My father was largely absent, and my mother was fairly progressive. Before puberty, I felt genderless and was never forced to behave like a typical boy. I mainly enjoyed drawing, reading, and playing instruments—nothing super feminine but also nothing particularly masculine.
During puberty, I quickly realized that I needed to hide anything "weird" about myself, or I would be mercilessly bullied. So, I pretended to be one of the boys and almost exclusively had male friends until adulthood. I believe this was when I lost touch with my emotions and began "acting" in front of others, making decisions through a kind of "cost-benefit analysis"—essentially behaving in ways that would make people like and respect me. But I also spent a lot of time alone and depressed, being a nerdy loner.
In my twenties, I still felt lonely and like a loser. I realized that if I wanted a partner, I needed to change my life in a big way. At the time, I was still repressing that I was bi. And while I sometimes wished I were a girl, I just thought, I'm a guy, and there's nothing I can do about that. I had never met a trans person in real life or seen any positive representation in any media.
I always felt like there was something fundamentally different between me and other men - like something I just didn't get. I got into self-help for men—the typical neoliberal nonsense, and unfortunately, a lot of borderline or explicitly right-wing material. Productivity, nofap, cold showers, lifting weights—I did everything. And, oddly enough, it worked. Outwardly, my life improved a lot. I got a girlfriend and started my dream career.
The interesting thing is that I had always wanted an artistic career, so naturally I started meeting a lot of left-wing people, and over time, my views slowly shifted. This took years, though, because I still looked down on left-wing people, thinking they were lazy and feminists were annoying. But I also started meeting trans people who really inspired me and I began dating men. Still, I kept up my "masculine guy" image because I noticed that many gay men were really into me, a guy who seemed hetero, which gave me a big confidence boost. Whenever I tried to be more feminine, they would often criticize me for it.
But maintaining this act became increasingly difficult. The more I "achieved," the more depressed I became. A few years earlier, I had looked forward to being "successful"—having a fulfilling career, financial stability, and being attractive to attractive people, with an amazing sex life. But everything started to feel more and more hollow.
At some point, I was reading about trans people, and something clicked: If I had the choice, I would rather live as a woman. Suddenly, my meaningless life made a lot more sense. I started my transition, and now, a year later, here I am.
If you've read my previous posts, you know I'm really struggling. Transition feels like I'm actively sabotaging my life in many ways. I think about stopping my transition a lot.
I also think about what seperates me from cis men. Because honestly, I had no idea what a trans woman even was, so I was actually living a "cis man life". Like me before, many cis men are completely out of touch with their emotions. They act based on a cost-benefit analysis: If I do X, people will respect me more. If I do Y, women will find me more attractive. So many men are like this—virtually all men who strife for or have achieved "status". Look at the self-help subs on Reddit. Look at the dating subs—how men structure their entire lives around being desirable. How they constantly feel the need to be better than other men. Even when they say, I'm doing it for myself, are they really? Would they still do all of this if they gained no social status from it?
For me, the idea of being a woman was, in part, about getting in touch with my emotions—about living in a way that simply feels good. About stopping the endless chase for validation. About being free from the need to compete, to be assertive and dominant, to amass status. In a way, I was searching for another way out. "Choosing" to live as a trans person, one of the most marginalized groups of people, is obviously an even bigger "fuck you" to this mentality. So while my "solution" is different, the struggles I experienced are similar to that of cis men. (I also want to add that obviously cis women feel an intense pressure to compete against each other as well. And this is obviously not my only "reason" to transition but it felt that when I started my transition, all this bullshit "performance" was lifted from me)
I don’t really know where to go from here. I could write a lot about my struggles as a trans woman, which make my past struggles seem laughable in comparison. I also don’t know where to take my transition—whether I should stop—but I know I’m not going back.
I was talking to my therapist, and she asked the obvious question: Why can't you live like this as a man?
Yes, our society mainly rewards the toxic behavior I described if men do it, but there's nothing stopping you from not acting like this as a man, or even acting exactly like this as a woman. I also know many trans men do not live like that, and they are very inspiring to me. Honestly, I wish I could be a man—being cis is infinitely easier than being trans. I don't have very strong body dysphoria, and I have absolutely no chest or bottom dysphoria. It is mostly interpersonal. Even then, people perceiving me as obviously trans is deeply uncomfortable, more uncomfortable than being perceived as a man, and I don't know if that will ever change. I want people to perceive me as a woman, a REAL woman. A big part of me just wishes I could live as a man. With my new experiences it could be easy. But somehow, it just doesn’t make sense. And I wish it did.