I'm a girl who avoids any kind of publicity like it's the plague.
Growing up, all I ever wanted, all I ever NEEDED! was to be just a normal girl like all the other girls.
My heart ached so badly for that (in truth it still does), I remember crying myself to sleep at night trying to be quiet so that my older brother (who I shared a bedroom with until I was about 6 or 7 years old) didn't hear me.
It's hard even now to think about that, my tummy knots up I start to sweat, feel nervous and scared, emotionally I start to shut down.
My childhood was traumatic, as a young girl I was terrified, all I wanted was help, but no-one ever did.
Now days my life is ok, despite how I felt back then, I made it through (to my own amazement), it was hard in ways and to an extent that most people will never know or experience.
I have no desire to re-live any of that any more than is absolutely neccessary, but the truth is that it still creeps in in some ways, my life isn't 100% that of a normal natal born female, but I have no choice in what remains, I can't change it, I can only make the best of the life I DO now have.
So I live quietly, I don't bring attention to what was, I just be the girl I needed to be as best I can.
Living my life the way I do, not verballising what I've been through to the people now in my life, I've learned a little about myself and how people view and recieve me, and also witnessed what they think and how they feel about "trans-ness" when they're not censoring themselves.
The unfortunate truth (and it's unfortunate in some ways even for me, I wish it weren't this way but I can't make anything else of it) is that "Trans" people ARE different and different in ways that most people do not like.
It's not even that people do not like our differences by concious choice, but rather, that when it comes to the sub-concious programing of the human species (specifically the part where we're programed to find a suitable mate and procreate) our differences go against all that most know and understand, which (again, sub-conciously) forces them to find us distasteful as a natural progression.
In short, they don't like "trans-ness" for the exact same reason I hate it about myself. my body does not "work" the way that I need it to, nor how THEY need or expect it to.
So I know the reason they sub-conciously dissaprove of me, have you tried living with yourself when everyone else in the world hates about you the exact same that disgusts you about yourself? let me tell you, it doesn't make things any easier!
Where am I going? what is my point?
The girl in the video below is is named Jazz Jennings. She's a beautiful young woman (in my eyes anyway) who was born into much the same situation as I was.
Her parents and family have and are handling it very differently than my family and I did, her story is a very public one, one that (thanks to the internet, and television media) is known by people the world over.
By boys and men the world over.
Because her situation has been handled the way that it has, I suspect she's learned to feel about herself differently (in some ways) than I did about myself at her age and in some ways I guess that MAY be a good thing perhaps.
But here is the problem I see, I suspect in ten years when Jazz is older, when she's finally rid of the curse the universe "blessed" her with (between her legs) and I'm confident she WILL be rid of it, or she'll die trying, what then?
Will she have a chance at the life I have?
My life is hard, I don't really wish it on anyone, but it's survivable.
I can have a man love me, he doesn't need to face judgment from a world who find me and my situation distasteful.
I/we can adopt children, for the most part we can be "normal", an acceptable couple and family to be friends with.
I'll be honest, people sense in me that I was born different, maybe they don't fully realise exactly how, maybe they do, but they like me, they don't want to hate me, it's not their conscious choice to feel about "trans-ness" the way that they do, and in fact if I give them an easier option than to hate me, (so far) they've always taken it.
The easier option?
I make it possible for the to ignore my difference.
I don't talk about it, I just be (as best I can) what they understand a female to be.
Jazz will never have that.
Not now, not with all the interviews, books and videos and now commercials. So when she's ready for some kind of life, it won't be there.
What kind of future will she have?
In honesty it terrifies me to contemplate it. I'm truly scared for her and young girls like her who've done similar.
Certainly she's made something of a difference for girls born how we were born, not all good, not all bad and I commend her for the good she HAS done. (not that I think for even a fraction of a second that was the original intended purpose for her being publicised)
But at what cost?
