Life without looking up. How I came to know that I am transgender.
(translated by google)
This article needs to be updated. Must! I am writing this for the third time, two months already! Most likely, I will break this topic into several parts, depending on the feedback and your questions, I will cover the topic in more detail in the future.
Writing this article turned out to be the most difficult thing for me to write before, because writing it requires raising in my memory extremely painful moments in my life that repeatedly brought me to the brink of suicide. Also, the topics of harassment and violence against children, in particular against me, are raised here. Therefore, I do not recommend reading it for especially impressionable people.
I warmly welcome you to the Sabbath, sweet soul. My name is Reynira and I would like to tell you about my childhood, everything that followed it and how I realized that I was transgender. Let’s get started.
I’ll start from childhood.
Like others, I went to kindergarten (I was forcibly shoved there, and I kicked). Everything is as usual: they bring you and you get to know your peers, you play something with someone. But besides the game, they also try you for a tooth, for how you can defend your boundaries, but being a soft child, I could not do this. I wanted to be friends and not compete like the boys did. At first I was expected to be called names, then bullying and fights, and because of this, around the preparatory group, I had my first thoughts of suicide.
But I was on the same wavelength with the girls, I played mothers and daughters with them and something else that I don’t remember anymore. However, among the boys, I had one friend who did not poison me and with whom I played checkers. It was my favorite game, but there were few people I could play them with.
Somewhere around the age of five, I realized that I like cute things, but I could not say it. After all, I was brought up as a boy, in many moments it was uncomfortable and I tried to accept it. Also “should be”.
There was no special contact with my parents, because my feelings, needs and desires were repressed. A father, a handsome man, a leader, and the protection of the family, from childhood, constantly broke down on me, both psychologically and physically. The child cannot take care of himself. And my mother could not oppose anything, she tried to be a good mother, but I did not have confidence in her and did not appear. In many things she did not understand me, and she could not protect me from her father either. And when I told something, it was either ignored or came out sideways to me.
An illustrative example.
In kindergarten, prescriptions were given, exercises for training, and there were a lot of them, not for a couple of tens of minutes. My father told me to complete them in 5 minutes, threatening with a dog leash (we had a Rottweiler and the leash was heavy). Of course, I didn’t make it. And he beat me EVERY 5 minutes, until I completed the prescription … through tears and pain. And I came back to this man every evening after school.
Or his sadistic experiments so that I would sit in the corner with my knees on peas.
Now let’s talk about school.
After kindergarten, I thought that finally the torment and bullying among peers would stop. A new, more adult and conscious life. How wrong I was!
The children became more and more violent. This is connected not only with being transgender, but in general with the fact that you are somehow different. By character and interests, and there were many of them: first of all, encyclopedias, music.
However, my mild nature, which in society is more attributed to the female sex, played a not very pleasant joke with me. I could not defend myself and was the object of harassment. I was beaten, tripped, insulted, spat on, caught after school, and especially strangled in the snow when there were teachers nearby who didn’t care, even when I almost suffocated – sheer hell.
The adults didn’t help in any way, and my father kept saying that it was necessary to catch everyone one by one and beat them, but I couldn’t do that!
I didn’t want to hurt anyone.
I asked to go to school with a musical bias, although there was an option to go to a simple one, which did not suit me at all. Perhaps thanks to creativity, I still somehow held on. I myself signed up for additional choreography classes, and after the lessons I changed into a dance uniform: leggings, ballet flats, and danced with other girls.
Closer to the third grade, it became impossible to study, as bullying gained unbearable momentum. I ran away from school and even stopped attending choreography, I didn’t have the strength and I didn’t want to go into the school walls at all. And she was never in a hurry to return home, and sometimes, after her father’s regular breakdowns, she ran out into the street in winter in home clothes. I couldn’t be with him… And I dreamed that all the suffering would end. I prayed to God to kill me. I’ve tried suicide since elementary school. But … Something stopped me: either weak character, or the fact that I dreamed of making the world a better place and did not want other people to go through the same thing as me. It was very hard, because every minute was filled with suffering, and I did not see a light at all. None.
I grew up in complete misunderstanding and spitting.
Therefore, she did not trust her parents and hid a lot. I secretly changed into my mother’s clothes, made my chest out of something soft and looked in front of the mirror. I can not explain it. I just liked it. I liked to feel my femininity. Oh…how should I put it…and I also used my mom’s pads and tampons imagining I had a vagina (shame). I don’t even want to comment. It just was.
I thought, why is everything so cruelly arranged, why can’t I express myself the way I feel and not get psychological and physical injuries.
From the third to the fourth grade, I moved to another school, where there was also bullying, but not so hard. I finally found the strength in myself and opposed the fact that my mother cut me like a hedgehog. I started to grow my hair. I was so happy about it! I have always hated short haircuts. I liked how elegant different hairstyles look, how hair hangs down like waves that you just want to stroke. However, in order not to be bullied more and not to give more excuse to bullies, I tried to wear cooler clothes, which would be more masculine. I didn’t even wear pink, which I really liked, because I would definitely be branded for being girly.
In high school, I also continued to change clothes, and even more often. I also admired anime intersex characters and constantly thought: what a pity that I was not born like that. And I still didn’t understand my transgender identity. I didn’t even know the word. She was in different relationships with girls, where she tried to play the male role. She suffered from the fact that she could not fully express her feelings: “You are a boy, you must be strong!”. Once I decided that I could trust a loved one and still burst into tears, to which … I caught a very reproachful look. For me it was very painful. It was truly treacherous on the part of the girl I loved. Since then, I have become even more isolated in self-expression of pain and for a very long time. I always said that “everything is fine”, even when it was not so at all.
I wanted to be myself!
In life, in love, in everything! For as long as I can remember, it has been a constant struggle between my need and society’s opinion. I want to be myself and be accepted. After all, I have the right to feelings, to self-expression, to choose my own path (I just burst into tears and went to hug a plush shark from Ikea).
I have always wanted to sing high.
Before the voice began to transform, I sang along with the rest of the girls. When I began to take bass notes, they put me at the head of the male voices so that the boys would look up to me. But no one listened to my opinion: that I would like to continue to sing high, and I could. And since she could not use a high voice, he was lost for many years. And now I am very glad that I was able to master the high voice again, at the beginning of 2019. I am still very happy and try to sing as high as possible. This makes me very happy, because it was a pipe dream for many, many years.
Even the best teachers told me to quit singing falsetto, I have such a good bass and so on and so forth. I would be interested to see their faces now, what they would say when they heard me.
After school, I went to study in the direction of opera vocals. My father constantly scolded me for choosing this direction. He saw me, at most, as a bus driver, just like himself. He tried to get me a job at the cemetery so that I could dig graves. I tried somehow, because then there was a great need for money, but I simply could not stand it physically (I won’t call myself strong, my back started to hurt very quickly). I generally do not like work where you cannot invest intellectually and creatively. Personal growth is important to me.
My father said that I just put my family in cancer and that studying costs money. At the same time, he spent most of his salary on swill and snacks for him. And because of this, rent arrears only grew, and he took more and more loans.
The attitude towards me was generally like this: “be grateful for the fact that we give food, and have not yet been kicked out of the house,” when I just needed emotional support, and not constant swearing, bullying and breakdowns on me.
I wondered, since I am so bad that they are not ready to raise me and pay attention to me, then why did they give birth to me at all ?! My father constantly said that in childhood it was necessary to beat even more, otherwise some kind of down, a fag grew up, who, like all people, cannot do ordinary things.
Before I left, my mother once said that it was a pity that they couldn’t shove me back and remake me so that I would grow up normal. It was so awful to hear!
There was a very funny episode in college.
Once I came to visit a friend to rehearse songs and play music together. And she, for fun, invited me to change into her prom dress. I played along and gladly agreed to support the venture. And… I was very happy! The dress was beautiful and it suited me very well. A friend said that it suits me even more than her, and I beamed and took a bunch of pictures. Then my hair was dyed in different colors (there were more purple and pink shades, and the dress was blue) that period was golden for me at times. I felt freer.
Somewhere in the second year, a very important relationship for me ended.
They helped me somehow to stay afloat. I spent a lot of time with my girlfriend, came to her house, spent the night. As soon as the couples ended – immediately to her. All the way from home to college I associated with her. And parting, I lost the last strength to regularly attend classes, because absolutely everything reminded me of the past. I had to transfer to another college for the variety department, but I did not last long. This completely infuriated my parents, and they stopped funding me in my studies. I still have a debt of 30 thousand rubles and my documents in college are being held.
I fell into depression for 3 years.
I couldn’t do anything. Just lie prone. Periodically be insulted by my father, who took it out on me, especially in a drunken stupor. I sometimes made attempts to break out of this circle, but I had very few psycho-emotional resources.
I spent a lot of time playing games, books and documentaries trying to get through the pain. She was often on the verge of jumping out of the window, often standing on the windowsill. I tried to comprehend my life, myself, what to do next, how I want to live and what to bring to life. I always wanted to be creative, to be myself, to help others, otherwise why live. So I thought.
But then an impulse arose in me.
I began to listen to myself more. With little money that I somehow cut out, I bought cute women’s things on Aliexpress and thought that I was a crossdresser (that’s what people who change into clothes of the opposite sex are called). Then I found out about being transgender. And I began to delve even more into the study of myself, my feelings and sensations.
I thought how wonderful it would be to have a feminine body, but I was afraid to start hormone therapy because I had heard all sorts of horror stories. Although, then I began to dig deeper and deeper and for two years I considered hormone therapy.
At the beginning of 2019, I went crazy. I’m sick of living in a swamp with people who don’t understand me and don’t accept me. I was driven by the fact that time is passing, I want to look the way I feel from the inside, the body is being formed, and I decided to start hormone therapy. I didn’t have money for a medical commission and regular check-ups with an endocrinologist, I somehow found funds for hormones. And then, suddenly, I was inspired by the example of one trans girl who showed the possibilities of her voice on the Internet. And she got so fired up that she sounded like a woman’s voice in two weeks and actively trained for the next year.
In fact, I was very lucky, because I have been singing all my life and somehow intuitively understood for myself what to do, even if it was difficult and painful, but it was constant training and I tried so that my parents would not hear me (although then I became impudent and so I talked with friends on the discord, and my mother thought that I was a fool, again they were funny, but when my father heard, I received a lot from him …).
Then my breasts began to grow, I hid them under various thick sweaters. I managed to live with a transsexual for a while, but then I had to go back.
There was no financial cushion, as well as patience. The last straw was new psychological attacks from my father and a slap in the face from my mother, who had not really used physical violence against me before, she was just always on the sidelines while my father terrorized me.
And it went like this:
I spent several days visiting a friend, it was autumn, and while I was going to her, it was warm, but back it was already cold; she gave me a sweater so that I would not freeze, it was a cute pale pink sweater (there is a lot of this color in the article, I usually wear purple, red and orange clothes). I returned home and hid the new sweater in the closet shelf. I needed home clothes, I could not find them, and my mother changed the situation in my room without my knowledge. Then, all of a sudden, she comes, digs through the shelves and finds my sweater. After that, the interrogation began: what kind of things are these, from which garbage can I take all this, and in a similar spirit. By the way, I have already accumulated a lot of women’s clothing while I lived with a transsexual (I bought “half” of the second-hand). Mom thought these were my ex’s things when they weren’t. I said it’s none of her business that these are my things and that I keep what I want in my own wardrobe. To this, she said “these are women’s things” and gave me a slap in the face, and then she was also offended that I was like that and made me feel guilty.
The person whom I considered more adequate in the family, unlike the others, with whom, although there was no understanding, there was no violence either … She hit me because I was me. I left the Moscow region for Moscow, right at night, on the last bus. I wandered there all night and in the morning, at 5-6 in the morning, I sat on the big ring metro and slept for several hours. I began to look for any opportunity for someone to stay. I spent the night at the registration, stayed somewhere longer and brought a lot of things with me.
I tried to open up to my mother in transgender, but she does not understand this and insists on the most ordinary psychiatrist. She forbade me to communicate with grandmothers, to reveal myself. The father does not know, otherwise he would have nailed it.
I didn’t see my mom for several months. I haven’t talked to my grandmothers for a long time, although I would very much like to tell them, but this can be a dangerous shock for them, the same age. I’ve always been sued for my long hair and feminine looks.
I often find myself thinking how wonderful it would be if I realized myself much earlier and if others accepted it. How, together with my mother, I would learn to paint, pick up my clothes. When I imagine these scenes, I cry. I can’t live my teenage years again, in a different way.
At least now that I am self-aware, I am very happy.
I live with my girlfriends, trying to settle down in life. People see me as a girl. I can calmly talk to people on the streets, in shops, I can be more emotional and sensual and I don’t get slapped about it. Of course, the reality is overshadowed by the situation with relatives and the fact that I have not yet found money for doctors and a commission in order to change documents and lead my life more fully and healthy, but I decided to concentrate on creativity, because this is what I really love and can . And I really hope that in the end I will be able to earn money from this. But, alas, money is needed right here and now, so I will start with webcam, periodically releasing articles and streams on games and music.
Now it is important for me to improve the situation with the endocrinologist, hormones and documents.
I can’t go to a regular clinic for help, I’m a girl, and my documents are male, and this causes a lot of problems. There they can show aggression, call me by the name that I am not called, or accuse me of stealing documents, because I no longer look like the person in the documents.
In the future, my dream is to move to the Netherlands and live in a place where people like me are treated better, where I have more opportunities to realize my creative abilities and where I can receive qualified medical support.
In conclusion, I would like to say that you are not afraid to be yourself.
It is important to love yourself, accept yourself, despite what others tell you, and go your own way. It is much more painful to live life for the sake of others, without having been the person that you have always been and are.
At the beginning of 2019, I was born again. I found my new body and began to like myself in the mirror, others began to perceive me differently. I wake up thinking “how wonderful it is to be a girl!” and I’m so happy about it that I hug myself and thank myself for everything I’ve done.
And even though the path that I have chosen is dangerous, because there are aggressive people who do not understand, because I started serious therapy without medical support, and because we have a transphobic country in general, when homophobia is brought up in people by the state, I am still glad that I young woman. And I will die. Being. Girl.
Being myself is a right that no one can take away from me.
