Gender Dysphoria is a rare medical condition. I’m glad it is. It’s also hard for people who don’t suffer from Gender Dysphoria to imagine what it is like. Why is it so hard to just accept your fate and behave ‘normally’?
I’m trying to answer that, by telling you every once in a while how I felt, what I thought, when I went through the various stages of my Gender Dysphoria, from know even knowing what was wrong up to my transition. Therefore, I’m not only aiming at those who are in doubt about their gender identity themselves, but at those who know someone with Gender Dysphoria and are having hard time to try to understand as well. And, of course, at everyone else believing that men can become women, and women become men, by having their genitals changed by means of surgery. Frankly, that’s a myth.
Something else I want to achieve is to improve acceptance of people suffering from Gender Dysphoria. One of the first steps in that process, in my opinion, is increasing transgender visibility. That is an issue by itself, because most trans people want to live a normal life and therefore remain as invisible as possible. Older transgenders already have a life of hiding behind them, younger transgenders actually have the opportunity to live their lives without much of a past and I’m not sure if exposing that past will do them any good.
I do have a past. I tried to live my life in the gender that was assigned to me when I was born for 42 years. I would have to break up with approximately 250 people, family and friends, and start a new life at the other end of the world, in order to erase that past. And I’m not going to. I don’t need to cover up my past. I learned too much, have a lot of memories to be fond of. I share that past with my friends. They support me being me, so I don’t need to be invisible at all.
“Emma: I am me” is a classic palindrome. And here I am, being me!
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