Chapter 7

In therapy, we had created a list of steps that I could take to come to terms with my transition. The first one was coming out to my parents, and the second one was coming out to my other family, which, of course, both failed in some way. The third one was top surgery, which I don’t think I will ever be able to get. Top surgery was my most anticipated goal. Not only would it have given me so much more confidence, but it would also make me eligible to get better access to hormones. I’m not a trans guy, not fully.
Hear me out. I’m non-binary but in the sense that I want to be spoken about with male pronouns, I want to be seen as a guy because that’s what I have seen myself as too. I suppose that I kept telling myself that I’m not a trans guy because I’m asexual, and in my mind, if I was asexual, I didn’t want to transition fully, I never wanted bottom surgery, I only wanted top surgery. So if I didn’t want that, then I was not a guy, right? Because which guy didn’t want to have bottom surgery if they were trains?
What I say now will likely make you think that I am the worst person alive, but there was a time in which I wished that I had some cyst in my breast, just so that it would be easier and quicker to have these things taken off my body, and I didn’t have to go through all these excruciating, painful and humiliating processes of getting gender-affirming care. So in a way, I felt like I had lied to everyone I came out to. I told them I was non-binary, but I still get very warm in my heart when my friend calls me by my full name. That isn’t very gender-neutral of me anymore, then. I won’t get it on my ID because then I would not be non-binary enough, and then I would be a liar, right? Because I am not a guy after all, am I? I am just not a woman. 
But why then, do I get the biggest smile on my face when someone calls me ‘he’? Why do I feel like jumping through the air when someone calls me ‘bro’? And why does it feel like a knife twists in my gut when someone does the opposite? When they call me ‘she’ and when they call me ‘woman’. It feels like an insult although it shouldn’t. Women are awesome, don’t get me wrong. I love women, I just don’t love myself as a woman because I am none.
Maybe that’s also why tears dwell up in my eyes when I look at some of my old dresses, or why I hate my inner child so much. Why I started bawling in therapy when we talked about that. She asked me why I could not look at the little trans guy in the corner, who looked at me with such a bright grin, the short hair fluffy. I didn’t hate him. I just hated what he went through and I hated that I was responsible for the pain he would go through.