I don’t know if it’s typical or not, but it definitely matches a lot with my own childhood and young adulthood.
Except I was too scared to stand out so didn’t dare to even consider my appearance. I just wanted to fade into the background and hope the school years would pass by quickly.
It’s hard for me to write on this topic without sharing more than I’m comfortable with. Sorry if it sounds a bit vague here and there, that’s just me biting my tongue.
It kind of flooped out when I gave one too many sad sighs. She pressed me on what was going on, and eventually I told her. She didn’t take it very well because she was never exposed to any of this. All she knew about transgender women was from what she saw on tv, which wasn’t exactly a complete representation. We spent a long time talking, with me giving reassurances over and over again that my feelings for her hadn’t changed at all. We had been married for 15 years at the time, have kids, so basically a long happy life together suddenly started to crumble before her eyes. It didn’t help that she is incredibly insecure in general.
It took several days for things to calm down, and I decided to not do anything for a few months to let her process it. It took me years to get to this point, it’s not like I could expect her to speedrun through the entire thing.
It’s about a year later now and things are better. She’s still a bit weary, but supports me in a lot of things and seems to be coming round more and more. She already overcame so many of her old prejudices and preconceptions.
It helps that only a month or two after our talk, she got a trans woman as a new coworker at work. That coworker just started HRT at the time and is very outspoken and loves to overshare on everything that’s going on with her life and the changes happening to her body :)
There’s still a long way to go, but I feel hopeful.
I recently had to attend some course at work. Everyone was required to introduce themselves with their name and a single word that would describe them, starting with the first letter of their name. Like: “My name is Chris and I’m compassionate“
Of course my name starts with a T 🤦♀️
I was last in line and all I could think was “don’t say trans, don’t say trans”
Ended up with something lame like “technical” 😒
Ouch, that’s way too accurate.
I’m going to save this one for when I started doubting myself again.