Zombies.

Mummies.

Michael Myers (the one from Halloween, not the funny guy).

And... for girls like me... the worst and most frightening and soul-shredding of the slow-moving terrors... the one that shakes us to our very core and turns us into gibbering crying piles of emotive waste...

Puberty.

The years of absolute despair and horror as my body inexorably changes, into what I know I am not. I should have been one of the lucky ones. I told my mother. I wanted to be me, I begged to be me.

And I had to watch as I changed so slowly into who I was not.

Everyone always told me that I was the "very image" of my father. He's tall, rugged, square-jawed... like a nice and well-heeled version of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. I have watched as I became a copy of that sort of being.

I wasn't even screaming on the inside, I was numb. My mother knew about me. My mother knew and let it happen anyway, and took every opportunity to compliment my masculinity and how easily I would find a wife and be a good father and how I was a perfect specimen of manhood. She knew it was the worst torture for me, but because of HER values and expectations, she wouldn't let the rest of the family know. If ever I tried to tell anyone, she'd talk over me, and give me a dark look.

You always hear about how in letters like these, people like me talk about how wonderful their parents were, but they just didn't understand. Bollocks. My mother understood. My mother is a clinical psychologist with a reputation for being the shrink that all the TG folks in the area want to be under the care of. She's won humanitarian awards for it. Not that she ever mentioned this to me, I found it on the internet. I went searching on my own for help and kept being recommended back to my own mother as the "best" choice.

So, I'm not going to say that my parents did right by me, that it's just me. No, frankly, the way you'll find me is all her fault. She did rather the opposite of right by me. I do hope my father refuses to forgive her.