Ch Ch Changes ...

Let this cup pass Lord.

Curled up in agony, rolling back and forth, back and forth, caught in the horrendous torture of a mind out of control, a mind that won’t stop, why me why me why me.   Stop it stop it stop it, get control “our father who art in heaven” nononono not me not me not me.

Hours and hours and days and days.

I am not a woman, I am not a woman, I am not a woman.

Functioning, when out of my room, but barely. 

Trips to therapists, with and without my spouse my love, who is going through this with me.

One therapist I hire because she is specialist in this world, the world of the transsexual, the world of people who never fit in.  The other I hire because he is the exact opposite, a Devil’s Advocate, someone to tell me there is no such thing, you have other issues, snap out of it.  Or in the words of my wife’s best friend, “Oh stop it.  Suck it up, live with it for 30 years and die.”  And she was a liberal from Swarthmore, which is a double adjective, with both words meaning the same thing.

And yet the agony, the pain, the thoughts the thoughts the thoughts.  Get thee away from me Satan.  This is impossible, mental illness, suck it up, suffer, you can’t change for a man to a woman.  You’re trying to escape, it’s irresponsibility, yes it is Satan or mental illness get those thoughts out of your mind.  You’re 45, married, four kids, a law firm, everyone has issues, suck it up.  And soon. Because you will lose family and friends, those you’ve known forever.  And your clients too.  No money nothing.  Your entire life will be destroyed.  Suck it up.

But I couldn’t.  And I didn’t.  And changed.  

From this:

To this:

And nothing is the same.   But nothing important has changed.

For the next few weeks in an extended irregular longform serial, and with Frank’s, and your, indulgence, I will be writing a little about the aspects of the change.  Emotional and physical and spiritual and cognitive and mental.  I’ve had to go through each of those changes to Know Thyself.  Some of them are surprising to me, and may be to you too.

Oh, and the reason for this, the reason why I’ve had to change, is still murky to me.  But science is starting to understand why.  It is a result of a hormonal irregularity in the womb, a mismatch between the embryonic development of my mind and my body.   As a recent Wall Street Journal article noted:

In the 1990s, scientists began to compare … sexually dimorphic regions in the brains of transsexuals and the rest of humanity. Early work in this area required the examination of brains postmortem; recent studies use images of the living brain.

The results show that when individuals of Sex A—despite having the chromosomes, gonads and sex hormones of that sex—insist that they're really Sex B, the gender-affected parts of the brain typically more closely resemble what's usually seen with Sex B …

The issue isn't that sometimes people believe they are of a different gender than they actually are.  Remarkably, instead, it's that sometimes people are born with bodies whose gender is different from what they actually are.