#trans grief

[katywalliams1]

[fieryfoxboy]

Gonna be vulnerable on main here.

It really seems like all of the other trans people I know who are at least a few years into their transition experience some level of gender euphoria on a semi regular basis, even if they regularly struggle with dysphoria as well. They talk about how happy they are to be socially and/or medically transitioning, what a joy it is to be and present as the gender that they are in whatever ways that means to them. They talk about how happy it makes them to get gendered correctly by people they know.

This just isn’t something I’ve really experienced much, if even at all. I’m almost 4 years on T and I’ve been out of the closet longer than that, and I just… don’t feel that way?

I feel utterly miserable to the point of wanting to stop existing when people misgender me, or when I look in the mirror and feel like I look more feminine than I feel I should. But when I look in the mirror and see myself looking relatively close to the way I want to, or when people gender me correctly, I never feel joy in this, even if I try really hard to make myself feel it. I feel a mild sense of relief, at best, and oftentimes just apathy- I find myself thinking “this makes other trans people feel sincerely happy? But, this is just what I feel like should have been happening with me this entire time.”

I don’t know how to articulate it, but even in situations where I’m able to experience relief from my dysphoria, there’s always this lingering air of palpable, bitter grief that follows me and infiltrates my senses, no matter what. There’s a slight alleviation of dysphoria that comes with certain acts, sure, but this cannot be mistaken for joy. The absence of unnecessary suffering is not the same as the presence of happiness or fulfillment.

I truly wish I wasn’t like this. It makes me feel so alienated from most other trans people I meet. I wish being trans were ever a source of joy for me and not just something I associate entirely with the experience of dysphoria and life shattering misery. I wish I were capable of experiencing the types of Trans Joy I see expressed by so many other trans people.

At this point I’m just trying to make myself accept that no matter how hard I try to force myself to shift my perspective, I’ll always feel like I’m stuck in the wrong body, and I’ll keep trying very hard to make it my home anyway, no matter how wrong everything feels.

[howlingtothevoid]

Complex feelings, hidden delusions

...

I wish I was a boy, I wish I was your man

[crowscadence]

Trans grief, but over the father-son experiences I never got to have

I was never taught how to tie a tie. I learned from a YouTube tutorial in the bathroom of my freshman dorm.

As a young teen, I was taught how to shave my legs rather than my face.

I can forge my own path as a man now that I’m an adult, but there’s some things I can never recover

[decotome]

Somewhere out there there is a depressed, hyperfeminine religious girl out there who can’t understand why she prays every night to be a boy and cries herself to sleep thinking about how she can never be like the other boys in her small town.

Be the one to cut his hair. Be the one to see his face and tears when he looks in the mirror. Be the one to throw his gifted jewelry into the river and watch the look of freedom on his face.

Take him to a club. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy or even adult - just a simple hangout. Get him a drink if he wants one and dance with him if he says yes.

Be his first kiss. His first hug. The first one in this new body and mind of his.

Kill that sad, grieving girl and turn him into a flowering, hopeful man.

[love-ardour-anarchism]

sometimes i come to wonder as i am looking in the mirror with all my clothes or stripped there bare sometimes i come to wonder

if your dream girl is really half a boy if all my butchness is what you'd desire if you would love me for my manesque charm if you'd still love the hair on all of me if you'd still kiss the stubble there above my lips

or if you'd fall right out of love with all my non-conformity with all the blurring lines that make up all of me with all the ways that I so blend the womanhood I keep the masculinitiy that I've been seeking all my life

i wonder if you'd love me if i never was the same if i was never one or then the other if girls were prettier than me and boys had more of that same charm if i was always knock-off copies and not a man but shaped unlike the goddesses of old

i wonder if you'd love me if i never kept my shape if i would always wander or if you'd find a better man a sweeter wife an image there bereft a statue more sublime than you could cut from all my unshaped marble

just like they did who called me "wife" for half a decade long and then just left to find all that i lacked

and i know its no good to think of it that way but some days like right now i'm more enough the stereotype

[whereserpentswalk]

Being enby is so weird because you have the same yearning that most trans people have to have had a childhood that matched your gender, but the childhood that matches your gender isn't even one our culture even has a concept of. Like, I yearn to have just been a kid in a way that had nothing to do with being a boy or a girl, to have been a cute genderless child as opposed to being something that was trained to be bred. There's almost a model for what a genderless childhood that I'll never have had looks like with enby middle schoolers with very accepting families, and I do wish I got to have that, but it's still not what I really want which is to have been recognized as genderless from birth. And there's nothing as easily expressable as having wanted to been just a boy or a girl.

[easternhognose]

It's so hard to talk about grief in the trans community because it is always labeled as regret. I lost so much of the life I could have had to transition. I lost the ability to travel the country, my childhood friends, extended family, job opportunities.

I want to be able to talk about the things I miss without people using that as evidence against transitioning. I want to be allowed to grieve my grandmother dying not knowing my name. I want to grieve the way that I will never learn family knowledge of recipes and crafts, because I chose not to be a girl anymore. I can't talk to most of my extended family anymore. The ones I can still misgender me. I can't tell people I meet anything about my life without outing myself. I can't have baby pictures and childhood stories.

I don't regret transitioning, I like the life I have built for myself and I still mourn the life I had to give up for it.