Naming your experience and accepting yourself as a transsexual
- naming your gender conflict transsexuality
- giving permission to hirself (I am permitted to feel this way)
- winning guilt and shame
- coming out to others as a transperson
Choices of life
- transitioning/part-time womanhood (transvestism)/being a butch
dyke/transgender lifestyle...
- family-life, social networks, work and professional choices (how does
transitioning affect other parts of life)
- considering the right time to start transitioning
- considering your transitioning goals (what do I want to change in my life
by transitioning)
The partial loss of self- determination due to some of the care being
regulatory
- tolerating insecurity of your own future
- tolerating the feelings of fury, powerlessness and depression
- accepting the realities of life
- being an active transitioner (seeking information, support, navigating
through the care system, “educating” the caregivers in transgender issues when
needed (enduring the role conflict of being in the roles of the patient and the expert at
the same time) and to make complaints about the decisions in the care and severance
payments.
- choices between manipulating and honesty in the care relationship
- choices of care, for instance what is the acceptable surgical quality and
how much do you have willingness to pay for it (Expensive quality surgeries in foreign
countries versus cheap, safe care in Finland, but in slower pace and with quality that may
be good, but not the best there is).
Surviving discrimination
- managing the everyday experiences that deteriorate self-esteem
(people’s reactions, stares, gawking, verbal insults) in public places and in
business.
- the feelings of alienation and weirdness (like “I am like an alien
from the outer space”)
- tolerating the uneasiness and reservedness of the others (usually
connected with your own uneasiness and reservedness).
Improving in the gender self-expression
- unlearning old gestures, styles and gestalt
- learning to express your femininity or masculinity by your gestalt, body
language, style
Improving self-esteem as a member of felt gender
- starting to believe that you are a “genuine” man or a woman and believing that
nobody else would doubt that either.
- finding the right combination of masculinity and femininity in your own persona.
- Managing new situations and processing the changed behavior of people (a transman is
more credible and convincing than before since men are trusted and a transwoman is
observed more closely since women are looked at and so forth)
- Gender-euphoria (cf. Gender dysphoria)
Finding your sexual identity
- whom I will be drawn to now when in new roles and when people’s
interpretations and expectations about me have partially changed.
- Learning sexual pleasure, learning to like your own body
- Lifestyle choices in connection with the sexual identity and partner
choosing
Rebuilding human relationships
- intensifying close relationships when the great secret no longer exists
- new human relationships (within the gender community, for instance)
- loneliness and withdrawing from social contacts/reservedness and distrust
on others
- Trust on others and yourself has to be built so that it can be believed
that others can like/appreciate/love/accept/fall in love with even when you are
transsexual.
Grief and losses
- losses in near relationships (some important human relationship (a love
affair, friendship, relationship to parents or children for instance) can be broken or
wither during the transitioning)
- years lost having most energy directed on transitioning
- lost choices and prospects (often own offspring, career or societal status
for instance)
Transgender identity and the community (influencing, voluntary work)
- relationship to subculture (lesbigaytr)
- interest in transgender history in different times in different cultures
- solidarity and identification with the gender community and transpeople
- thinking the gender structure
- transpride
- societal lobbying in “our” matters
Accepting the end result of the transitioning
- usually after the sex reassignment surgery and post-transition you have
the feeling of euphoria and then a disappointment, return to everyday routines
- accepting the end result when long term, even life goals have become a
reality
- compromizing with your own wish of post-transition femininity or
masculinity with the reality.
- Adaptation to transition outcome and physical changes that have not been
as great as wished.
From openness to privacy
- distancing from the gender-community and concentrating on other goals of
life
- choices on coming out or staying closeted in new situations and new human
relations
Accepting relationship to personal history and past
- accepting your lived life and the choices that have been made
- reflection – clarifying to yourself what being transsexual has meant
as regards to the personal path of life.
- Transgender identity fades away and other identities come in its place
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