Coming Out Strong

I’ve spent a lot of my life with my baseline mood being “unhappy”. I chalked it up to having a “melancholic” temperment, or (if I was in a particularly bad mood) a justifiable response to being shitty. I had good days, of course, happy things happened, but it always felt like my baseline was sad and it wouldn’t take much to knock me down and keep me there.

I also, for many years, seemed to keep coming across trans women talking about their experiences. A coincidence, surely, since I work with computers and that’s been a very represented demographic there for a long time. But…a lot of what they had to say, or would off-handly mention really stuck with me. Why? I spent years trying to down-play it; I just had respect for people that would go through all that. But then that became, “if only I was trans, but I can’t be, of course”, and then “well, it’s too late – I’m a hard-boiled egg”.

Finally, a month ago, I spontaneously told my therapist about all this – the first time I’d ever spoken out loud about these feelings. I couldn’t even say it at first – “I have thoughts about gender”, I said. My therapist was helpful; I reached out to people whose work I’d read, told my wife and then other family. Initially I just said “I think I’m not cis”, but as I dipped my toe into presenting differently, I couldn’t deny how amazing it felt. Somehow, with these little changes, my baseline mood sky-rocketed. When I next spoke with my therapist, all the regular issues I would talk about had, if not completely gone away, become so much more managable. I thought I couldn’t be trans because I never experienced dysphoria, but in retrospect I spent a lot of time unhappy and uncomfortable with myself in a manner that actually seems not too far off. More importantly, when I do even small things to present as female, I feel…amazing.

I feel so fortunate to finally say, with the love and support of my family, that I’m trans 🏳️‍⚧️.