So I'm working on my own personal timeline. When did my egg first start to crack? When was I in denial? Just for my own edification, I'm trying to come up with as specific dates as possible. I'm going to go over a lot of ground that I've already talked about in earlier blogs, but this time I'm going to go into mind-numbingly specific detail. Also, a lot of it is just going to be listing fictional characters I liked to pretend to be when I was a kid. I'll probably come back and update this a few times as I think of new things.
Anyway, this blog entry is mostly for me, so feel free to skip it.
1978?
Totally guessing at the date, but I remember playing with Barbies with my cousins. I was a bit jealous because their dolls had a lot more outfits than my Six Million Dollar Man dolls. There is an old picture of me holding up some Barbie dolls, smiling.
Lunch at School
1983
For a while in the third grade, I would sit with the girls at lunch time. I remember one of the boys taunting me with "If you keep hanging around girls you're going to turn into one." I replied, "That's okay, I don't mind. Girls mature faster than boys." I'd read that piece of trivia somewhere, and I always liked spouting trivia. But the real takeaway here is that I didn't get the boy's insult. It didn't occur to me why someone would be afraid to turn into a girl. I knew he was trying to insult me, but I was just like, "So?"
Ghost Manor
1983
There was a company called XONOX who made games for the Atari 2600. They were unique for selling these odd double-ended game cartridges, so you got two games for the price of one. We had one called "Ghost Manor/Spike's Peak". The ghost manor game had you entering a haunted mansion to rescue your partner from a vampire. The cool part was that you could choose your sex. If you picked the male, you were were rescuing his girlfriend, and vice versa. You used the console's Color/B&W switch to set the sex of your avatar.
I always picked the girl. This was before "Super Mario Bros" or "The Legend of Zelda", but even at the time I knew that most stories had men rescuing women. I thought it was really fresh and unique to control a girl rescuing a guy. It was also fun to keep flicking the switch and watch your character go back and forth between male and female. If only it was that easy in real life.
The Cat Club
1982-1992
When I was a kid, I started a cat club. It was basically GI Joe except it was cats vs dogs. Of course we stopped playing Cat Club sometime in elementary school, but we drew comic books about it well into high school. My first Cat Club character was male, a black cat named Midnight. But a few years later, I introduced Midnight's sister Twilight, and I sometimes played as her.
Lizard Woman
1983-ish?
With so many action figures being the same size, we used to combine them all in our scenarios. There was a 1979 Flash Gordon cartoon series that had a character called Lizard Woman. I had her action figure. For some reason, a friend and I used to play a scenario where Lizard Woman owned a space gas station. We used the Dagobah playset from Empire Strikes Back as the gas station, and people from all over the galaxy would stop to fill up or get repairs, bringing their problems and prompting adventures. Since the Lizard Woman figure looked naked, I used to make outfits for it using balloons.
October 1983.
I would have been in the fourth grade when GI Joe issue #16 ("Night Attack") came out. Weird, I had been thinking third grade, but that's exactly why I'm making this list. My friends and I were on the playground, reenacting scenes from GI Joe comics. They wanted to do the scene where the Baroness gets blown up in a HISS tank (don't worry, she lives). They pretended a certain piece of playground equipment was the tank, and they elected me to stand in for the Baroness. Even though it only lasted a few minutes, and I don't think I even spoke, it stuck with me. Something about pretending to be a woman - that it as okay to do so, and I was even being encouraged to do so - opened a door for me.
In later years, when I started buying GI Joe toys of my on, my favorites (other than Snake-Eyes of course) were mostly women. Baroness, Scarlett, Jinx, and Zarana being my absolute faves. For some reason I never cared for Lady J, though.
I had one friend who gave me a hard time for even buying female figures. He thought they were a waste of plastic, and since "girls don't play GI Joe", he didn't understand why they even made them.
The Sea Prince and the Fire Child
1983?
This was an animated movie I saw as a child. It was a retelling of Romeo & Juliet, but in a more fantastic setting. Once or twice I played as a variation of Malta the Fire Child, when playing with my next door neighbor. She was a fairy-like creature.
Darth Leia
1983
Shortly after Return of the Jedi, I remember playing with Star Wars figures by myself. I played a scenario where Darth Vader decided to try to lure Leia to the dark side, kidnapping her and teaching her the Force. I put Vader's cape on my Leia figure, making a cool black/white contrast. The idea of an evil Lea was really appealing, and I went back to this scenario several times.
Bounty Hunters
I'm guessing 1984-1985.
Well after Return of the Jedi left the theaters, my friends and I still played with Star Wars figures. One friend and I loved playing with the bounty hunters. He would play as Boba Fett, and I would play Boushh. Technically it was a Princess Leia figure in Boushh disguise, but our personal canon as that in RotJ Leia had stolen the outfit from the real Boushh, and that's who I was playing.
We had a running theme, often telling the same story over and over. Boba Fett and Boushh met and decided to team up and become bounty hunters together. Also joining them were G.I.Joe's Snake-Eyes, and a Cobra Lamprey (hydrofoil pilot) for some reason. In a lot of versions of the story, Boushh would pretend to be male, and eventually Boba Fett would discover she was female. We replayed that scenario dozens of ways.
Later in high school I drew a comic book about these characters, along with comics about the video game Metroid. This eventually morphed into "Space Stories" which had characters from all kinds of places. I generally preferred adding female characters to the stories, and I had to force myself to make some of them male because I wanted my friends to read them.
Voltron
1984-ish?
This is where it gets murky, because I remember watching Voltron and He-Man with my next door neighbor, but I could also swear he moved away before 1984. Anyway, we played Voltron a lot, and I liked to play as Princess Allura. I had friends who hated her character, mostly because she replaced fan favorite Sven as the Blue Lion pilot. I would pretend to hate her right along with them, but secretly I loved her.
I specifically remember one time we were going to play Voltron, and I really wanted to play Allura but didn't want to seem weird. So I pretended to use "Eeny meeny miny moe" to pick my character, but intentionally fixing it so the result was Allura. So I must have known by then that playing female characters wasn't considered normal, but it was still important to me.
1984
The GoBots were never as cool as the Transformers. I avoided the toys for a while, because they just weren't as interesting. But then the cartoon came out, and we discovered the GoBots had one thing Transformers didn't (yet): female robots. For this reason alone I bought GoBots to supplement my Transformers collection. Pathfinder the UFO is still one of my favorite toys. We pretended the Transformer "Cosmos" was her little brother.
Gauntlet
1985
One of the first cooperative multiplayer arcade games, Gauntlet was just awesome. My friends and I put hundreds of quarters into that machine. I always picked Valkyrie, telling the others it was because I liked her durability or whatever, when it was really because she was the only female. The following year saw the release of two more multiplayer arcade games: Rampage and Quartet. Again, I always picked the female character, even though one of them was a giant lizard.
Golden Dragon
1986?
My parents and I were eating at a Chinese restaurant. I don't remember the context, but my dad said, "I believe that above all else, homosexuality is a sin. If you can't accept what you are..." and that's all I can remember.
He wasn't referring to me, but I still felt called out. I didn't say anything, but inside I wondered if I was gay. I didn't really understand what gay meant at the time, but I knew I was feminine.
Metroid
1986
Literally the first thing I ever heard about Metroid was that when you beat the game, it turns out (spoiler alert, I guess) that you're a woman. I bought it as soon as I could, and it quickly became my favorite game. It still remains my all-time favorite game series.
Some time around 1988, I actually played outside as Samus Aran. This memory sticks out because I would have been around 15, which is well after I had outgrown that sort of play.
Aliens
1987
My maternal Grandmother died in 1987, and at one point I was given a box of her old books to see if I wanted to read any of them. I picked out Alien, the novelization of the 1979 movie. Of course I liked it so much that I had to see the movie, and the sequel Aliens, and now they're two of my favorite movies.
What makes them so much better than your standard horror/sci-fi movies? Well the creature design is part of it, but Ripley is another big factor. In the second movie she was such a badass, even today she's the go-to character when people are trying to think of good female action heroes.
Maniac Mansion
1987
I loved this game for the Commodore 64, along with its spiritual sequel, Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders. Maniac Mansion had you pick a team of three characters right from the beginning, and I almost always picked the female characters.
Migraine Headaches
1986-1988
For about a year and a half, I suffered daily
migraine headaches. At the time I attributed it to stress – a lot of
difficult things were happening at once. But looking back, I think it
was clinical depression. Basically I gave myself headaches because I needed a real symptom so I’d
have an excuse not to get out of bed. I can't prove it, but I believe at least part of my depression was gender related. I will blog more thoroughly about this later.
1992
The February 24, 1992 issue of Newsweek had an article about whether homosexuality was nature or nurture. I never read the article, but the idea stuck with me. I still didn't know I was trans, but I knew I was feminine, and I came up with my own theory: Maybe scientists think there's a gene that's only present in gay people, but actually it's just found in people who act like the opposite sex. I had the idea that maybe I had that gene, even though I was straight.
JediMUD
1992-1993
In college I was addicted to an online game called JediMUD. But was I addicted to the game itself, or to the fact that I could walk around and be seen as the opposite sex? Even when people spoke to me out of character, I still pretended to be a woman in real life. I didn't know why I did that, but I couldn't stop. I just needed to be seen as female, both in and out of character.
Because of this, one could argue that my trans issues were responsible for my poor academic performance, leading to my leaving college, and never finding a high paying job.
Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger
1994-1995
Two of my favorite RPGs. Both allow you to build your own active party from a larger pool of characters, and I almost always used the female characters more than the males. Even if they weren't always the most powerful characters.
Mulan
1998
This is one of my favorite Disney movies, even though, objectively, it's not that great. I identify with Mulan more than any other Disney character. The scenes where she's trying to fit in with the men remind me so much of myself trying to act male. Also the way she's terrified of being discovered and outed, especially in the bathing scene. The whole story reminded me of the Bounty Hunter stories I would play with my friend as a child.
NeverWinter Nights
2003-2006
This was the game I was playing when my egg cracked. I bought NeverWinter Nights about a year after it came out. I never really got into the main quest, but the online mode was fantastic. I played on a server called "The Silver Marches", which required players stayed in character. I enjoyed creating characters with full backstories, with well-defined (if shallow) personalities that made it easier to roleplay.
The characters I played most often:
Brynwyn Elswyth, an elf archer with a bubbly personality.
Dervish, a human fighter who was constantly trying to prove herself.
Madeline Starkraven, a former pirate with mental issues.
During this time I made an online friend. He lived in Mexico, but in my time zone, so we were often online at the same time. He taught me a lot about D&D and its lore. I didn't specifically tell him I was female IRL, but he assumed it early on and I never corrected him. After a while, we started talking outside the game as well. We sent a lot of e-mails back and forth, and we kept corresponding even after we quit the Silver Marches.
Again, I just couldn't help myself. It wasn't enough to be female in game, I had to let people think I was female in real life as well. I don't know how else to say it - I simply couldn't tell people I was male. It was a complete mental block.
Realizing I had a problem, I explored this feeling, trying to sort out exactly why it was so important to me. I started doing some googling, and for the first time I came across the terms "transgender" and "gender dysphoria". This was my epiphany, the moment my egg really cracked open. The more I read, the more I realized I wasn't learning new information - I was just learning the proper words for feelings I had felt all my life.
I did reveal I was male to my online friend, and he was very accepting. We're still friends today.
Snopes Message Board
10/5/2005
My first "coming out" post was on the snopes message board, in the "Letters You Wish You Could Send" topic. It was a bit longer before I worked up the courage to actually start coming out to people I knew.
This Blog
1/26/2006
This is when I posted my first blog on the subject. Around the same time I came out to a lot of friends and family.
Therapy
2006-2008-ish
To sort out my issues, I went to both a psychiatrist and a psychologist. The first psychiatrist I went to couldn't really help me. He was great at his job, but he didn't have much experience with gender issues, and after a few sessions he admitted I should find someone else. So I asked someone at the support group who they use, and they gave me a name. I saw that psychologist for about two years. Then my insurance changed and I could no longer afford it.
Makeup
7/8/2006
This isn't the first time I left the house en femme, but the first time it was really successful. A friend of mine did the makeup job, and she did fantastic work. Unfortunately, I think I look like one of my aunts, who is bigoted.
I went out to a meeting of my transgender support group, and several of them complimented my makeup. It made me happy, but I didn't go to many more meetings of that group. It just felt depressing. When you put that many depressed people in a room together, the depression takes on an air of its own, and it hangs like a cloud.
Nashville Pride
6/2/2007
I dressed as a woman and went to Nashville Pride, which was held in Centennial Park that year. I had a great time, but there was also an element that was emotionally scarring. While I was walking from my car to the event, I overheard a child ask their parent, "Why is that man dressed that way?" The parent answered, "Don't look at him, honey." I haven't dressed out since.
Atlanta Pride
6/24/2007
We made a special trip to Atlanta to go to their pride festival. My intention was to dress out again. My cousin offered to let us sleep at her house so we didn't have to pay for a hotel. When I warned her I planned to dress as a woman before leaving her house the morning of Pride, suddenly they were busy that weekend and we couldn't stay. Imagine that.
So we did stay at a hotel, but on the morning of the festival I decided not to dress out anyway. It was too hot, and I didn't want to take the extra time to get ready.
Dungeons & Dragons
11/22/2008
This is the first time I played in D&D 4th edition. I was no longer going to go support group meetings, or seeing a therapist, and I hadn't put on women's clothing in a year. I was very close to suicide at the time, but instinctively I knew what I needed to do to save my life. I looked for a D&D group.
I've been playing D&D semi-regularly for 10 years now. By living vicariously through my female D&D characters, I scratch that itch that dressing up used to fix. It's not perfect, and I'll probably pay for it later, but for now it keeps me going. I still have my ups and downs, and sometimes I seek additional support. Blogging helps me purge my inner demons, and I've had a lot of help from people on websites like reddit and Tumblr.
Today I've given up on ever transitioning. Maybe if I wind the lottery or something, but right now I have to focus on other issues, like money and my spouse's health.
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