Yesterday I finally got to hang out with my only trans acquaintance in the area after a prolonged dance of the competing schedules. He’s a stealth, fully post-transition Southern guy who was assigned female at birth but had an intersex condition that allowed him to pass as male most of his life, whenever he wished to do so. It was hard talking about these things, although I’m glad to say I mostly kept control of my emotions. (Being quick to tears has been a life-long embarrassment, and it’s something I’m proud to have started getting more of a handle on.)

I told him about what I’ve been going through, and he told me more than he ever had before about his story and his transition. The TL;DR version of the conversation was that he thinks it’s very likely that I’m trans, but didn’t do much in the way of selling me on transition because his life seems pretty sad and lonely. He remembers being very successful with women pre-transition, but hasn’t had a relationship after his marriage broke up during his transition. He feels very invisible and lonely being stealth, and wishes he was in a more LGBT-friendly area but has a career and a life in Tennessee which he’s not willing to give up on.

One of the things he said that was the most discouraging was that he still experiences a significant amount of dysphoria, even several years post-transition. Here’s a guy who passed better than I probably ever will before transition, is on T, had top surgery, and currently looks exactly like a normal dude, and he’s still obsessing about his shoulders and his hips and spends thousands of dollars a year to maintain his thinning hairline.

Until recently, I probably would have said I had a much healthier and more realistic body image than he has. When I was younger had some very serious problems in that area (a decade long struggle with severe anorexia and bulimia that seemed to resist all treatments and therapies), but for the past few years I thought I’d put all that behind me. It’s not that I learned to love and accept my body, but I learned not to think about it, to dismiss all thoughts about the way my body looked as shallow, obsessive distractions. It might have been a flawed strategy- I still looked at myself in the mirror and hated what I saw, I just didn’t let myself focus on that hatred or act on it- but it allowed me to become a much more balanced, worthwhile person, and to like myself even while I still hated my body.

These gender issues have threatened all of that hard won peace and stability. My greatest fear is that, now that I’ve opened up this can of worms, I’ll never get that back again.