Irony’s Sting

The first thoughts and feelings I can clearly remember that indicated something was up with how I related to gender happened when I was 12. If you’re interested, the thoughts were along the lines of “It makes me very sad that I’ll never know what being a girl is like.” I accepted that there was a serious possibility that I was trans, serious enough to warrant me going on hormone replacement therapy to see how that felt, at the age of 32. Two decades is a long time to live in the liminal space between these points.

People and brains are resourceful. You learn to adapt to the weirdness of wanting to exist differently, and you get on with life anyway. Coping mechanisms begin growing in the mind like dandelions in the spring.

Fantasy was a crucial coping mechanism for me. Convinced that I’d never know what life as a woman would be like, I turned to the imagination and spent an exhausting amount of time thinking about what it would be like to be female instead of male. This began when I was going through puberty, when testosterone was surging in me for the first time and I was discovering what attraction to women was like. It became very easy to believe that envy and attraction were the same thing, and since I was expected to be attracted to girls, I assumed all my envy and desire to be one myself was another weird aliased form of this attraction. Imaging being female became a core part of my fantasy life.

This drove a subtle shift in how I thought about this part of myself. It became pleasurable and rewarding to indulge the part of me that wanted to see myself, view myself, imagine myself female, so I indulged it. But to keep the spell going I had to tell myself that I didn’t really want this. It was fun to pretend, to muse, I’d think to myself, but I was convinced I needed to be the man I was growing into. If I had to be him, and had no control over it, I might as well be happy about that, right? I convinced myself I had no real desire to be a woman instead of a man. Fantasies are not to be taken too seriously, after all. I interpreted the cold loneliness of the thought as evidence of its truth.

Part of my process of coming out to myself as trans was realizing that what felt like desire really was desire. It was fun to pretend I wanted to be a woman because I actually did want to be a woman. I recognized that was a much less weird explanation than anything I cooked up between 2001 and 2021 to explain myself as a cis person who had these thoughts and feelings so persistently. Almost overnight I stopped fantasizing about all the magical transformation and body swap scenarios that I obsessed over in my long dark night of gender.

Every once in a while I’m reminded of what a big part of my life this was for so long. I take a look at the subreddits and blogs that cater to the audience thirsty for this content, but never for long. It’s too painful. Convincing myself that I was being ironic when I was expressing my most sincere desires was necessary for me, for a time, when I was ignorant that there was a better way to live. Now that I know myself better, the need for this lie has evaporated, and I can see it for what it is.

I’m glad that, at least for this one part of me, I’ll never need to be ironic again about what I really want.