Holy crap. My head is a whirlwind right now. I just went to my GP and talked about gender stuff. I have been holding this in forever. I was so nervous before I went in, I thought I was going to die. I was tapping my feet in the waiting room and my hands were shaking, my heart was racing. I told her I was nervous right away (thanks to the advice of Cat). She said take your time – I am so grateful that she was patient like that. It was so hard to get started.
“It’s about my gender”, I said…. “I don’t feel like a woman. Basically that’s it. I don’t feel like I’m a woman. I’ve felt like this for as long as I can remember.” She asked me about when I could first remember feeling this way. “As a kid. I never wanted to wear skirts or dresses. I hated school cause we had to wear skirts.” Of course, I know that you can be any gender and wear skirts and dresses, but for me as a kid this was one of the things I noticed that made me different to girls I knew.
Now things are more complicated – I didn’t mention this. I feel like I’m in drag when I dress as a woman. (No, there’s nothing inherently wrong with drag; I just think it’s something different to performing your gender.) Sometimes I enjoy dressing up though. I don’t feel like myself, but sometimes it’s nice to be someone else. Someone socially accepted at face value.
She asked about partners. I said I’d had relationships with women. I said I never felt like they were relationships between two women.
She asked about now. I said that I bind my chest sometimes. I said that I asked my partner to call me a different name but he always calls me honey anyway.
We talked a bit about the help I’m getting from the CMHRS. I told her about my fear that my gender confusion will be passed off as identity disturbance associated with BPD. She said she recognises it is an issue in itself. She said I should try to be honest with my therapist about it. I said I’d try. I said I had tried to talk to my social worker about it but I didn’t explain it very well and she didn’t know much about it.
I said I was scared the CMHRS was going to try to ‘fix’ this, to try to make me feel like a woman again and that I’d lose all the progress I’ve managed to make so far, by myself. She said that they shouldn’t do that, that it wouldn’t be right for them to do that, which I found reassuring.
She says she’s going to find out about the nearest specialist services and see if she can refer me. She mentioned counselling to help me figure out where I am and where I want to go with this. She’s going to write to me in the next couple of weeks.
Oh my god, I just feel so excited, relieved, scared, embarrassed, overwhelmed. Now I have to talk to my partners and I’m worried they’re going to be freaked out. I think one will be okay and the other will be freaked. He’s very heterosexual. He likes me as a woman even though he understands I don’t necessarily feel like one.
I said that when I’d talked to my women friends about it they say “oh but there are lots of ways to be a woman”. But I feel like this goes beyond that.
Update:
The partner I thought would be freaked out was indeed a little freaked out. But he didn’t run for the hills or anything, so I suppose it could have been worse. I think it makes it hard that I don’t really have his support, though I can understand him being a bit alarmed about it I suppose.
Borderlion 