My Grandmother’s Kaleidoscope: A Constantly Changing Life
By Anonymous
The author wants to make it known that he has now detransitioned.
I grew up right outside of Annapolis M.D. From a young age, I learned differently. I did not speak until I was 3, and throughout my childhood, I had learning difficulties from math to reading. As a young child, I had a very creative mind, always asking questions and kind of living in my own little world. I made up languages, I explored the woods behind my house; I was basically, a very creative and free-spirited child. I always identified more with my mom than my dad, partially because my dad was mean to me when I was young. He would make fun of my high-pitched voice, give me a hard time for liking to have tea parties at my grandmother’s house, and would often call me faggot (thinking that I was gay). Both my parents have told me that they thought that I was gay growing up. I would often run around the house acting out Step in Time from Mary Poppins, my favorite movie as a kid. I also hated sports and any activity or group that lumped me together with other boys. One August my dad brought me to a tryout for a football team, which I hated! Anyway, the ball hit my eye and I started to cry and I just stood there looking at my dad like, “Why are we even here?” I distinctly remember never being able to picture myself as a man when I grew up -not as a woman- just not a man. I think part of this was due to identifying more with my mom, but also due to something else.
I never had many friends growing up and had tons of social anxiety. Learning social skills, like learning in general for me, was difficult and took longer. Growing up I had crushes on boys and girls, but my crushes on girls were not “normal crushes,” they were wishes that I could be them. My mind would go straight to wondering what it would be like to be them (how they felt, what they thought, what their life was like). I also would notice if girls had on pretty dresses or nice make-up more than your normal boy; my attraction was to femininity more than to females. This would simultaneously turn into a wish that I could be them, instead of a normal boy’s attraction to them.
By the time I was roughly 13, I had become super uptight, and completely isolated, and when I started going through puberty I became extremely uncomfortable in my skin. Internally I was crying, I hated my body. I ate too much during this period of my life as a way to comfort myself. I felt all alone in the world. This was by far the most unhappy, brutal part of my life. My interests included history, politics, philosophy, and art. Unfortunately, I expressed my interest in these subjects in ways that kept me isolated. By age 16 I was in so much pain I developed anorexia and bulimia and had to drop out of high school only partially through my 10th grade year right after Christmas break. I was a good student who got good grades, so this was devastating for me. I was hospitalized for my eating disorder. It was at this time that my internal need to think of myself and want to be female became increasingly strong and overcame me, which at first felt like a void or emptiness in my life. It felt cold and hard to understand at the time.
At 17 I worked in a salon at the mall which I enjoyed, but I was still mostly isolated. I started expressing how I felt in dress at this point, sometimes wearing dresses and heels and growing my hair out, often wearing make-up. This made me feel better about myself, and more in line with my internal feelings and thoughts. In a small way, it was my first way of externally expressing my wish to be female; making it seem more real. At around this time, I started meeting up with men and sometimes hooking up. I was never emotionally attracted to them, but sometimes physically. I continued having hookups or casual dates with guys hoping I would meet the right guy as I got older. This continued until I eventually had surgery, and I have never found anyone. But I wanted to feel loved, and to be seen as who I was. None of those encounters led to a relationship.
By 18 my eating disorder had gotten so bad that I had to quit my job due to my ever-increasing gender dysphoria. I left home (my parents kicked me out) and I stayed in shelters in Baltimore and D.C. At this point, I was presenting as female. After several weeks of being homeless, my parents, out of concern that I would die or that something horrible would happen to me, decided to rent me a room to stay in Baltimore. For several years, from roughly 18 1/2 years old to 25 years of age, I lived in Baltimore in different places. I was able to hold down only a few short-term jobs (one in a salon, one at a call center) because my social anxiety from feeling like I was in the wrong body, as well as my severe depression and my eating disorder, made me essentially incapacitated. When I say that my discomfort with my body was bad, it was literally so bad that I had constant thoughts of wanting to hurt myself. I started taking hormones around age 23 (I just turned 28 ).
During this period of my life, I was completely isolated. I used to go out for walks at night on Federal Hill so I could overlook the city skyline and harbor while listening to Miles Davis or John Coltrane. Something about the song Blue in Green by Miles perfectly expresses how I felt during these years; alone, cold, starving, struggling to survive, wanting to feel loved, and feeling misunderstood by my parents and the world. I was lost and by this point completely dissociated from my body (even though I started looking very feminine). People always used she/her in public even if I was not trying super hard to pass, never giving me a double glance or the side-eye walking by. If anyone was staring at me it was because I weighed (fluctuating) between 100-110 pounds. I barely saw my parents or my grandmother and never saw my siblings. Photography, specifically black and white cityscapes and landscapes, was the one hobby that I enjoyed during this time.
By the end of 2019, I had scheduled bottom surgery and breast implants. My bottom surgery was a complete nightmare. I chose the colon vaginoplasty. The first attempt completely failed. It died several hours after the operation, causing the surgeons to have to use a skin graft in the meantime. The blood vessels failed to connect. I was in the hospital for 2 weeks in more pain than I had ever been in before, so much pain that I felt for sure that I was going to die. I could not even move in my bed. When I was finally able to go to the bathroom, I looked in the mirror, and the reflection I saw looking back at me looked alien. My body was so swollen and bruised from all the trauma it had been put through. I was black and blue all over, and my stomach had completely swelled, and all the other parts of my body had been drained of all fluid. When I got out of the hospital I was unable to dilate because the procedure had failed. A month later I had a successful second surgery. The following 2 years (2020 and 2021) were almost all spent recovering, with a few surgical alterations afterward.
It was roughly 2 years after my surgery that I began to realize that my intense need to undergo transition was not caused by some internal true female self, but rather by a lifelong wish to be a girl. I believe this desire started because I was mistreated by my dad when I was young and I identified with my mom. Identifying with my mom led me to constantly wonder what it would be like to be a woman (from what they think, to what they feel). I believe that if I had not developed anorexia from my gender dysphoria, as well as my off-the-charts social anxiety, I would have been able to come to this conclusion without having undergone irreversible surgery.
Since having surgery, I have tried having relationships with men, all of them leading to no real connection. And since I’ve undergone surgery, dating a woman is not an option. I know of the Blanchard typology of Mtf transsexualism; the homosexual transsexual and the auto heterosexual. I don’t neatly fit into either. I really wish I had known this information before surgery, and transition in general, so I could have made a more well-informed decision. I should have had the opportunity to make the decision I did based on all the known information. I feel that since I turned 16 my main and only goal in life was to fix my gender by trying to become a woman. This caused me to hate myself and my body.
Four years since my surgery I am still in shock. I look back at my life so far and I feel like I am looking into a kaleidoscope my grandmother has in her living room, in which all the pieces of my life are constantly changing, thereby changing who I am and how I identify, with the only constant being that each different image is created out of pieces of the last one. My life, for the better or the worse, can be summed up by one of my favorite quotes found in a poem by Robert Frost.
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost
This is my story. We all have to find our way in the world. I’m fighting for my life right now, but that’s what makes life worth living.
My political views on transition:
I believe that I may have been helped if puberty blockers had been available at the time, but my gender dysphoria did not get really bad until I turned 16, so I am what they call late-onset gender dysphoria, even though I did suffer from it before. Most kids who have early-onset gender dysphoria outgrow it, so I am against transitioning minors at this early stage. I believe people like me who primarily had late-onset gender dysphoria (16) should have their brains scanned and studied so they know what neurological signs to look for that indicate the high likelihood of late-onset gender dysphoria. With these individuals, I do think hormone blockers would be appropriate if it were to become possible to determine if someone will develop late-onset gender dysphoria, or if their early onset dysphoria will continue and grow more intense with age as mine did. I believe this because although my gender dysphoria was primarily late-onset, I was only 16, and it has totally uprooted my life and has nearly killed me many times.