How a Trans Woman came to realize she mattered.

So, here it is.

My story -or confessional, if you prefer - Of how I came to realize how, no matter what, I was someone who was to be valued. And of what it means to be a transgender woman, growing up. So, if there's anyone out there who's looking for smut, don't read further. There won't be any. :P

Everything I'm writing here is truth. It's painful truth, but something I feel like should be shared because stories like mine matter. Not just as something educational, but also as something that emotionally connects to those who may not understand what being trans really means for a lot of people. Now I can't speak for anyone else and I can only tell you about me, but I can say that I think I'm one of the lucky ones. And I always have been. Yet still, my life has been hard simply by the fact that my brain and my body, my heart and my soul are disconnected.

For most of my life I have been told who I should be, how I should act and why I will never amount to being anything.

Which, as you might imagine, has never been something I appreciated.

In many ways I was lucky, because I grew up in a family home where my being trans wasn't an issue.

My parents may have divorced when I was quite young, but they were united in one thing- loving me. Which leaves me in better stead than most. For I have met and been friends with other non-cisgender people for most of my life and their experiences are, and continue to be in many cases, horrific.

My life wasn't like that. Instead, when I was about 4 years old and my mother noticed that I was uncomfortable when she dressed me in boys clothes-and that I constantly stole my sisters' and wore whatever I could whenever I could- she decided that she would let me choose which clothes I wore by taking me shopping with her.
We would go to nice department stores, stand in the youth's section and she'd pick things up here and there as we trailed through. If I said something was nice, she'd add it to the basket. Then we'd go to the changing rooms and when we got there all those clothes would be spread out over any available surface and she'd ask me to choose which ones I wanted to try on, and then which ones I wanted to buy.

Keep in mind, I was still 4 at the time so I didn't always pick the girls clothes. But that did make up the vast majority of what we would end up buying.

I did, however, have a penchant for Mary Jane's. Which unfortunately persists to this day. (Though I very rarely admit that, and I don't wear them out. A 28-year-old woman in Mary Janes? Not sexy. :P) So, always I had girl's shoes on. My hair I was allowed to grow out and when I got a little older than that, perhaps 6 or so, I told my parents that I didn't like my birth name, it made me uncomfortable, you see. At the time there was a few programs on TV where the main character -Buff, athletic, manly etc.- had the same name as me and seeing all that maleness on someone with my name upset me. So, my mother, being the pragmatic and extremely Bohemian woman she is, decided that she'd call me Ashley for now.

"Because it's a girl’s name, and a boy’s name."

I loved her for that and didn't appreciate at the time how unbelievably unselfish and accepting that was.

Can you imagine how much love that would take to do? To see your young, that you have given birth to, a being on whom you would naturally place expectations on because they were assigned male at birth (AMAB), and to just let all that go. To just let your sweetheart be. I still struggle to fathom that.

But of course, my changing my name came with difficulties for her, and my dad though he wasn't really in the picture at that time, being that he was in the Army. After all, I suddenly went from one name to another, teachers and the parents of my friends were confused by it and didn't understand how a little boy was permitted by their mother to be a little girl.

My mama, a mixed-race woman of British and Maori descent, was by no means a stranger to controversy however and took most of it in stride. She didn't care what other people thought because I was, at the end of it all, her little love and how she chose to parent was entirely her prerogative. No one had the right to tell her what to do or who I should be, but that didn't stop people from trying.

Youths I had grown up with, who I had been friends with since we were in diapers, were suddenly no longer able to come to or host playdates where I was involved in them. I was ostracized by my teachers and treated like something to ignore, to tolerate only when I made my presence known. Naturally, that was difficult for me. It would be difficult for anyone, going from a regular daughter to a pariah in the space of two heartbeats. But in the end, it didn't matter. We had to move in any case, and I started over again in a place where nobody knew I wasn't a little girl like everyone else.
I didn't really have any problems. I was just Ashley. And the place I went to was open to the idea of trans youngsters. They recommended to my mother that we joined Capricorn, an LGBT agency in Australia (where I was living at that time) that is like Mermaids here in the UK. It was started to help youths of trans persuasion find others like themselves and be mentored by those who had transitioned long before. Many transmen and transwomen of all ages, races, backgrounds, came to Capricorn to tell their stories. Heavily watered down for the young ones, but much darker or in depth for the tweengers and young adults.

It was there that I began to find my stride and I became certain, more so that I already was, that I was a girl. Ever since I'd been little, I'd just assumed I was a girl. When a teacher would call for boys on the left, girls on the right, I'd go right. Without even thinking. I'd never realized I Was a boy until I was told I was by those around me. I'd never realized I was different until people said I was.

But now I had found my tribe. I'd found new friends -some of whom are still in my life today and are happy, healthy and secure in the knowledge that they are loved for who they are by those who actually matter- and I'd found a place where I felt safe. So, as I turned 11, I told my mum and dad that I was sure. Completely and utterly sure that I was a girl and that I always had been and would forever remain so. My mum just looked at me, smiled and said. "I know."

But it was my dad, who had not long re-entered my life whose words still stick with me and even to this day make my heart swell with love.

He took me in his arms, kissed the top of my head and very seriously made a point of looking me in the eyes when he rumbled at me. "I don't care if you're my son. And I don't care if you're my daughter. You're my blood. That is all that matters. You live this life as you know you should. You live as yourself and no one else. That is what will make me proud and that is why I will never stop loving you."

They changed my name again at that point to Sophia. The name they would have given me had I been assigned female at birth. And shortly after that was when I met Vincent.
Because of course, every good story involves a boy, doesn't it?

My final year of primary, he transferred in. He was half Chinese, half Australian and the sweetest thing you'd even known. He invited me to his birthday party, along with half of the area and when we played pass the parcel, as you do, I was sitting next to the boy who won the prize at the centre. Vincent got up, gave the prize to me, and said, "You're my girlfriend now." And that was it. We were together. We were so close that when it came for him to go to a boarding house for his upper years, I asked my parents if I could go with him to the same place. Being the loving parents they were, they said yes because they wanted me to be happy. From the moment we got there we were Sophie and Vincent, Vincent, and Sophie. There wasn't one without the other. He knew I was trans because my parents told me to tell him. He didn't care and his mother, Lyn, didn't care either. We were inseparable and so much of my identity was tied up in him. We lived in this bubble where everything was said, nothing was left unsaid. We were brutally honest with each other and we worked. We clicked in a way I've yet to experience with anybody else, though I hold out a lot of hope, ha-ha. I lost my virginity to him when we were still young. It was... not perfect because these things never are, but it was as romantic as we could make it as tweenagers whose only experience of romance came from The O.C and Degrassy High. We had a relationship where we were each other’s pillar of support though we did sleep with other people and were in an open relationship, no one could come between us. He provided me with a level of acceptance and joy that, quite honestly, I never would have got from anyone who wasn't him at that young age.

We had our problems, of course, but until we left Hills, we were together. Didn't split up once.

That came with its own problems though. Because who was I without him? So much of my growing up, so much of my identity as a person was tied into him and who I was with him. I didn't have my own friends and neither did he. All our friends were exactly that our friends. My hobbies were his hobbies. My likes his likes. His dreams my dreams. Everything was shared. And that was ultimately my downfall. Because I had lost so much in those 8 years, we were together. Transgender friends I had grown up with committed suicide because the pain was too much. Some got hooked on bad things to ease their hurts or ran away from home to enter the sex trade to supply themselves with hormones, or their next fix.

I struggled. I had been on hormone blockers from the time I was 11. My classmates had noticed the fact that, though I Was tall and growing older, that I didn't seem to go through puberty like the rest of them. And I felt it important to tell them why, because I'm not the kind of person who can hide something about myself, or cover things up for an easy life. I am who I am, and people will either understand or they won't. That openness caused a great many rifts, however. And my resentment of the CIS girls in my life, not because they were mean but because they could have everything I wanted and that I thought I was rightfully entitled to because I too was female, made me mean.

In fact, it made me downright cruel.

I hated the fact that they could have a period and I couldn't. That they had been born with a cervix, ovaries, and the ability to bear a babe when I would never be able to.
It hurt. It hurt that I would never be as much of a woman as they. For though I could alter my appearance, have surgeries that aligned my outer self with that which more closely resembles who I am on the inside, biologically I would never be the same.
It tore away at me that I wasn't who I should have been born, but even through all that Vincent was understanding and so were my family. I mean, I did earn myself the rather unflattering nickname of 'Medusa', but no one blamed me for how I was.
I was still going to Capricorn, still being mentored, and seeing a counsellor, but very little helped during that period of my life to make me feel good about myself.
In fact, I all but hated who I was, and I could never look at my body with dispassion. Everything was so tied up with what I wasn't and could never be that my self-hatred grew and grew until all there was left in me was rage, sadness and yes, grief.
Because that's what it was in the end, an overwhelming grief for who I had lost. I'd lost the image of me as the princess in the fairy tales, the image of me as wife and mother that I had dreamed of as a youth. And I all but gave up hope of loving myself.
After all, what was there to love in one who was so monstrous? Or so I thought of myself.

My mirror became, all at once, both my best friend and my worst enemy.
I loved how pretty I was to look at when I had my make up on and looked the part, but when I wasn't made up and I just saw my own reflection I hurt. I yearned more than anything to be able to take my make up off, pull my hair back and see the face I held in my mind’s eye of who I truly was, but I never did. I can't describe how that pain felt, not in any words available to me anyway. It is something that is ultimately indescribable.
All these issues I had with myself, the biological, physical and appearance based overwhelmed me on a regular basis and left me feeling like I wanted to die.
And that was how I felt when, eventually, at the end of our education, Vincent and I went our separate ways.

He left to go to Hong Kong. I left to go to London. Though we had been and had meant so much to each other, our relationship would never have survived a long-distance arrangement.

We were so physical, so close and so dependent on each other’s direct presence that it never would have been the same.

We parted on good terms, though.

But then I was left to try and find myself as a person without him whilst also trying to deal with my other issues.

I ... didn't handle that well.

I tried to fill myself up with alcohol, partying, and the touch of random strangers. Constantly I sought validation through other people and in so doing continuously missed the point. I wasn't really finding myself by doing that, I was finding ways to hide from everything else that was going on. To hide from my own fears and insecurities that never seemed to go away or to become bearable. It was at this point I ended up in rehab. And after a hell of a lot of soul-searching and a hell of a lot of intensive therapy as well, I finally started looking at myself differently. I came to understand that whilst I may never be exactly what I wished I could be, enough would have to be enough.
There would have to be an acceptance of myself and an understanding that would help me grow into a stronger, healthier person.

I took part in therapies for physical health and meditation used in tandem with each other, and consequently I got slightly addicted to the gym. (Though since lockdown I am way too lazy to have done much recently. And, it's not the same training by yourself.) And I learnt that I enjoy things that are a little extreme, like sky diving and base jumping (Though when I first did that I am not ashamed to admit that I nearly lost myself from fear.) and other thrill sports. They made me feel like I had accomplished something, that I could get over my fears and it gave me confidence. Confidence to grow as a person and look at myself in a way that was more than just negative. I came to love myself because I realized that I had no other choice but to love myself. Otherwise I would be wasting all the days of my life in fear and regret and grief when it, my life, should be so much more than that. Being trans may have caused a lot of problems for me and it may have even been a catalyst for a lot of the bed experiences in my life, but being trans has also taught me the value of compassion and understanding not only for myself but also for others.

There is value in being trans, and I am worth more than the sum of other people's opinions. The only voice that matters is my own, and the only thoughts worth anything to me should be those belonging to the people I care about and who care about me too. Otherwise it's all just white noise that isn't meant for my ears in any case.
I learnt to be strong through adversity and that, I think, is the best way to learn to be strong. Because no one can take what you learn from you and every time you or others put you down, that's another excuse to pull yourself back up. I'm not perfect, God I'm far from it, but I don't wake up in the morning with the desire to cause another person pain and I care about others... so I think that makes me great.

Anyway, that's my story. Heavily condensed as you might imagine, but I wanted to share it with you all just in case you, the reader, could find some benefit in it and it could maybe help you understand why we are, some of us, the way we are.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for taking the time.

It means a lot.

Hopefully my story has touched you, hopefully it's even helped you to understand not just me but people like me and if not, you're more than welcome to comment and ask me questions. I'd be happy to answer any you have. :)

Sophie. X

• Add Comment
• View Blog