I am a completely normal person. I am a student. I am 26 years old. I do things right. I do things wrong. I am studying healthcare because I want to help people. I have had a fairly normal upbringing with sports, school and friends. I enjoy watching football and meeting friends for a beer or two. I was even on the circuit football team once upon a time. In addition, it just so happens that I am trans. For many, the last sentence can change the whole image of me. That sense of familiarity you got from reading the first nine sentences. Gone in half a second. Now I will defend everyone who experienced just that. Because I myself have thought that trans people are a bunch of weirdos who only exist on reality TV or in very alternative parts of society. It wasn’t until I had a friend who is also trans that I realized that I had a slightly wrong image of what a trans person is. Because this friend was and is also a normal student. If you had seen her on the street, you would have only seen a completely normal girl. Last year, therefore, I finally came to terms with my gender dysphoria and started hormones. It was a process I had put off for far too long. Denying who you are for so many years is not healthy for either body or soul. By meeting another transgender person, I realized that it was possible to have a normal life, even if you were born with the wrong biological sex. Today I feel fantastically much better, both physically and mentally. And it’s only now that I realize how far down I’ve been. In both school, work and social situations, I find that most people accept me for who I am – even if I still don’t look like the most feminine girl you’ve ever met. Hormones take their time, unfortunately. But with each passing day I become a little more myself. Now the fact that I am trans is only a small part of what makes up the full me. It’s no longer as big a deal as it was – and as I thought it would remain. It is okay to disagree with me and my gender identity. I know there are people out there who think it’s nonsense and can’t understand us trans people at all. For some, it may be that they have a religion, where anything that violates the gender norms in society is not acceptable. And they have the same right as me to think and say what they want, even if I don’t necessarily agree. At all. I myself am a believer, although I would not say that I belong to a specific religion. I have great respect for people to be able to believe and think what they want. That someone should decide what to do with my life and my thoughts is not okay, however. It is perhaps not so easy to understand how it is possible that a girl can be born in a boy’s body or vice versa. That’s illogical, you might think. And if so, I agree with that. But how do you think I felt when I was growing up? I consider myself a logical person, and growing up it made zero sense to me that I was born as a girl in a boy’s body. No matter what I filled my daily life with, I continued to think and feel the way I did. I tried to be as macho as I could to hide that I didn’t really find myself masculine. I copied other men’s behavior, even though it was totally unnatural to me. And people probably saw through me, no matter how convincing I tried to be. Glossary of gender Gender dysphoria A psychological discomfort someone has because they do not feel that the gender they were assigned at birth matches their gender identity. Gender incongruence A medical diagnosis that describes a situation where a person’s gender identity is not the same as the gender the person was registered as at birth (in medicine called biological sex). Transperson Persons with gender identity(s) or gender expression that violates what society expects of them on the basis of the gender they were assigned at birth. Some trans people are women or men, others are neither men nor women and some do not categorize their own gender identity. Non-binary Means “not binary”. Often used for people who feel that they do not fit into the categories of woman or man. Gender-affirming treatment Treatment with hormones and/or surgery, and/or psychotherapy which should give a person the opportunity to function in accordance with their gender identity. Source: Foreininga Fri, Store Norske Lexikon, Bufdir. I hoped that the thoughts would go away, but eventually I had to realize that it wasn’t going to happen. If I hadn’t accepted what felt like a defeat at the time, I probably would have ended up lonely and unhappy – or even worse – maybe I wouldn’t have been here at all. Unfortunately, this is how it goes for some trans people who postpone their gender change for too long. It is not logical that I was born in the wrong gender. But the thing is, it’s my reality. And the more feminine I become—the more I look like a woman, act like a woman, and the more people treat me like one—the better I feel about myself. That’s all I am and want to be: a fairly normal woman of 26. And I happen to be transgender. (A variant of the post was first published on Andrea Schirmer’s own blog.)
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Quite normal – but happens to be trans – Speech
