[Guest Post] Denial, Acceptance, Willpower and Thresholds

My girlfriend wrote something and it's brilliant and we're hosting it here as she doesn't have her own blog. Think that's all the intro it needs.

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(Disclaimer, I am a trans woman, and am only speaking for myself here. I am trying to be as inclusive as I can with this, but if I've got something wrong, please let me know and educate me on it!)

Being trans isn't a choice. It isn't something that is done to you at some point in your life. It's not an event, an act or anything like that. It's something that you are, and have always been.

Whether you realise it or not.

People make this realisation at all sorts of times in their lives; some (such as a recent massively publicised story) early, at 5 or so, others of us only come to this realisation later in life. I can't actually pin down the time I realised and accepted that I was trans, nor when I realised that the label "transsexual" was the most "accurate".

This is because people have different levels of gumption, chutzpah, willpower, call it what you will. They also have different levels of hurdles to over come (internal and external!) and different people come to these things in different ways.

Personally, the signs were there from an early age - I thought it was most unfair that I had to be a boy and play with boy stuff (although Lego was amazing) whereas girls got to be girls and play with girl stuff! This, to me at the time, was the natural way of things. Girls were girls and boys were boys and wanted to be girls, because being a girl was so clearly superior. This was so self-evident to me that I didn't even mention it to people.
Even once I had admitted to myself this secret and accepted that this wasn't how everyone else felt, I was in deep denial - trans people were weird, and trans women were ugly (I don't think I even acknowledged the fact that trans men existed! I suspect now, though, that I was so absorbed in wanting to be female that it didn't occur to me that girls would want to be something other than a girl!). I also didn't have the most open parents about these issues - which, now that I know more, is understandable, even if it has set me back at least 15 years.

Even now, being open (to myself and to the world at large) about being a trans woman, there are things I have been in denial about (there are no doubt many things I in still in denial about), am accepting, and things that now I have accepted them am looking to change.

My "primary sexual characteristics" for one. Or, to put it in a shorter manner, my penis. I have historically had a low to non-existent level of dysphoria about having one. This has, and is, causing difficulties with the NHS, as that's a big issue for them (trans women are meant to have always hated their penises and want to cut them off, or something). This lack of problem has largely been a symptom of the surroundings, though - the clothes I wore fitted around it, everyone expected it, and it was useful for some things. Now, though, as the clothes I wear matter more to me (and aren't tailored around having one!) and my self-image is altering, having a penis is just getting bloody annoying. I've read people's recent experiences with GRS, and while it doesn't sound the most pleasant experience to go through ever, I know I could cope.

Yes, the leap from something known to unknown is scary and frightening, but when it's something known to be unpleasant and annoying, that leap starts to look better and better. The leap from presenting as male to presenting as female (even if people didn't immediately realise) was similar - a known that I didn't like to an unknown that could have been worse but ultimately turned out so much better.

I've been through this "denial, acceptance, act" cycle, or am knowingly in one of the stages, on so many things: social transition - was unaware, was in denial, acted, check; appearance of breasts - was unaware, denied I needed them, overcame threshold, acted, check (this was helped massively by the advertising campaign by Andrej Pejic modelling lingerie for Hema and my related discovery of "Two cups bigger" bras!); receding hairline - was unaware, denied it was happening, accepted it was happening but denied I needed to do anything about it (trusting, foolishly, in the NHS), have now accepted I need to do something, but am still working on the "act" part; GRS? - was unaware, never really had denial about that, it was more indifference, but have accepted that this may well be a plan.

The over-riding narrative I'm trying (and not sure I'm succeeding at here) is that of the balance of gumption and thresholds. Willpower and dysphoria raise your gumption, your willingness to DO SOMETHING. Denial and social (heh, and medical) pressures raise the threshold, the barrier to doing anything. As willpower and dysphoria increase, if they reach the threshold of pressures against you acting, you get something done, otherwise your gumption laps around the foothills of competing pressures and you exist in a low level of dysphoria (or sometimes even high level, if the competing pressures are high enough), sometimes in denial, sometimes fully aware of the problem, but unable to break through that barrier of social expectation.

What's more important to take away is that breaking through on one of these fronts (penis problems, breast issues, receded hair, social transition) does not mean that the others are automatically solved at the same time - each must be confronted, accepted and acted on in its own turn.

And that's where I am. Some things I've acted on, some I'm accepting, and some I'm just plain in denial about. However, there's always progress - either the dysphoria and willpower change, or the social pressures against change. As Dorey from "Finding Nemo" said: "What do we do? We swim, swim, swim."