Straight dude with a t-girl friend needs advice

[racquel]

He wants to be a woman, he looks like a woman, and he's serious enough about this that he's on hormones and got a boob job. The only reason you think of him as a man is because you grew up knowing him as a man.

You're not uptight. It's just a hard thing to deal with. Being gay is much more normal (and therefore understandable), and when someone comes out as gay you can usually look back at his life and say, "Yeah, that makes sense." But being transgendered is confusing.

Seeing someone out of nowhere decide they want to be a woman makes most people think the person is pretty much insane. It's harder to look back at the person's life and make sense of it. If you had two transgendered friends -- one you met before the transition and one you met after -- you would obviously have much less trouble relating to the one you always knew as a woman.

Remember this is the same person. She's still your friend. She still has the same personality. Maybe she acts differently than she did as a guy, but that is just because before she felt forced to express herself in accordance to culturally-imposed conventions of what is expected from a male, and now she's found the strength to defy all that and be who she wants to be.

The thing that probably bothers you the most is that you're thinking, "If this person is sane, why the hell did it take him over 20 years to figure out he wanted to be a woman?" I'll try to answer that by giving you a summary of my life, since it's similar to a lot of T-girls I've met around America.

I started getting into my mom's makeup and stuff when I was 3. My dad also beat me pretty well for it, so before I even started kindergarten I knew that I needed to keep my feelings to myself. I prayed every night to wake up as a girl the next day until I was 12. Then I started having sexual feelings, and I figured the whole gender confusion just meant I was a pervert. Our culture doesn't portray people with gender issues in a good light -- they're either seen as a plot element of stupid comedies (Mrs. Doubtfire, Big Momma's House, Medea, whatever) or they're seen as psychos, perverts, or both (Dressed to Kill, Silence of the Lambs). I tried for a long time to convince myself I was a gay guy. I got picked on in school, and eventually started overcompensating and working out all the time. I usually had long hair, but a few times I decided I was ridiculous and shaved my head (one time I actually poured Nair on my head). I was in therapy on and off, but I usually didn't even want to talk about my real problems. I tried to kill myself with pills and alcohol a couple times. But I was single and very isolated and most of my friends thought I was a nice guy and fun to be around. They never really noticed my problems.

When I transitioned I lost 95% of my friends. Not because they were bad people, but just because they didn't understand it and to them it was basically the death of the guy they liked. Oh well.

Dealing with my feelings was very stressful, and it was a lot easier to ignore them (although that didn't work very well). Transitioning itself is very stressful, too. It all made me a little crazy, so it's totally understandable that the outside observer would just think I'd lost my mind. Maybe I had. It's a chicken-or-the-egg thing. Am I unstable because I'm transsexual, or am I transsexual because I'm unstable? Who knows.