Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
And other uses of trans identity
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 21 December 2022 – gender:hacked
I’ve written about this trend before… but there’s more to say about it. Here’s the text of the original post:
I didn’t have a secret life. But I had a secret dream life—which might have been worse. I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself.
That’s how Honor Jones opened her viral Atlantic story about the home renovation that turned into a divorce. But curiously, it’s a line that could just as easily appear in many FTM transition stories from older, heterosexually-partnered women, like this one:
It’s been a very hard road, not the least coming to terms with needing to transition in the first place… In 2018 my chronic pain flared up so badly that I was stuck in a wheelchair for a few months, barely suppressing the fear that I would never walk again and I would die in middle age destitute and addicted to pain meds. My husband took perfect care of me, and I learned what real love is. When I finally got a diagnosis and proper treatment, it worked so well that I could be nearly pain-free, and I was so grateful to be given a second chance at life. I had new conviction that life was worth living, and so something needed to change. When I realized my gender was the core of so many of my issues at 27, I was afraid of what I would lose by transitioning. But more than that, I was afraid of what I would lose by not transitioning. A therapist helped me understand the meaning of self-love, and from that point I was set on transition. I got divorced, gave up my job to move back to my home country, and moved in with my grandmother. I won’t lie, I struggled. Almost a year after leaving, I miss my ex-husband every day.
From the outside, it looks like I’ve lost everything I had, but it’s really the opposite. It was all the price I had to pay to live, and it’s worth it. Every little hair on my cheek is worth it, every time I look at porn and jack off is worth it, and every cringey voice crack is worth it.
41, WI, parent, trashfire. February, like someone flipped a switch, I crashed into the deepest trainwreckiest depression imaginable. Totally dysfunctional. I won’t even attempt to get into all the feelings, all the components. But the core of this being some kind of gender panic though started to emerge and I didn’t really want to accept it because how would I have made it to 41, made it through marriage, made it through having given birth to a child, and not known I was trans. Simultaneously, in reviewing everything that has been or felt wrong with my life, it started to fit pretty well.
So over the following months and in therapy and in talking to people I’ve basically come to accept I am almost certainly a trans dude, and have been experimenting with social transition, which is tough, tbh, but ultimately feels pretty good although I feel like an imposter in a *different* way than I did before. That’s its own separate rant, honestly.
My therapist thinks I should try at least microdosing T, and while I am a person who is crippled doubting my own decisions when they’re intractable, I eventually agreed I probably should and got, honestly, pretty damn excited about it.
Fast forward to now: I’m completely done with the life I’ve lived up until now, desperate to like … start? honestly? before I’m dead? … I feel so impatient, like I’ve already wasted my whole life and I’m just desperate, honestly, not to waste any more. I dunno what advice there is to give really but I also have like no community so I could do with some support, I guess.
Read one or two of these stories and you might not make much of it. Read 20 and they all start to sound alike…