I used to have an outie, and now I have an innie! March 19th, 2024, what most people know as Taco Tuesday had an entirely different meaning for me as Taco Tuesday. It is 6am and I am at the UNC Hospital in Hillsborough. I have checked in for my procedure, had my vitals taken and signed all the paperwork I needed to sign. I have met my surgical team, been asked a hundred questions. I have texted my family and friends and my friend who is staying with me while I recover has the important numbers to call to let people know I am ok. We are just waiting on the surgeon at this point. He is there by 7am and I am being wheeled off and I don’t remember a thing until almost 6 hours later when I wake up in recovery.

I was born a boy. Thats what everyone told me. Thats the anatomy I had. That was my life. It was a life filled with chaos and confusion. It was a life pretending to be a boy, trying to survive this world because back then in the 80’s and 90’s people did not understand people like me. So, for my whole life I wore a mask, I was an actor playing the role everyone wanted to see me in. A boy, a man, a father.

It was a life filled with showering in the dark, hating my own anatomy to the point I would wish for bad things to happen to it. It was a life plotting out how long it would take to bleed out if I cut it off and if I made the call to 911, waited ‘x’ amount of minutes before cutting it off and flushing it down the toilet so it can’t be reattached, I would make it to the hospital in time to survive and I wouldn’t have to worry about thing between my legs anymore. Years of uti’s because I could not bring myself to touch it unless I was self-harming it. Years of self-harm and attempts at unaliving myself because I hated my body so much. Depression and anxiety. Panic and C-PTSD. This was my life. Constant emotional pain. Physical disgust. I would smile for you, but the eyes betrayed me every single time.

Finally in 2018 after so much self-abuse and a breakdown, I transitioned. What followed was varying levels of happiness but more pain because of how society treats me. But milestone after milestone led me to March 19th, 2024. Fighting and suing my employer for health insurance coverage and here we were, the big day. A 5.5-hour surgery where my genitals and pelvic floor were going to be rearranged into a beautiful vulva.

I awoke to my friend with me and the nurses hovering over me. Everything went swimmingly. I know I was still pumped full of pain meds but as they wore off, I never felt pain, only happiness. A surgeon healed me where anti-depressants and therapy could only put band aids on my mental pain. Today I get to joke that now I only have regular people problems in my life, and I have to say I would take this any day of the week. Finally, not only does my body look and feel like it should. But my soul is healed. March 19th, 2024, my life was saved and I finally found happiness in myself. It is the day that I will remember for the rest of my life. That sense of finally being whole, of being complete, of being me, nothing will ever compare to that. In the few short months since that day, I have already forgotten a lot about what that anatomy felt like, I am only left with the memories of pain which are far outweighed by the happiness I experience every single day now.

Life may throw challenges at me still. There may be times of stress, grief, or anguish, but all I have to do is remember that day to know that I can accomplish anything.

What do I even call you? Gregory? Lillie? I’ve wrestled with that these last few months as I’ve been finding myself in this world and really trying to figure out WHO I am.
On paper and in pictures and in so many people’s memories, you were a little boy and on some levels that still bothers me that I was robbed of a childhood I only ever was able to dream about and beg for. And for years, I blamed you. I hated you so much. I couldn’t stand you and I called you every single name in the book and I probably made up a few along the way as well.
It was your fault I couldn’t be a girl. You didn’t stand up for me. You didn’t speak up when you had the chance. Who else could I blame? All I could do was turn that anger inward, on you, on us. But the facts are, you existed before the internet. You didn’t know there were people like us out there. And being from a small town certainly didn’t help when you didn’t even know there was a community.
So as part of OUR healing process I need to look at the facts. And Gregory, you did the best you could with what you had. So many of your actions were due to various trauma responses and I can no longer be angry with you for that. Somehow you knew that the world wasn’t ready for me.
So, you kept me safe, and you suffered alone for decades. You gave up your youth to protect me. You became a father because you knew I would never bear children of my own. All this you did for me and so much more. You had to grow up so fast in a world that would never have accepted me back then. And you did all that in order to protect me when I thought you were being selfish.
My hope is that you can forgive me for the bitterness I felt towards you for all those years as you kept me safe. My hope is that through reflection and inner child work that you and I, Gregory and Lillie, can finally be healed and whole. This is so much more than me saying thank you for keeping us safe. For preparing me for the world and giving me the tools to navigate it. This is me asking you for your forgiveness for not understanding the burden you put on yourself and all that you gave up so that one day I could exist. So, thank you Gregory. Thank you for everything. Because of you and your sacrifice, I’m able to exist.

My parents told me ever since I was a little boy that I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up. They would say things like, ‘Gregory, you’re so smart. You can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it.’ ‘Greg, you’re good at everything you try. If you’d just apply yourself, you can have a great career.’ But those are just things parents are supposed to tell their kids, right? Isn’t that part of being a parent? Making a child believe they can do anything they set their hearts to? Encouraging your kids to aim for the stars?

At 10, you ask ‘Can I be a cheerleader like my big sister?’ You’re met with laughter which fades quickly because they realize you’re serious. No, the answer is no. That’s what girls do and you’re a boy. You can do anything that boys do.

At 12, your grades drop in school, and you’ve lost interest. You’re told ‘you’re smarter than this.’ You ask, ‘Can I do gymnastics like my little sister, or be a ballerina?’ Gregory, they would say, that’s for girls. Not boys. You’re not a girl. And you replied, why can’t I be? And the answer is simply because you cannot.

You’re sent to your room, told never to speak of this again. And you didn’t, until you were 14. You told them you didn’t know what you wanted to do with your life. You’re reminded that you can do anything you want. And they heard you mumble that’s a lie. You’re sent to a Dr. to fix you. To make sure you never have those thoughts again. For years it worked.

You’re 42, it’s another sleepless night scrolling the internet. For some reason you do a specific search that night. You send an email and think, I’ll put all these thoughts to rest finally. The next day you get a reply. She wants you to tell her about yourself. You pour your heart out. You tell her all your thoughts and feelings of wanting to be a cheerleader, a mother and how puberty was torture.

Two days later she calls you and says she has an opening! But fear sets in. Is she going to be like the one that tried to fix you when you were 14? You decide it’s worth the risk. And for the first time in 30 years, you have a therapist. She is kind, compassionate and understanding. She says you can be anything you want, it’s never too late. You recoil because your parents used to tell you that. You tell the therapist that’s a lie parents say. And she counters with, why? Why is it a lie?

Because you’ll lose everything. Your kids, job, family, and partner. You have responsibilities. She says, you have responsibilities to yourself as well and that while she can’t make promises on if you’ll lose anything or anyone or not, what she can promise you is, that shedding your mask and people’s perception of you may be scary, yet it can also be rewarding to be your authentic self. And she guides you along the way.

And each milestone along the way heals you a little bit. You find a little more joy in life whereas before, that was something you didn’t see a lot of. Then one day, you see her in the mirror. It was just a quick glimpse, but you seen her. It’s weeks before you see her again, but she lingers a little longer. And over the next few years she replaces him in the mirror until you hardly see him anymore. You wonder if he was ever real or not. You make new connections, and you lose some connections in your life. Yet, you gain new connections that are much stronger.

Your relationship with your kids becomes stronger when you thought they’d hate you. 4 years after meeting your therapist, you have your first surgery. And you’re riding high. 5 years after meeting your therapist you have the big surgery. That’s the moment your soul is healed. You say goodbye to your therapist because you don’t need her anymore. In parting you leave her this message that is the most profound thing you were ever told, even if you thought it was a lie.

You tell her that once upon a time, there was this kid who dared to dream. He was told he could be anything he wanted to be when he grew up. So, he became a woman and lived happily ever after. All it took was for one person to believe in her and to support her and she found that she could do anything she wanted to in the world because all she had to do was dream it and then manifest it.

I always knew I was different, yet the ability to articulate exactly what I felt eluded me for most of my life, especially the early years. I grew up in the 80’s, pre internet, so I didn’t know there were other people in the world like me. When the internet came about, I learned that I was a crossdresser. Though that didn’t exactly fit me, it was the closest thing I had to an identity.

As a teenager I would go through a form of conversion therapy which resulted in burying my feminine side and trying to brace hyper masculinity. It was nothing more than a mask that I would wear for the sake of others. For if I could fool them, one day, I could even fool myself. I thought I was rather good at it, yet there were many days and nights she would be just below the surface, screaming to be let out. Every time I would silence her and go about life. The smile on my face was a poor attempt at hiding the sadness in my eyes.

Decades would go by and with each passing year I marveled that I was somehow still alive. I could never picture a future where I existed, where I had happiness, genuine happiness that persisted in my day-to-day life. I would become depressed over time which led me to one of the most life altering choices I would ever make. Instead of going through the motions and simply existing every day I sought help from a therapist, not just any therapist, but one that also specialized in gender identities, transgender people.

I would finally have answers to my questions. I finally had the language to define who I was. I wasn’t a boy; I wasn’t a man. I am a woman, a trans woman. What did that mean for me? How can I do this at the age of 41, I asked myself. With my therapist’s guidance I was able to answer these questions, navigate this transition and all the added pressures it would bring on someone that has a family, job, and lives in the bible belt.

It wasn’t easy by any means. Depression would set in at the knowledge of being different than the rest of the world. Yet I would plug away. I think my most defining moment early in my transition was the loss of a dear friend who was also a trans woman. The pressure got to her, and she took her own life. And I was scared, terrified, because only weeks earlier that was very nearly me.

My employer had exclusions on gender affirming surgery in the company Healthcare plan, so I was at a loss of how to pay for these surgeries. So, I would keep asking my employer to remove said exclusions. Each year the answer was no. Each year I would send a formal request to corporate and each year I would get a different reason why they wouldn’t remove the exclusions. After 4 years of this I reached out to an attorney for assistance and after a year of back and forth, my employer at the urging of the EEOC removed the exclusions on gender affirming surgery.

I had my first surgery in November of 2023, a breast augmentation or as the community calls it, top surgery. And my bottom surgery was in March of 2024. You’ll hear people say that gender affirming care is lifesaving. And that’s really a hard concept to grasp unless it’s something you’ve experienced first-hand. I even didn’t fully grasp how life altering it would be until my first surgery. Yes, I had gender dysphoria regarding my body. Yes, there were times I hated my body so much I wanted to hurt myself. Times spent in the shower, in the dark, just crying.

And then you have corrective surgery. To many, it’s a small thing. A small step. But when your body is foreign to you, when your body has betrayed you and you wake up from that first surgery and see the results of it? I cannot fully describe the amount of joy I felt. Finally, my body was starting to look like it should have all these years. Finally, I felt at home in my body. I started to stand up straighter. The was no longer this unseen weight on my shoulders. Finally,, I was me! I was happy. I am happy! My body was finally mine, not some impostors. More importantly, when I try to imagine what the future looks like, I can see a world where I exist in it. Transitioning, and gender affirming surgeries, gave me another chance at life. I’m both lucky and grateful to have been able to see the world from two sets of eyes.