I am now six years out from when I like to say I “officially” started my male-to-female transition. In reality, I had started years before, but six years ago this month is when I felt doctors and my therapists finally said I was “cleared for takeoff.” In that six years, I have found that I have built a lot more friendships and alliances than I have ever had before in my life. I don’t attribute that to me being transgender, I instead I believe it is because I am more genuine than ever before.
Some people might question how I can be genuine and not be the gender that matches the body I was born with. I think you would have to have known me before January 2016 to understand why I say this. Was the male me bad or in some ways not worth knowing? No, I don’t think so. But, I happen to think the female me is the best, most honest, no holds barred version of who I am inside. It just so happened that the package I came in didn’t match the contents inside.
For anyone who has ever done a project, like say, repairing a car, and couldn’t get the proper part for the job know, jerry-rigging available parts to make them work is frequently met with poor results. In the case of transgender people, it is like being sent from factory with the wrong parts and spending years of emotional tinkering in an fruitless attempt to get it all working properly. Yet somehow, it never quite does — that’s why we transition. Trans folks rely on the skills of the “master mechanics” — the therapists, doctors, and nurses that we see, to get our “engines” purring like they should have been all along.
Now people are not machines, but I think because of my 20 years working as a mechanical engineer, I frequently rely on analogies like this because it puts things in terms that many people can understand. Still, despite the best efforts of artificial intelligence, the technology that helps computers and other machines “learn,” no machine can capture or understand the complex range of emotions, feelings, and sensations that we humans have. Transitioning to an new gender is not just a simple matter of reprogramming or installing some new parts, it is a period filled with every emotion that we humans can conjure up.
Some of the mechanical comparisons I used above, may make some more hard-nosed, practical people understand, but despite my technical training and work experience, I am really quite a softie inside, quite emotional and ready to cry at the drop of a hat. For others like me, I offer “The Velveteen Rabbit.”
The Margery Williams 1922 book “The Velveteen Rabbit” tells the story of a small stuffed rabbit who wanted to be real. It was through the love of the rabbit’s owner, a young boy, that the rabbit becomes real. Now, of course, transgender people are real — living, thinking, breathing humans, but I think I am safe in saying that all we trans folks want is to be “real” boys, girls, men, and women. Amazingly, I have found through my journey, that it is through the love and acceptance of others that has made me become a real woman.
Mariel E. Addis grew up in Florence, moved away for 16 years, and returned in 2013.