My history with doctors is not good. I have suffered from various mysterious ailments over the years including extreme fatigue, violent nightmares and insomnia, seizures, period pain so excruciating that it knocks me unconscious, fainting, as well as the suicidal depression, paranoia, and heart-hammering anxiety. You know, hysterical woman kind of stuff. All of these problems have been belittled, dismissed, and not investigated by doctors. I have sat in doctors offices in tears of deep humiliation and shame as they have told me there’s nothing they can do and they’re sure it will go away soon. I have not been believed, or taken seriously, and my health has continued to decline to the point where I am unable to work to support myself. I have long since stopped trusting them or seeking help. A long time ago I burst into my doctor’s office crying “please, please help me, I can’t control my thoughts, I’ve been wandering for hours and I can’t go home alone tonight, because if I do I know I’ll kill myself”. They gave me some antidepressants (but didn’t diagnose me with depression) and sent me away. That night I tried to kill myself. They never followed it up. In my early twenties I asked to talk to someone about being raped as a child. They sent me to an untrained counsellor who could offer nothing but a sympathetic ear for three sessions, and then refused to refer me to anyone who might be able to actually help.

I know all about gatekeepers.

So it was with a heavy heart that I visited my doctor for a breast check up (still no cancer!). There was a new young doctor who saw me, and I hadn’t had any bad experiences with her yet, and she seemed nice and attentive (possibly her soul had not been burned out by the job yet). I decided that this was the best opportunity I was going to get, and told her I was definitely transgender, but needed counselling about it because I was unsure what I wanted to do about it (really I was unsure how my past was influencing my identity, and I needed to be sure, and I think subconsciously I was looking for ways to cope other than transition, which because of my mistrust of doctors scared the shit out of me). I tried to emphasise how absolutely certain I was, thinking that any hint of doubt would result in not being taken seriously, and then the only path to freedom I had found would be blocked to me. To my utter surprise she was very reassuring. There and then she referred me to the Gender Identity Clinic, saying that it had at least a year long wait, but they would counsel me there, and apologising that that was all she could offer. I left in a daze, I couldn’t believe it had been so easy. A year was too long to wait though, I needed to talk over these things urgently, it was really beginning to get to me not having anyone but my trans friends and online forums to help me sort through the tangled web of my thoughts and feelings.

I could not afford private counselling but looked around and found an LGBT charity who provided it for free. Perfect! I thought, they are fully trained and will know what they are talking about. I had quite a few sessions with my counsellor, and I can now say that she was utterly useless. Whenever I tried to bring up aspects of my past to examine whether they had made me dis-identify with my sex, she said “gender is innate, it doesn’t matter what happened in your past. Plenty of people are abused and it doesn’t make them become transgender. In fact you were probably so affected by sexism because you’re trans, while other girls didn’t notice as much. It probably wasn’t actually as sexist as you imagined, you were just uncomfortable with your assigned gender”. This made me feel like I couldn’t trust my own perceptions. She also told me “first you were a victim, then you were a survivor, but now you need to move past your identity as a survivor and become just a person who is open to anything”, but I was only just beginning to come to terms with the idea that I was a survivor, because I had only just moved into a space where the things I had survived were in the past. I wondered if perhaps there was any way I could get out of being trans, any other explanation, but she was very clear that “the fact that you even questioned whether you are trans, the fact that you wanted to be a boy as a child and had short hair, that you are so uncomfortable with femininity, that you identified with male characters, that you crossdress, that your life has been so difficult for reasons that aren’t readily apparent, all mean that you are definitely trans and always have been, and always will be. You can’t get out of it, it’s the core of your true self” all this was put to me in the vein of joyfully embracing and celebrating the wonder of diversity, not letting the side down by being a closet case with internalized transphobia, and finally taking my place among a loving community that would welcome me with open arms and stand up for me against the outside world, where I would finally be free to be my true self. It was very attractive, when nothing else was on offer. It was also a lot of pressure, I had become responsible for representing not just myself, but also my community, and the ideology the community subscribed to.

The idea of medical transition was becoming a sword hanging over my head, an inevitability, a rite of passage I had to pass through to become a true adult, a recognisable human being. I did not so much want it as felt like it was impossible to live in this limbo wasteland state for the rest of my life, now that I knew I was trans. The promised land was on the other side of transition, and I was piss scared.

Some months afterwards I got my psych appointment with ~The Gatekeeper~ I had to pass before in order to reach the Gender Identity Clinic. I saw him as an adversary who I must trick, and not show any weakness to. As we all know, gatekeepers are only there to stop trans people from accessing the treatment they need to live. I had been heavily coached by my friends on what to say.

It was so easy, I didn’t even need to bend the truth much. In fact the whole process was incredibly easy. I have never in my life been facilitated along the way so readily, and with such respect, as I experienced along the transgender pathway. I cannot imagine the life of privilege someone must have led in order to consider this process as a hostile establishment throwing obstacles in their way. I showed him pictures from my childhood, where I was wearing boy’s clothing, and pictures from my teens, with my scrubbed face and tee-shirts and jeans. He asked if I had ever enjoyed playing with barbie dolls, I told him no. He asked how I felt about dresses and makeup, I told him truthfully that I find them humiliating and uncomfortable, and feel like I am dressed in drag. He was very impressed by this. I did not tell him how I feel about my body, because he was a man and I’m not comfortable talking about my intimate parts with men, so the diagnosis was transgenderism, not gender dysphoria. His report was laughable, composed entirely of shallow stereotypes. My friends celebrated my success and progress, I felt hollow.

Now my way was clear to the Gender Identity Clinic, although he had been late and delayed me by at least half a year. My friends railed at his incompetence, proof that they didn’t care about us and were all out to get us, but I was secretly relieved. I had learned that the GIC doesn’t counsel you, they expect you to have sorted yourself out before you arrive there, ready to transition. I think, very subconsciously, I wanted someone with some sort of authority to stop me, to really see me, to tell me that being trans was not the only way to interpret my life or move forward, to offer me another way out, but they just kept ‘helping’ me and respecting my identity rather than my experience, which I would not tell them for fear that this was the only help I was ever going to get. I could not say this was not what I wanted or I had made a mistake, even to myself, how would anyone ever listen to me or take me seriously ever again? I knew the costs of not being taken seriously very well.

I was, by now, beginning to pass in public, at least until I opened my mouth. I went to visit my family and could not hide my change in dress, so I came out to them. They took it extremely well, thankfully. I was not passing as an adult, but as a teenage boy, which was deeply humiliating. I brought this up to my friends, but obviously the answer was starting hormones, which would lower my voice, give me facial hair, and redistribute my musculature. I wondered about this. Would it redistribute my musculature enough that I could go up a size in clothing, even without the mass of my breasts, or would I be stuck in children’s clothes and short sleeves for the rest of my life? I carry much less weight on my hips and thighs than many women, there really isn’t any padding there at all to be lost, and yet the skeletal structure makes my hips wide. How was that going to change? It wasn’t, and neither was my height. I was wearing makeup to contour my face and darken my brows, to try and appear more masculine (just until I transitioned, of course), and realised I was wearing more makeup and felt more insecure without it than at any other point in my life, except when I tried out weaponized femininity, and I really hadn’t liked it then either.

I was having trouble bringing myself to use the men’s toilets, I would feel extreme anxiety and often come close to having a panic attack. The answer to this too was transition, so I would look more like a man and therefore feel safer. Every time I managed it I felt a rush of achievement, I did not realise that in living this way I was constantly triggering my trauma, and the rush was not actually achievement but relief at having escaped from a situation that felt incredibly threatening and dangerous to me. I did not realise that I didn’t have to be putting myself in these situations, I did not realise that these situations were probably not as dangerous as they felt, and I was attributing the feelings of danger to the fact that I was trans and the world was so dangerous for trans people. Every time I was scared, nervous, or uncomfortable, it was not my own subjective reaction, it was evidence that the world really was a dangerous place for trans folk. The only way to be safe was to pass.

One incident that stood out happened when I wasn’t feeling up to going into the men’s toilet and went into the women’s instead. Every time I did this I felt like an enormous failure, not just to myself, but the entire trans community. Everything I did had become either a success or a failure, seen entirely in terms of gender and passing. This time when I came out of the stall there was a little girl of about eight washing her hands. She was alone. When she spotted me she gasped and flattened herself against the wall, then fled. The tap was still running. I stood there shocked, she had obviously taken me for a man, and I had seen the look of fear upon her face. I knew that look from my own child face, I knew the exact fear that she had felt, and I had now been the cause of it in a child. I felt a deep stab of shame. I had violated her boundaries, I should not be in the women’s bathroom. I could not go back, there was no island of safety to return to without harming another. I had to transition, it was the only way out of this fog, this cloud of fear.

I related the incident to my friends, hoping they could shed some light on the continuing disquiet I felt. “Haha, silly little bitch, I wonder how she would have reacted to me?” they said. “It’s so sad that kids pick up transphobia so young” they said. “Think of it this way, you passed when you weren’t even trying! You’re so lucky, I’m jealous, teehee” they said.

“What were you even doing in the women’s toilets? I would never go in the men’s” they said. “Well I’ve been raped, I’m scared of men” I blurted, before I even knew that was the answer. In the shocked silence, Helen, one of the cis wives who occasionally came along and sat quietly in the corner, reached out and put her hand over mine. She gave me a look of such understanding, compassion, and solidarity, that no words needed to be spoken. I squeezed her hand in gratitude and she nodded.

“Men can be raped” recovered Megan, as if to reassure me that I had not been unmanned. “In fact trans people are raped at a much higher rate than anyone else. God, it makes me so angry! Poor you.” But I was not a man when I was raped, and did not look like one. I was a woman in my twenties with long hair, I was a little girl in the frilly dress my mother made me wear. The conversation turned to all the ways trans people, and especially trans women, are raped and abused. Helen and I shared another look, and I’m not sure what we communicated, but we understood each other perfectly.

I had always wanted to know about how my friends came to identify as transgender, but whenever I had tried to tentatively broach the subject they all deflected. The group atmosphere discouraged revealing any personal details we didn’t want to, which I had previously found refreshing, but now I really wanted to know. I think all the logical inconsistencies were beginning to get to me, and I wanted to have some deeper conversation about the thing that we all had in common to make it all make sense. They didn’t want to talk about it and got quite defensive and hostile, so I backed down, but became watchful in a way I hadn’t been before.

I discovered over time that none of my friends had ever really faced any discrimination. They were all white and in good jobs that had not suffered because of their trans status. With the exception of one, the people in their lives had been supportive. I was surprised, and contrasted this with my own unemployment and isolation. Their experiences did not match the trans narrative they were always talking about. With careful questioning they revealed that most of them had female partners who were completely supportive, and had done all the behind the scenes work that women do so that their partners are free of any other responsibility and can succeed in these good careers. None of them were aware of the dynamic, even as they described it, but I knew it like the back of my hand.

Rachel went into an impassioned rant about how awful affirmative action was. Women could achieve anything they wanted, and the only reason there were less of them in leadership positions was because women had different priorities from men and weren’t as confident. I asked why she thought that, and what part she thought upbringing and historical power imbalances played in this, and was told that the lack of confidence was because women were naturally less aggressive than men. She ignored the social structure bit. None of them had ever experienced misogyny, or even knew what it looked like. They mistook the internal pressure to pass they felt as sexist scrutiny of their appearances coming from the outside. They told me I could not possibly feel this pressure as I was a man, and men were not judged for their appearance.

In fact they all seemed completely incapable of extrapolating from their own experiences to empathize with mine. I saw our situations as equivalent and could easily empathize with them. Rachel often said that my insights about being trans really resonated with her, and wondered how I came by them, but it was obvious to me that they were experiencing similar things to me but just coming from the opposite direction. I seemed to mystify them though. How could I possibly want to be a guy? Being a woman was clearly so much better and had no drawbacks. Why on earth did trans men want to grow facial hair? Cue a half hour discussion of how annoying hair removal was. I tried to say isn’t it self evident? Can’t you imagine why someone with gender dysphoria who is trying to pass would want the features of the gender they identify with? But they all looked at me with blank, uncomprehending faces as if what I was saying was utterly alien to them. It was maddening, as in I felt like I was going mad.

There was a lot of sexism from the fully transitioned transwomen who dropped in periodically. They talked shit about cis women all the time, like “this bitch I know is pretending to be supportive but the other day she wanted to help me with my makeup. Ugh! Like bitch, please!”, “I know! Cis women are so manipulative, she was only trying to undermine your confidence and make you feel like you’re not as good as her!”. The motivations they ascribed to women were unrecognisable to me. Well, from women, anyway. There was a lot of “now I’m on estrogen I’ve totally lost my ability to park, teeheehee! I understand other women so much better now, life is so hard for us”, “you’d better find a boyfriend and he can do it for you!”. There was also a lot of violent talk about smacking men in the faces for small sleights, and I realised they felt entitled to speak like that because they were women, and women weren’t really violent of course, so it’s empowering. There was a lot of co-opting of the idea that aggressive and sexually provocative = terrible in a man but empowering and justified in a woman (a trans woman, anyway). They went to see that Tangerine movie and when I asked what it was about all they could talk about was how there had been these two trans girls, and one of their boyfriends had cheated, so the trans girls had kidnapped that cis slut and dragged her all over town, and beaten the shit out of her, it was so great! Why hadn’t they beaten the cheating boyfriend I asked, at a loss for what else to say. Because he was her man, while that bitch had it coming, was the answer.

They talked all the time about flirting with men to get what they wanted, like hitching up their skirt to show thigh and outright propositioning and what sounded like sexually harassing men, even though they were “lesbians” and had female partners. I wondered how much of this was distinctly “unladylike” bragging and exaggeration. In fact I couldn’t help noticing I’d encountered all these behaviours and attitudes before from a certain group within society…

I didn’t want to be around them, but that was very hard to admit to myself as it was so disloyal to my community (by now the only community I felt would ever accept me), and started leaving early whenever one of them arrived.

One day it all tipped over. Michelle was talking about how fun and exciting it would be to be groped by a stranger she had seen “eyeing her up”. Literally every woman in my family has been groped more than once, from my great aunt to my niece to me. It is something I have found out gradually over the years in secret, whispered moments, each too ashamed to speak about it openly. “You wouldn’t like it if it happened to you” I snapped. Michelle glared, but then laughed as someone commented “you would if the guy was hot!”, and they relaxed into a discussion about how guys just couldn’t help themselves around a transwoman’s hotness, and if they really became a nuisance you could just punch them in the face. They had no conception or respect for what it is like growing up female in this world.

Later we were finally having a conversation about puberty. People were saying how harrowing it had been when hair grew on their chest, when their voice broke, and I chimed in with when I got my period. Michelle hissed at me and stormed off, “what is her problem?” I said. They all looked at each other in a way that suggested everyone but me knew what her problem was, and they were deciding who should tell me. “Look” said Megan, “It’s not easy for her, you’re so lucky, you have everything she wants and you don’t appreciate it”. I was floored. “How could she possibly want what I have?” I asked, “I have dysphoria just like she does, I could be jealous that she has everything I want, but I’m not, it doesn’t make sense”. They all looked uncomfortable, like I was being obtuse. I felt like my brain was melting. “Well yeah” said Megan, “but you’re still luckier than her. You’re a guy, you have male privilege, you don’t have to deal with sexism like us women”. Everyone else nodded sagely as if this was obvious and I was being quite dense.

“What?” I said, as the world fell away from me and cold shock trickled up my back.

It was kindly and patiently explained to me that I could not, and had never, experienced any misogyny, because I was a man, completely indistinguishable from a cis man. That patriarchy was set up to benefit me, I could not deny that I had grown up with male privilege, and if I tried to it was just a sign of this privilege. That men like me oppressed trans women like them. That they often felt I was talking too much and taking up too much space within the group, but were too nice to say anything about it.

This is why I wrote out my history for you, so you could see, because I cannot articulate what I felt in that moment.

It was the silencing I have always encountered, that when I reach for the language to define my own experience there are no common concepts I can use to make others understand. That others can look right through me, and collectively decide that I am something that does not reflect the truth of me at all, and my truth is rendered invisible. That my existence is a lie, just because others choose to not believe me. That they have all the power to define what is real and important, and I have none. You know which ‘others’ I am speaking of.

I thought about the word ‘nice’. I had thought of my friends as nice all throughout this experience, but had they ever actually been nice to me? I did not have much experience of people being nice to me to compare it to. I thought of them as nice because they thought of themselves as nice, and I had been trained my entire life to accept other people’s self definitions over how they were actually treating me, especially men’s.

Looking back now I cannot tell you why I put up with all of this. There is nothing that chaps my ass as much as sexism, but my mind kept on going “but…they’re women” and I had heard a lot of sexism directed at women by women before. It took a long time to be able to admit to myself that this was completely different. Besides which, they seemed to have absolutely no awareness that what they were saying was sexist, and it was so easy to get drawn into seeing things their way when my center was so shaky, my social training so conducive to that, and everyone seemed to be experiencing it as fun girl talk, except me.

I think I was so beaten down and starved of human contact, and my self esteem was so low, that even though a lot of it offended me to the core I believed I would never find any other friendship ever again. I mistook the hope and buzz at having finally found a place to belong for enjoyment, and it wasn’t all bad. I believed that I could not get out of being transgender, that once I had decided I was, I was stuck with it forever, after all, according to trans ideology it’s an innate and immutable core identity. I believed I was damned to this life, basically. I believed that any discomfort on my part was just a sign of me being too sensitive, and I needed to work on myself to get better at coping. I put up with things I should not have put up with, like a kicked dog, believing I deserved no better than these scraps.

What a downer ending! Don't worry, after vastly underestimating how long this would turn out to be I have pretty much reached the end, I will write (hopefully) only one more part to cover how I got myself out of this pickle, and what I concluded from it. Thanks to everyone who has been following and commenting!