OPINION:
In 1977, I was a 23-year-old man working at De Anza College in California. Everything about being me and living in my own skin seemed terrible. I didn’t understand my body or its constant desires. I couldn’t get my head around how to act in public, and I was often ridiculed by friends and foes alike for my erratic social behavior. Relationships with girls drove me to distraction; I could never understand them or their emotions.
I hated my tall, lanky body and never looked in the mirror. Life was strange, confusing and often harsh.
I was a tourist in my own life, but I had no return ticket home.
I had long played with the idea of being transsexual. That — not today’s all-encompassing “transgender” — was the word doctors used back then.
The more I struggled with living in my own, male skin and becoming an adult, the more I gravitated toward the medically created fiction that I was actually a girl trapped in a boy’s body. The tipping point for me was when my wife left me for another woman. This threw me into a tailspin from which I could not recover. My wife’s departure destroyed the weak underpinnings of my male identity. The only light I could see in the darkness of our divorce was this: If I were living as a woman, I would not be going through this kind of pain. Cross living would save me from it all.
So I found a doctor to support my transition and quickly jumped into the daily grind of trying to hide my natural maleness from the world I lived in. The first couple of years were horrible. I was 6 feet, 1 inch tall and very masculine in build, so I stood out like the freak of nature I was. Every day was a new and frequently painful lesson on what I was doing wrong as my supposedly authentic female self.
After 12 years of cross living, I eventually went all in and in 1990 had a complete sex change.
An interesting fact about the 40-plus years I’ve lived as a transgender woman: Every day that I woke up as a “woman,” I had to prepare myself to ensure that I was “passable” as female. I checked my deep voice, adjusting it to a higher tone. I looked in the mirror to see whether any of my maleness was shining through the cracks of my female facade.
By all accounts, I was a male tourist in a foreign, female land. I was not born in that land, and I was not part of that tribe. Yet for more than four decades, I remained there, a stranger. Although I dressed and tried to act the part, it would and could never come naturally to me.
Eventual “integration” can’t possibly take place when one attempts to change sex. How we are as males and females is built into our DNA. Our maleness or femaleness is not assigned to us at birth, nor is it forced onto us by inflexible social norms. Our societies do not force gender roles upon the individual; instead, we individuals shape societies based on the natural, holistic expressions of our DNA.
That same biological code drives us forward and triggers us to mate, have families and reproduce.
Fortunately, I eventually realized these facts, and three years ago, I detransitioned back to male. For the first time in decades, I am no longer a tourist in my own life. I wake up each day to my actual, God-given, authentic self.
• Rene Jax is a lecturer and author of multiple books, including “Don’t Get on the Plane: Why a Sex Change Will Ruin Your Life.”
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