I was trawling through my hard drive this evening (yes… I know… utterly boring… until I reread what I had written).

Just over four years ago I started my journey to acceptance and transition. Rereading what I wrote then made me think… it might be useful to someone on the path. So here it is.

An Epiphany on the Journey – 13th October 2011

I was planning to write this evening; and indeed that is what I now feel compelled to do. Not perhaps the joys of the light hearted escapist fiction that I had planned, nor more tangled poetry, but still I need to write.

When we look back at our lives, our experiences and our feelings, it is always through a mirror formed from our conditioning and environment. That mirror is never immutable; it changes with our experiences. Sometimes it warps subtly over time, at others it fractures suddenly to cast prisms of bold colour over areas previously ignored or forgotten, and as we look back in that evolving mirror our sense of self also changes.

Five months ago I walked into a doctor’s practice in Wimpole Street suspecting I was transsexual. In the next hour the mirror fractured and I had moved from suspecting to knowing.

This evening as I read the, often rambling, thoughts contained in Jan Morris’s book ‘Conundrum’ I realised that I had moved from knowing to being.

I’m me.

This is no longer an intellectual issue for me, an assessment of courses and risks; a need for justifications and a search for reasons why.

I’m still me.

For the last year I have searched; websites and academic papers, fiction and fact. Yet always it has been external; each discovery a little gem or nugget to be compared against my own situation, my own history. Each breadcrumb a way to score myself and ‘prove’ my condition.

A preponderance of maternal aunts? Check.
A feminine 2D: 4D ratio? Check.
A phase of hyper masculinisation? Check

Is this right or wrong?

Silly question; it was right at the time – for me.

All the introspection about my childhood, all the concerns about my periods of denial, or the late age (13) at which I recall first deciding that I was really a girl, even the validity of my own recollections was questioned as I struggled to be sure, truly sure, in my effort to fit within yet another mold.

Others may follow a different path to self-acceptance and certainty, some may never reach it; but at it’s heart, for me, is a simple fact.

This has nothing to do with external hormonal markers or childhood memories. They might explain, they do not prove.

This is simply a case of knowing, within my heart and soul and mind and in every fibre who I am.

I’m me.
I am a woman (alright… in need of surgery admittedly)
I have always been a woman.
I will always be a woman.
I have hidden and mutated to fit within the demands that society has placed upon me.
I have lost much but also gained much in that process.
I cannot accept those demands to hide any longer.
First and foremost…
I’m me.