“Nature chooses who will be transgender; individuals don’t choose this.”
– Mercedes Ruehl

Yesterday, I wrote a blog called The Guise of Love.

Today, I read another blog post similar to mine by a man named John. While going through the comments on John’s post, I saw one comment that deserved a blog post of its own.

Today’s blog is dedicated to Elain. These are her words.

They need to be heard.

Open your mind and your heart and listen.

 I’m transgender. Do you know what I think about when I go into the bathroom? Going to the bathroom. Washing my hands. Checking my hair and makeup. Full Stop. I and every other transgender person I know (and I know about 600 transgender people personally) feel exactly the same way. We just want to pee.

“Use the men’s room then” people say.

I have rather pronounced breasts (Yes, real, physical breasts, natural and made by my body). I wear a dress. Heals, Blouses. My hair and makeup is not even close to being masculine.

Do you know what happens to me when I go to the men’s restroom looking like this? 4 times I have been assaulted. Once that put me in a hospital for a week. I have been spit on at least 30 times. I’ve had more disgusting things said to me than I can count. I’ve had urine thrown on me twice, feces once. I’ve had to pull my pistol out on men 5 times. I started carrying a firearm after I was hospitalized by a right wing Christian hater in Florida, who nearly beat me to death and would have, had he not been pulled off me and restrained btw. One of these days I am going to be forced to shoot someone who thinks it is perfectly fine to assault the transgender person for no other reason than I am transgender. And it will be because of right wing pretend ‘Christians’ and their ramped up hate towards transgender people, since they can no longer legally hate on gay people.

We are the next target for their disgusting, un-Christ like hate.

I got so tired of the hate I was facing, on a daily basis. EVERYWHERE I went, that I chose to relocate to a state with transgender protections because I REALLY don’t want to have to shoot some hate driven so-called ‘Christian’ for trying to assault me because they have been taught by their church that I am an easy target for their hate and fear.

‘Christians’ are always screaming about people who are LGBT being so militant.. you know why we are that way? Because YOU do everything you can to cause us harm, to revile us, to hate us, to treat us as less than human. So.. we got active. We defended ourselves from YOU. Now many of you are crying we have an agenda.. that we are trying to take away your rights. NO.. WE RE NOT! We are just trying to be allowed to live, love and be happy, like everyone else. BUT YOU WON’T LET US. So we have to activate, protest, be militant. We’d rather not have to do that. We just want to live, like everyone else, without being afraid we will be fired for who we love, evicted for who we are, not for anything we did wrong. Be able to walk down the road without pretend ‘Christians’ spewing their idiocy and hate at us. Be able to marry the person we love. JUST LIKE YOU!

And then we have people like John here, who actually gets it. Who understands that humanity isn’t black and white. One way or the other, that we are in fact an amazingly diverse and variable species. People like John give me hope that someday, I will be able to walk down the street without fearing I will be attacked, and possibly murdered, just for existing. Right now, that is a very real fear for me EVERY TIME I STEP OUTSIDE OF MY HOME. And I blame that 100% on ‘Christians’.

If any of you walked a day in my footsteps. Lived a day in my shoes. Had the faintest glimmering of what goes on in my mind, how I feel, how I think… you would know that being transgender isn’t a choice, it’s a matter of living or ending your life. It almost ended my life. I fought who I was as hard as I could. I created a façade. Male. Tried to live so society would leave me alone. Buried myself so deep, that nobody even knew I was there. And I hated myself and life so thoroughly, just hated everything and everybody but mostly I hated myself. I was so deeply, miserably unhappy that death seemed a viable and much better alternative. Every day of 50 years of life, I was miserable. Unhappy. Hated myself. Hated everyone else. It came to a head. I almost succeeded in killing myself. My doctors don’t even know how I survived and have told me that I shouldn’t have. That was a year ago. I stopped pretending and playing YOUR game, and finally accepted what I had been forced to deny my entire life. I accepted who I was, something I knew before I even turned 4.

Oh yes. I have memories going back to 4 and earlier. Massive distress at my body, at parts of my body. It was wrong. Broken. Misshapen. I didn’t know what to call it back then, but the one and only time I voiced it… I got beat so badly I had to lay on my stomach for three days. I never mentioned it again until a year ago.

And you know what? I am happier. I no longer hate people. No longer look in the mirror and hate myself. For the first time in my entire 51 years of life… I like who I am. I will kill myself rather than be forced back into that THING I pretended to be for 50 years. You don’t know my pain. None of you except another transgender person can really know it. But you can be empathetic. Understanding. Instead of hating and fearing what you don’t know. You can educate yourself. And if you really are Christian… you can do what Jesus told you to do in the first place. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. You can’t love your neighbor when you are trying to criminalize their very existence.

Sorry for the rant John. You strike me as a decent person and one I could respect and admire. But it had to be said. From our view.

~Elain