Today I am celebrating 6 years of “FFS you silly cow, just accept it, you’re a woman!”
Ignorant people seem to, by and large, think that a transgender person suddenly pretends to be the gender they were not born as.
Reality is, transgender people finally stop pretending to be the gender they never were; incorrectly were assigned as.
What I had been repressing for 31, possibly even 36 years, depending on which triggering occurrence I use, could not, and would not, be contained any longer.
When you get dealt a crappy hand in poker, you don’t ask for new cards either, do you?
Now mix that with a Dutch proverb “wie het kleine niet eert, is het grote niet weerd” (free: “who does not honour the penny is not worthy of the dollar”), and you had the toxic mix I felt submerged in from a very young age on.
Maybe the most innocent but telling thing is me asking at a young age: “Mama, als er jonge kaas is, is er dan ook meisjes kaas?” (“jonge kaas” = young/fresh cheese, but jonge and jongen (boy) are homophones, and boy <> girl). I literally asked whether girl cheese existed, because boy cheese obviously did.
For all those years, I tried to behave and look like a boy or a man; pretend to be a boy, especially in my early puberty, that acting out took shape. Awkwardly.
I started playing soccer, decided I was going to study computer science, and I made “boys don’t cry” into much more than cheap words; I did not just not cry, I went way beyond that; *any & all* emotion was stripped from my soul. No emotions in, no emotions out.
That seemed to be the “boys don’t cry” cliché played out, but in recent years I realised it was me making sure that Laura could not come out unannounced, and nothing from outside would trigger Laura either.
People came to know me as an emotionless and annoyingly objective/impartial robot.
And you all know the industry I made my career in (after about a decade of temp jobs in data, IT & web); the live music industry.
From the outside it looked (and still does, but to a lesser extent) like one of the manliest industries to work in (closely behind mining and oil platforms?).
I am Laura. I am Woman.
