Shame and Guilt

One of the things we transpeople fight a neverending battle with is shame and guilt issues. They are the result of the accumulation of things and events that we experienced growing up in mismatched bodies.

For example, if we held our schoolbooks the 'wrong' way, flopped around in mom's heels as a toddler or wanted to play with dolls instead of army men and trucks, we were quickly and firmly told that we couldn't do that because we were 'boys' and those were 'girls' things.

As you grow older and the defined gender roles become more rigid and the peer pressure to conform becomes more intense, you look for any outlet to relieve the growing pressure to release the girl inside and discover crossdressing as an outlet to do just that.

But as you do that you're bombarded by the negative cultural message that 'it's wrong' for boys to wear 'girls' clothes, but note the contradiction that girls not only can wear 'boys clothes' it's celebrated as a fashion statement. You're more troubled when you sit in your church on Sunday and hear your pastor spew forth an anti-gay sermon. Heaven help you if you get caught while in cross-dressed mode and get the beatdown of your life.

That forces you to retreat deep inside, resolve not to tell anyone about your issues out of fear, and you begin to feel guilt for not standing up and being honest about who and what you really are.

You struggle to do what your heart and your brain are telling you, but because you're in the opposite body are being slowly pushed to conform to the gender norms and expectations of being an inhabitant in that body.

If you're a person who thinks and plans long term, you end up not making those plans because you have a transgender issue that's the wild card in the deck of life that will upset whatever hopes and dreams you dare to have.

Relationships? If you're honest with yourself, you back out or sabotage them because you don't want to hurt the bioperson that is falling in love with you. You dread telling your parents and family members because you're afraid of not only being tossed out of the house, but being cut off from their love and affection forever.

And you're miserable because of it.

One of the first keys to beating shame and guilt is dealing with all those issues. You also must realize that it's not a crime to be transgender and live your life. You had no more control over being transgender than you have over your sexual orientation or other immutable characteristics.

What you do have control over is how you intelligently deal with the issues that resulted from the body-mind mismatch.