Oh wow, thank you so much for your in-depth reply on my ask to becausedragonage! I hadn't thought to mention it but I am actually in my mid-twenties, which is adding to my conflicting feelings about the things going on in my head. In a lot of ways I worry that what I'm feeling isn't valid because I'm "too old" to do anything about these questions. I unfortunately do not have a relationship with my parents, and could not tell them this when I was 12, or now at 25.
NOOOOO!!!!! MY LOVE!!! NO! It is NEVER ever ever too late to learn about yourself. It is NEVER EVER too late to transition.
You learn the things you learn at the pace you learn them! When I was 20, I thought I was a cross-dresser. I told that to my then-fiance. When I was 25, I realized that my story and experience did not match the story and experience shared by the people in the CD support groups I was in. Nor did my experience align with the reported experiences of the spouses in the Significant Other of Cross-Dressers groups my then-wife belonged too. (BTW, all of those groups, CD and SO alike were SUUUUPER toxic to both me and her).
So I came up with “bigender” as a word to describe my experience - it turns out that the word had existed for a few years, but it wasn’t well-known, so I thought I coined it, and I started using it to describe myself and my gender identity.
When my wife left me, I was 30. I created the forums on bigender.net and started posting videos on youtube, becoming one of the few faces of bigender, if anyone could be said to be. I even got invited to speak on it because of those videos.
So, here I am, 31, or so, I’ve started taking HRT which I would have sworn five years earlier that I would never do, and I fall in serious crush with a (tragically gay) man and another with a non-binary person. I’d never acknowledged or admitted to myself any sexual attraction to anyone other than women. I had an existential crisis, my dear, let me tell you.
As it turns out, nothing came of either of those situations, and I started dating my current girlfriend shortly thereafter. Over the years since then, I’ve found it more and more disingenuous to use bigender as a descriptor and now generally call myself a trans woman, and I’ll be 39 this summer.
In fact, at the risk of oversharing, I’ve been really wrestling with the notion of figuring out how to go about seeking (and paying for) SRS which, ten years ago, even though I could have called myself trans, I would have sworn I’d never do.
It is never too late to learn something new about yourself. You are a living person. You are a work-in-progress, beloved, and the work is never finished, only improved in fits and starts. You get to be a whole person, containing contradictions and multitudes.
It takes years and work and effort to shake off the shame, fear and guilt that other people’s expectations have placed on you. And you figure it out when you figure it out. You are a gift, and gifts aren’t unwrapped all at once. That fear, shame and guilt is the ugliest wrapping paper, but damn if it isn’t tough to tear. So, basically, I guess I’m saying forgive yourself for not knowing things before you learned them.
One of my favorite posts out here in trans tumblr world is this one. It’s just trans woman after trans woman sharing their photos and talking about beginning transition in their 30s and 40s. There’s a bunch more in the notes, too, I think. Beloved, it is never too late. (I don’t know of one of these that predominantly features trans men, so if anyone knows, please let me know and I’ll update this post).
You’re never going to be younger than you are at this moment, so it sounds like the perfect age to wrestle with these questions and figure out what to do with the answers. But even if it takes you a while to really figure it out enough to do something different from what you’re doing now, don’t panic. There is no expiration date on transition.
I am sorry that your relationship with your parents is not good, or non-existent, but I’m here, and so is @becausedragonage and I recommend reading @trans-mom and @vaspider to find more support. They are good moms. I suspect by 25, too, that you’ve learned that found family is just as, if not more, important and supportive than birth family.
You deserve good things, darling. You are a good person, and you deserve to be lucky enough to meet you.
