How to Explain?

birth defect. if i don't start the conversation off like that, they shut their ears down and judge. "I was born with a birth defect that with a female body, even though my mind is male. If you woke up tomorrow in a girl body, you'd want to get out of it, right? That's what it's like for me. I know who I am. My body just didn't seem to pick up on it when I was in the womb, but I'm correcting the problem now."

if you don't reason with people, they make assumptions and go into religious tirades. science is usually enough to convince otherwise unaccepting people. less

I'm struggling with this myself as I come out to people more and more.

With real life friends I've been taking them aside one at a time, asking them if they know what a transgender is and explaining if not. Then, once I see that they understand, I explain that I am one. It's worked well for me so far.

How I came out to my friends online was via a large post. Up until then, they always knew me as male.

Here's the post:

Once upon a time there was a little boy. And he thought that he was like all the other little boys. He wrestled and played and told his mother that he wanted to grow up to be just like daddy. And his mother smiled and patted him on the head and told him to go and play with his brother. But as he got older, more often she would say ‘That’s not proper’ when he played, and make him come to sit beside her and read and be quiet. And he didn’t understand why all the other little boys could wrestle and play, but he couldn’t. And he didn’t understand why the other little boys got to wear suits that looked like what their father wore, but he had to wear a dress when they went to church. And why, when he asked his room be painted green, his mother painted it pink.

And as he got older, he realized that no, he wasn’t like the other little boys. He was different. And so he tried to be the sort of way that people wanted him to be, even if it never felt right. He wore what they told him to wear and sat and read instead of wrestling and went, slowly, from being a happy, cheerful little boy into a sad, quiet one that did things to himself that he didn’t like.

He cut himself. He tried to kill himself. He avoided people. And he never understood why, because he didn’t want to do those things, but sometimes when he did, they made him feel a tiny bit better.

When the little boy was eighteen and in college, he got very bad headaches. They sent him to have an MRI to try and find out why, but they never did. Instead, they told him that he had what he’d always known, which was a perfectly normal boy’s brain. But the doctors fussed and somehow he never told his parents. They would fuss, too.

So the little boy kept living the way that he had always been told to live, even if it didn’t feel right. He got married and had children, two little boys, and he worked to raise them. But inside he was sad all the time, no matter how hard he tried to be happy.

And he made a pair of friends and they knew him the way that everybody else knew him, and that made him sad. So one day he finally told them who he really was and one hugged him with open arms, but the other told him no and called him horrible things. They told others horrible things about him as well. And so he didn’t like to tell people the truth about himself.

He made new friends, but they never saw him, since they were all over the computer. He didn’t like to leave the house if he could help it. And his friends knew who he was, even if they never saw him, and that made him happy.

But the little boy, who was a man now, was sad, because he couldn’t tell them everything, and sometimes he had to lie to keep them from knowing the thing about him that had made his friend turn on him. And he knew that lying was wrong and he hated it, which made it worse.

Until one day, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he wrote about how scared he was and sent it to a place anonymously. And then, several days later, he decided to tell everyone the truth and he wrote a long story and this time it wasn’t anonymous.

Hi. My name is Mason. And this is my story. less