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Making Sense of It All

My True Self

by Lee Etscovitz, Ed.D.

When I began my gender change about eight years ago, I was hoping that I had found the key to happiness. I hoped that by acting at last on hidden feelings and wishes I would be clearing the way for greater self-fulfillment. In a way I was right, for I am definitely a happier person. At the same time, however, my happiness has been tempered by certain complications, such as rejection by family members. There are also legal, economic, and medical complications to handle.

But what has really become an eye-opener for me is the fact that nothing has really changed in terms of life itself. I still have to live day to day and find the courage and means to face the various problems which continually emerge. I now simply face these problems as a woman rather than as a man.

I suppose I should not be surprised by any of this, and in a way I am not. But what amazes me most is what I have begun to learn about myself, especially about my past. For example, I am beginning to understand the loneliness I experienced for so many years and the feeling of being different. Most of all, I am beginning to see how my life has evolved to its present point. The following poem, called "I Disappeared," is an attempt to express briefly but comprehensively the struggle I have experienced in my search for my true self:


I disappeared before my eyes
the day that I was born.
I had my share of mother's milk,
and blankets kept me warm,
but cold and hunger swept my soul
till I became invisible
and lost my human form.

I learned to read my parents' lips
but never read my own,
until at last I lost my voice
and learned to dream alone.

And then as if to complicate
the world behind my eyes,
I soon began to feel that I
belonged among the girls,
who seemed to be the favored ones
with carefree curves and curls.

In secret shame I hid my heart
behind a blend of boyish acts,
but all the bikes and trains and trucks
could not erase the inner facts.

The emptiness within my soul
was filled for years with school and work,
but nothing seemed to last,
for though I tried to fill the void,
I could not form a past.

And so I died a double death
by disappearing twice,
until I learned the painful truth:
my deaths would not suffice.


I had to reach beyond the shell
that I had safely made,
beyond the safety of my dreams,
beyond my long charade.

I found my way to helping hands,
to hearts that hugged my soul,
and gradually I heard my voice
till life became my goal.

I will not disappear again,
though sometimes I despair,
for self-belief is always more
than curves and curly hair.

The human form will always be
far more than what the eye can see.
To be oneself should not seem strange;
the difficulty is the change.

The first half of this poem describes, not the fulfillment, but rather the suppression of my sense of self, for it was as if I were being raised to hide my true feelings. Aside from the gender confusion which I began to experience in my teenage years and which, as the poem depicts, I also proceeded to hide, I lived my whole life in an emotional closet. I am reminded of one of those large, oversized walk-in closets which are sometimes the size of a small room and which can seemingly contain tons of things. Similarly, my emotional closet was large and all-encompassing. Into it I packed my feelings about family members, my hopes and dreams, my frustrations and anger, and, of course, my gender confusion. In a very real sense, I packed it all in.Without even realizing it at the time, I was giving up on my true sense of self by going into a closet that contained not just my gender issue but all of me.

A psychiatrist once remarked that I came by my personal difficulties honestly, in that my parents were unwilling, or more likely unable, to attend to my feelings. My mother was somewhat caring, especially when I was very young, but I have no recollection of ever being hugged by her except, perhaps, as a form of greeting. In fact, what started out as at least some measure of attentiveness by her when I was a child turned into emotional oppressiveness by the time I became a teenager. Her own insecurities, anger, and general neediness left very little room for the expression of my own feelings.

My father expressed even less affection than did my mother. But rather than engulf me with his feelings, whatever they were, he kept everything inside and so excluded me completely from his inner life. At the same time he bombarded me with what he felt should be my goals and purposes. He was also punitive, both verbally and physically. The point is that neither my mother nor my father really listened to me, and so I felt invisible as a person. In other words, I disappeared.

Not surprisingly, home was never home for me, at least not in an emotionally satisfying way. I thus developed some interests which served to create an imaginary world in which I could live, at least temporarily, with some degree of sanity. For example, I never wanted to leave movie theaters, for it meant returning to a place — to a world — where I did not belong. At least in the movie theater I felt alive for two hours at a time. Afterwards I would reluctantly return to a private holocaust where I was a walking dead person. I did what I was told, perhaps hoping that my obedience would be rewarded with love. I also developed an interest in Lionel trains, especially since my first name was Lionel. I thus felt special, if only symbolically, as the trains responded to my commands within a world of my own design and construction. But outside of that little world I was the train with the name "Lionel" obeying someone else's commands on someone else's track at someone else's speed.

My life, as the poem points out, was more of a charade, more of a performance, than a genuine involvement. I was never my true self, though I did not know what that true self entailed. Instead, I always felt like a pretender, like I was simply going through the motions of participating in life but was not really present. I sought psychiatric help for many years but continued to feel lost and detached, both personally and interpersonally. It was as if my parents had written a script for me which I had been faithfully following since the day I was born but which somehow did not reflect the way I wanted to feel about myself. Actually, I knew less how I wanted to feel and more how I did not want to feel. In other words, I was more familiar with what felt bad than with what felt good.

Even now, though my parents have been dead for several years, their scripts are not easy to bury. I may have forgotten most of what I learned intellectually in school, but what I learned emotionally as a child is not as easily forgotten. It was in terms of an unhappy childhood, complicated by a growing gender confusion, that I entered adulthood, but understandably an adulthood that was also unhappy. It was with great relief that I eventually found my way to The Renaissance Transgender Association and to a helpful gender therapist. My gender change has opened the door to a more fulfilling life, but the fact remains that there is more to my life than gender fulfillment. What I have been describing as a troubled upbringing is, as I have indicated, not easy to erase. There is more to personal growth than a gender change. Halloween may be a crossdresser's holy day, but for me it also represents ghosts from the past that continue to haunt my life in the present.

My gender change has assuredly put me closer to my true self, but it is not the final answer. Instead, it has opened the door to the possibility of even greater self-understanding, for it has given me a sense of myself in terms of which I can now deal more effectively with my life as a whole. As the last two stanzas of my poem put it:

I will not disappear again,
though sometimes I despair,
for self-belief is always more
than curves and curly hair.

The human form will always be
far more than what the eye can see.
To be oneself should not seem strange;
the difficulty is the change.


Want to comment? Send email to Dr. Etscovitz at hmdm@voicenet.com.