Message to long-ago Tamsin: Sweetie, cisgender boys DO NOT glow with secret pride when saleswomen mistake them for a girl, or when lesbians look at them disbelievingly and say, "OMG, you're such a dyke!" Just shut up and get in the robot, girlypop. Estradiol is cheap, and you're going to love it.
I've got dozens of stories like this, as everyone seems to, and I just love hearing them.
My entire pre-transition life is basically a long string of "OMG JUST TRANSITION ALREADY!!!" moments. I've said, many times, that my history really only makes sense if you view it through the lens of "she was a girl who didn't know she was a girl." I can be angry and sad about that, or I can laugh.
This is like talking at a mirror, that's got a cooler username than I do. XD
Aw, thanks! It's just my name and my domain. And I know there are no universal trans experiences, nor even universal transfeminine experiences, but a lot of our experiences rhyme with one another.
Mine's just my youtube channel, so mine's no less reused! Yeah, everyone's is slightly different. Most of my real life friends are trans (How I spent so much time in secondary school around them, refusing to let myself come out I'll never know), and all our experiences are as different as can be!
Wild, right? It's almost as though the only thing all trans people have in common is... being trans? 🤔🤷♀️ I'm separated by long years and long distance from anyone I was at secondary school with, and I've no interest in going to a reunion, so I've no idea if any of them turned out to have been trans.
Then again, I graduated high school in 1990 in the Deep South. Trans people hadn't been invented yet, and certainly nobody native to the South would've succumb to such a ghastly condition. I was from somewhere else—California, specifically, to no one's surprise. (NB: this all is sarcasm.)
A note for the skeptical: both examples are drawn from my actual, literal life. The saleslady thing happened in my teens—IN THE DEEP SOUTH, no less—and the "lesbians calling me a dyke" thing happened at least twice, in my twenties. IDK what to tell you. Apparently people just see me as a girl. 🤷♀️
Good job Tam, and good job wife 😉
My sweetie is the BEST. 🥰
You both are, and deserve each other 🥰
Aw, thanks. I try to deserve her every day. 😊 Thinking about this, I realized that I stayed closeted for so long—even to myself—almost entirely because I spent my entire life trapped in other people's gendered expectations of me. The very first moment someone asked ME who I was, I knew.
I get it. The reason I only transitioned at 36 when I already knew at 4 is because all feedback I ever gotten about trans people was negative. Had I someone to reassure me that it was okay to be me instead of only hearing it spoken about in disgust, I would have transitioned a lot sooner.
Yuuuuuup. I think it's telling that, the MOMENT I was asked about it by someone I trusted to love me no matter what my answer was, I was immediately like, "Um, yeah, actually, I'm kind of a woman about it."
So proud of you. And I love that you are both still working towards being deserving of one another. When you get so used to having a partner that you stop working towards the relationship is the first (and most deadly) sign of decline...
Contrary to a lot of people's beliefs, relationships are work. We work hard at our relationship... but the work is also a joy in itself. We also play—a lot!—because that's who we are as a couple.
People think of "working on a relationship" as meaning "prevent it from falling to pieces". They think of stuff like couples therapy and other high-profile stuff. Working on a relationship should start way before that, on day 1, and never stop. It's all of the small things combined.
The funny thing is, we see a couples counselor on a regular basis! 😂 It's part of the work we do—not because we're falling apart, but as maintenance, like getting your car tuned up. We're both communicators, and having an uninvested person there to help facilitate communication is really useful.