I already wasn’t doing great over the holidays break and then I just sort of went off the rails and spent like a solid day or two crying or trying not to cry. I wrote down a bunch of stuff to try to process it, which was a VERY good idea in hindsight. There’s a lot I want to say about it but I maybe need to collect my thoughts a bit better before giving the full version.

The short version is that over the years I’ve learned to disassociate as a coping mechanism, and once I realized I was trans I wanted to move away from that, which is a good thing, of course. The catch though is that, given I have a long time before being able to fully transition, my identity and sense of self is propped up by the ideal version of myself that I’m trying to become. Something I was reading got me thinking back again on how I’d previously experience the world as an egg. Knowing what I know now, however, I was no longer able to disassociate from my current or past reality and just started to spiral.

We are a movement of masculine females and feminine males, cross-dressers, transsexual men and women, intersexuals born on the anatomical sweep between female and male, gender-blenders, many other sex and gender-variant people, and our significant oth-ers. All told, we expand understanding of how many ways there are to be a human being. Our lives are proof that sex and gender are much more complex than a delivery room doctor's glance at genitals can determine, more variegated than pink or blue birth caps. We are oppressed for not fitting those narrow social norms. We are fighting back. Our struggle will also help expose some of the harmful myths about what it means to be a woman or a man that have compart-mentalized and distorted your life, as well as mine. Trans liberation has meaning for you — no matter how you define or express your sex or your gender. If you are a trans person, you face horrendous social punishments - from institutionalization to gangremoved, from beatings to denial of child visitation. This oppression is faced, in varying degrees, by all who march under the banner of trans liberation. This brutalization and degradation strips us of what we could achieve with our individual lifetimes. And if you do not identify as transgender or transsexual or in-tersexual, your life is diminished by our oppression as well. Your own choices as a man or a woman are sharply curtailed. Your individual journey to express yourself is shunted into one of two deeply carved ruts, and the social baggage you are handed is already packed. So the defense of each individual's right to control their own body, and to explore the path of self-expression, enhances your own freedom to discover more about yourself and your potentialities. This movement will give you more room to breathe — to be your-self. To discover on a deeper level what it means to be your self.