A simple question 'WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?'

A friend I hadn’t heard from in a while recently sent me a facebook message, asking a really simple question, “WHY”? Offering up that my blog is giving great insights into the process but not so much on the ‘WHY chose to do this?’

I figured if he had asked this question, others are probably also thinking it, so I thought I’d touch on this.

To me transgender is a fascinating phenomenon that is safe, normal, and a beautiful experience to go through, the more I allow myself to be ok with it.

It really isn’t about being gay or what your sexual orientation is. My experience of living as a transgendered being is very different to this. It’s not about what’s ‘out there’ that you’re attracted to, it’s about who ‘you’ feel yourself to be within.

The easiest way to explain this is to offer a simple exercise;

Close your eyes & just imagine that tomorrow you wake up in the opposite body to what you’re in. Of course I’m asking for a little make believe here! But seriously imagine walking around in the opposite gender body for a little while, it might feel a little bit fun or scary or both! But ultimately you still know within yourself that you are what you were yesterday. You’re looking out at the world feeling within your heart, body, and mind that you are who you were yesterday. Yet the world around you sees you, treats you and expects you in their worldly view to act and behave the way THAT sex does. BUT inside its like “no this isn’t how I feel or who I am, even if you do see it that way”.

That simplistically is my and has been my reality for as long as I can remember. I would wake up each day and think “right well even though I don’t feel it’s who I am, everyone else around me who is female is wearing this, saying that, behaving this way. I am in the body I’m in, so I guess I better follow suit and do the same as the majority of society and just get on with life like everyone else”.

30 years down the track, my heart was speaking loud and clearly, “NO this is just not going to work anymore. Stop being WHO YOU ARE NOT! NOW is the TIME to re-align the inner world with the outer appearance ... get moving!”

“It’s time for you to trust yourself and that there is NOTHING WRONG with you for knowing yourself energetically and internally as male; for wanting to be called Andy, for wanting to wear boy clothes and connect with the world in a male body! It’s all completely natural, a normal order that exists within human’s, it’s just not very common so not really spoken of...like being gay wasn’t spoken of 40+ years ago! It’s all welcome and it’s all part of the divine order of life.”

Any attempts to ignore this would ignite a HUGE pain within my heart that was becoming debilitating and distracting from being able to do much else.

I was taught a few years ago that the body is the barometer of the soul, and that the soul communicates to us through body sensation: nudges, gut feelings, twinges, pain, muscle catches, pleasurable feelings ... so once I stopped ignoring all this and said “OK I hear you, I get it. I will look into this” and started talking to the counsellors, doctors, psychiatrists...3 weeks later I had a big green light go ahead to start. Safe to say the fact that it all happened so easily and without challenge was enough guidance for me to know this is the right path. The most blessed thing of all, of course my heart no longer aches, it sings!