It’s honestly been a long time since I have had a night like tonight when I have had a great deal of time to think about how my transition is going and what still troubles me. I think the thing people honestly do not get about how being trans and openly transitioning can affect a person is the isolation it can put between you and those around you. I am so lucky to have the trans community that there is where I live. While smaller than others from what I hear, there is definitely a great degree of variety of identities expressed here.
I am also thankful for new friends and old who have come forward and just been there. As what accompanies isolation is a sense of fear, that feeling who you are is far away. That you are subject to things not of your control, and for what comes naturally to some does not always come naturally to you. This does not mean merely some surgery, but really a broad sense of identity. More specifically, how some women bridge the gap between cultural expectations and things deemed outside of them. I love martial arts, I love the drive it gives me. How I can feel elegant, smart, smooth, precise, and firm when rolling/sparring with someone. But today I thought about competing at a state-level competition and my anxiety spiked. I thought about the reality of going out on a mat, of likely having to compete in the men’s division, of being told whether I could or could not wear a bra, and honestly this shouldn’t bother me. I want to just barrel in and break expectation. But it does, right now I am worried about my safety, and I am worried about what could happen.
So I have decided I am not ready for it. I am not thinking about the important part of why I go to compete at tournaments. To have fun, and enjoy the sport. I don’t have any viable way for feeling comfortable enough there yet. I stepped out of Judo and trained at the dojo I do for Jiu Jitsu because I honestly feel more comfortable there. I appreciate the care my coaches and fellow players have shown for me. I did not think I would be very welcome at my Judo dojo for a lot of reasons. I don’t have the energy yet to invest in building that relationship back up to a point where I am not stressing myself out. I think this is a big truth that maybe I am still learning. You can not bring fear onto the mat.
You can not bring self loathing, or shame there. You let go of that to commit to the art whole heartedly. It is not a place for ego. It is a place to share, connect, and understand that your body and mind are a single entity. In order to excel you must treat both with respect. If I brought what I feel now to that mat, it would not be worth the effort yet. For it brings me to my next point about transitioning, patience. It is the most difficult part. I want to scream sometimes. I want to see my body be how I feel it is sometimes. But I am already a woman. I strongly identify with most of the women in my life; I feel more comfortable with groups of women than men; I feel so much happier with estrogen than testosterone; and I feel ultimately that my body, my primary sexual characteristics, my hormones, and my brain, could never come to an agreement on this whole gender thing. My hormones and brain said one thing, and my body just never was able to paint that picture. So it is just another part of myself that I have to accept.
It lacked the ability to fight certain infectious diseases, so I was given vaccines as a child. It lacked the technique to form perfect eyes, so I have worn glasses since middle school. It lacked the ability to produce testosterone for the gender I was assigned, so I was given testosterone since I hit the average age range of puberty. When I started my delayed puberty I did not desire purely heteronormative sex, so I looked for partners who could satisfy that desire. When I felt I lacked the level of coordination and focus I felt I needed at the time, I was so happy that my friend Greg asked me to try out Judo. And when I found myself ultimately unhappy with testosterone and the gender I had been prescribed, I, with help from people who also experienced how gender is used to divide and disenfranchise those who experience it in a non-standard fashion, started my transition to connect my mind back to my body. To feel as myself and not as to how I have been pressured and coerced by homophobia and transphobia.
This all takes patience and time. Sometimes because training Judo is a difficult thing to do correctly, and muscle memory takes time, not just knowledge. And sometimes because we have systems set up to gate keep each other and tell each other that this is how it should be done because any other way might be giving up control those as the gender conforming feel they deserve. So when I can not land a move correctly when I have trained it a thousand times, or I look in the mirror or shift in my chair for the thousandth time, I feel a bubble of impatience rise up. It is a difficult road if we just push these feelings aside, and for some the whole journey is finding and embracing that which in ourselves makes us feel uncomfortable. To see past the pain, fear, and anguish, and recognize that we as humans will at some point need to process those emotions. It is up to us as to how we direct them, and how them change us.