I wish this wasn't my lot in life. I didn't wake up one day and choose this. I identify with being a woman and feel weighed down by being trans and wish that part of me didn't exist. I don't really feel pride anymore.
Thinking back, I'm realizing that I wasted my entire life just trying to survive. I spent my entire childhood depressed and sometimes suicidal because I could never be a woman. When I was 18 and realize being a trans woman was possible, I wasted seven years toiling over whether that was the right choice, whether I'd be happier opening myself up to constant mistreatment if I got to live on my own terms. When I finally realized I couldn't go on anymore and found a therapist and started HRT, I was 25 and male puberty and completely run its course. I lost so much during that process. My transition has gone much better than expected, and I have my moments, but I will never fully pass now.
Conservatives say we make being queer our entire personalities, and I try so hard to resist that. I have other interests, but I'm just so exhausted by life all the time and I can't do them. I want to write a book, learn a language, learn code so I can make an indie game. I've been trying to learn piano for three years now and I'm still not very far. I wish I could have had the time to learn all these things earlier. So much my time has been spent either depressed about society's transphobia or trying to "catch up" on being a woman, learning how to dress and put on makeup years late, coming out and having to revisit my relationships with everyone I know, making new friends to make up for the ones I lost, doing voice lessons, going to protests, laser and surgery, constant appointments, undergoing the lengthy name and ID-change process. I could go on. I've missed out on so much in my life on account of being trans. I read a lot about authors who grew up writing fanfic wishing I was one of those people, instead of just being sad and doing the bare minimum besides keeping my grades up and reading books. These days, I just go to my job, sometimes work overtime, play catch-up, spend time with my partner, and read the news.
And now just three short years of being fully out and on hormones, it's all being taken away and I genuinely don't know where I'll be in four years or whether I'll be alive.
There's probably nothing after this, and this is the only life I get. I can't have my own consciousness if reincarnation is real. If the Christian god is real, then at worst I have being turned into a genderless angel-thing and being stripped of my womanhood in heaven, or hell at best. I'm not saying being born a cis woman would solve all my problems. I've dealt with sexism too and know how harmful it is. But I don't think I will ever get to live a normal life, and now at almost 30, I don't think trans people will ever achieve social acceptance in my lifetime. Things keep going worse, and our most influential trans person in office says we need to slow down trans acceptance.
I think a lot about the concept of people just living, wanting to do things but who end up just working and being tired, and then dying before they get to accomplish any of the things they wanted to achieve in life. At this point, I've whittled down all my life goals to just two things: get married to my fiance and make some piece of art that someone says they liked, even though I'm so far behind and it wouldn't be very good.
I'm also very tired of having to spend SO MUCH time and energy on something that ought to be largely irrelevant to my life, I totally feel that. However, there is one thing that makes me feel a lot better about it. I imagine what I might have been like, as a person, if I didn't have any kind of marginalized identity.
If I wasn't like this, my entire worldview would likely have been developed from a fairly privileged position. I would never have experienced this struggle. And while the trans struggle is not identical to the struggles of other marginalized people, it definitely hits a lot of the same notes. So I feel like it has definitely broadened my understanding of other people's plights, to the point where I don't think I'd wanna give that up in exchange for being cis. I feel like that me might've ended up more of an asshole, you know?