DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE TRANSEXUAL?
Kerwin L. Schaefer
I'm going to assume that all of you are happy and comfortable with your body, at least as far as your sexual organs and perceived gender are concerned. Now, just imagine that you wake up tomorrow morning and you are in the exact same body, but you have the genitals and secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite sex in place of your own.
For a person who is transsexual, this would be nothing less than a dream come true. But how would it feel to you? Inside your head, you'd still see yourself as belonging to your original sex, but there you stand in front of a mirror, naked, clearly presented with the physical evidence that you are not what you know perfectly well that you are.
Now, how do you feel as you look at your new sex organs? Puzzled? Appalled? Terrified? Or maybe just curious?
But life goes on and you can't stand there by yourself staring at your reflection. Time to go out into the world. What clothing will you wear? Your own – and feel somehow that now you don't belong in it, or it doesn't fit quite right anymore? Or maybe make a quick trip to a clothing store for a wardrobe that suits your new body -- but you're not comfortable in those clothes either. Still, you try to make the best of things.
Much to your surprise, when your friends and coworkers see you, they act as if this new sex is the one you've been all along! How can this be? Don't they remember? Can't they see you as what you really are? What's worse, if you have a spouse or partner, even they can only see you as what you now appear to be.
Confused and flustered, you struggle to adapt, and to learn the proper behavior in order to get along in this new body. Your social role fits you like your clothing: perhaps fairly well, perhaps not at all, but you must do the best you can in order to live in this world.
And all along, you know, deep down inside, that this is not you, not really. But you dare to tell no one, for fear of being considered crazy, because every time you go back to that mirror for another look, it is you, no doubt about it.
Why did this happen to you? I don't know. And even if you dare to confide in someone else, no one can give you a satisfactory answer.
After a few days, when it becomes clear that this situation is not going to change, then what do you do? If you're one of the ones who isn't terribly distraught about what has happened, maybe you can learn to adjust, adapt to how things are, and go on with your life, regardless of the niggling doubt that something is wrong. Or maybe you just resolve to endure the body you've been given, and come to an uneasy truce with it, as many of us manage to do. But maybe you're excruciatingly unhappy this way and you go crazy, or even commit suicide, as others of us have done.
Then again, maybe you find that you can't possibly be happy this way but have the good fortune to discover that it's possible to get something like your original body back. To what lengths might you go in order to do this? How much money will you spend? How much pain are you prepared to endure? What job will you risk losing? And more, how many friends, family, and loved ones are you willing to alienate, if it turns out that they can't or won't adjust to what you feel you must do?
Those are the feelings of a transexual, and those are our options.
So what if that really happened to you? All I can ask you to do is think about how you'd feel, and how you would deal with it. I know how I felt, and I know what I did. And it's made me a whole lot happier with myself than I've ever been in my life.