History, Goals, and Comprehensibility (TS responses)

[LeaP]

Why, "after 23 years of marriage and three kids", you have chosen/decided to transition now? Also, just what does transition mean to you? What is your end goal?
...
Perhaps for some, leaving wife and family behind was necessary for their own personal survival. For me that just seems incomprehensible.

These comments and questions were posted in a recent thread and prompted some off-topic (from that thread's perspective) responses. Rather than distract that thread further, I though I'd take things up as a new topic.

The topic is not concerned with the original contributor's perspective, and I would ask the mods to delete any responses that go there. Rather, it is:

1) Whether the questions in the first part of the quote are even meaningful for a TS, and,

2) Why leaving wife and family might be necessary for survival. Please note that I am NOT ASKING if leaving a long-term marriage is comprehensible in itself.

What do you think?

[Kaitlyn Michele]

Survival instinct.
That's what kicks in. That's what the "bell is rung" really means.

It's not about rational thought. It the instinct that makes it all happen... then you need your rational mind to get it done and live your best life..... (of course your rational mind continues to scream bloody murder the whole time)

That's the context of how I looked at it.. that's why part of me knew I had to transition just to feel alive...I knew it was happening...but my rational mind looked at your questions and led me to all kinds of misery...
my rational mind considered these types of questions and whatever headway I would make (of course I can't transition!!!!) got hammered by the juggernaut of instinct...my poor wife!! my poor kids!!! it haunted me...and I knew what I was doing was in some way very bad for them...but I instinctually knew I had to live and that i'd have to deal with consequences in the future...it wasn't "necessary" for me to live...but as a living breathing human my will to survive is built right into me.

It's not relevant to me that perhaps my actual physical survival was not at stake... I never seriously contemplated dying but I could not feel alive...and this was killing me whether I believed it or not... and I instinctually knew it...

Leaving family, losing jobs, taking health or personal risks...these must all be thought of in the context of how sometimes rational thought gets trumped by simple human nature and the idea that you simply can't fight nature forever.

A guy sees a baby in the street about to get run over...he instinctively wants to save that baby...he is not thinking or considering anything...he has no goal to be a hero...he has a wife and 4 kids and yet he jumps in and gets run over as he pushes the baby out of the way... or he dives into ice cold water and drowns trying to save an elderly person that fell in.....or rushes into a burning building for a dog.... its instinct...he didn't leave his wife and family behind because he chose it... he had no goal other that to save that baby or pet... he didn't expect to die...

I don't know any transsexual that transitioned after their 30's without significant struggles around the craziness of it as it relates to the rational mind...it drives people nuts
I also am not aware of any older ts transitioner that didn't suffer greatly in an attempt to satisfy that rational minds "knowledge"...(ie how can you leave a wife and kid of 23 years?????!!!)....

[becky77]

You reach a breaking point, then seek therapy and as someone else said elsewhere. When you finally accept yourself, its like all the denials and fear and inaction are stripped away and you are driven to seek change. That point comes at different stages, but once reached you know what you have to do.
I just think its something you can't explain to someone else.

[KellyJameson]

Anytime I hear "chosen to transition" it automatically disqualifies the argument.

You do not chose to transition so much as you relent to the need to, which has always been there since childhood, whether it was recognized or not for what it was and is.

Gender identity is not a choice so gender dysphoria is an effect as a consequence of the brain sex being opposite the body sex.

When I talk about brain sex I'm talking about white matter versus grey matter, left hemisphere versus right hemisphere along with hundreds of other characteristics that in general make up the biological differences between men and women but men and women share much in common so there is a spectrum of masculine and feminine expression as a mixture of both in everyone.

Not all people who transition are transsexuals.

Gender identity must be expressed and if you cannot do it through your own body and out into the world you will find a "proxy" such as a wife, and or you will try to kill the need for gender expression as the person knows themselves to truly be, by going in the opposite direction.

There are so many assumptions made about the transsexual and one of the bigs ones is that they even understood the source of their torment.

For some it is a long painful learning curve or an immersion into avoidance and self destructive behavior.

The psychology of transsexuals is very consistent across time, cultures and ethnicities because it is not about gender as man made gender roles but biological so effect and adaptations are very similar.

As an example there are only so many ways to adapt if you are born with only one leg excluding the adaptations that technology allows for. This does not mean we are inferior or broken as someone may assume about the person born with one leg.

Creating a family is certainly part of identity formation but the mistake is made when it is used to form gender identity for the transsexual who should be forgiven from not understanding fully their motives for getting married and having a family.

Not being able to live your gender identity creates a vacuum and anxiety that the person must fill and cope with somehow.

Some go into the military others into a bottle or marriage but it is still using something to cope with the separation from self that they are trying to repair but which can never be repaired except through some form of transitioning.

One way was and is trying to bend society to the body by destroying the gender binary but this in my opinion is inferior to actually changing the body because the mind needs the body for personal expression of the self created by and inside of the brain.

Eliminating the gender binary completely actually could be psychologically very destabilizing on a social level but time will tell.

[Kathryn Martin]

1) Whether the questions in the first part of the quote are even meaningful for a TS, and,

2) Why leaving wife and family might be necessary for survival.


I think the questions in the first part of the quote are completely irrelevant. Mind you I am writing from the perspective of a women with a transsexual medical history. First of all the tie in with a long term marriage and children is a non-sequitur, one just doesn't have anything to do with the other. The motivations to have a family and your status as a transsexual have a connection but not in the manner in which the person asking the above question assumes they do. Having a family or not (remember paradigm) is very fundamentally connected to self experience. Transition has no meaning, it is a process to bestow meaning and in this sense this is an unanswerable question. I don't think it is useful and even less fruitful to contemplate goals. Everything is in the way not in the destination. Of that journey the process of transition is nothing but a minuscule part, like crossing a street on a thousand mile journey. (Ok maybe a boulevard).

The second question which is your question is incredibly complex. If you consider what the fundamental premise of marriage is, namely whether you are willing to take up life's companionship with another person in the most fundamental and deepest decisions of you life, then those considerations may give you an answer to that question. I very gently disagree with Kaitelyn on this. I don't think the dissolution of a marriage has anything to do with instinct let alone survival instinct. Part of what makes us human is that we do have the capacity to both intellectually, emotionally and spiritually govern our own survival. When marriages dissolve, underneath all of the outer emotional and fiery rhetoric and action, the structure of our commitment begins to dissolve into the proverbial sand that runs through our fingers until every last grain has fallen away. This is not specific to transsexuals or gender inventive persons, it is what happens when the commitment leaves us or our partner.

There no such necessities as you postulate, but rather disabilities. My thoughts.......

[Rachel Smith]

What Kelly said. I can say it no better.

What Kathryn said about marriage at the end of the last paragraph pretty much sums up how a marriage can dissolve whether one is classified as being transgender or not. My marriage was pretty much in the crapper long before I was diagnosed as being such. Perhaps that was because I wasn't truly happy inside. I found it was very difficult to try to be something I wasn't, happy. That I am sure wore on my wife as I can't imagine living with someone that is not happy in themselves. Being transsexual was just the straw that broke the proverbial camels back.

No one chooses or decides to do this it is a matter of survival, I know. Being constantly sad & unhappy leads to depression which leads to, well you know.

[Angela Campbell]

The first quote is a common one from someone who has no understanding of gd or transsexualism. It is just not something you can understand if you haven't experienced it.


The second I cannot say because I was never in that situation.

[Kaitlyn Michele]

wow....so different and so the same

[LeaP]

The purpose is education. The questions are just the tool.

Superb responses all. They show the irrelevance of the first questions. Not their importance (they are indeed that), but their irrelevance.

The second is wrapped up in the meaning of self. Incredibly complex as Kathryn said. Circumstances CAN invoke survival. Or sustain lies and fictions and illusions.

None of this is rooted in rational thought and choice, though choices must be made!