Tag: writing

Battles with self

I talked with my therapist today about a few things. She didn’t get the packet of letters that I mailed to her last week yet so I didn’t bring up the subject of grief.

What I did bring up, I have been wrestling with all day: my transgender issue. I have been born a biological female yet my head thinks I am a male. I asked my therapist calls me and she said a heterosexual male. My fear is that talking about this is going to stir up some feelings of suicidality. It almost always does because I am not born a male. I just think that I am one. I feel like I am one. Coming to terms of this has not been easy. It has only been so for the last few years that I have been open about this. I wish I could go back and say when I first started feeling this way and it would be around the time that I was in kindergarten, when I felt different than other girls. I always liked taking things apart to see how they worked. I didn’t like dolls growing up. Though I did like trucks and stuff. I would love playing over my friend Tony’s house. He had all the cool boy toys. We would play for hours. I was also into a lot of sports growing up. When Tony started to play baseball, he was on the Oakland A’s. He then decided he was not a Sox fan because he was on the A’s. I got mad at him for that, because I always felt like you had to root for the home team no matter what.

During the registration period, I asked my father if I could play baseball. It would have made me the happiest in the world. But my father said no because that was a boy sport. I was so hurt. But I didn’t let anyone know how hurt I was. We were poor so I never got the equipment needed except when a neighbor across the street cleanout his place and threw away his gloves. It was the first time I actually had baseball equipment. Tony and I played baseball together after school for I don’t know how long. When he was off with his team, I would throw the ball against the steps making diving plays and making believe I was throwing out the runner on second base. I played like that for hours. It was really fun. I could hit better than Tony did. I guess because I had a lot more anger than he did, I could also throw the ball farther too. We would have contests as to who could throw the farthest. I always won. I also threw the highest. Red Sox baseball became my passion. I would love to watch them play. I didn’t go to many games as a kid. Again it was because sports were a boy thing not a girl thing.

The only sport that I did get involved in was basketball. I might have been able to cream Tony but I never was good enough to make varsity. My career high is 4 points in one game, and that was because only five players showed up. Me being one of the five. It was a good game as we crushed Brighton. It must have been the first game that I ever played in the whole game, minus the time I spent nursing a calf cramp.

My father and mother never went to any of my games, even though we lived only a block from the high school. They just were interested in me. My couch told me I was the shortest player to jump high. That was because there was a high beam between my parent’s bedroom and the parlor. I used to always run and jump to see if I could hit it. It took me a long time but I finally was able to do it, though the downstairs tenants didn’t like it much.

Growing up I look at all the things that I hated about myself. I hated getting my periods and that caused me so much pain. I hate developing breasts. I was always bumping into things with them. And it hurt! I never liked the way I looked because of these things. I still don’t. I still think I am the ugliest person on the planet. And who could blame me. My father helped by calling me Faccia Brutto (ugly face in Italian) everyday for as long as I can remember.

I still am not happy with my breasts over all these years. Though I am getting creative and calling them gynecomastia (male breasts) and hoping that if I lose weight, they will shrink. But losing weight is hard when all you want to do is kill yourself.

For a long time, I never put the two together, the being a male and my suicidality. I really had no clue why I was suicidal until one night I had the revelation that it could be because I think I am a male and I really am not. It is very hurtful to be called a she when you want to be called a he. There was a time that I would always get complemented as a he and when the person recognize my gender they would get all frazzled and apologize. I always said it was ok and that I liked being called a him. It just feels more natural to me than being called a her. I can’t stand it. And I guess, subconsciously, it was hurting me. It took me to a dark place where suicide became my life’s goal. All I thought about was suicide. Killing myself was the ONLY way out of my situation. If I couldn’t be a male and be called him, then what was the purpose of me living.

Last year I decided that I was going to change my name to Mike and be Mike. I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be. It still is hard. I told my middle sister this and she was supportive but scared for me. Flashbacks of when I came out gay as a teenager came flooding back. I couldn’t tell my other sister I wanted to be a male or my mother. There would be no way for them to accept me for being me. My eight year old still asks if I am a guy or a girl and I always answer with, what do you think. And she goes with girl. It hurts. I will never forget the day when she came in to the bathroom when I was going and found out the truth. I was crushed. Really crushed. If there was a noose waiting for me that day, it would have had my neck in it. I so wanted to die and still want to die because I know I can’t live my life as a male. I don’t really know what that means because technically I do live as a male. I wear the boxers and clothes that are mens. The only thing female that I own are underwear and that is when I get my stupid period that has not been able to be stopped. I can’t go on if I am bleeding monthly. I know this deep down inside because it kills me to have a monthly so bad. It hurts. And there is no other way to describe it. I can’t tell you why it hurts, it just does. I have been living this way for most of my life and it kills me when people get the wrong pronoun and such. I know that by coming open will get people confused. I feel like I am causing them a burden and believe me, I would rather die than cause this grief.

I had a talk with my mother years ago about why I need to buy male things but it went by the way side. Even my youngest sister tried to get me to buy women’s clothes. I hate them. I never have like them from day one. They just don’t fit right. They don’t feel right. I wear mens clothes because they are comfortable to me. My middle sister wanted a football jersey for Christmas last year. She got a men’s large but she didn’t like it because it didn’t feel right. She wanted me to get her a female version but the only jerseys that I could get were men’s. Oh well. I ended up returning it for a medium. Now the guy is in jail for murder so she won’t be wearing the jersey at all!

I wish I could say that I am a female but it goes against the grain. Even typing the words has my gut in agony. I am a male trapped in a female’s body. I do not like it. I hate myself because of it. And I want to take my life because of the shame it has caused me.