFF.
Likewise, because of all that and much more, for most of my life I have considered being transgender to be my curse. Understandably so since it has put me through more suffering and misery than anything else ever managed to. At first when I started realizing how it has changed my entire life and personality, that felt enormously depressing. It was like, "so not only my sexuality is messed up, everything I am and have become has been fucked up by it as well". However, later I began to realize: but there are things in myself that I like which are also a consequence of that. Like my self-awareness - because I spent all my life analysing myself in order to understand by what was "wrong" in me; like my intelligence - greatly developed by my endless questioning and looking for the reasons of it; like my different perspective and understanding of things - a result of me being different, being out of the box; like my imagination - a result of my endless running away from the unbearable reality; like my creativity - provoked by the need to escape as well as so much pain and frustration that needed to vent somehow; like my spiritual views and insight - that has been prevalent in transgender people since the ancient times. So yeah, being transgender has always been incredibly painful, it has always been a life of misery and suffering, at times it has been nothing short of traumatizing and it nearly killed me at one point. But in the end, it has made me into a personality I actually value. It made me different in a way I like, it made me special. I mean, everyone is different and everyone has something special to them, but a whole lot of people never find out how they are special and/or never develop it. I have. And I am very proud with it. The price of that has been high. But right now I prefer to think that it was worth it. I never had the choice of whether to go that way or not. I simply had to. I prefer to see the positive side now.
None of that, however, is a reason for me to stay as I am. I still feel the frustration and pain from being stuffed into a box that doesn't befit me. Of being trapped in a wrong body. I want that to be gone. Which is why I have decided to go through partial transgender surgery and finally start living up to my true self. Whatever anyone else thinks about that, is completely irrelevant. No one else has to live in my brain - hence, no one else has a say. That's my philosophy now.
Finally,
A word to my fellow Satanists.
I know some of you will be totally cool with all that. Others, however, not. I cannot really tell what are the odds, but I have friends for whom I am certain will disown me as a friend the moment they learn I am transgender. I hope I'm wrong, I really, really hope I'm just mistaken, but I do have that feeling for some of you. So I'll directly ask: What. The. Hell. Seriously, I don't understand. What possible reason can YOU have to hate me over being transgender?
Maybe not everyone has really thought that through, but those like you are sort of underground dwellers, you thrive in the dark, in the shady place of society's lack or refusal of understanding. You don't have that understanding, but you don't really want it either. You're fine with being hated, which is something most of society cannot even fathom. That's a strength on its own, the power of independence. Because of that, tolerance to many of you is a cheesy word for something you simply don't practice. But it's not tolerance I am calling for. In my understanding, the greatest virtue and strength that you, the underground dwellers, have is the ability and courage to be yourselves right against society's pressure and dislike. You thrive in the shadow, even in the oppression of society, because this is where you can wage your battle for your own inner freedom. The freedom to be yourself. I am doing the same, but not only as a Satanist, but also as a transgender person. It'd be rather hypocritical of you to hold that against me since this is essentially the same thing, the rebellion against the norms and boxes of others in the name of being your own inner self and express it freely. I confess that as much as I strive to not care about whatever others think about it, I do care when those of my own faith stigmatize me - I care freakin big time. Why? Because being stigmatized by an enemy is one thing - but being stigmatized by an ally is much too different. I don't demand anyone sharing my sentiments. What I want is to not be treated in a prejudiced way by those who are of my own blood.
By the way, speaking of the boxes of society, I already said that, but I'll point it out again. The only reason why society nowadays frowns upon the transgender is fucking xnity. Aren't you Satanists? Aren't you against xnity? Aren't you supposed to not support it in any way - and especially when it goes against Nature and Freedom? Well, maybe not everyone understands it this way. But I feel personally offended by that lack of perspective.
Hail Lucifer.
Edit: As the story unravels, I wrote the entirety of it.
You can read it here, mind you, it's rather long:
The Rainbow days of a Transgender - Pt. 1Hello my friends, watchers and random travellers who ended up in my realm. As you know (or not), recently I underwent my second, out of 2 planned, surgery for alleviation of the rather heavy gender dysphoria I have been experiencing pretty much all my life. I did promise to tell the story, the whole surgery saga, more in detail, but as it so happens, there are other things I would like to also tell here, so to speak to close this chapter of my life and finally open a new sheet. Because of that it took a bit longer than expected to put it together, apologies for that, and also grew a bit lengthy. Nevertheless, these are things that I have experienced over the years, that I went through in one form or another again the recent months, and that I have been aching for a long time to share. I decided to make it into a literature piece rather than a journal because some of these details are rather personal. Anyone can still read them, but I am not so keen on having them flat out on my front p
The Rainbow days of a Transgender - Pt. 2Continued from Pt. 1
THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL
The summer that followed was serene and for the most part happy, because I wasn't worrying too much of the second surgery just yet. I was enjoying life in a renewed body which suited me much better than before. There is no way to explain why having glands on your chest can be such a huge burden to an FtM transgender.... Just like there is no way to describe the joy of finally having them removed. Everything, from the simple joy of wearing your favourite metal band t-shirt without anything distorting the image, to the lightness and pleasantness of the new shape of your chest - and I was never to enjoy anything about my body shapes before. As bizarre as it sounds, I even find myself much more attractive than before - even if that's probably only in my own head, and even if I don't really even care about it. But it's there nevertheless! And care or not, it does feel good.
However.... once the summer was over,
Unhappy New Year
It's January 1 2021, and you are not going to hear a "Happy New Year" from me today. Instead, I will take the time to tell you why. As it so happens yet again, there are multiple reasons, each more disturbing than the other. Consider that last as a warning and a disclaimer before you read on. The world has been changed and since I no longer can stand the violent propaganda conventional news, I sometimes brush upon the things said by various people in my relatives' limited social media circles - you know, just to keep track of things a bit and to observe the thought lines of what I consider to be my enemy: the hooman society. Know the enemy, as they say, and I find it important to measure and gauge the mindsets and attitudes of said society, and in particular the certain kinds of insanity that run more and more rampant these days. That's partially a lie of course, I actually search for the voice of reason.... albeit seldom it is to be heard these days. And so the following
The Cancer upon Earth
WARNING. This will be hard. I won't spare what I think. Every once in a while I have to argue with someone about the fact that what humanity is doing to the rest of the world is absolutely atrocious. Even people who generally agree and dislike what humanity is doing, often find that I am too radical in my views and feel the need to argue in various ways in defence of their species - which is perfectly natural, I understand. I understand the natural need to defend yourself and your point of view. I understand the natural aversion to see oneself and as monster, as the villain, as the calamity that brings destruction. But while you're doing so, what you forget is to look from the point of view of the other Living Beings on Earth. Over the years I've grown the ability to do so. To look at this world through their eyes - not through the human. The world that is equally also theirs, yet they are never given the chance to decide its fate anymore. Through those sorrowful, painful eyes, what
Crime against Nature
In regards to what I mentioned the other day.... I want to share, as much as I feel absolutely disgusted with what happened and with writing it.... However.... take this seriously: WARNING: This is going to be ugly. DO NOT READ ON if you are sensitive for Nature and Life, or the environment, or get easily overwhelmed by the human crimes against Nature. I'm not joking, do not ignore that warning, do not read on if you take such things too heavily. I know I did and I regretted for a while that I even know. I live in Bulgaria near a small town next to the capital. The district mayor for a second mandate now is a fairly young man, an engineer from one of the patriot parties, who got to the post thanks to the support of people for raising his nomination for the elections. My family supported him too, because he sounded reasonable and well-meant. I withdraw any and all support for him years ago already because he seems to believe that trees can only get in the way - along streets and
To our Members
Greetings everyone! I would like to make a little announcement and address some points that have come up so far in discussions here in the Group.
News & Future Plans
Within the past couple of weeks we have been recruiting people into the Group. It goes a bit slow at times, since we discovered there's a limit to the number of pending invitations at any given time. I plan to go promoting the Group more actively once the vacation season (August) is over, since a lot of people are actually away now and there's a measurable decrease in traffic on DA altogether, which is normal and happens every year. So we are hoping the group can grow more r
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So you don't like the stereotypes that people attach to males and females?
Well, neather do I!
But your taking things too far here.
True gender is just the identification of the reproductive traits of a physical organism.
To say that you are neather male or female makes no sense.
...unless you are speaking in a mental or spiritual sense.
Well, neather do I!
But your taking things too far here.
True gender is just the identification of the reproductive traits of a physical organism.
To say that you are neather male or female makes no sense.
...unless you are speaking in a mental or spiritual sense.