(Disclaimer: This may offend any trans* people. Read on at your own risk.) Lately I've been musing over my gender identity and transgender identities in general, and the more I think about the faker it all seems to me. Clearly I don't want to think this way, I absolutely detest having these doubts, but at the same time the conflicting evidence proves in my mind how fake I am. Knowing the falseness of my gender identity is weighing me down, pushing me back into the vortex of depression I was in before I started living partly as a woman, and it's been something I've habitually blocked from my head through the years, but I can't do it anymore; the hold it's gotten on my mind has prevented me from discarding the idea, and as the truth unravels, so does my sense of my gender identity. Of course this doesn't mean I will abandon my female half as that is simply unthinkable, but I can't help but regard this as a mental illness. I don't consider transmen as men, nor do I think of transwomen as women since they've been socialized as women and men respectably, and you can't go a lifetime living as one gender and suddenly decide that it doesn't fit you. It just appears to be so facile how trans* people think they can excise the laws of biology to accommodate themselves to be something they're not. And like it or not, us trans*people can't pull off the exactitude of the gender we're trying to emulate, despite how believable it may be on the outside. No matter how much I want to be a woman, no matter how cogent my presentation may be, no matter how good I am at appearing like a woman, it doesn't change that beneath the dress, the makeup, the wig, and the voice, I am a man. Trying to be a woman at my age is so not workable as I've been socialized into being a man, so therefore I can't possibly relate or understand the life of a woman in any meaningful way. I hate saying that, it even makes me quiver a bit, but it's the truth, and the most painful part about it is how inescapable that truth is. I'm a woman (or at least I'd love to think I was...) but as a man I have no conception of what it's like to fear going outside for a nightly walk, and I continue to do that even when I'm presenting as a woman, because I know that unlike I'm not defenseless. I want to have children with a woman and I want to be the one who inseminates her via sex - that's not an experience of womanhood and in light of that I feel stripped of my womanhood. Both of those experiences encapsulate manhood, not womanhood, so realizing that I feel like a man and only a man even though I'd like to genuinely feel like both. I've enumerated all the progress, the triumphs, and setbacks I've made since I began bisecting my life as a woman and a man, and it's undeniable that I have changed in so many ways, but at the same time the falseness of my gender identity still gnaws at me, and the conflagration of doubt has been fueled more by all these thoughts swirling in my mind. Just like the conflagration on 9/11 brought the World Trade Center, the fire is burning my own identity at an equally destructive pace. I'm feeling so insecure and the beliefs I had about transgenderism are about to be smashed into smithereens like the WTC was. Can someone confute these doubts an persuade me to believe I'm not living a lie? I'm in such a dysfunctional state, so I come to you people of EC for some assistance.
