CW: Suicide related stuff, discussion of sexual assault and adjacent topics.

We're the same person entirely. The only thing that changed, in the end, is that I stopped beliving that I needed to be a guy because my body was male.. Once I stopped having to interpret everything through a masculine lens, a lot of stuff changed in a sense, but it also didn't really change. It was a process of recontextualisation, but at the end, all the same stuff was still there, just seen in a new light.

For example: I thought my male sex drive pointed at women. Wrong. It pointed at nothing - through the lens of male sexuality, I'm ace. But I'd misinterpreted women that I thought of as having some or many features of the woman I'd like to transition into as women I was sexually attracted to.

Once I came out to myself, I realised that I wanted those things I admired for parts of myself instead of wanting their holders carnally, which explained the mindfucking cognitive dissonance of it all, and my male sex drive fell off a cliff and died once it was deprived of women to be attracted to.

There was lots and lots of stuff like that. Some as awkward, other things less so, but in the end, all the same motivators and drives defie me, I just understand myself way better now. Which kinda sucks in a sense, because not underrstanding myself was a big driver for my love of philosophy and I'm struggling to find an equivalent passion to drive it because I don't ever want to let that part of myself atrophy and die.

The biggest change - the biggest recontextualisation - was me understanding my gender dysphoria as dysphoria instead of self-hatred. I used to fantasize about going into the past and torturing any of a number of past me's to death very slowly for the "mistakes" they'd made that led them to becoming me.. My dysphoria was pretty awful. I felt happy twice in the time since puberty, and both times the sheer cognitive dissonance of it made me feel like I was was going insane - literally, it felt like a psychotic break. I was happy, feeling awful, and furiour at the happiness for making the awfullness so much worse by contrast, all simultaneously. Words cannot fucking describe what that was like, and I wouldn't wish it on the worst person in the world, I likened identity to rape because it was something people forced on me without my consent. I wanted to be nothing and no one and apart from all the world, and to an extent still really do, but for fewer reasons. Before it was driven in part by self hate and in part because I hugely believe in the phrase "splendid isolation". Now it's just that latter bit.

And instead of going into the past to inflict crimes against humanity on myself, I want to go back, give that trans kid a hug and tell her she didn't need to go into the closet to forget who she was, or to tell the "boy" that lived after her that it's okay, that it's all right, that I love him, that it isn't his fault, that it's all because he's not a he at all, that the science is sound, that it's not an opinion, that he can stop being the agent of his own violation -

Because I've been assaulted in what was minimally a sex-adjacent way, and living as a guy was so much worse, omg.

It was a violation. And it was ultimately self inflicted. Because I was told biology was real, and I was acculturated to know that I had to be a guy. That a man entering a woman's space was filthy like racists were filthy. An utter degenerate. That I had no right, and that even if there was a right, I had a penis anyway and that was that - I'd just be a pathetic thing faking it.

God, I wish I could give that kid a hug.

I love her, before she forgot herself.

I love him afterwards.

They had the strength to make it to the end, even if just barely. To walk through absolute hell, step by step, forward unto dusk, where I am now, under this starry sky.

To hate them would be to hate that persistence, the determination, the courage, and the will to not fail that brought me here - because they are me.

They aren't anything but me.

It's important to be happy with your body, but bodies are ultimately just shells. We're the same soul.

Just wish I could do anything at all to let them know that one day, they'd look back, and know it was worth it, even if it was also completely unnecessary - or should've been - and that there would be even one person who undeerstood and even understanding, yet still cared for their existence, and saw it as worth it, and loved them, and thought they weren't a wrong thing.

That would've made it so, so much easier than going utterly alone, and having - for sheer survival, to never even once give in to hope, lest it be crushed utterly.

Now that I'm not stuck with T-mediated emotional suppression - though that was a useful survival tool, so much as I hated it, thanks, balls, I guess - looking back and engaging with that past of mine never fails to reduce me to tears.

But I'll never let it go.

I can't.

This pain is mine.

It defines me as utterly as every positive things I hold in myself, and to let it go would be to forget where I came from and become lessened for it. And I refuse.

I was strong enough to go into the dark of the closet. I was strong enough to withstand the utter hell I found there. I was strong enough to march to the end of the line, with only a single faltering step - and even then, I did not fall. I sure as hell can be in my past self's corner, even if I am powerless to do anything to effect their journey.

To turn my back on everything I went through to arrive here - that would be death, or something so close to it that from my pov, there's no practical difference.

In the end, that's my perspective. My relationship to my past self. I'm not going to contextualise it as pre-transition, because I'm not going to accept that transition is a break in continuity. We are all one.

But the only right answer is what's right for you, because the only rule that binds all equally is this: To thine own self be true - and do as thou willt shall be the whole of the law.

Footnote: I use the historical pronoun of my past selves that coheres to the identity that they held - asserted, I should say - internally. I only do this with myself, or if another person asks me to do it for them, else I use the present preferred pronouns. In my case, it's a matter of respect. I realised that I was trans in 2014, and proceeded to keep on keeping on with the male identity for another six years, for reasons that I don't agree with now. But back then, despite living with suicidal ideation every few minutes of every hour of every every single day, never burdening anyone with the task of helping my emotional self-management, I kept on walking my deathmarch through hell to the end of nowhere, because it was that important to me.

And if he had the courage to face that atrocity of a life for those reasons, and if we're the same person, and if I'm not going to let go of this pain...

Then I can't erase that. Even if it isn't the underlying truth - and it never was. Those were the worst years of my life, and I accomplished and laid the foundation for some of the things I'm most proud of, and I did it playing that utterly, horribly unfitting role. So even if thinking of myself hurts, when it;'s in that way, I can have a little fucking respect..

Ahahaha. Sorry. Looking back at this really hurts, and I'm a little emotionally compromised rn. My mind went, "Hey, what if someone gets offended by how you refer to yourself in terms of pronouns, and I took it too seriously. Not feeling incredibly rational atm.