“The story is already written”- the message came to me while on one of my daily walks in the nature area by my house. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to share my story with a select few individuals. I’ve been graced with the love and compassion of friends and family that have witnessed my personal evolution from one stage of life to the next. Beyond social media posts and reflective essays in graduate school, I’ve not written about my life with the intention to share it with others. As such, this feels new and foreign to me, and I have spent considerable time thinking of how to “properly” craft this tale.
My role in this is to simply put the pieces together. Since deciding to tell my story, I’ve been sitting with questions like, “Where do I start? What should be shared first: being transgender or my path with shamanism? What individual stories are critical to the major storyline? What aspects are irrelevant?” I think one important consideration for myself is not to view this chance to share as a jigsaw puzzle with set pieces that conclude with one particular image. Rather, this is like being gifted a pile of Legos that allows me to create something unique that can continue to grow.
As I continue in my healing journey, the more memories bubble to the surface, giving me more pieces to work with. As my life continues to unfold day by day, more stories become part of my journey. As such, the story grows and evolves over time. Overall, I believe there is value in having a general chronological flow to my story, but since life itself requires flexibility and adaptability, so too can I embody these traits in the endeavor to share.
Since it was the first conscious aspect of my story, I’ll speak first to my identity as a transgender person.
There has been a common narrative associated with transgender people. It’s the belief that we all “feel like a boy in a girl’s body” or “a girl in a boy’s body”. For some, that’s absolutely true. Maybe something in their life experiences early on gave them the insight to their truth. I think it’s important to bring attention to the reality that the narrative I mentioned isn’t everyone’s story. This narrative is limiting and potentially harmful as it puts people in boxes, while completely leaving out others. This narrative can cause some folks to feel invalidated, since they don’t feel that way. As such, they may struggle with feeling valid in their experiences. For others who resonate outside of the gender binary, they’re completely left out of the picture.
Prior to graduate school, I had sparse interactions with gender-expansive folks. I knew some folks here and there, so my own understanding of gender identity/expression has grown in recent years. I completed my internship for my Master of Social Work program at a gender services program, and as such, I was exposed to dozens of life stories from transgender and gender-expansive clients. In some of these stories, the onset of puberty is what “woke” someone up as their hormonal influences started to have an impact on their biological functioning and physical makeup. Other folks seemed to always have always felt “off” but had no idea how to describe what it was they were feeling. It wasn’t until meeting people with similar experiences that they acquired the language to describe their feelings. In receiving insight through new language, something in them *clicks* and they have a whole new level of understanding their past and present experiences.
I continue to reflect on my own experience, doing my best to reach back into the depths of the past to come to a clear understanding of what my own gender story has looked like. I can’t say that I was that person that “felt like a girl in a boy’s body”- maybe social conditioning shut this out of my mind well before I could have the chance to really feel my true self. I can say though that my body always felt kinda awkward to be in. Friends that I’ve known since childhood can attest to perceiving that awkwardness and have noted such a difference since I transitioned. But before I started that aspect of my journey, I’ve felt like I’ve been trapped in my body for the majority of my life. It’s only been in the very recent past that I’ve started to heal and reconnect with my body- reclaiming my physical body and doing the work to feel more at home in it.
Throughout my late childhood, early adolescence and late teenage years, I recall moments of wishing I had been born a girl, daydreaming of a life that felt more congruent with how I wanted it to be. The daydreams often involved thinking things like, “if I was a girl I would do [this] and [that] and be like [this]”. These thoughts weren’t necessarily distressing or ones that caused me to feel extreme despair, but they were prevalent enough for me to be able to recall years later. But then again, there’s so much of my childhood that feels fuzzy and not totally clear, so maybe there was more distress or despair than I’m fully aware of. One thing was clear though: some part of me knew, “I would feel better if I was a girl”.
Like I mentioned before, I went to a private college-prep academy that had its foundation as a non-denominational Christian school. I was also born in and raised in North Texas until I was 23 years old. This was not a helpful combination for being able to accept, let alone feel safe in my gender identity and sexuality (bisexual/pansexual. I identify with “bisexual” in this because pansexual wasn’t in my vocabulary until recent years. It’s part of my own personal liberation and acceptance of self to speak to the label that once terrified me to accept). Beyond just feeling a lack of safety and acceptance in this environment, I did not have helpful nor positive exposure to those in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
I don’t remember when I first learned about transgender people, but I imagine it was through TV. I vaguely remember watching an MTV reality show that had a transwoman as one of the reality show members. Considering that this show was aired in the 2000’s, she was not painted in the most positive light. What I do clearly recall is a stranger- not directly affiliated with the show- called her “a man” during one of the scenes, which caused significant distress. I also remember a Super Bowl commercial that depicted a guy standing at the urinal. Then, in walks in an objectively beautiful woman that stands right next to him. Whatever the man’s initial reaction was- could have been confusion, curiosity, or lust- it quickly shifted to shock as the woman began peeing in the urinal next to him while standing up. The commercial then had some “witty” voiceover that said something like, “know what you’re getting” or something like that.
I remember phrases like transvestite, tranny, she-male, and a variety of other slurs that had a hateful, judgmental connotation to them. I could feel the judgment and hate in these words. Again, there’s really a lot of my childhood that feels unclear. Maybe I knew early on that I was transgender and I coped by suppressing how I truly felt. It would make sense, considering there wasn’t a single source of support or encouragement that reflected to me: I am allowed to be this way.
I recently remembered a video game that I used to play extensively when I was in middle school and high school: Fable. It was a fantasy-based role-playing game in which you could customize your character in many ways throughout the span of the game. The second installment in the series had a side quest that you could complete that gave you a potion called, “The Potion of Transmogrification” and once you got it you could drink it and change your gender. Something in me felt pulled to drink it- a curiosity and a resonance that ran deep. But all the while, I felt an enormous amount of hypervigilance, and that if I were to drink the potion I would be doing something immoral.
I drank the potion and after I did, I felt a burst of excitement in the moment, but quickly the weight of shame came crashing down on me. The game auto-saved and I couldn’t go back to earlier in my save-file. My body ran hot with the fear of “is someone going to find out?” i.e. my parents or brother. They had no reason to go looking at my game file, not that I believe they would know how to do so in the first place. But knowing that the game had character biography information, including gender, I felt like I could be “caught” at any moment. Looking at the written text of my character’s new gender identity, I was absolutely overwhelmed with fear at seeing the word, “Transgender”.
My world for the first part of my life was very small. School was the primary source of lived experience. I didn’t take part in any extracurriculars outside of school. With the exception of one childhood friend, all of my friends were classmates or friends that were once classmates. I graduated with a class of 35 students, and a large chunk of those folks were people that I knew from age 5. Other than that, I played video games, and watched TV. Again, my world was small, and I was conditioned to have very narrow worldviews. These worldviews caused me to hate myself and to be afraid of the way that I felt. I tried for years to deny my truth, and actively repressed these things.
When it came time for me to graduate high school, I chose to go to a nearby university: The University of Texas at Tyler. I wanted someplace that was close enough to home but not too close, one that had a relatively low cost, and one that had a small student body. If anyone reading this has awareness of Texas and its culture, once again, it’s not a very accepting place. Going from North Texas to East Texas was not a helpful shift as the culture becomes even less urban. It is historically safer and more accepting for queer folks in urban areas due to the correlation of a higher population of liberal/progressive ideologies and community. All that to say, living in East Texas for 4 years didn’t help with my journey of self-acceptance.
In fact, I spent much of that time hiding. Hiding in an on-again/off-again relationship that caused more harm than benefit, hiding in sports that I wish I hadn’t subjected my body to (because of the amount of injuries that I still deal with today), hiding through binge-watching tv during my free time, and hiding in alcohol and partying. But before I found myself hiding in these things, there were a key few moments that I do remember taking place during my first semester of freshman year.
Shortly after graduating high school, I was very homophobic, just like I was taught to be. Would this have been as huge to me if I hadn’t been struggling with my own sexual urges that would have been labeled as gay? Hard to say. A person with a fragile sense of self will do a lot that they don’t actually resonate with in order to fit in and feel safe in community. It was in my first semester of being away from the toxic environment that I grew up in that it dawned on me: “gay, lesbian, and bisexual people just love who they love. They don’t choose to be this way. There isn’t anything ‘wrong’ with them. They’re just following their hearts” (not exactly a ground-breaking realization, but for me at the time, it was. Again, this says a lot about the environment I grew up in). If I couldn’t help who I liked and loved, then it was no different for those with same-gender attraction.
That, to me, was a first major step in shedding the skins that I had grown in my childhood and adolescent years. Still, this did not shake me deeply enough to my own core being to allow me the freedom to be myself and to accept that I myself was part of the queer community. I spent so much of my younger years actively denying the sexual urges that I had for guys that I continued to tell myself, “that isn’t there”. Not to mention the thoughts and feelings around wishing I had been born a girl. Shedding the skins and the wounds of the past is an ongoing journey that can often take much time to resolve. Especially when it feels that we don’t have the love and support from others to be accepted for who we are.
One of my classes during freshman year was my Psychology 101 class, a catch-all of general psychology information. One of the lectures delved into gender identities compared to biological sex. I recall the professor explaining concepts such as, “someone born as a biological male can identify as a male. Someone born as a biological male can identify as female. Someone born biologically female can identify as female. Someone born biologically as female can identify as male. Gender is a social construct, etc.”. At that time, the lecture made zero sense to me. I couldn’t wrap my head around the difference of sex vs. gender and the lecture left me feeling confused.
At that time, the entire concept of gender was something that I couldn’t wrap my head around because it did not fit into the binary-based concept of sex that I was conditioned to maintain. Again, please keep in mind that as a young person, my high school taught that the Earth was only about 6,000 years old… My school taught the theory of evolution with the clear expectation that I would use that information to know what the counter-arguments to Creationism would be, and so that I could be prepared to make my case for a Creationist perspective. Again: small worldview. Not to mention harmful conditioning.
Sometime after that class, I was back home in North Texas visiting family. I was talking to my mom and we were driving her old, white mini-van down a familiar road that we had driven down many times to and from my former high school. In this conversation, I shared some of the realizations I had already been having in the few short weeks since leaving home. Particularly, I remember talking about bisexual/lesbian/gay folks and the acceptance that I had come to have for this community. She was supportive and encouraging, as she had also been on her own journey of expanding her beliefs. Somehow in this conversation we started to talk about transgender folks. I have trouble remembering the specific details related to this part of the conversation, because it rattled me to my core in a way that caused me to repress it as best as I could.
I think that I said something to the effect of, “even though I can understand LGB people, I still don’t get transgender people”, and went on to share about my psychology class and the lecture about gender and sex. I think my confusion stemmed from the conflict of new information that challenged my old frames of reference. Though I cannot remember it clearly, I imagine that my confusion also contained a blend of judgment and bigotry.
My mom responded to my confusion with a very simple concept. She essentially said something like, “it’s when a person feels a certain way on the inside but it doesn’t match up with the way they look on the outside”. For some reason, this simple explanation was enough to make it all *click* for me. In a moment that shook my reality, for the first time I found myself saying internally, “that’s me”. This was my first moment of being able to clearly recognize that I was transgender.
But recognition does not automatically lead to acceptance, especially when your entire life up to that point reinforces that the way you feel is not only wrong, but will lead to rejection from friends, family, and the general public, and subject you to eternal damnation in the fires of Hell. Not a great way to spend eternity if I do say so myself. In that moment of realization, I stuffed my truth down into the deepest, darkest hole and said to myself, “I just have to get through my life and after I die I won’t have to worry about this anymore”. At that moment, I had made the decision to bury my truth so far down that I intended to take it to my grave with me. I decided that I was going to do what was expected of me: go to school, get a job, marry a woman, have kids, and live the rest of my life “normally”. This tactic felt like it worked, for a bit of time at least.
When our truth lives inside of us, it cannot stay buried forever. There are consequences to living out of sync with our True Self. I felt empty and disconnected for much of my life without even realizing it. I just felt like my life was a movie and I was watching it happen as though my eyes were a TV screen. Once I realized how abnormal that was, I spent many years trying to “find myself”, all while keeping an integral piece of my True Self locked away and kicked down into a seemingly bottomless pit where she would stay for many years. I spent years feeling like something was missing, and it would be years before I remembered what it was that I locked away.
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