Please won't you explain a bit more what you mean by saying ' a real transsexual', Sid?
Actual book title:
Real Men Don't Eat QuicheActual book title:
Real Women Don't Pump GasSo what about someone who eats quiche
and pumps gas? Do they just shimmer into non-existence?
C.S.Lewis wrote that people have two uses of the word "real" that are actually diametrically opposed to each other. I wish I could give you an accurate quote, but this was the sense of it: They will say of some great spiritual experience, "Oh, but all that
really happened is that you heard some music in a church." They've stripped away all the emotions and feelings, and reduced it to the mere physical facts. Then they will say, "It's all very well talking about the high dive when you're sitting here in an armchair, but wait until you get up there on the board and you'll see what it's
really like." And here they say that the bare physical bones of the experience (which you can easiliy grasp, sitting in your armchair) is not enough for understanding--you need all the impressions and feelings that go with the actual experience.
So what's a "Real Man" or a "Real Woman?" Damned if I know. But I did know that I had spent too much time being fake: doing what a Real Woman was supposed to do, rather than what
I wanted to do. Spending my life (to that point) being unable to trust my inner gut feelings about something as basic as which sex I belonged to did not do a thing to increase my self-confidence. So I decided that I wanted to stop being fake, and start being real. But that didn't include spending the next 30 years examining my every wish and desire to be sure it measured up to the Real Man criteria. I wanted to try being myself, whatever that might include. Ordinary woman, normal woman, ordinary man, normal man--these were not options that were available to me. I wasn't a Real Woman--Real Women don't have an inner conviction that there is a penis buried somewhere in their abdomen, and that at the
very next x-ray, it will be seen, and then brought to light, and they would say, "I knew it all along!" Could I be a Real Man? Does a Real Man have 28 years of memories of living as female? Has he tended himself through approximately 200 periods? Does he know what labor feels like? Did he take Home Ec in high school? And so that's why I decided that I was going to be a Real Transsexual.
I hope that rather long-winded discussion helps some.
And when you say you 'came out', what exactly did that mean? Come out as a FTM wannabe or as a gay man in a woman's body or what?
Ah, the good question! "When did you change, Sid?" Well, you saw the timetable back on page one. Where to I point to and say, "Right there!" It's a process--a journey as much as a destination. And what an interesting journey! But I digress.
In the summer of my 29th birthday, I had been reading books and articles, and thinking hard and honestly about my life, and I came to the conclusion that, yes, I believed I was male (which made me FTM TS). Along with this, I had to face the fact that I had a strong sexual attraction for men that I had been acting on for my entire adult life. (I also had an attraction to women, but I had never done anything about it at that point. Didn't feel equipped to satisfy a woman. {Yes, I know, and I knew then, too, but that's still what I
felt.}) Well, I dithered and agonized, and finally decided to put the whole thing on the shelf for 3-5 years, and see how I felt at the end of that period. If I still felt the same, I thought, I should probably "do something about it." But as soon as I made that decision, I had the sickening recollection that I had made that exact same decision before--more than once.
So in September of 1978, I acknowledged to myself that this thing was not going to go away. That, whatever I did about it, I would believe forever that I was really a guy. That's what I call my "coming out." I told my shrink, I told my husband, I told my mother. But the
real coming out for me was facing it myself.
Sorry if any of this is intrusive, it's just that I've so many of these questions free-floating in the back of my head for such a long time! But they were such off-limits, terrible kinds of thoughts, so off-the-wall, so twisted (I thought!) that I never dreamed I'd ever have the opportunity to actually acknowledge them outside my own head, let alone ask them of anyone!!
I know exactly what you mean by "off-limits, terrible kinds of thoughts, so off-the-wall, so twisted." That was I felt about this strange conviction that, under it all, I was a gay man.
