The Early Years- Dicovery, Fear and Guilt

It is now just over four weeks before I undergo a procedure that only a few years ago I thought I would never be undergoing in my life as I continued to live my life inside a shell I had created to hide my true essence of who I am and always have been- Melissa. I thought that in the few weeks that remain before I undergo my Gender Confirmation Surgery (GCS) at the skilled hands and vision of my surgeon, Dr. Christine McGinn, I would take this opportunity to reflect back on the various periods of my life, asses my final thoughts as I enter these last stages of my physical transition although I fully realize that my spiritual and emotional journey is far from over and will continue for a great part of the remainder of my life long after the GCS which will also be performed along with my breast augmentation ( BA) by Dr. McGinn.
These procedures will not make me a woman…I already am a woman and have been one my whole life. I just received the wrong indoctrination by those who raised me as well as society based upon my physical appearance. I don’t blame anyone for the wrong indoctrination – they were doing what they believed was right Becoming a woman is not as simple as one day you are a male and then you wake up and you are female. I will finally have the body physically that will correspond with my true essence. However, the surgical procedures to be performed by my surgeon will not simply make me a woman. I have always been one but the journey will go on long afterward for me to relearn all that I did not learn in my previous life inside the shell and a journey to grow as a woman and a person! The surgery will assist society in recognizing me as a woman since it is stuck in its binary thinking so documents such as birth certificate, driver’s license and many others will now reflect me as a woman. These procedures merely correct, along with my previous FFS in January the incorrect body parts and put my body in tune with my spirit.
In this week’s blog I will discuss my early years of life, which for me, was one of discovery, feeling alone and living in fear of this deeply held secret I carried inside of me. Next week I will discuss the middle years of my life in my denial, repression, anger and refinement of the shell that hid my true essence of my soul. Needless to say, that will not be a pretty one but I would not be where I am today without that dark period. I will take a week off the following week to discuss my travels to Washington D.C. with Paula and my friends to lobby for our rights and dignity as transgendered people as part of the NCTE’s Transgendered Lobby Days. However, I will then discuss the more recent periods of my life in the subsequent blog where I evolved from the shell and finally emerged to live my life fulltime as Melissa – my true essence. The last few days before I depart for my surgery I will give my final thoughts as the big day in my life approaches which will change my body radically to what it should have always been in my life as well as discuss and give thanks to many wonderful people who helped me in my journey and who have helped me reach this point in my life.
I was born in 1960 and I grew up in a house my parents moved to when my mother was three months from bringing me into this world. Mom always wanted a girl. Especially after my older brother’s birth I was told that my mother prayed everyday for God to grant her wish to have a little girl she had desired so much in her life. Maybe my soul and brain received the messages and prayers but my genetic code obviously did not and I was born and classified in our binary system of thinking of society as “male”. As far back as I can remember I never fully felt that my body fit my image of how I saw myself and felt I was a girl. I recall an episode when I was about age 6 or 7 years old when I received the wonderful but only occasional delight of getting to play dolls with the neighbor girls. I loved those times so dearly and my father would have died if he knew what I was doing. One afternoon, I found myself alone in the basement of my neighbor Diane who let me occasionally play dolls and house with her. Her clothes were sitting folded on the dryer and it was not long before this uncontrollable urge to remove my boy clothes and to put her’s on instead overcame me. I stood there trembling in her clothes and clutching one of her dolls and while the feelings of guilt and shame overcame me for those few brief moments I had a clarity of who I truly was but did not understand why I was like that at all.
The episodes repeated themselves again and again. I felt so ashamed and so full of fear, anguish and guilt. I hid the feelings very tightly. There was a kid in my school who was picked on mercifully because he was gay but I lacked the courage to stand up and defnd him for fear of having the scorn turned on me.The indoctrination as a male worked against my inner feelings but still I knew I was “different”. Since I knew nothing of this and knew no one else who talked about anything like this I feared I was so alone! Why was I like this? Did I do something wrong? When opportunities were no longer available from my classmates and neighbors I sought out to emulate my mother by dressing in her clothes – a process which occurred at least a few times a month –pretty much from the time I was about eleven or so until late in my high school years. I was so sacred I would be caught but I could not stop myself from doing this ritual over and over. I dearly loved expressing my femininity and often wondered what girls my age would be doing in their lives. I still lived in shame and fear and still felt I must be alone or one of the few who were afflicted by these feelings. My parents continued to raise me as their “son” and not their daughter. As the years went on, more and more indoctrination occurred against my true soul and essence.
It only caused me more guilt and shame but as hard as I fought to fight off the feelings that kept pouring out. When I was twelve I discovered the terms cross dresser, transvestite and transsexual from a psychology book I found in our library. When I was 13 I dressed from head to toe as a girl with all the accessories and I discovered my name was Melissa ( It just sort of came to me as I looked at myself in the mirror that afternoon as I stood before it and seeing a reflection that seemed so right.) When I was fourteen I almost told my parents who sensed something was eating at me but I could not find the right words to express what I felt or even how to begin and I thought they would not love me anymore when I told them. So I lied to them. I made up another story of what was bothering me .The lies came so easy and freely and soon my life would be filled with them…..the early years of my life gave way to a period of denial, lies and deceit to myself and others as well as emersion into typical “masculine” things that I believed would rid me of these feelings that I was a girl. The lies and denials and deep repression of Melissa would leave me imbedded in a tightly wound shell that would take decades to erode…………...

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