Month: June 2018

Shouldering Fashion

I’ve always felt limited when it came to my wardrobe, more specifically, my attire. Solely because of my physique. I mean, let’s face it: I’m not built like the intended demographic for any fashion label.

To begin with, I have a more boxy figure. I have some curves, but that’s really about it. I can also be tall and a little awkward. And as if this wasn’t enough, along comes…

My shoulders.

I fairly sensitive when it comes to my shoulders, and really my upper back in general. It stems from the fact that I’m AMAB, or “assigned male at birth”. I’ve had years of experience of looking at my body and going… ew… but doubly so for more revealing clothes like tank tops and certain dresses. I mean, my self image alone has kept me away from such clothing, and helped create an inner conflict, which is, do I play it safe or do I step outside of my comfort zone?

Well, it’s hard. I try to break out outside of my own mind, and then I recoil, saying to myself, damn Kristy, don’t go around defiling female fashion with your stupid shoulders. Screw that noise, Kristy, you’ll be fine without those cute tops and dresses. Step outside your comfort zone and liberate yourself from your own thinking? Nah, screw that noise. How I feel works just fine for me.

And it would be fine, except that I run across WAY too many cute clothes, and I’ve come WAY too far to thwart my own life like that. And I get it, people probably think, wow, what a huge problem to have. Well, it is. Not just for me, for the sake of SO MANY people who have had self-image issues. Be it our shoulders, our legs, name it. My body, the clothes themselves, they were never the problem.

I was the problem.

The truth is, my shoulders aren’t too broad. I’ve had my boyfriend reassure me multiple times, I’ve had other people echo his sentiment, and I’ve seen girl with broader shoulders who do just fine. My shoulders are fine, it was the dysphoria-induced lowered self-esteem that I was fighting, that it was me holding myself back all along. Not a physical feature, but rather a mental one.

This fight is over, as far as I am concerned. I’m better than I what I sometimes give myself credit for being. Time to rest my mind, and lift this weight from my shoulders. And yes, pun intended. Life is for living. I’d rather embrace being carefree than embrace fear. Time to step outside my comfort zone. And I have the perfect dress for that.

Maybe you have that perfect dress, too.

The Self-Loathing Trans Woman

The process of coming out, first involved coming out to myself. And while conventional thinking might say that, gee, how hard is it to be honest with yourself? Well, the answer is that it was a much larger deal than I would have anticipated.

To begin with, I did not have the most supportive upbringing in probably any aspect of self-expression, but doubly… no, triply so… with anything coming close to me being “girly”. When I was young, say 7 years old?, I would sneak into sister’s room to try on her clothes. It wasn’t long before I was busted, and it would be years before I did any “cross-dressing”. My family may have ended that attempt at self-exploration, self-expression, but they couldn’t stop me from looking at other little girls and asking, why not me? Why don’t I look like them? Why am I not wearing their kind of clothes? Add to this that any display of over-sensitivity on my part was met with stern rebuke, and what was the result?

Suppressed gender dysphoria. Simple as that. Throughout childhood, where most attempts at boyish behaviors were nothing more than poorly executed facades. Childhood proceeded to become adolescence, and by the way, thanks a lot puberty, and adolescence gave way to adulthood. By the time I was in my 20’s, I could not look at women without some semblance of envy, that I did not have a feminine physique, that I was assigned male at birth. 

It was awful. I was depressed, felt isolated, and more so, felt like a freak in a world full of normalcy. I mean, who the hell wants to be a transsexual in a world that felt overwhelmingly against it? My dysphoria became my secret shame. I hid it,  exposing it only briefly in a stunted attempt at transition in 2006, and it ate away at me, like a dark, horrible secret, because, well, that’s what it. A dark, horrible secret.

My internalized dysphoria, which evolved into internalized transphobia, caused me to develop such a toxic attitude that it impacted friendships, work performance, and my own peace of mind. It was like a venom was slowly destroying the tissue that constituted aspects of my life. How could I escape it? Religion, philosophy, avoidance, medication, all things failed to stop that venom from seeping throughout my being.

How long does it take for a secret shame to turn into self-hatred? For me, a few decades. Eventually it reached a head, and I could not live as a “guy” anymore. The time came, in 2016, to confront myself. The demon of dysphoria was a tricky one… it lied to me, telling me how insignificant and flawed I was as a person. It told me how corrupt and deformed I was. I mean, how do you defeat something like that?

Truth is, I conquered it with honest love and admission. I told myself that I was transgender, that I was worth it, and that I loved myself enough to try. And since trying, I have found success, not just in a vocational sense (which is a big achievement on it’s own), but success in how I managed relationships, socialized with strangers, managed my personal issues, and so on. Have you ever told yourself that you loved yourself, and said so as a form of encouragement? Maybe you should try it sometime.

Because in the end, it was an attitude of self-love that eradicated a life filled with self-hate.