Know? What's "know"? I've posted before on how the meaning of this changes over time, but this time, I want to emphasize how the
implications just keep sinking deeper and deeper. Anne Vitale describes how this plays out in terms of life stages accurately - but clinically. To consciously experience passing from one stage to another, however, is quite another thing, the difference between fearing what you may become to feeling its realization.
All the self-analysis drive has faded away for me. I don't need it to understand myself any longer, at least for gender. I still feel some need for validation, though, because analyses like this commentary on Vitale's views:
https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2014...clinical-view/
... can still trigger - what? - pain, angst, even desperation - as my identity is questioned, parsed, and judged by others. Nothing, NOTHING in the literature really describes my life and how identity has played out and why. So "when did I know" doesn't seem like such an interesting question any more. The answers, including those I've given, don't seem that interesting or enlightening any more, either. Any time I have a more intimate exchange with another trans woman, the depth and complexity of the nuances are more telling than than any arbitrary knowledge milestones.
An old friend's signature line read "There are many ways to be a woman - or a transsexual." I've come to appreciate that point of view more and more over time. Life runs two ways: forward in un-appreciated experience and continuously retroactive in ever-changing understanding. There's beauty and pain at both ends. I'm not sure that
valuing one stage of understanding more than another does anything but create more problems. Live in the now. Act in the now.
Sorry if this is a little dense.