Jess Love and Her Transition:

Patience = Success

Part 2

     Continuing with my identity crisis, being a child who is reading "mixed messages" left and right, who is told he is a boy when s/he feels like a girl,  and living a sheltered life will all equal a recipe for failure if the issues are not addressed and kept under wraps.  I was a child who loved to be coddled, treated with the utmost care, and free of any stress or pain.  My parents were both facilitating and condoning of this behavior as well.  Of course, we all know that in the real world, we get cut, bruised, and fall any given moment if we are not careful.  Not me, my life had to be one of a delicate nature and perfection.  I can thank my Mom for breeding that in my mind.  As a child, I never felt that I fit in, especially when I went to school.  While I was placed in the boys line separate from the girls, I got scared if another little boy played rough with me.  I desired to be sitting with the little girls playing with their dolls and being so polite around each other.  After all, how could I not desire that social activity; I was a girl!  Boys were beneath me and not appropriate for my company.  They were to be feared and avoided at all costs!  Isn't that how we bring up little girls to think?  I can recall that I hated when teachers treated me without the care and consideration that was employed with girls. This is why I spent most of my time either alone and playing a make-believe game all to myself or I would sit on the side of the playground or gym (when there was gym class), feeling sorry for myself, hoping some other child would come by and feel sorry for me, or I would ponder on being back home with my Mommy.  This state of being led me to be excessively and abusively bullied practically all of my elementary school career, into high school, and even into my freshman year of college.  The only reason the college bullying stopped is because I took off two semesters; when I came back, my struggle to make and keep friends began and has lasted ever since.

     Why do I even ramble on about these stages of my life?  Because these events are indicators that there was something wrong in the way I felt.  My depression was fueled because of my sense of feeling inappropriate in my body and in my mind.  I could not produce what was expected of me and was not going to try harder because it would only hurt me more and drive me to perhaps experience worse consequences.  Throughout my childhood, I was riddled with anxiety, fear, insecurity, and what I now know as depression.  There was that sense that I had to run and hide all the time for fear of getting discovered and/or physically hurt (this running away also took a symbolic nature with reference to me being transgender).  I just wanted to be free and desired for people to like me and could not understand why anyone would hate me so much.  Bullying in a children's circle is a reflection of bullying that takes place at home, and I am witness to that.  At this point in my life, I can say that the biggest bully of all was my father, who also bullied my mother in turn.  He was authoritative and a dictator, breeding fear into my life and making me feel worthless.  As a male role model, he was garbage.  The other males in my family were no more supportive, such as two of my uncles.  My father would always tell me as young as the age of 6 that he wanted nothing to do with me and that I needed to be with my mother.  However, at age 15, he said that I would become his companion.  (The reason for that will be explained in another post and the further emotional abuse that I endured as a result.)  While my parents were always protecting me from being outside and from interaction with other children, I was losing out on all the social cues and the experiences that would shape me into either a boy or a girl.  In being bullied, l I allowed for other boys to take my things away from me, such as school supplies and even a toy once.  Even some girls hated me because they thought I was a weakling.  Years later in 5th grade, I was being called "gay", but I never understood why and what that word meant.  This shows just how naive I was at the age of 9.  I do remember that there was a time at the age of 9 when I was going around my class telling people I was a girl and acting like one.  (Shouldn't this have raised any suspicion from my teachers?  Or did they suspect that there was something "off" but they did not want to give it a name?)  While this progresses, by the time I was 10 I was running away from the boys in my 5th grade class who were ganging up on me every day after school to want to hurt me.  This is where my mother literally forced my father to come to the agreement that I had to be taken out of school.  The joke was that I went to Catholic school and you wouldn't even think that some child would be bullied in this manner in a school that taught religious views and "love for one another"!  How hypocritical!  My next school while Catholic, was not any better, and I was still bullied.  By this time, I was reaching "puberty" which I had no knowledge of and my so-called hormones would be put to the test, to see if I reacted as a "man" or as a "woman".

How do you feel about your "genitals" and how do you define yourself?

Quite frankly, I hate them.  I don't even know they are there most of the time!  I have always associated my hardware as a quite larger vagina, or as I have been told by some women, "You have a fat vagina!"  I was always self-conscious of my intimates, to the point where as a child I would pull the little sausage link (lol!) and thought that eventually it would go away on its own.  One time, I even referred to it as my vagina in front of my mother (I was about 6) and she just corrected me but nothing more came out of it. While I may have been self-conscious of it more as I became a teen and was aware that mine wasn't so big, I did want to give it a chance to do it's "work".  Yet that alone always seemed so uncomfortable because I always found myself feeling embarrassed and shy.  Sometimes if I was to glance at another boy or man's crotch "by accident", whether it was during gym class or on the street, I would find myself staring at it for a long time, even lusting after it.  I never acted on my feelings because quite frankly, it still seemed gross at just the thought.  With that said, I am NOT a gay man!  If I was gay, I would feel comfortable being a man, but since I don't feel like a man and the thought of being a man is sickening, then that justifies that I am a woman trapped in a male body and aim at correcting this problem, so my inner feeling matches my exterior.  Fortunately, since I don't display a large "penis", my crotch displays a "fat vagina" so it can pass as cameltoe in tight jeans.  To further accentuate that fact, I wear a ladies thong on the outside of my jeans as a sign of fashion and as a statement that I am a woman and proud of it!  This is why I wear panties on the outside of my tight jeans.  More in my next post...