I have sold myself out many times over the years, sacrificing what my mind and my heart say is right in the name of others or in a morality pushed upon us by a society that does not care to know us. We find ourselves again in an era where selling out one’s identity or beliefs may be necessary for our own security or that of our families or loved ones. I have done this myself, for better or worse, and the experience has proved enlightening.

I can go on and on about my life’s story, about growing up not fitting in anywhere, about my epiphany as I matured that I was supposed to be female rather than male, that to find my authentic self, I had to go through a seemingly impossible process to align body to spirit. But that is not the purpose of this article. Suffice it to say, I did those things for the most part successfully and lived my authentic life. My peers looked up to me, as I once wrote, “I was a fucking super hero”, in the trans community.

The illusion that people like me live under is that once it is all said and done, your problems are solved. All is right in the world, and you live happily ever after. Life is not like that. For me, soul-crushing anxiety took over my life. Every moment, every decision, every trip to the mailbox became a terror-inducing ordeal. It got so bad that I could no longer breathe, and might even pass out on the spot.

In America, depending on the state you live in, medical care as a trans person can be… challenging. For me, going to the doctor for any reason always had the same root cause, or was at least mentioned in the post-appointment notes: “transsexualism with unspecified sexual history”. I have the flu? It’s transsexualism. Headache? The same. Severe anxiety? Guess what!

To beat this devil, which was destroying my life, I decided on an approach I called “The path of least resistance”. I needed to make my life as simple and as easy as I could so that the anxiety monster had no fuel to burn with. This included stopping the female presentation and changing my name to the old, much less beloved male form. I had caved in, sold out, denied everything I had once touted as the gospel truth in the name of a moment’s peace.

There I lived for the next decade, barely able to function, ruled by anxiety, which could scarcely be held at bay. Eventually, I was able to find proper help, counseling, and medication to take control of the very physiological problem that brought me the anxiety, apparently, my entire life. During this time, I also learned…

Lesson 1. Masculine vs feminine.

I am a big video game fan, especially RPGs where you create your own character to play through a story. In all of these character creation sections of the game, the idea of gender is usually represented by a simple tick mark: male or female. In reality, however, aside from genitals, the concept of maleness or femaleness is a wide spectrum on which people exist at every point. Some folks are very worried about the whole “which genitals were you born with?” idea, but in general, most people really don’t care and certainly don’t want to see for themselves when passing someone on the street.

Lesson 2. Archetypes.

“Boys like blue and girls should like pink” is how our modern society classifies what boys and girls should like and aspire to. Interestingly enough, in the nineteenth century, those colors were reversed, with blue being feminine and pink being masculine. These social expectations of what males should like vs. what females should like dominate practically all aspects of our social lives, from clothing, toys, and car style to career choice. The simple truth is that these expectations change regularly and are meaningless in any important sense.

Lesson 3. Mental Health

Failing to conform to the gender your genitals determine to be has long been considered a deviancy, or at best, a form of mental illness. People who bucked gender norms were demonized, children were warned against speaking to them, and frequently, they were imprisoned in asylums. Then things got “better”. Such people were classified as mentally ill, or “troubled”, and in need of correction. Things then got “better” again, where the idea of transsexuals and crossdressers was more socially accepted and fetishized. People labeled thusly were coached in changing genders to conform to how they felt they should be. Mind you, there was still no gray area; you were male, or you were female, and regardless, you were almost guaranteed to be ostracized for the rest of your life.

Lesson 4: Money

Let’s face it, if you give someone an opportunity to make money off something, they will. As mentioned earlier, “changing gender” was no different. When I was still in my twenties and was still early in my journey to find myself, one of my therapists shared a pamphlet she had received from some professional association or another. In essence, the pamphlet sold trans people as a commodity. “Want guaranteed revenue for at least a year? No insurance covers it? Treat the trans community!”.

Granted, the medical industry has changed a lot over the years, and insurance now covers many things that it once flat-out refused to. However, the fact remains: Changing genders is big business.

Am I saying changing your body to match your authentic self is wrong? Absolutely not! I have no more business dictating to others what they should do with their lives as anyone else does. My purpose in this article is to advise that one goes into such journeys with open eyes, with the facts of what to anticipate rather than vague, impossible promises. What did I do? I am still me, and I find it impossible to be anything but myself, regardless of appearance or social expectations surrounding me. It’s inevitable, and in that fact, I find peace.