Throughout life I have been very masculine. I kick boxed with my dad, always had to be the boy in house, and kissed a girl when i was I think 3 or 4. I didn’t know that this was wrong at the time I was just being me. And the whole issue of getting me in a dress forget about it… squirts ( shorts inside a skirt) were the closest she could get me in. But later in life I noticed I kind of liked guys. I’m actually still confused when it comes to how I feel on this subject. I haven’t kissed one, but I do feel this attraction towards them, expecially when I see there muscles. Do you think I have this attraction because I want to have their muscles or do you think I have a genuine attraction to them. I feel that I’m a man inside, but I’m so confused. Please help me out.

Tony

I love your blog, and can really relate to it being a genderqueer/transgender person myself.

I am doing something similar to Mable, using your blog in a research paper to help strengthen my argument about transgenderism not being a choice.
Proper citation and crediting has already been given in an annotated bibliography, work cited, and in text citations.

thank you,
Warii.

You’ve asked a good question, and I’ll try to answer the best I can coming from the perspective of a trans individual (which is all I know LOL)

I wrote about looking in the mirror for many years and seeing a strange “ugly” person. I couldn’t look at this person in the mirror, this person wasn’t ME. It wasn’t so much the physical attributes, because realistically, I wasn’t “ugly” – I just FELT “ugly”.

I SAW “ugly” because that person I saw in the mirror didn’t match how I saw myself. That person staring back at me was a “shell” and I felt unattached to that shell. When I looked into that person’s eyes, I saw … nothing…. blank… emptiness.

And that hurt deeply, emotionally and mentally. I couldn’t understand how other people saw me, because I couldn’t get past seeing the shell.

It wasn’t that I spent my life feeling “ugly”. I just didn’t feel RIGHT. So in not feeling RIGHT, I felt wrong, so therefore, I LOOKED wrong. I FELT unattractive, so therefore, I WAS unattractive (illogical reasoning, but common amongst trans people).

Once hormones began having their effect on me, I began seeing LIFE inside that vacant shell. The hollow emptiness (that I saw) in my eyes began to take on substance, and there was LIFE. As the physical changes to my facial features, and my body began to align with the way I FELT, I began to see “beauty”. I began to see a person who was smiling and full of life and dreams and possibilities.

“Looks” should not matter. Whether one is tall, short, thin, large, hairy, balding, pointed nose, or webbed feet, the looks don’t make the person. But the looks DO affect the person’s outlook on life and on themselves.

We’ve all heard it dozens of times in our lives, “until you can love yourself, you can’t love anyone else”. And for a transperson to be able to love themselves, sometimes it takes the miracles of hormones and surgeries to help them in that journey of self-love and self-discovery.

What I’ve been saying all along here, to sum it up, is that looks ARE important to a transperson – for themselves, inside, how THEY perceive THEMSELVES. Once they can love the person they see, others see a beautiful person too.