There are plans in place to move to Arizona next year. I was going to do it secretly. I was going to cut ties with everyone I knew back home, but for a select few. I was going to start over. I was going to give up on people that I’ve known for ages, on the chance that they will reject me. That’s borderline personality talking, if you’ve ever heard it whisper.
There are plans in place for me to get bariatric surgery. In a couple months, my body will begin to change rapidly. I was going to start hormones then. I was going to try to be sly.
The truth of the matter is that I will be rejected by some. I will be found out. And this is not the authentic way to live my life. I will regret it.
So I’m going to make the brave choice.
I’m going to choose the words that will baffle, will hurt, will likely come back around to show me pain in the face of a deeply conservative community.
I am not what I was made to be.
I am transgender.
I have had these feelings for a long, long time. Not feelings, really. Knowledge. A soul scab that never quite heals right ’cause it keeps getting torn.
I push it away. Again. And again. And again.
“It’s not natural. I’m just a tomboy. There’s not enough women in manufacturing, you might be an oddball but you’re an important one.”
“They’ll hate you forever.”
“They’ll think their kid is gonna go to hell.”
Probably a dozen psychiatric hospitalizations. Maybe half that many semi-serious suicide attempts(I say semi about the results, not the intent).
I’m on about $1600 dollars worth of medications each month and I still can’t work through the anxiety of going to a goddamn second-run theater.
I was already in hell. I’ve been there a long time. I was in second grade the first time I told someone I wanted to kill myself and I didn’t get any kind of therapy or medication until I was 19.
This is the chokehold, the silencing factor, that a belief system can have.
Maybe I won’t be accepted.
But the time has come.
And I’ll run it if I have to. To Arizona or anywhere else.
But today I declare my journey.
Today I take the first step.
Please consider donating to the costs of transition here:
Rexicorn 