This is about a female who transitioned to being male, and who is attracted to males romantically. She says being "trans" brought her freedom, but at the same time, for anyone outside reading this, it seems obvious that decision has also became the source of her life problems, making many of the males whom she wants to be with more reluctant to want to stick around and be with her, something she doesn't seem able to recognize. This was posted in the comment section in YouTube: @banditnosey I'm a trans man and have been medically transitioning for six years. Last night, I finally kissed a man I've been idealizing and infatuated with for almost as long. He’s one of the most beautiful people I've ever seen. I painted him a few years ago. He showed up three and a half hours later than he said he would, we danced and made out for a few minutes, and then he said “I actually just want to dance by myself now” and went and talked to his other friends. I left and started to take the hour-and-a-half-long walk home instead of paying for an Uber and I felt, for the first time in years, overwhelmingly suicidal. It was 4:30am, the streets were completely empty, and I felt so disgusting and ashamed and alone. I was in crisis and the self-regulating part of me knew I needed to talk to someone. And I realized there is no one in my life anymore who I felt like I could call at 4:30am in crisis. I broke up with both my previous serious partners, my best friend and I have grown apart, my family is complicated, and everyone else keeps me at a polite distance. I dialed the Trans Lifeline number for the first time since I was 16 but could not stomach the thought of being answered by a tired, burnt-out employee who didn’t want me to die only because they didn’t want anyone to die. I had no sense of myself as a kid. It got far worse after puberty started. I started believing I wasn’t real. I stopped leaving my room. I wasn't sad; I just felt like a huge gaping hole. I would crash my bike repeatedly on purpose to try to shock myself out of the world. At 15 I started making an effort to be better at being a girl and it was catastrophic. Looking at myself in makeup felt like looking at an alien. I was completely invisible at school, to passers-by. Trying to be feminine made me feel sick and angry and humiliated in a way that felt too big and dark and wretched for a human. I spiraled and spiraled until finally I attempted suicide. When I got out of the hospital I asked my mom to cut off all my hair. My parents didn't let me get on T [testosterone] while I was still a minor, but when I finally did at 18, I felt like I became part of the world. I was, counter to the usual way it goes, able to cry again. I recognized myself in the mirror. I felt attractive for the first time. I had my first romantic and sexual experiences and as hard as it was being gay and trans and as many times as I was rejected after a few hookups, I felt like there was magic and hope and love in my life. I no longer felt like I was trapped deep in the back of my own head, watching myself live from a distance. I got into my first serious relationship eventually. I got engaged to him. We moved in together. The relationship fell apart. For the past year or so since then I've been working on rebuilding my life. On paper I've done well at this. I have a really fulfilling and stable job, my family and I are on good terms, I have a social life--but I feel like I've re-lost the ability to connect with anyone on anything more than a superficial level. I'm visibly aging and it scares me. My friends have been distancing themselves from me. I'm desperately trying to find the source of the rot but I can't, and I’m worried that something in me is still fundamentally broken. I’ve been undeniably depressed. But I've been staying optimistic and trying to take care of myself, even if I fail more often than not. Until last night. I fell straight back into the abyss last night. I keep having this thought: what if this is all because I’m not really trans and never was? I try to force myself to imagine being a girl again over and over. It’s not pleasurable, but I keep beating myself over the head with it. I never felt like I was innately a boy growing up--I feel more that I am now, but I'm not much better at it than I was being a girl. I'm just much happier being bad at being a boy than bad at being a girl. But every time I’m not happy, I start to have those thoughts sneaking in--this is it, it’s not working anymore, the jig is up. I do feel that in many ways I transitioned to escape death, physical and spiritual death. And boys were and are the most beautiful things in the world to me. I wanted to crawl inside them. I wanted to feel like them. And I'm scared of someone or something taking my boy-ness away. I also really hate myself right now and it’s so easy to think, well, look at the most obvious thing first, you're a transsexual. And I don’t have a strong innate sense of gender. And being a man f***ing sucks sometimes. Being a gay man especially f***ing sucks sometimes. But it’s also the most precious and beautiful thing I have. I may be wrong, but it seems other young men only want to use her because she has a vagina. They don't seem to be interested in sticking around and staying with her. Probably because it seems too weird, since I would guess she is awkwardly stuck somewhere between seeming male and female, with all those hormones she's been on.
