Can’t You Wait Until I’m Dead? ~ Chapter 13: Surprise, Mom, I’m Gay
As I waited to hear back from Mom, I wondered if the letter I’d devoted so many hours to researching and revising could help others. It’d been over five months since my last blog post, and reading other coming-out letters helped ease my anxiety. I anonymized the letter by replacing names and places with blanks—a practice that continued through the life of the blog—and began with a photo of my wooden ballpoint pen in its wood box, sitting on my wooden desk.
On Coming Out
2 November 2016 –
Dear Mom,
I’ve been wanting to tell you about this for a while, but I'm having a hard time finding the words or the right time. One part of me wants to wait until we can be in the same room, and the other part doesn’t want to keep it a secret much longer. Before I start, I should say that I’m in a very happy place psychologically right now. I know myself better than I have at any time in the past—I feel like I’ve finally figured it out and can smile a lot easier now.
You have probably been noticing little things like my quest for colourful shoes, earrings and painted toenails, my voice going up in pitch on occasion, my hair getting longer, and adding more feminine clothes and jewellery to my wardrobe. The earrings appeared in the summer of 2014, but I didn’t appreciate why, other than to fight off depression, until the spring of 2015.
It was then that you might recall I had an argument with my officemate, _____, about transgender rights. It took that argument to make me realize why I felt so strongly about it—that I have always identified as female. Identifying as female makes me a transgender woman—a label I don’t really like, but it describes me in today’s language.
Between spring of 2015 and now, I have read just about everything there is to read about being transgender and the feelings I started to have, called gender dysphoria. Doing the research on gender dysphoria and gender identity disorder made me realize that my gender dysphoria goes back to the first social interactions that I can remember. Maybe there are some you might have noticed.
I first noticed that I wasn’t like the boys and wanted to be with girls in elementary school, most memorably, when we had a “boys vs. girls” volleyball game in gym class and I was on the wrong side. I cried uncontrollably, and the teacher asked me to sit out the game on the sidelines. One student asked me why I was crying, and I told him I didn’t know. Unfortunately, looking like a boy, I didn’t fit in with the other girls in school—they didn’t want anything to do with a “boy.” It left me lonely and a “loner” for the most part.
I really only felt comfortable playing with girls like _____ across the street and cousin _____ on the farm. I liked playing with cousin _____ so much that I remember asking if I could marry her. I remember soon after we moved into the house in _____, I tried on some of your shoes, and remember another wonderful moment playing with the girl down the street who dressed me up as a bride and married me. Looking back, my only male friends were on the effeminate end of the spectrum. I could go on about all the things over the years that should have tipped me off that I was psychologically a woman placed in the wrong social group by my anatomy.
I realize now that I didn’t have gender dysphoria as seriously as some trans women because, early on, I didn’t see any alternatives and decided to repress my feelings. I was also always attracted romantically to women and could physically fit the heterosexual mould. My romantic attractions to _____ and _____ before her seemed perfectly normal to me, but futile to others in the case of _____. I didn’t know she was lesbian in high school, and others tried to tell me that it would never work, but I didn’t get the hint—I didn’t know that lesbians existed.
In large part, it has been my social ignorance and lack of role models that kept me from discovering who I really am. When _____ and I first moved in together, I tried on one of her bras and clip-on earrings—she laughed it off and took a photo to use for future blackmail should I want to run for public office. Had she or I reacted differently, I might have thought about all of this thirty years earlier. Neither of us had the frame of reference we have now.
One of my more recent awakenings was seeing the comic Eddie Izzard on stage in _____ (2000) wearing a bra, makeup, heels and a dress, calling himself an executive transvestite.[i] A quick search on the internet turned up an interview where he said he identified as a male lesbian, and in the last five years or so, as a transgender woman who has never physically transitioned. At _____ in 2012 I attended a “queer competency training” session to help us work with LGBT students in our classrooms better, they asked us which pronouns we used, and I replied, “I don’t like pronouns,” because I couldn’t say “she,” especially at work.
The desire to wear lipstick and dresses popped into my head at least a few times a year since I joined _____, and I half-heartedly joked about it with my closest co-workers and _____. Deep down, I was probably hoping for some validation and acceptance of my feelings from others. I hadn’t reached the point where I was ready to accept it on my own.
I probably don’t need to tell you this, but to borrow from a letter I found on a helpful website: The biggest problem with transsexuality is not transsexuality itself, it’s the misinformation and misconceptions out there and the attitudes that are driven by that. Gender Dysphoria is a medical condition and is not a psychological disorder that can be treated with counselling or CBT. It is also not a disease. It is not cross-dressing or a fetish, and it has nothing to do with who I’m romantically attracted to. Transsexuality is about the reality of who I am, not what anyone did to me, or the result of life experiences.
Transsexuals have existed throughout human history and live in every culture in the world without exception. Why am I this way? It probably has to do with the neuroanatomy or neurophysiology that developed before I was born. You may be stressing out that the steroid treatments you had to conceive me may have caused it—there’s nothing I can do to keep you from going there, but to say that it’s a “negative and unhelpful” thought that has no basis in theory or fact. Those of us on the transgender spectrum have been around long before drugs to treat infertility were invented.
My first thought on realizing that I had gender dysphoria was that I could be cured by taking antidepressants. It would spare me, _____, you, and the rest of the family the stress of my “coming out” and transitioning to social life as a woman. I talked to my GP in 2014 about starting to take antidepressants again, but decided instead to do the cognitive behavioural “BounceBack” program and see where it took me. It brought me better self-reflection and the ability to handle negative psychological spirals, and I think it prepared me to cope with the dysphoria before I could get treatment.
After working with a therapist and two doctors, it turns out the only viable treatment for gender dysphoria is to transition to life as a woman, or at the very least, presenting with more feminine attire and behaviour. It’s no easy task to transition at age fifty with a greying beard, low voice, and receding hairline. If there were any other way, I would do it. But I can’t fall back into the depression and confusion that comes with dysphoria.
Since May, I have been taking what’s called generically HRT in the trans female community. In my case, I’m taking spironolactone in tablet form as a testosterone blocker and estradiol in patch form. Some take high-dose oral estrogen, progesterone, and a different androgen blocker, but I’ve had good success lowering my testosterone with the low doses of both drugs I’m taking.
Within about a week of starting my current doses of both drugs, I noticed that it was much easier for me to smile, and occasionally, I now feel as emotionally up as I did back in my twenties in Los Angeles—an incredible high point I hope to regain permanently. The acronym used in the literature and medical guidelines for my transition is MtF (male to female). Although it can be frightening at times, worrying that I will never look or speak femininely enough for myself (dysphoria stems from an internal standard), I feel as though I’m on the right path for me and that I can cope with the gap between a feminine ideal and what I can realistically achieve at age fifty.
If you’ve followed most of the sensational transgender news stories over the decades, there’s often a focus on the surgeries, especially SRS (sexual reassignment surgery). I don’t know if I will have surgery at some point (it’s covered by our medical system in _____), but I will cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I’m working on my voice, getting rid of my facial and body hair, and slowly replacing my wardrobe with women’s clothes. I’ve also taken a makeup lesson to learn the basics.
The next big step in my mind will be legally changing my name and gender in _____. The name that resonates most for me is _____. I hope in the future to come out to _____ and the kids, friends, and at work. One of the hardest things I think you and others may have is using my new name, but it’s really not a big deal for me, and I don’t think it ever will be. When I’m living “full time” as _____ with a more feminine voice and appearance, it will gradually become easier for others to use my new name. There are no fixed dates for any of this, and I’m prepared for the years it will take for everything to happen.
Telling _____ was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. There were times many months ago that I made some awkward attempts to broach the subject, mumbled something, and when she said, “What?” I said, “Nothing.” It all came out one day during spring break (March 2016) when my dysphoria was peaking and I needed to explain to her that I was meeting with a therapist to talk about it.
I can tell it hasn’t been easy for her, but she’s doing her best to cope with the changes. She has been helping me work through it gradually, shopping for lipstick and clothes, surprising me with pink socks and a shirt. We have even gone out once together shopping and eating out as the women that we are.
I just want to finish off by saying that I’m still the same person I always was. I’m happier now that I’ve stopped hiding my femininity and understand why I’ve always felt like a woman. I’m also happier each time I can be honest with everyone and am simply changing gender from a son to a daughter, brother to sister, and uncle to aunt.
I’m open to any and all questions you might have and will do anything I can to help you understand. I hope that our relationship can continue to be as honest as it has been, and I understand that you may need some time to work through it yourself. It has taken me over a year to get to where I am now, and there are many more years of changes and adjustments ahead.
Love, _____
PS: If you’d like to read more, here are a couple of the websites I visited during the early stages of the journey:
(I included links to the gender identity page on the Provincial Health Services Authority page[ii] and the family issues page on Andrea James’ Transgender Map page.[iii])
One of probably many places you can look for additional support in _____ if you need:
(I added links to Rainbow Families[iv] and PFLAG.[v])
***
Mom replied an hour later, “What’s the big deal? It will take me time to process it, but I’m not deeply shocked. Allan, either. Sleep well—I love you.” Allan was her partner, a retired engineer and family friend since the seventies. The next day, she wrote, “Your letter is really thorough, covers a lot, and it’s clear. I’m trying to wrap my head around all that it implies, but you don’t have to be nervous on my account.”
We’d suss out each other’s real emotions when we talked during our next regularly scheduled Saturday morning phone call. What I had no way of knowing, three thousand kilometres away, was that her first reaction to my news was actually deep shock, sobbing on her knees, shock.
[i] The coming-out letter was written in 2016, before Suzy Eddie Izzard added the name Suzy, and stated a preference for she/her pronouns (“…but don’t mind he/him”) on Twitter/X, June 1, 2023.
[ii] “Gender,” Provincial Health Services Authority, Trans Care BC, October 27, 2022, http://www.phsa.ca/transcarebc/gender-basics-education/terms-concepts/gender.
[iii] Andrea James, “Transgender family issues,” Transgender Map, October 27, 2022, https://www.transgendermap.com/social/family-issues/.
[iv] Rainbow Families, October 27, 2022, http://www.rainbowfamilies.org/.
[v] PFLAG Twin Cities, November 1, 2016, https://pflagtc.com/.