Meme thing again

[tgjerusalem.livejournal.com]

---So how did this all start and how did you end up here?
Met some other trans kids online when I was 13 or 14, started doing a lot of web research. Within a couple years I was definite about wanting to transition. I started using the name Mike online in middle school, and started using it at school in 10th grade. I'd planned to start T when I turned 18, but I was in high school and didn't have family support, so I didn't. I wasn't able to get it until the start of my senior year in college, two years ago.


---What is your plan to transition?---Are you aware that many transsexuals never live a "normal" female life and end up involved with other trans people and in the trans community for the duration of their lives?

So? ::shrug:: What the hell. Trans folk are good people. Besides, I hope to go into academia, and hopefully it'll just come across as another eccentricity.

---If you pass perfectly in 3 years, will you tell others about your past?

I haven't been mistaken for a woman in over a year now. I'm closeted at work, but at least I tell myself that's just because it's a very short term job as a painter until I start grad school next fall, and it's not worth the hassle and risk of outing myself. I'm out already to my grad school program, I mentioned it in one of may application essays.

---Why do you want to transition?

I was approaching total non-functionality before I started transition. I'm talking a serious basket case here. It's possible I might have been able to survive and had some kind of functional life if I'd adopted a very duty-bound attitude and found some kind of work to take over my life. Maybe become a nun or something. But I doubt that would have worked, and I was at the point of wanting to cry every morning because I had to get out of bed. I'm not a woman. Being seen as a woman was humiliating and isolating in ways I can't adequately describe. I can't live like that.

---What is your sexual orientation and how does your changing your gender effect that?

Bi, for lack of a better word. Queer as fuck is also a term I like. I'm not changing gender, I'm a man who was understandably but incorrectly assumed to be a woman for a long time. I wasn't interested in any kind of romantic involvement with anyone who was attracted to me while under the misconception that I was a woman, so becoming visibly a man has made it possible for me to start looking for partners.

---What will you do about employment? Do you plan to transition at work?

Right now, I work under the table and haven't bothered to tell my employer. In the future? Hopefully, I'll be out and working through grad school and eventually out while working as a professor. The Catholic Chaplain at my old school was also a professor, and an openly gay man. He wasn't dramatic about it, he was actually a quiet, painfully shy, mousy little 60 year old man, but ocassionally mentioned his gay rights work in class when it was relevant and would talk about it if you asked. That's how I hope to be.

---Are out to your friends and family? How are they reacting to your decision?

Friends rock. Friends are pretty much all queer, or are the kind of straight people who don't need explanation. I've made them all since I started college, they all knew I was trans right off. Family, not so much. We don't talk much anymore.

---What is your goal? After you go full-time will you pursue other surgeries?

I'm hoping I can get top surgery and a hysto in the next five years, though I have no idea where the money will come from. I have some ideas for piercings and other genital modifications, but no plans to go through genital surgery yet. It costs the earth and the restults suck. I'll stick with silicon for now and hope that by the time I have $30,000 to spend all at once better options are available.