Life in Denial

The key point of living in denial is the fact that you do not know that you are living in denial. You learn to ignore the mains hum of discomfort and not even hear it anymore. The problem is, it’s still there, but it will never go away unless you acknowledge it, face it, and learn to accept it for what it is.

I knew from when I was small that I felt wrong being a girl. I was what some people might call a tomboy, or others might just call unfeminine. I only had boys as friends and didn’t really play with dolls unless it was playing hospitals with my male cousin. I made up an alter-ego who was a male superhero. I was into computers and Star Trek and Doctor Who and made go-carts out of my dolls prams. Nobody ever said that I was trans or non-binary, I was just expected to grow out of it.

When I was about 13, I knew I wanted to be a boy. I had my hair cut short and even when it was longer I felt like I should look like Jason Donovan or Pat Sharpe, when I had it short, people told me I looked like Princess Diana, which they thought was a compliment. I used to always wear denim Sherpa jackets, and oversized T-Shirts usually with Sci-Fi logos on them. They were especially baggy because I was embarrassed about growing breasts.

I did seek help not just from my doctor but from my school counselor, neither of whom were helpful. My doctor told me that I was ‘a pretty girl, and I should just go and get on with my life’, and my school counselor told me that it was just a phase, and in a couple of years I’d have a baby and I’d forget I’d ever said it. I even tried to talk to people at the Brethren assembly who had a strictly complementarian view about gender roles. I put a lot of stock in what these people said because it meant that I must be wrong.

I use to think that the Lord had a purpose in making me female, and that finding my identity in Christ would stop these feelings. I rationalized it that God made me female because I would have been a bad man, someone like my dad, an aggressive and sour bully. But I also didn’t like the way that being female cut me out of the faith I was so eager to cling to and it lost me friends, including my dearest cousin who I had grown up with, as they didn’t want him to associate with females. Neither were women allowed to speak or even read the notices in the meetings, instead having to wear headscarves and remain silent.

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I strongly believed that once I got into my twenties my body clock and hormones would kick in and I’d be desperate for a baby. Even my mum believed that I had a built-in maternal instinct, which had somehow manifested itself in my brushing my guinea pigs. However, I never saw guinea pigs as substitute babies, I just liked them as pets, I do not think there was anything maternal about it. I shied away from getting into girly talks about babies etc because I didn’t feel I could fake interest in something which I couldn’t relate to. I also ignored letters from the doctor regarding smears etc, because it was reinforcing the idea that I was biologically female, and that made me uneasy.

Getting a nose job in my twenties was something I thought would fix my dysphoria. I did have body dysmorphia which was focused on this feature because I got bullied at school over it. I wonder tho, how much of this was down to having to achieve a feminine standard of beauty, and whether nobody would have been bothered by it had I been AMAB. Once I got my nose fixed, I could experiment more with dressing up and wearing makeup, and I tried my best to be a glamour puss, even cultivating an identity as a ‘opera diva’. People used to tell me how nice my boobs were and what a great figure I had, and how beautiful my voice was, but instead of being proud, I felt empty. These were such gendered, hyper-feminine things I had cultivated, and the identity still didn’t fit with how I felt inside.

I invested a lot in my ‘opera diva’ identity, and I feel a bit foolish because of it. I had wanted to study music technology at university but I felt pushed out by the ‘old boys club’. I switched my modules to performance and underwent a lot of vocal training, because I had seen the kudos other girls got at uni for this, and I wanted some of the same respect. I had to work hard at it, but I not only got my degree, but I got 100% for my performance diploma and got to study in Italy with a top-flight baritone. I thought I was doing the right thing, and I thought I wanted this, but deep down, something felt off about it.

Being a Prima Donna was a way I thought I could make being female work. I thought I would be strong and be respected. I wanted to sing the highest notes and the most dramatic arias. I could play the glamour model role, but it was just a costume for me. I did a bit of work as a magician’s assistant, where I was put under the spotlight as a ‘sex object’ but it was false advertising. I knew I could never submit to sex, not even for fun because my gender dysphoria made me unable to take the female role. I managed to hide this for a long time and laugh it off, but I could not acknowledge it. I tried going on the pill and sought out herbal remedies like ginkgo biloba which I thought would magically give me a sex drive and make me ‘normal’ but it didn’t work. The pill just made me emotional and erratic, and ginkgo did nothing.

Dating has been hard for me. My mum always thought that I was some kind of ‘man hater’ or that I was afraid of them because I didn’t go courting, but that was never the case. She always used to say, ‘there are nice men, you know, they aren’t all braggarts!’

Of course, I know. When I found a man ‘attractive’, it was really because he was someone who I wished I could be like. Mum couldn’t understand this attraction was about looking for a role model, and not sexual attraction. David Bowie and the young Peter Gabriel are great examples. Secondly, even having a relationship with a ‘nice’ man, there would have been pressure put on me to be the woman in the relationship, and I found that deeply uncomfortable. If he was a red blooded cis-het man, I would not be able to give him what he wanted no matter how ‘nice’ he was. I imagined myself as the hat-wearing Brethren wife, and I knew I couldn’t go thru with it.

I started a horrendous relationship with a man with a disability for this very reason, which is one of the things I regret doing the most. He was a musician and songwriter, so we had a lot in common, and we got over attached very quickly. I hoped I could live my dream of having a recording studio and making music, which had been my life’s ambition. I was still very hung up on the idea of being a glamorous opera singer at the time, and that colored my perception somewhat. What I could never accept was the true reason I wanted a relationship with him was because of my gender dysphoria and fear of weakness. Because of his illness, I felt more evenly matched and knew he couldn’t overpower me, so I felt safe. I only ever wanted an asexual relationship, but things got out of hand and misread, which brought our friendship to an abrupt end.

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Part of me still misses him. It took that heartbreak to really reevaluate my life. I felt awful about him for several years, but even tho I tried to date again, I knew something was wrong, and it was me.

It was only in the last couple of years I came across the term ‘asexual’. I didn’t know how common this was. I also mistakenly thought that nearly everyone was heterosexual, which I too was wrong about. And finding that I was not the only person who experienced this deep discomfort with living as the gender I was born was very comforting.

My story is an almost textbook account of how trans and NB people learn to hide behind false images and pretend they are happy when they aren’t. You just push it down inside you and make excuses, anything from your class, financial status, failed relationships or personal circumstances can be blamed rather than just owning up to it, and facing the reality that it’s gender which is the issue.