it's crazy to me i only transitioned 6 and a half years ago. it feels like it has been my whole life.
legitimately the time before that feels like a weird and faraway memory. it's insane to me that I have been Living In Seattle for over half of the entire time that I have been transgender.
honestly just the scale of time is so bizarre.
in a few months i will have been just living in seattle for nearly as long the entire saga of college and the EVERYWHERE I was during that period (hanover, san francisco, tokyo/shimokitazawa, chiba, san diego, new york...)
i guess honestly it only feels like i really LARPed as a man for like. a year or two there, in college.
i think in high school and especially middle school i was pretty trasngendered. i was homecoming queen for christ's sake.
so as a result, it feels like my experience of being Male or whatever the fuck was actually only really when i went back into the closet for my alcoholic arc (Freshman + part of Sophomore year of college). which is probably why it feels like my whole life has been trans.
seems like the time i have been transgender actually extremely *does* dwarf the time i was pretending not to be. when i was a child and a teen i was like. actively wearing dresses and largely hanging out with other girls, even if i didn't have the words or the medication for what i was.
at times i, like many trans women, have mourned not having a "girl childhood". but I think realistically the childhood I had was pretty much mine.
even now I think i feel regularly like i do not experience life as a woman (though I'm vastly closer to that than a man), but a third specifically-transfem gender.
and i think my childhood reflects that in a lot of ways. a kind of longing for femininity that was reached in some ways but still felt just a little out of my grasp.
i recently saw an essay interpreting many "third genders" of various world cultures as essentially just "transfems who are assigned to a third gender rather than being seen as women" (this just provoked thought in me w.r.t. my own gender experiences here in america; i lack the context to comment on the actual claim)
and I think I generally feel that matches up with my experiences. I think my experiences are very definitively that of a Trans Woman just based on the way people perceive and treat me.
which is something i could obviously attempt to alter -- with surgery, or voice training, or whatever. and I think being perceived this way and thus commonly treated as Male(TM) in New Hampshire, or being in non-queer spaces, have continually been deeply uncomfortable experiences for me.
yet; here in cap hill seattle, in what feels like the transfem capital of the country (though I love SF), I feel deeply at peace with this positioning of my gender, which is a feeling that was unfathomable to me early in my transition,
i'm a woman who is transgender. and that's the truth and it's what people see. treatment or perception as something less than a woman because of my transness is really a personal problem for them, not for me. I want to be perceived as a woman. i admittedly take some few efforts in that regard, but it is not done with the intent of "passing" for something i'm not (cis) -- but because i prefer to be sorted into the "women" camp of clunky cis-addled brains.
it feels good that my gender is more *precisely* what I am -- more specific than just a woman. I don't have any efforts towards pretending I'm cis, with the hope of being perceived with a different background than the one that I have.
i have regularly been treated in gross ways because of my transness -- and shocker, turns out, most of my dysphoria is indeed societally-induced. when i'm perceived as a trans woman and treated as a man it feels awful. in encounters and relationships where i am treated as a woman, i actively *prefer* for me to be being perceived as a trans woman -- that I am treated that way with full knowledge of who i am. my transness is part of my gender, and it's important to me.