Academia

It’s not easy being smart.

Academics are a really big part of my life. I have never gotten anything less that the highest marks possible on a report card, and I’m one of four contenders for valedictorian in my Class of 2010. Right now, my cumulative GPA is somewhere in the 4.6 range (we can get a 5.0 for an honors or AP class if we get a 96% or higher). I’m taking every honors or AP class that I can possibly get my hands on.

Even if I wasn’t personally driven to accomplish everything I can academically, it wouldn’t be practical for me to do anything else. I’m going to get exactly zero financial help from my parents when it comes to college—they haven’t saved anything for me. That means it’s pretty much scholarship or bust. I’ve got a lot of dreams for my future—I want to go to college in London, for one—but I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford it. If I can get a full ride, that’s going to make my life a lot easier.

Anyway, to the point that prompted this entry: Exhaustion. Next week is exam week, and 75% of the exams I’ll be taking are in honors classes. Remembering obscure formulas from the beginning of Honors Chemistry is going to be delightful, I’m sure, ditto on names from American History. I’m so bad with names, it isn’t even funny. I have high averages in all of my classes, and the chances of me dropping below that all-important 96% in any of them are low, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be stressing over them until I have my report card in my hand.

With competition for valedictorian so close (we’re all within 0.05 of each other, if I recall), one mistake is all it would take to lose it, and right now, getting valedictorian is probably the biggest goal I have for myself. Next year is going to be a nightmare—if my scheduling works out, I’ll have four AP classes and four Honors classes. I will probably suffer a nervous breakdown at least once, but it’s what I’ve got to do.

Wish me luck.

Shopping and Sadness

Shopping has become peculiar for me since I’ve admitted that I’m a transsexual.

On one hand, it’s absolutely delightful for me to be able to shop for the things that I’d like to look at. I don’t have to stay in the men’s section looking at clothes I have absolutely no enthusiasm anymore. Going with my friends—Krista and Lindsey, especially—is a really liberating experience. They’re my best friends—with the obvious exception of my girlfriend, Kate—and they have been nothing but supportive of me since I came out to them. If I have something I want to try on, I’ll have them tell me if it’s too over the top, or just simply doesn’t work.

Conversely, shopping for feminine clothing kind of sucks, to be honest. There are so many things that I’d love to wear that are off-limits for safety purposes—dresses, skirts, shoes, purses, anything with lace, most items in pink or with floral patterns, et cetera. Even in a perfect world, where I wouldn’t have to worry about being the victim of discrimination due to how I dress, shopping would still be bittersweet.

Men and women are built differently. I couldn’t fill out a lot of the really great clothes that I see—I don’t have the chest, or the hips, or I have too much shoulder, things like that. That’s the underlying problem with transsexuality—for most people, the problem it presents cannot be fixed by normal means. I mean, there are surgeries, but obviously those are far too expensive and serious for a teenager. I could stuff (I have experimented with this in private, with moderate success), but then you’re back to the discrimination issue. Getting beaten up is not high on my list of things to do, and I know there are people who would do that.

There are a lot of problems in this world. Most of them can be overcome with hard work. Having the wrong body is not one of them. I’m in fairly good shape, it’s just the wrong shape; no amount of exercise is going to make my chest grow. Whenever I’m feeling depressed—and that does happen several times a week, I’m sorry to say—these kinds of issues are usually to blame.

Statistically, about 50% of transsexuals will have a suicide attempt by the time they are 18, if I recall the studies correctly. I’ve spoken out against suicide to my friends for as long as I can remember, and I still don’t believe that it solves problems. Still, there are times when I can understand why that statistic is so high. Sex-change operations are not cheap, and they are far from perfect. To a lot of people, they seem out of reach. Being stuck in the wrong body for the rest of one’s life is an extremely depressing thought. I try not to dwell on it, but some nights are just bad.

One day at a time.

Going Straight

I got a hair straightener today!

This is quite exciting. My hair wasn't exactly curly or anything, but it had a tendency to flip out at the sides, and it was definitely frizzy. Hair straightener should take care of that nicely. It even came with a "Lusterizing Cream," as the container puts it, which should help de-friz and protect it from heat damage.

I won't be posting pictures of myself for anonymity purposes, but rest assured, my hair is distinctly more feminine than it was a few days ago. I started parting it a bit to the side, which makes it curl around my jaw pretty nicely. Credit goes to my friend Krista (name changed) for inspiring the part-alteration.

Boys Don't Cry

I just watched “Boys Don’t Cry” for the first time. One-sentence summary for anyone who hasn’t seen it: A FTM passing himself off as a man is found out, and subsequently brutally raped and murdered by his former friends.

I believe that this might be the first time that I’ve been fundamentally, genuinely scared in a long, long time. Like, I can be startled, or I can worry about the future, but that’s not really scared—I can’t remember ever feeling a fear like this. It gets into my heart and my chest and my shoulders and my throat—it says to me, “Alexandria, that could be you.” Fear of what could happen to me as a transsexual just made me break down crying (what an appropriate film title it turned out to be).

I know we’ve come a long way since the 1990s, when the film is set, but all it takes is one crazy, intolerant person, and we (as a society) are not anywhere near truly accepting anyone in the LGBT community. Mob mentality and its implications frighten me, too—if one person picks on the little transwoman, it must be okay, right?

Sorry for this post being a downer—I really meant for my first post-history-explaining one to be upbeat. I’ll get around to it, I promise. I just needed to get that out.

The History of my Gender Identity

"If you want to know who you are, it's important to know who you've been." – Jadzia Dax, DS9: “Equilibrium”

I haven’t always been transsexual, or, at least, I haven’t always been aware of it. It was a relatively gradual process of exploration, denial, acceptance, and everything in-between.

When I was young, I was a pretty normal little boy—I might not have been particularly fond of playing in the mud or wrestling, and I might have been a little prone to the emotional side, but by and large I was unremarkable in the gender identity realm. About the most feminine thing I did was play with an Easy Bake Oven (lot of good that did me, I still have trouble making macaroni and cheese).

Looking back, I suppose the first signs that something was unusual about me were in elementary school, though at the time I didn’t have even the slightest idea of what a transsexual was, being a very sheltered child. I was identified as gifted from a young age, which—let’s face it—is an area traditionally dominated by girls. I’m not saying that there weren’t smart guys, but realistically, it was generally the girls who were smarter and the guys who were rough and wild.

I most definitely fell into the category of “reads a lot, last picked for sports teams, not many friends, smarter than pretty much everyone, quiet,” that sort of thing. Interestingly, I almost exclusively had male friends during my elementary years, a polar opposite of myself now. Personality wise, I was quite kind, for the most part—I distinctly remember being the only one who was worried about a widely disliked girl when she fell at recess. I was just really, really quiet.

Enter middle school. Not much of note happened here, at least in terms of transsexuality. I started to branch out and make more female friends. This is probably because middle school is where all those cute little kids start growing up and developing distinct personalities, and I usually found myself on the side of the girls. I wasn’t into sports, and I was in any honors classes that they offered, most of which were female-dominated.

Now, eighth grade (last year of middle school in this area) is where it gets interesting. I believe it was around this time that I started exploring my sexuality. The easiest way for me to do this was—you guessed it—on the Internet. At first, I just went onto chat rooms as a girl (I’ll be honest with myself here) to get a thrill. I built myself a little persona and everything; of course it was completely unrealistic, but then again, everyone exaggerates in chat rooms.

Probably in the middle of eighth grade or so I started playing Star Wars Galaxies. Playing as a female seemed like a logical choice at the time, because I’d noticed the vast differences in the way that one was treated as a girl while goofing around on Runescape (don’t worry, I’ve left that cesspool far behind). What I wasn’t expecting was how much easier it was to be a female. I felt like I could be as social as I wanted, talk however I wanted, and for the first time, people wanted to talk back to me. It wasn’t just a set of business “you get me this material, I’ll give you this” relationships anymore, I got to know people, and it was wonderful.

“Liberated” is too weak a word to describe what being myself felt like. I didn’t need to participate in dull combat anymore; I could be an entertainer/crafter and not be ridiculed, playing the social game for all it was worth and then some. I made great connections with a lot of people, and as far as they were concerned, I was just another twenty-something girl playing the game along with them. I made sure to keep my persona consistent—I was another person entirely online.

While playing SWG, I formed a very close relationship with another player. Like myself, the player was a man with a female avatar, but that didn’t matter to me. As far as we were concerned, we were both females—I’ll admit that I lied and said that I was female in real life, but in a way, I suppose that was true. To this day, I don’t really know what that relationship was—whether it was between two men, two women, a man and a woman, or something else entirely. Whatever it was, it was wonderful, and I have always regretted the way that I ended it. To be frank: I flipped out. I was ashamed of what I was doing, I was terrified that my secret would come out, so I sent that player an in-game email with some excuse about paying the rent, and promptly deleted the character and canceled my account. As far as that player knows, I really was the person I passed myself off as—I never told them the truth. There’s more to this story, but that’s not for this blog post. Maybe later.

Anyway, after the SWG incident, I went into denial for about a year or so. I was consciously telling myself that I was a guy, that I was meant to be a guy, that my jaunt as a female was wrong. I just wanted to be normal. I’d been growing my hair out during the SWG time, and had promptly decided to cut it after being teased by some kid whose name I don’t even remember now.

Slowly, I started getting back into my feminine side. I downloaded the Ventrilo client, actually, having joined a gaming clan as a female. You can imagine how that worked—I had to use text, while everyone else was on voice. Long story short, I got close to another person very quickly, a man, and again, I flipped, though I handled it differently. I tried to use a voice-masking program to sound female, the way I increasingly longed to be, but that failed as I tried it, and my secret was out to everyone in the group. I quit the application, and that was the end of my stint. I’ve never gone back.

After another few months of denial, the feelings were starting to get too strong to ignore entirely. Slowly, I let myself become more effeminate—I grew my hair out, I crossed my legs at the thigh rather than the knee or ankle, I adopted more identifiably female speech patterns, I started hanging out with more girls than guys. This was around the beginning of high school, I’d say. I wasn’t identifying as transsexual—I still didn’t really know what the term for my condition was, I don’t think. I was just exploring; in a lot of ways, I still am, and probably always will be.

I should probably mention that in the summer before freshman year (summer of 2006), I got myself a girlfriend. Kate (name changed for privacy purposes) pushed my gender identity issues to the side, at least for a while. Ironically, we met over the Internet, where gender doesn’t matter. Long-distance we were (and still are!), but we spent more time together that summer than most local couples do in a year. We even stayed up all night to watch the sunrise together a few times, even if hers was a few minutes off from mine.

Getting back to the transsexuality, the feeling just built and built over the next year and a half. Last December (December 2007) is when I really admitted to myself that I am what I am. I knew in my heart that I wanted to be a girl. The question then became how I was supposed to tell Kate something like that. I knew that she, like I, was a pro-LGBT person, but realizing that you’re dating one is a lot different than a statement of principle. Knowing that I needed to tell her in person, I waited until spring break to tell her—I stayed the week at her house, but it still took me most of the time to work up the courage.

Her reaction was everything that I could have hoped for. I’ll freely admit that I broke down sobbing while I told her my story, but she was more supportive than I could have ever hoped for. Not only did she accept me, she wanted me to explore what I felt I was meant to be. She had no trouble with me dressing or behaving the way that I wanted to—Kate’s even said that she’ll stick with me even if I get hormone replacement therapy, or even reassignment surgery. Our love is beyond physical sex (I know, I know, that’s terribly corny, but it’s the truth). “Love is love,” as they say.

Even once I admitted it to Kate, it took me a month of being back at home before I could bring myself to tell anyone else. Each time that I told someone, though, it got easier. I chose my friends well—not a single one of them has had a bad reaction. They’ve ranged from curiosity, to confusion about what “transsexual” meant, to complete, automatic acceptance. It’s been great.

A lot harder than telling my friends was telling my parents. I told my dad first—he was eating when I told him that I needed to talk to him, describing it as one of the top five most important conversations you could have with your kid. He was confused, at first—I think he latched onto the word “bisexual” more than “transsexual,” since I mentioned that I was a little bi. He was particularly confused that Kate could possibly be okay with it. Understandably, he was very concerned about my safety—we all know what kind of world it is. I’m staying anonymous on this blog for a reason. In the end, though, he agreed to support me, and it was an incredible relief to tell him.

Telling Mom came a day or two later. She was more confused than anyone else, I think—she didn’t really know what “transsexual” meant. Dad and I talked through it with her. Again, after some explaining and heartfelt discussion, she accepted it. They said that it wasn’t a complete shocker—I had effeminate mannerisms, and they could see that.

That pretty much takes us to the present day. I’m not sure where I’m going, but I know that my friends will help me along the way.

I promise that subsequent entries won't be so long, I just needed to get all of that out in the open.