What Leads to Transition - My Story summarised
A couple of early posts on the blog (here and here) were called 'What leads to Transition' , they were quite rambling and didn't arguably talk all that much about the what and why of my decision to transition, in part this was despite it being one year post social transition and over a month into 'full on' Medical Transition I was still coming to terms with my own identity and it's evolution.
The choreographer George Balanchine said "I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance." and this is a little bit of what I felt in Summer 2017 about transition, 2 plus years of exploring who 'she' was came to a crisis point, fortunately for me, I was in a position where I had stability in work in work, home and friendship, I had also found my happy place in the ballet Studio. Transition is rarely a choice, it is generally a necessity the alternatives being far worse or
It reached to point where a feeling and sensation that I had previously considered to be panic attacks started to reoccur but without seeming triggering events. I now do wonder if much of my depressive symptoms going right back to the late 1990s were in fact symptoms of Dysphoria, and the feeling of being lost, or dissociative and depersonalised existence stemmed from my dysphoria rather than from some of the situations I found myself in.
Summer 2017 and the need to transition ... It was quite simply the case that being 'that boy' was putting on the face and putting on the costume, and the realisation that he had just been a series of characters I'd portrayed - to survive in a hostile to openly LGBTQ people school environment in the era of S.28, to try and assert my position against the 'rah' element in my first attempt at higher education and then the constructed persona of my time as a Nurse.
There are now two words that cover that summer , 'fear' and 'trapped'
Fear of transitioning, but fear of not transitioning, I recognised that many of the problems were in fact due to the impact of Dysphoria -I realised there was no way forward a productive vital human that did not feature the dominance , if not exclusion of any other , of my true self, my true self being the Woman who posesses the name Nicola Jayne, a woman deprived of a girlhood by ignorance and fear.
I felt trapped by being him, trapped to the point that there were people who within 24 hours of having met them when I was presenting masculine knew about the real me, these people are some of my dearest friends now and part of my tribe, a family of choice bound by a love of dance the #TBRFamily. In other posts i have talked about the few months between my first and Second TBR and that January 2018 TBR was a very public expression of the authentic me.
The choreographer George Balanchine said "I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance." and this is a little bit of what I felt in Summer 2017 about transition, 2 plus years of exploring who 'she' was came to a crisis point, fortunately for me, I was in a position where I had stability in work in work, home and friendship, I had also found my happy place in the ballet Studio. Transition is rarely a choice, it is generally a necessity the alternatives being far worse or
It reached to point where a feeling and sensation that I had previously considered to be panic attacks started to reoccur but without seeming triggering events. I now do wonder if much of my depressive symptoms going right back to the late 1990s were in fact symptoms of Dysphoria, and the feeling of being lost, or dissociative and depersonalised existence stemmed from my dysphoria rather than from some of the situations I found myself in.
Summer 2017 and the need to transition ... It was quite simply the case that being 'that boy' was putting on the face and putting on the costume, and the realisation that he had just been a series of characters I'd portrayed - to survive in a hostile to openly LGBTQ people school environment in the era of S.28, to try and assert my position against the 'rah' element in my first attempt at higher education and then the constructed persona of my time as a Nurse.
There are now two words that cover that summer , 'fear' and 'trapped'
Fear of transitioning, but fear of not transitioning, I recognised that many of the problems were in fact due to the impact of Dysphoria -I realised there was no way forward a productive vital human that did not feature the dominance , if not exclusion of any other , of my true self, my true self being the Woman who posesses the name Nicola Jayne, a woman deprived of a girlhood by ignorance and fear.
I felt trapped by being him, trapped to the point that there were people who within 24 hours of having met them when I was presenting masculine knew about the real me, these people are some of my dearest friends now and part of my tribe, a family of choice bound by a love of dance the #TBRFamily. In other posts i have talked about the few months between my first and Second TBR and that January 2018 TBR was a very public expression of the authentic me.
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