Learning What It Means To Be Trans Changed My Life Forever

The moment I finally understood “what was wrong with me”

Picture taken by Clara Dolderman’s partner, who prefers to stay anonymous

It is amazing to me that after profound, powerfully egg-shattering experiences, it was another eight months (!!!!) before I realized that I am a trans woman. (Discussed in previous essays — My Trans Journey at 50 and Discovering My True Gender.)

Although I had attained the unassailable realization of “repressed femininity arising in me,” I didn’t know what to DO with that. I tried telling one person I trusted. It went… poorly. So my realizations kind of dried up, I slipped back into depression, and [insert half a year of being dysfunctional here.]

Then it was early winter, and I was doing what I typically am doing: reading, writing, researching things.

The title of an online article caught my eye — “Gender Dysphoria Is Not What You Think.” It was written by Cassie LaBelle, whose profile pic was this charming cartoon-character who seemed smart and quirky, the kind of person who would be fascinatingly fun to have lunch with.

If there is a multiverse, then there are probably realities in which I never read this article. I feel sorry for those alternate-mes; I hope they’re ok.

But in THIS reality, I did read this article. (Yay!) And that was The Key.

I realized, with 100% clarity, that I wasn’t “exploring the Divine feminine” or merely “embodying femininity”, or whatever else I was thinking at the time. I was, in fact, a trans woman, finally discovering herself.

** This Blew My Mind **

Suddenly, my entire life was brought into crystal clear focus. A whole lifetime of confusion and dysfunction and paradox, and then BOOM — clarity. Even though I didn’t understand it, even though I had no intellectual, academic, psychological knowledge of how it was even possible to live for 50 years and not understand my own gender, I had to accept it. The truth, once revealed, was utterly undeniable.

Dukkha

Why IS “this whole gender thing” such a big deal, anyway?

Every trans person has heard some version, from the aligned-with-their-birth-assigned-gender people, of:

“Just get over yourself. You can’t make up that you’re a girl, if God made you a boy.” (Or vice versa). “You just have to accept yourself and take responsibility for your life.” “You were a girl (or boy) when you were born, and you can never change that.”

My favourite was to be told by my highly conservative, woefully undereducated step-father that indeed, my mom KNEW when I was in the womb, that I was a boy. And there ain’t no denying mystical womb-knowledge, now is there?

It’s even more difficult for many people, including me at first, to understand how you could live for decades “as a boy” and then discover one day, “ta-daa, I’m a girl!” Surely that’s…impossible? Even delusional?

But there’s a very simple way to understand all this.

In Buddhism, the word dukkha is often used to mean “suffering” in its various forms. But the original meaning of dukkha is more specific than just “suffering”.

Dukkha originally meant a misaligned axle.

Think about it. If you have a wagon, and one of the axles is not aligned properly, then the whole wagon is going to wobble. Right?

As it wobbles, it creates friction at the joint. It’s going to be under constant “stress”, and therefore, the joint is going to wear out more quickly and break more easily.

But even worse! As the axle wobbles, and the wheel wobbles, and the wagon wobbles, and the wagon-driver wobbles, everything is put under wobbly-stress. The stress spreads from the axle, throughout the wagon, all the way to the driver themselves.

Imagine the beleaguered wagon-driver, trying to make a living, feed their family, navigate the bumpy roads of the world, but this stupid, wobbly wagon is driving them nuts!! It breaks down all the time, lurches along, crashes the wares together. It’s hard to steer. It’s bloody exhausting.

The driver spends so much precious time fixing the wagon, nailing new support boards to tighten it up, or simply sitting on the side of the road, broken down, cursing their existence.

Goddammit I hate this wagon. Being a delivery driver sucks. My life sucks. I hate my life. UGHHHHHHH!!!!

Now imagine that the driver never realizes that the axle is the root of the whole problem. With a better wagon, they wouldn’t be so stressed; they wouldn’t be late all the time. Life would be SO MUCH BETTER.

But without knowing the axle is misaligned, the driver simply suffers.

This is dukkha.

Gender Dysphoria Is Not What You Think

In her article about gender dysphoria, Cassie explained how so many of a person’s life struggles can be gender dysphoria in disguise, or else can be exacerbated by unrecognized gender dysphoria.

If you don’t know your gender-axle is misaligned, then like the wagon driver, you’ll attribute your problems to all sorts of things — being “a loser”, having “something fundamentally wrong with you”, having a bad upbringing, having emotional issues, mental health issues, etc. There is no shortage of potential explanations for struggles, when one doesn’t understand their root.

And if you grew up in an family/community environment in which “gender diversity” was virtually unknown, and nothing in your education (right up to getting a Ph.D. in Psychology, astonishingly), gave you a conceptual framework for understanding gender-questioning and nonconformance, it easily can never even cross your mind that you might be a different gender than what you were assigned at birth. You’ve always been told you’re a boy (or a girl), and that’s that. Deal with it.

So your axle stays misaligned, you suffer, and you don’t understand why. You just try to “adapt”.

Cassie brilliantly described what that felt like for her. And it was a window into my own soul.

(As an aside, this is the most obvious, incontrovertible argument for teaching gender diversity in school that I can imagine, and shows one reason, among many, why the transphobic, anti-LGBTQ+ crowd is so rabidly against such education, crushing it every chance they get.)

It was Cassie’s essay that finally gave me the intellectual framework to understand, explicitly, that I am a trans woman. I spent a few weeks in a daze, literally experiencing my life flashing before my eyes, countless memories coming up, everything suddenly making sense in a way it never had before.

At some point (actually, this was March 14th, 2023 — pi day, ironically the day I came “full circle”, you might say), I went to my bathroom and looked in the mirror, looked deep, deep into my own eyes.

I am trans. I am a trans…girl.

…..

I am a girl???

…..

I am a girl!!

…..

And my “egg” hatched, right then and there.

Trans Acceptance

The difference in moving from denial to acceptance has been an incredible delight. Honestly, it’s wild, beyond anything I would ever have believed.

Of course my life did not instantly become perfect. Life is complicated, and being trans has created a whole new set of challenges, to be sure.

But when I wake up in the morning, things FEEL different. There’s a different vibe, a different energy to my day.

My first moment of consciousness in a day used to feel like, “Mmmrrrpphhh…ugh…is it morning already? God I’m tired. Well, ok, another day.”

Now it’s quite simply “Mmmmm, another day!”

And as I get up and move around in the world, taking my place in society, I LIKE myself. I feel at home in my body. I feel…right. Which is a profound experience when you’ve spent your entire life feeling “wrong”.

It’s like I was wearing the wrong glasses for all these years, and everything was always blurry and confusing.

And now, the right prescription and — poof — Clarity.

It’s like going out into the countryside, far from the lights of cities, and looking up at the Milky Way in all its splendor. For all your life, this profound beauty has been there, shining; you just can’t usually see it.

(Note: In the Environmental Psych class I used to teach, every year when talking about light pollution, a fair proportion of the class would admit that they had never, not once in their lives, seen the Milky Way. Imagine! The fact that you can obscure our very place in the universe by too much societal-pollution, is a pretty apt analog for how you can obscure people’s true gender by too much societal-prejudice.)

And so, if it’s a challenge for anyone to understand the reality of “being trans”, then I’d like to offer it more like a gift, a little anthropological opportunity to peek into the diversity of the human experience and understand just how wildly, beautifully different humans can be.

You can choose to see Nature as beautiful or scary. But if it’s not about to eat you, why not see it as beautiful?