[LChoy]

I found this article in the Huffingtonpost. Very good perspective on why someone would change their gender


Transgender Author: Why I Decided To Become A Woman

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...ef=transgender

To her, I am sacrificing our family for a panty-hosed version of a typical male midlife crisis, abdicating relationships and responsibilities to roar off on the Harley-Davidson of transsexuality (the metaphor is hers) toward a fluffy pink Shangri-la of self-centered gratification.
But I don’t see myself in her bitter mirror, because I’m not transitioning for the sake of happiness. I have no illusions that becoming a jobless, homeless approximation of a middle-aged woman is a recipe for bliss. This isn’t a typical male midlife crisis—it’s a typical transsexual midlife crisis.

That’s what’s so hard to explain. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a man—at least, I have nothing to add to the complaints women traditionally make about the opposite sex. What’s bad about being a man is that I’m not one.

The more I outwardly surrendered my life to those around me, the more I thought about gender. When I walked to the bathroom, I thought about gender; when I sang my daughters to sleep, I thought about gender; when I sat in my office, I thought about gender; when I stood in the classroom, I thought about gender. Finally, I realized I was thinking about gender every waking minute. There was no relief anymore, no moment when I was unaware of my estrangement from my skin.

In the name of being a husband and father, I had turned gender dysphoria from a chronic discomfort and occasional crisis into a system of torture. For years, being a man had been a habit. Now, being a man was a matter of constant self-denial, a desperate failing effort to control the rage for transformation that seemed to be all that was left of me.

My absence of connection to life— that numbness where a feeling of physical presence and aliveness should have been—shattered into two overwhelming, contradictory imperatives: the need to become the true self I had never been and the need to die before that self ’s emergence fatally injured my family. Being a man, for me, was a performance, and most people were not only willing but eager to take that performance for me.

A body is there, but it’s not yours. A voice is coming out of your throat, but you don’t recognize it. The mirror contains another person’s face. When your children wrap their arms around you, they seem to be hugging someone else. Every morning you wake up shocked to find that parts of you have disappeared, that you are smothered in flesh you cannot recognize as yours. That you have lost the body you never had. This isn’t me, you say to yourself. This isn’t me, you say to anyone you trust. Of course it isn’t. There is no “me,” no body that fits the map, no identity that fits your sense of self, no way to orient yourself in a world in which you exist only as an hysterical rejection of what, to everyone around you, is the simple, obvious fact of your gender.