Wow, this was an incredible..and tortuous read. I’m right where you were. At the threshold in front of the 2 doors. Preparing to make a choice. Trying to determine if I can live with the consequences of either. In my case, there’s a 3rd door. I’ve had my hand on the doorknob several times, and managed to avoid opening it. Ugg. Thanks for the wonderfully accurate description of my situation. Best of luck to you too.
Chad, I'm really glad you're still here to have written this. That threshold is a rotten place to stand and I remember it far too well. I haven't got anything clever to add, I just didn't want to read that and say nothing.
Stevie, what you captured here is important for the people who think it is a black and white decision. As the wife of a transitioning partner, I did feel an initial sense of “I did not sign up for this, you are abandoning the social contract we had as a husband and wife.” But the more I understand what she had to suppress in order to play a role that she was not comfortable with, the more I realize that the choice was the less painful one. It initially did seem selfish, but now I understand the pain she endured in trying to be someone she was not. She never intended to deceive me, and she did not want to hurt me, but she did need to please 8 and 80 year old versions of herself. It took the untimely death of a close friend of hers to make her realize that if she did not transition, she would essentially die unhappy, having never lived the life she wanted. As I get more familiar with her past, this is easier for me to accept. That does not mean I still do not grieve the husband that I lost, the male body that I found attractive. But I recognize that she could not longer live in that body. We are trying to stay together, we are best friends, and we will endure. it is not easy, and sure, she did make a choice, but she also made a choice to ignore it when she met me, to marry me knowing who she was, to hide it for 18 years. And that must not have been an easy choice either.
Thank you for writing this. The view from your side is the one almost nobody publishes, and it's a good deal more generous than any of us have a right to expect. The bit I keep coming back to is your last line. She chose to ignore it when she met you, chose to marry you knowing, chose to hide it for eighteen years. Those were choices too, and they cost her, and they cost you, and nobody ever counts them. I hope you two do endure.
I think there's also a nuance that a lot of people don't understand about late transitioners. And that is that so many of us try to live in denial of what we are, some because of their own religious or moral beliefs, some because they are scared of the consequences, and some because they unexpectedly fall in love with someone and cannot imagine their life without that person. And so they make what they think is a rational "choice", and that is to deny who they are, thinking that this alternative is something that will ultimately keep the demons at bay and allow them to live a happy, fulfilled life. Unfortunately, as much as I'd love to have had that narrative, the decades of depression, suppression, suicidal ideation and related things grew to the extent where they were the dominant force in my life.
So yeah, technically these are choices, but I don't think I really like labeling them as such, because to do so gives them an illusion that there is control over one's fundamental gender identity, and that is not the case. I didn't feel I really had a choice in what I did. I am transgender - that is a fact. I fell in love with my wife - that is a fact. I was in an impossible situation - that, too, is a fact. And ultimately, these all came together into what @marriedwithconsequences described above.
Truthfully, none of the above felt like a choice to me. Perhaps it is more like Hobson's Choice - there was no good answer that would satisfy all constraints.
Hobson's Choice is better than anything I managed in the essay. The horse by the door or you walk.
I'd still separate the two things, though. Being transgender was never a choice. What I did about it was, and that's the only part I'm claiming. I use the word anyway because "no choice" hands people the job of deciding whether they believe your compulsion, and they judge it badly. But you're right that conceding the word costs something too.
I totally understand. Where I’d very gently push back, though, is the notion that it’s a compulsion - this leans towards pathologizing language that implies that it’s a disorder, while the DSM-5 explicitly states that it is not.
If I may humbly suggest that you’re doing yourself a bit of a disservice by saying you had a choice in what you did about it. I think the choice comes in HOW you did things, not in whether or not you had a choice other than an existential one. Is that splitting hairs? Perhaps. But I think that we, as transgender people, in the current world political climate, live and die by people splitting these hairs.
So I’m not for a moment suggesting that you’re wrong here. I certainly had a choice in HOW my wife found out about things, and to say that I handled it poorly is a gross understatement.
Very nice! In my case I guess I’m unique. Child came out as trans, then my adult daughter came out as a lesbian, found out I was intersex and leaned fully into transitioning, then my spouse was like “screw it” and transitioned… 💖💖💖
That is a remarkable run of news for one household. Your spouse going "screw it" made me laugh out loud. Sounds like once one door opened the rest came off their hinges entirely.
I used to agree, until today actually. When talking to a very dear woman friend, a friend only knows me post transition…
I realize there was NO choice, it life or death (actual, physical; or mental, that state of dysphoria that I had triggered). But perhaos it’s deeper than that, particularly for those loved ones who knew you before.
I describe this other element as “version management” . Those folks who knew you did it difficult to let go of what you were, a kind of version 1.1 perspective.
For myself i see the whole thing (ie my being a woman) as a version 2.0, so so much has changed it merits more than a slight upgrade!
This, my, version 2.0 outlook has consequences… One being others accepting that the old life essentially was not one…. and V2 may be less palatable to those folks who are not open-minded, and/or fixated with existing structures and memories…
Version management is a very good phrase and I'm going to steal it. People do try to run you as a point release. Same product, new packaging, all their existing memories still compatible. It isn't that, and it was never going to be.
Very interesting view of the dilemma that I, like you, had to live with. You nailed it right on the head. Ever since my coming out, I've used, somewhat uncomfortably, the "I had no choice" explanation knowing full well it didn't quite explain it accurately. I made a choice, for sure I did. And that choice was made even if I knew it would probably destroy everything and everyone. In fact, my sadness and regret of seeing people I love suffer almost equals the joy and euphoria of starting my transition. But the alternative no longer was viable "for me".
I think that somewhere, somehow, I have the right to be happy with who I am. But, like you say, it doesn't give me the right to dismiss the pain others are suffering because of this choice. I still care so much about them that I am trying as hard as I can to make it all work and minimize their pain. All the while, holding off things I still want so badly. I've started HRT almost a year ago and am very happy about it. But I fear my next choices, FFS, voice therapy, will not be so easy to manage.
I could write about all of this all day... But I will spare you. I just think that your text explains things in a beautiful yet very realistic way.
Thank you for this, genuinely. You've said something in one sentence that took me an entire essay to circle: the sadness of watching people you love suffer almost equalling the joy of finally starting. That is the actual shape of it. Not joy with a footnote, not grief with a silver lining, but two things of nearly the same weight carried at the same time. I don't think that ever fully resolves, and I've stopped treating it as a failure that it doesn't. It might just be what an honest transition feels like from the inside.
"The alternative no longer was viable for me" is, I think, the truthful version of "I had no choice". Not that we couldn't have carried on. We both know we could have, because we both did, for decades. But we couldn't have carried on and remained ourselves, and at some point that stopped being a price we were able to pay. That's what was written on the first door. Nobody outside could read it. Half the time we couldn't either.
On holding things off to soften it for the people around you: I recognise that instinct completely, and it is love. I'd only say, gently and from experience rather than as advice, that I spent a long time telling myself "if I just wait a little longer they'll be ready for the next bit". They mostly weren't ready by the time I was, and the waiting had its own quiet cost that nobody was counting. FFS and voice were, for me, the things that made me feel finished rather than in progress. But the timing of those is yours alone, and nobody's transition looks like anybody else's.
You have the right to be happy with who you are. You also owe them honesty about what it cost. Holding both at once is the whole job, and from what you've written here, you're doing it with more care than most.
And please don't spare me. Write it all day. That's what this comments section is for, and frankly the world could use your version of this essay too.
Stevie, I feel your anguish and distress. Literally. You could be largely writing about me except I am fortunate that my family and my wife have not turned their back on me. But for me ultimately it boiled down to a choice, and that choice, to quote a rather famous author, was quite simply to be or not to be, in the most literal sense of the phrase possible. And I chose to be, because the alternative would have caused even more pain for everyone else.
I spent decades trying to avoid that "choice", only to find that I could not. My "choice" was simply to continue to live, and in order to do so, transition for me was essential.
To be or not to be, in the literal sense. Almost nobody writes it down that plainly and I'm glad you did. I'm very glad you chose to be. And glad your wife and family stayed, which is not the common outcome and is not nothing.
Misappropriating Shakespeare is either brave or asking for trouble, and I've just published an absolute monster of an article about my own face, so I'm not in any position to judge. I'll have a look.
When I was 27 years old I was in Torremolinos, Spain. And I went to a restaurant with my parents. And a woman who owned the small restaurant and her staff showed us a platter of the fish we ordered. It was still a whole fish. And they were going to cook it for us. That never happened in my life. It was one of the best experiences we ever had. And I've been to so many places and so many restaurants in my younger life I couldn't even possibly count. But when we walked into that restaurant, it was a choice. We chose to eat there. Nobody forced us. The truth is we could have skipped eating for that whole day. And we still would have lived. But what kind of day would it have been? A day of longing. A day of hunger. A day of going without. Getting by and surviving only. Maybe just on water. So what exactly is a choice?
The anti-trans people, knock themselves out with this choice stuff and all of these fine points --without worrying about who we are, how we live, and what we need and want. I know I already commented, but I ran across your article again.
And I wish I could choose to go to Marbella right now. Or Thailand. Or Baltimore. But I can't. I want to, but I can't make that choice. But if I could I would. I can make plans for it. And that's a choice. But the "choice" to be trans and gender nonconforming happened for me without me doing anything. 🐟
(Oh and by the way, the first time I ever ate squid 🐙 with the ink all over the rice was in Spain. Same for paella. Which took forever.).
That whole fish arriving at the table is a perfect Torremolinos choice. You could have skipped lunch and lived. But what kind of day would it have been? That's exactly the question the “you chose it” crowd never sit with.
And your last line is the one I'd underline: the choice they keep talking about isn't the thing that happened to you. Squid ink on the rice the first time, though. Now that was a choice.
I got married. Had a daughter. Took care of my sick parents. Raised 2 daughters that weren’t mine, but I made them mine. I did what society expected from me. Every single thing. I even went to church. Now I’m DONE. The rest of this life belongs to ME. No one else. I’ve gained a few friends and lost a lot more, but the important thing is I’m finding MYSELF. I couldn’t GAF anymore. I just couldn’t.
You did have a choice, not whether you were transgender, that is who we are, but you chose to transition and that leaves those around you wondering what their peers now think of them and it completely derails the plans people have made for their lives based on the premise that you would continue to place their comfort and needs over your need to live your one and only life.
I decided not to transition every day for 46 years (ok, for many of those years transition for me was out of reach so there wasn't really a decision, call it 35 years). Finally I transitioned.
It's been hard but almost everyone in my life got onboard and maybe that was because I was 58 and no one had any expectations for themselves that in any way depended on me being he of she.
There's something worth sitting with in the choice and not-choice split you're drawing. Being trans isn't a choice. What you do about it, and when, mostly is, and pretending otherwise has never made that conversation honest for anyone.
Fifty eight and nobody's plans built around you staying who you weren't, that's a strange kind of luck. Mine came with rather more wreckage attached, and I'd still make the same choice every time.
I'm going to stick to the belief that it's not a choice. You said: Stevie chose Stevie. And you talked about what you had gone through. That's not really a choice. Once you decided to do something about it? Once you decided to transition? Then there are choices. Then there are consequences to those choices. And people could feel betrayed for what you did. But a choice? Well, yes and no. Technically yes, but pretty much no. Because the other choice is to just be miserable and live a life that you don't want to live.
How much of my life was a life that I lived for others? Not just about being trans but just so many things? I don't know but it's big.
And now I'm lonelier than I've ever been. But I'm also freer than I've ever been.
You may well be right. My problem with no choice is that it hands people the job of deciding whether they believe your compulsion, and they tend to decide badly. So I'd rather say I chose, and that the other option was unliveable, and let them make of that what they like. Lonelier than I've ever been and freer than I've ever been is the whole thing in one line, though. That I recognise completely.
Tough one to read at first, but then I understood more and more what you are saying and yes, there is a choice. There always is a choice. I held out for 56 years, hiding who I really was and doing everything expected of me. Once both my parents died I knew I was at a crossroads - continue to do as expected for the rest of my life or be myself. My youngest at the time was 11, the rest 20+. I decided given how I raised them, that my children were very likely to accept me as myself (thank goodness I was right), and outside of them I could live with any other rejections. I hoped my sisters would accept me, that my neighbors would at least endure me. Instead I got near 100% acceptance. A miracle imo My kids have repeatedly told me that I am far happier, and a far better parent than I was before. So yes, there was a choice, but sometimes our math on it could be wrong. I was wrong in a good way. I hope someday your children understand that you made the right choice for yourself and that if they got to know you now they'd see you are a better person for being yourself rather than faking it forever.
Fifty six years of doing what was expected, and then near 100% acceptance. Your maths was wrong in the best possible direction. Your kids telling you you're a better parent now is about the highest mark going, I'd have that framed. And thank you for the last bit.
Wow, this was an incredible..and tortuous read. I’m right where you were. At the threshold in front of the 2 doors. Preparing to make a choice. Trying to determine if I can live with the consequences of either. In my case, there’s a 3rd door. I’ve had my hand on the doorknob several times, and managed to avoid opening it. Ugg. Thanks for the wonderfully accurate description of my situation. Best of luck to you too.
Chad, I'm really glad you're still here to have written this. That threshold is a rotten place to stand and I remember it far too well. I haven't got anything clever to add, I just didn't want to read that and say nothing.
Stevie, what you captured here is important for the people who think it is a black and white decision. As the wife of a transitioning partner, I did feel an initial sense of “I did not sign up for this, you are abandoning the social contract we had as a husband and wife.” But the more I understand what she had to suppress in order to play a role that she was not comfortable with, the more I realize that the choice was the less painful one. It initially did seem selfish, but now I understand the pain she endured in trying to be someone she was not. She never intended to deceive me, and she did not want to hurt me, but she did need to please 8 and 80 year old versions of herself. It took the untimely death of a close friend of hers to make her realize that if she did not transition, she would essentially die unhappy, having never lived the life she wanted. As I get more familiar with her past, this is easier for me to accept. That does not mean I still do not grieve the husband that I lost, the male body that I found attractive. But I recognize that she could not longer live in that body. We are trying to stay together, we are best friends, and we will endure. it is not easy, and sure, she did make a choice, but she also made a choice to ignore it when she met me, to marry me knowing who she was, to hide it for 18 years. And that must not have been an easy choice either.
Thank you for writing this. The view from your side is the one almost nobody publishes, and it's a good deal more generous than any of us have a right to expect. The bit I keep coming back to is your last line. She chose to ignore it when she met you, chose to marry you knowing, chose to hide it for eighteen years. Those were choices too, and they cost her, and they cost you, and nobody ever counts them. I hope you two do endure.
I think there's also a nuance that a lot of people don't understand about late transitioners. And that is that so many of us try to live in denial of what we are, some because of their own religious or moral beliefs, some because they are scared of the consequences, and some because they unexpectedly fall in love with someone and cannot imagine their life without that person. And so they make what they think is a rational "choice", and that is to deny who they are, thinking that this alternative is something that will ultimately keep the demons at bay and allow them to live a happy, fulfilled life. Unfortunately, as much as I'd love to have had that narrative, the decades of depression, suppression, suicidal ideation and related things grew to the extent where they were the dominant force in my life.
So yeah, technically these are choices, but I don't think I really like labeling them as such, because to do so gives them an illusion that there is control over one's fundamental gender identity, and that is not the case. I didn't feel I really had a choice in what I did. I am transgender - that is a fact. I fell in love with my wife - that is a fact. I was in an impossible situation - that, too, is a fact. And ultimately, these all came together into what @marriedwithconsequences described above.
Truthfully, none of the above felt like a choice to me. Perhaps it is more like Hobson's Choice - there was no good answer that would satisfy all constraints.
Hobson's Choice is better than anything I managed in the essay. The horse by the door or you walk.
I'd still separate the two things, though. Being transgender was never a choice. What I did about it was, and that's the only part I'm claiming. I use the word anyway because "no choice" hands people the job of deciding whether they believe your compulsion, and they judge it badly. But you're right that conceding the word costs something too.
I totally understand. Where I’d very gently push back, though, is the notion that it’s a compulsion - this leans towards pathologizing language that implies that it’s a disorder, while the DSM-5 explicitly states that it is not.
If I may humbly suggest that you’re doing yourself a bit of a disservice by saying you had a choice in what you did about it. I think the choice comes in HOW you did things, not in whether or not you had a choice other than an existential one. Is that splitting hairs? Perhaps. But I think that we, as transgender people, in the current world political climate, live and die by people splitting these hairs.
So I’m not for a moment suggesting that you’re wrong here. I certainly had a choice in HOW my wife found out about things, and to say that I handled it poorly is a gross understatement.
You did the whole list. Every box ticked, for everyone else, for decades. So no, you don't owe anybody the rest of it.
And the friends thing... I lost a fair few too. The ones left standing turned out to be the ones I actually wanted.
This is a really beautiful article Stevie .
I also agree that we all have a choice .
And we're choosing to be happy and that it comes with consequences to ourselves and others .
Well written.
Thank you Stefanie. Choosing to be happy and then paying for it in instalments. That's about the size of it.
Very nice! In my case I guess I’m unique. Child came out as trans, then my adult daughter came out as a lesbian, found out I was intersex and leaned fully into transitioning, then my spouse was like “screw it” and transitioned… 💖💖💖
That is a remarkable run of news for one household. Your spouse going "screw it" made me laugh out loud. Sounds like once one door opened the rest came off their hinges entirely.
Some people seem to view it as selfish. I view it as self preservation.
Both, probably. Self preservation doesn't stop being self preservation just because it's inconvenient for everyone else.
I used to agree, until today actually. When talking to a very dear woman friend, a friend only knows me post transition…
I realize there was NO choice, it life or death (actual, physical; or mental, that state of dysphoria that I had triggered). But perhaos it’s deeper than that, particularly for those loved ones who knew you before.
I describe this other element as “version management” . Those folks who knew you did it difficult to let go of what you were, a kind of version 1.1 perspective.
For myself i see the whole thing (ie my being a woman) as a version 2.0, so so much has changed it merits more than a slight upgrade!
This, my, version 2.0 outlook has consequences… One being others accepting that the old life essentially was not one…. and V2 may be less palatable to those folks who are not open-minded, and/or fixated with existing structures and memories…
Version management is a very good phrase and I'm going to steal it. People do try to run you as a point release. Same product, new packaging, all their existing memories still compatible. It isn't that, and it was never going to be.
Very interesting view of the dilemma that I, like you, had to live with. You nailed it right on the head. Ever since my coming out, I've used, somewhat uncomfortably, the "I had no choice" explanation knowing full well it didn't quite explain it accurately. I made a choice, for sure I did. And that choice was made even if I knew it would probably destroy everything and everyone. In fact, my sadness and regret of seeing people I love suffer almost equals the joy and euphoria of starting my transition. But the alternative no longer was viable "for me".
I think that somewhere, somehow, I have the right to be happy with who I am. But, like you say, it doesn't give me the right to dismiss the pain others are suffering because of this choice. I still care so much about them that I am trying as hard as I can to make it all work and minimize their pain. All the while, holding off things I still want so badly. I've started HRT almost a year ago and am very happy about it. But I fear my next choices, FFS, voice therapy, will not be so easy to manage.
I could write about all of this all day... But I will spare you. I just think that your text explains things in a beautiful yet very realistic way.
Thank you for this, genuinely. You've said something in one sentence that took me an entire essay to circle: the sadness of watching people you love suffer almost equalling the joy of finally starting. That is the actual shape of it. Not joy with a footnote, not grief with a silver lining, but two things of nearly the same weight carried at the same time. I don't think that ever fully resolves, and I've stopped treating it as a failure that it doesn't. It might just be what an honest transition feels like from the inside.
"The alternative no longer was viable for me" is, I think, the truthful version of "I had no choice". Not that we couldn't have carried on. We both know we could have, because we both did, for decades. But we couldn't have carried on and remained ourselves, and at some point that stopped being a price we were able to pay. That's what was written on the first door. Nobody outside could read it. Half the time we couldn't either.
On holding things off to soften it for the people around you: I recognise that instinct completely, and it is love. I'd only say, gently and from experience rather than as advice, that I spent a long time telling myself "if I just wait a little longer they'll be ready for the next bit". They mostly weren't ready by the time I was, and the waiting had its own quiet cost that nobody was counting. FFS and voice were, for me, the things that made me feel finished rather than in progress. But the timing of those is yours alone, and nobody's transition looks like anybody else's.
You have the right to be happy with who you are. You also owe them honesty about what it cost. Holding both at once is the whole job, and from what you've written here, you're doing it with more care than most.
And please don't spare me. Write it all day. That's what this comments section is for, and frankly the world could use your version of this essay too.
Stevie, I feel your anguish and distress. Literally. You could be largely writing about me except I am fortunate that my family and my wife have not turned their back on me. But for me ultimately it boiled down to a choice, and that choice, to quote a rather famous author, was quite simply to be or not to be, in the most literal sense of the phrase possible. And I chose to be, because the alternative would have caused even more pain for everyone else.
I spent decades trying to avoid that "choice", only to find that I could not. My "choice" was simply to continue to live, and in order to do so, transition for me was essential.
To be or not to be, in the literal sense. Almost nobody writes it down that plainly and I'm glad you did. I'm very glad you chose to be. And glad your wife and family stayed, which is not the common outcome and is not nothing.
Thank you. In case you're interested, I've written a fair amount about my journey thus far on my substack. I even had pretensions of literary ability by (mis)appropriating Shakespeare and re-writing the bard's most famous soliloquy - https://imperfectlybrokenandbruised.substack.com/p/intermezzo-in-the-name-of-action
Misappropriating Shakespeare is either brave or asking for trouble, and I've just published an absolute monster of an article about my own face, so I'm not in any position to judge. I'll have a look.
When I was 27 years old I was in Torremolinos, Spain. And I went to a restaurant with my parents. And a woman who owned the small restaurant and her staff showed us a platter of the fish we ordered. It was still a whole fish. And they were going to cook it for us. That never happened in my life. It was one of the best experiences we ever had. And I've been to so many places and so many restaurants in my younger life I couldn't even possibly count. But when we walked into that restaurant, it was a choice. We chose to eat there. Nobody forced us. The truth is we could have skipped eating for that whole day. And we still would have lived. But what kind of day would it have been? A day of longing. A day of hunger. A day of going without. Getting by and surviving only. Maybe just on water. So what exactly is a choice?
The anti-trans people, knock themselves out with this choice stuff and all of these fine points --without worrying about who we are, how we live, and what we need and want. I know I already commented, but I ran across your article again.
And I wish I could choose to go to Marbella right now. Or Thailand. Or Baltimore. But I can't. I want to, but I can't make that choice. But if I could I would. I can make plans for it. And that's a choice. But the "choice" to be trans and gender nonconforming happened for me without me doing anything. 🐟
(Oh and by the way, the first time I ever ate squid 🐙 with the ink all over the rice was in Spain. Same for paella. Which took forever.).
🦞🦀🐌
That whole fish arriving at the table is a perfect Torremolinos choice. You could have skipped lunch and lived. But what kind of day would it have been? That's exactly the question the “you chose it” crowd never sit with.
And your last line is the one I'd underline: the choice they keep talking about isn't the thing that happened to you. Squid ink on the rice the first time, though. Now that was a choice.
I got married. Had a daughter. Took care of my sick parents. Raised 2 daughters that weren’t mine, but I made them mine. I did what society expected from me. Every single thing. I even went to church. Now I’m DONE. The rest of this life belongs to ME. No one else. I’ve gained a few friends and lost a lot more, but the important thing is I’m finding MYSELF. I couldn’t GAF anymore. I just couldn’t.
You did the whole list. Every box ticked, for everyone else, for decades. So no, you don't owe anybody the rest of it.
And the friends thing... I lost a fair few too. The ones left standing turned out to be the ones I actually wanted.
You did have a choice, not whether you were transgender, that is who we are, but you chose to transition and that leaves those around you wondering what their peers now think of them and it completely derails the plans people have made for their lives based on the premise that you would continue to place their comfort and needs over your need to live your one and only life.
I decided not to transition every day for 46 years (ok, for many of those years transition for me was out of reach so there wasn't really a decision, call it 35 years). Finally I transitioned.
It's been hard but almost everyone in my life got onboard and maybe that was because I was 58 and no one had any expectations for themselves that in any way depended on me being he of she.
There's something worth sitting with in the choice and not-choice split you're drawing. Being trans isn't a choice. What you do about it, and when, mostly is, and pretending otherwise has never made that conversation honest for anyone.
Fifty eight and nobody's plans built around you staying who you weren't, that's a strange kind of luck. Mine came with rather more wreckage attached, and I'd still make the same choice every time.
I'm going to stick to the belief that it's not a choice. You said: Stevie chose Stevie. And you talked about what you had gone through. That's not really a choice. Once you decided to do something about it? Once you decided to transition? Then there are choices. Then there are consequences to those choices. And people could feel betrayed for what you did. But a choice? Well, yes and no. Technically yes, but pretty much no. Because the other choice is to just be miserable and live a life that you don't want to live.
How much of my life was a life that I lived for others? Not just about being trans but just so many things? I don't know but it's big.
And now I'm lonelier than I've ever been. But I'm also freer than I've ever been.
You may well be right. My problem with no choice is that it hands people the job of deciding whether they believe your compulsion, and they tend to decide badly. So I'd rather say I chose, and that the other option was unliveable, and let them make of that what they like. Lonelier than I've ever been and freer than I've ever been is the whole thing in one line, though. That I recognise completely.
Tough one to read at first, but then I understood more and more what you are saying and yes, there is a choice. There always is a choice. I held out for 56 years, hiding who I really was and doing everything expected of me. Once both my parents died I knew I was at a crossroads - continue to do as expected for the rest of my life or be myself. My youngest at the time was 11, the rest 20+. I decided given how I raised them, that my children were very likely to accept me as myself (thank goodness I was right), and outside of them I could live with any other rejections. I hoped my sisters would accept me, that my neighbors would at least endure me. Instead I got near 100% acceptance. A miracle imo My kids have repeatedly told me that I am far happier, and a far better parent than I was before. So yes, there was a choice, but sometimes our math on it could be wrong. I was wrong in a good way. I hope someday your children understand that you made the right choice for yourself and that if they got to know you now they'd see you are a better person for being yourself rather than faking it forever.
Fifty six years of doing what was expected, and then near 100% acceptance. Your maths was wrong in the best possible direction. Your kids telling you you're a better parent now is about the highest mark going, I'd have that framed. And thank you for the last bit.