Ryusuta
Smash Master
Link to original post: [drupal=3058]MtF - The Transition Story (Part 1: The Timeline & January, the month of hell)[/drupal]
It's hard to know where to begin my story. Even as I sit to write this, I'm attempting to come up with a pithy summary for my current situation that would convey some of its depth. I'm sure that the topic title will come to me in the same way the rest of this story - and truly, most of my writings - do: completely unplanned.
In December of 2008, I began to open a door for myself. A door between two different versions of me. The "safe" version was the one I left behind. That version was known as Adam to some, and Sir 0rion to others (both to others still, and by more names than that). That was the male version of me. The one I had grown up 2 and a half decades being. It was the version of me that was content to live with his parents, yet had wild ambitions beyond what most people would realistically expect. Adam was a person who had no qualms in considering himself to have something deep inside that set him apart. And for all I know, maybe he was right.
When I walked through that door, it was to become the brand new version of me. The marker on the doorway reads "Katherine," though I also go by Ryusuta and a lot of other names. A person perhaps a little more focused, and a little less extravagant with her self-perception.
Okay, so perhaps "doorway" might be a little misleading. The shift between the two versions of me hasn't occurred like opening a door, stepping through, and being on the other side. It's been more like opening a door into an unlit hallway and working your way through it. Because there isn't a set point I can decide where Adam ended, or will end, and Katherine begins, or will start.
Poetic license and symbolism aside, I'm talking about the process I began at the absolute end of 2008 - the process of transitioning from male to female.
And no, I still haven't thought of a topic title.
Life has been... complex... since I made that final decision at the end of that year. Soon following it, I took a totally uncharacteristic voyage to live with someone I didn't even know in person down in Virginia. It didn't work out exactly, but I moved up to Connecticut soon afterward. Sadly, that trip went bad, too, and I had to return to my parents' house in Denver, where I had to keep up my transition in secret until I was finally able to move out on my own.
I know already that there's going to be more to this story that I could possibly include just in one go, but I'm sure I'll be able to come back to it at a later time. For now, I just want to get these thoughts written down so they're not just cycling uselessly through my head.
I'd really rather not discuss my stay in Virginia, except to mention that one good thing about it was that it was the first time I was formally diagnosed with what I knew to be the case all my life: gender identity disorder, or GID. After things went bad toward the end of January, I moved in with my brother up in Connecticut. My brother might be the one person in my family to this day that - while he still doesn't understand my decision, and freely admits as much - is supportive of my ability to make it. To this day, he's the only one to have seen me in girl clothes. And seeing as I was only just starting out, I could only imagine what I must have looked like.
But anyway... I loved my brother and was soooo grateful to him. But it had no chance of working. His "apartment" could only possibly be suited for one person comfortably. Having me there was just too cramped. And worse, there was no job market in New Haven. NONE. Also, I had no car. Three strikes, I'm out.
I had to make the toughest decision since coming out to my family and friends. I had to move back in with my parents.
As terrible of a burden as that was for me, I was glad to be back in Colorado. I knew and loved Denver, and it felt right to be where I could be near my friends. The former part still holds true. The latter... well, it does and it doesn't. But I'll get to that later.
My parents in the past decade or so have fallen into a really religious conservative kick. With my dad, I fear it borders on slight lunacy. He's convinced that God fixed him when he was a teenager and cured him of being gay. *Sigh*
But to make a long story at least slightly shorter, they would have none of my transitioning. So I told them nothing of it. Don't get me wrong - I certainly didn't keep anything secret. They simply didn't ask, and I didn't tell. (Gee... I feel as though I've heard of that somewhere...)
My parents knew that I was occasionally seeing a therapist, and it eventually got through to them that it was a therapist that specializes in GID and transitioning. What they didn't know was that while I was staying with them, I had already begun to take hormones regularly and was working on picking up a few girls' clothes here and there.
Time took time, and a lot of things happened. Instead of putting my degree in broadcasting into something worthwhile, I ended up getting a crummy job working security for a swimming pool during the summer, a parking garage for a few weeks following that, and then a business complex.
Finally, at October of 2009, I was introduced to Mei, who was willing to sublet her house to me for a price I could actually afford. And that's where I've been traversing the symbolic hallway ever since.
So, this has been the absolute skeleton of what I've been going through. The basic timeline, essentially. The difficulties along the way are something I feel deserve blog entries all on their own, but I figured this would make a good starting point for my story.
Since I'm writing this here, though, allow me to talk about last month. Because it still blows my mind just what's happened in that time.
So, I'm on the verge of living full-time as female. I'm gradually getting more confident in my appearance, and I don't seem to be attracting any unusual attention (which could be seen as good OR bad, but is irrelevant at the moment). The point, though, is that pretty much everyone I care about knows me in person as Kat (which is what most people call me now).
I have a sister, who has long-since departed for Missouri. I'll say around 2003 or so at a guess. We basically never spoke to each other except snippits here and there. I told her about my plans to transition, and I'm fairly certain she didn't pay much heed. Well, fast forward a year or so later to last month. I receive a very disturbing message from a person I don't know on my Facebook account reading (verbatim quote):
"CALL YOUR REAL SISTER"
Yeah... that was certainly nice and cryptic. I asked who it was, and the person said it was her cousin-in-law. Which made SOME sense, since the person apparently lived in Missouri as well. So, after some discussion with that person and some deliberation on my part, I eventually called my sister.
What do you think I heard?
A reassurance of her support and love?
An expression of concern for my well-being?
A query as to what she might do to make things easier for me?
No. She picked up the phone, and immediately started screaming at me through a rain of tears. She told me (and this is a direct quote with no embellishment or change in context on my part whatsoever) that her little brother was dead. She said that I was completely and totally dead, and that she couldn't mourn my death because she has no grave where she could put any flowers. She asked how I could be so selfish... how I could hurt her like this... how I could scare my nephew away from his grandparents by being trans (it didn't occur to her that by this point I had long-since moved out). She insisted that I tell her if it was her fault, and told me that she would never, EVER call me by any name other than Adam.
It wasn't a fun conversation.
Oh, but that's not all! You remember the low-end security job I mentioned earlier? I was fired from that job. Apparently the client supposedly complained that I wasn't unlocking certain doors in the morning. A complaint which made little sense, because the layout of the buildings is such that if you unlock one door, you have to go through and unlock the middle doors and then come out through the end, so that it's pretty much impossible to miss the middle ones.
Even worse, no one from the company had bothered to investigate those complaints to see if they were legitimate. I was given a "final warning," and then a week later (maybe less), I was given my walking papers. What a great month! Thank goodness that's all that...
...Nope. I got three tickets in January. THREE TICKETS. The first ticket I got because a brake light was out. Instead of giving me a warning (I didn't know about it, and we were like 2 blocks from an auto store), BAM. 100 dollar fine. This was in between my "final warning" and my pink slip. The second one I got days later for allegedly going 12 miles over the speed limit. Something like 47 in a 35. I don't remember exactly without looking. Even with an early payment, it's a 2-point penalty and a $120 fine, so I'm debating whether I should take it to court and see if I can get the points knocked off in a plea bargain. I'm... *cough*... not counting on it. The third and final ticket I received when a cop pulled me over ALLEGEDLY for speeding, but he decided to "give me a warning on that" and ONLY wrote me a ticket for my tail light. Which was working. And red. With nothing wrong with it. At all.
Do you want the icing on the traffic cake? I'll let you count the number of tickets I've had before Janurary. That's right, count them again.
ZERO.
In one month, I go from a PERFECT traffic record to having three tickets.
Disowned by my sister. Lost my job. Three tickets totaling over 300 dollars. Last month was very, very bad.
So, I'll leave my long, long story at this breaking point for now. I have plenty more to say - BELIEVE me - but I'll save it for another time. In the meantime, I've got some Sluggy Freelance to read, maybe a Game Boy Color Game to play, and my back hurts. I'll write again soon.
It's hard to know where to begin my story. Even as I sit to write this, I'm attempting to come up with a pithy summary for my current situation that would convey some of its depth. I'm sure that the topic title will come to me in the same way the rest of this story - and truly, most of my writings - do: completely unplanned.
In December of 2008, I began to open a door for myself. A door between two different versions of me. The "safe" version was the one I left behind. That version was known as Adam to some, and Sir 0rion to others (both to others still, and by more names than that). That was the male version of me. The one I had grown up 2 and a half decades being. It was the version of me that was content to live with his parents, yet had wild ambitions beyond what most people would realistically expect. Adam was a person who had no qualms in considering himself to have something deep inside that set him apart. And for all I know, maybe he was right.
When I walked through that door, it was to become the brand new version of me. The marker on the doorway reads "Katherine," though I also go by Ryusuta and a lot of other names. A person perhaps a little more focused, and a little less extravagant with her self-perception.
Okay, so perhaps "doorway" might be a little misleading. The shift between the two versions of me hasn't occurred like opening a door, stepping through, and being on the other side. It's been more like opening a door into an unlit hallway and working your way through it. Because there isn't a set point I can decide where Adam ended, or will end, and Katherine begins, or will start.
Poetic license and symbolism aside, I'm talking about the process I began at the absolute end of 2008 - the process of transitioning from male to female.
And no, I still haven't thought of a topic title.
Life has been... complex... since I made that final decision at the end of that year. Soon following it, I took a totally uncharacteristic voyage to live with someone I didn't even know in person down in Virginia. It didn't work out exactly, but I moved up to Connecticut soon afterward. Sadly, that trip went bad, too, and I had to return to my parents' house in Denver, where I had to keep up my transition in secret until I was finally able to move out on my own.
I know already that there's going to be more to this story that I could possibly include just in one go, but I'm sure I'll be able to come back to it at a later time. For now, I just want to get these thoughts written down so they're not just cycling uselessly through my head.
I'd really rather not discuss my stay in Virginia, except to mention that one good thing about it was that it was the first time I was formally diagnosed with what I knew to be the case all my life: gender identity disorder, or GID. After things went bad toward the end of January, I moved in with my brother up in Connecticut. My brother might be the one person in my family to this day that - while he still doesn't understand my decision, and freely admits as much - is supportive of my ability to make it. To this day, he's the only one to have seen me in girl clothes. And seeing as I was only just starting out, I could only imagine what I must have looked like.
But anyway... I loved my brother and was soooo grateful to him. But it had no chance of working. His "apartment" could only possibly be suited for one person comfortably. Having me there was just too cramped. And worse, there was no job market in New Haven. NONE. Also, I had no car. Three strikes, I'm out.
I had to make the toughest decision since coming out to my family and friends. I had to move back in with my parents.
As terrible of a burden as that was for me, I was glad to be back in Colorado. I knew and loved Denver, and it felt right to be where I could be near my friends. The former part still holds true. The latter... well, it does and it doesn't. But I'll get to that later.
My parents in the past decade or so have fallen into a really religious conservative kick. With my dad, I fear it borders on slight lunacy. He's convinced that God fixed him when he was a teenager and cured him of being gay. *Sigh*
But to make a long story at least slightly shorter, they would have none of my transitioning. So I told them nothing of it. Don't get me wrong - I certainly didn't keep anything secret. They simply didn't ask, and I didn't tell. (Gee... I feel as though I've heard of that somewhere...)
My parents knew that I was occasionally seeing a therapist, and it eventually got through to them that it was a therapist that specializes in GID and transitioning. What they didn't know was that while I was staying with them, I had already begun to take hormones regularly and was working on picking up a few girls' clothes here and there.
Time took time, and a lot of things happened. Instead of putting my degree in broadcasting into something worthwhile, I ended up getting a crummy job working security for a swimming pool during the summer, a parking garage for a few weeks following that, and then a business complex.
Finally, at October of 2009, I was introduced to Mei, who was willing to sublet her house to me for a price I could actually afford. And that's where I've been traversing the symbolic hallway ever since.
So, this has been the absolute skeleton of what I've been going through. The basic timeline, essentially. The difficulties along the way are something I feel deserve blog entries all on their own, but I figured this would make a good starting point for my story.
Since I'm writing this here, though, allow me to talk about last month. Because it still blows my mind just what's happened in that time.
So, I'm on the verge of living full-time as female. I'm gradually getting more confident in my appearance, and I don't seem to be attracting any unusual attention (which could be seen as good OR bad, but is irrelevant at the moment). The point, though, is that pretty much everyone I care about knows me in person as Kat (which is what most people call me now).
I have a sister, who has long-since departed for Missouri. I'll say around 2003 or so at a guess. We basically never spoke to each other except snippits here and there. I told her about my plans to transition, and I'm fairly certain she didn't pay much heed. Well, fast forward a year or so later to last month. I receive a very disturbing message from a person I don't know on my Facebook account reading (verbatim quote):
"CALL YOUR REAL SISTER"
Yeah... that was certainly nice and cryptic. I asked who it was, and the person said it was her cousin-in-law. Which made SOME sense, since the person apparently lived in Missouri as well. So, after some discussion with that person and some deliberation on my part, I eventually called my sister.
What do you think I heard?
A reassurance of her support and love?
An expression of concern for my well-being?
A query as to what she might do to make things easier for me?
No. She picked up the phone, and immediately started screaming at me through a rain of tears. She told me (and this is a direct quote with no embellishment or change in context on my part whatsoever) that her little brother was dead. She said that I was completely and totally dead, and that she couldn't mourn my death because she has no grave where she could put any flowers. She asked how I could be so selfish... how I could hurt her like this... how I could scare my nephew away from his grandparents by being trans (it didn't occur to her that by this point I had long-since moved out). She insisted that I tell her if it was her fault, and told me that she would never, EVER call me by any name other than Adam.
It wasn't a fun conversation.
Oh, but that's not all! You remember the low-end security job I mentioned earlier? I was fired from that job. Apparently the client supposedly complained that I wasn't unlocking certain doors in the morning. A complaint which made little sense, because the layout of the buildings is such that if you unlock one door, you have to go through and unlock the middle doors and then come out through the end, so that it's pretty much impossible to miss the middle ones.
Even worse, no one from the company had bothered to investigate those complaints to see if they were legitimate. I was given a "final warning," and then a week later (maybe less), I was given my walking papers. What a great month! Thank goodness that's all that...
...Nope. I got three tickets in January. THREE TICKETS. The first ticket I got because a brake light was out. Instead of giving me a warning (I didn't know about it, and we were like 2 blocks from an auto store), BAM. 100 dollar fine. This was in between my "final warning" and my pink slip. The second one I got days later for allegedly going 12 miles over the speed limit. Something like 47 in a 35. I don't remember exactly without looking. Even with an early payment, it's a 2-point penalty and a $120 fine, so I'm debating whether I should take it to court and see if I can get the points knocked off in a plea bargain. I'm... *cough*... not counting on it. The third and final ticket I received when a cop pulled me over ALLEGEDLY for speeding, but he decided to "give me a warning on that" and ONLY wrote me a ticket for my tail light. Which was working. And red. With nothing wrong with it. At all.
Do you want the icing on the traffic cake? I'll let you count the number of tickets I've had before Janurary. That's right, count them again.
ZERO.
In one month, I go from a PERFECT traffic record to having three tickets.
Disowned by my sister. Lost my job. Three tickets totaling over 300 dollars. Last month was very, very bad.
So, I'll leave my long, long story at this breaking point for now. I have plenty more to say - BELIEVE me - but I'll save it for another time. In the meantime, I've got some Sluggy Freelance to read, maybe a Game Boy Color Game to play, and my back hurts. I'll write again soon.
