I’m not proud of my past, but I do own it and hope others can learn from it
MAJOR CWs for trans violence. I’m not proud of what I did in my past, but I’m sharing it in the hopes that others can learn from it. Also CWs for dysphoria, genital mentions, discussion of transphobia and misogyny.
I grew up during the 80s and 90s, and while there have been trans people well before then, and even some who had been able to transition through hormones and surgery, it was a topic that was not discussed. Being gay/lesbian was barely a topic that could be brought up by the time I was 10, and even then not without a lot of stigma and bigotry against those people due to the HIV/AIDS crisis on top of the lies told about them that we’re now seeing pushed on trans people. If you were trans you either kept in the closet, or you were rich enough to be able to disappear and come back a different person. In some cases you tried to be out without doing that, but that was only in very select locations in the USA and even then not without a lot of pushback.
I realized I wasn’t a girl by the time I was 8, but I had no word to describe what I felt. I just thought I was a boy with “different parts” and was confused when people kept saying I was a girl. For the longest time I legit thought that I peed from my clitoris because it was my super tiny penis. It wasn’t because I didn’t have any sex education, because my parents saw to it that I received age appropriate sex education from a young age, it was just that my brain decided that my clitoris was my penis and that was that.
When I had my first period I thought something was very wrong with me, even though I’d been told I would have one “because I’m a girl” (again, brain went and decided they were just using the wrong words). Then when I started growing breasts it became even worse because my brain was telling me that boys aren’t supposed to have breasts! But like before, couldn’t talk about it because I didn’t have the words nor the feeling that I could safely come out.
In fact, I didn’t even know trans men existed until I was well into adulthood. I only knew of transgender women and “butch” women (many of whom were mislabled and were in fact transgender men) so I just thought I was broken and that something was wrong with me. I developed SEVERE transphobia because of this…
