Call him TM. No, he’s not hiding his face because he is ashamed of who he is. It’s a matter of keeping his personal life separate from an amazing career. So why is he different? For now let me just say that TM has walked a lifelong path that most of us could not begin to fathom.

Imagine getting a Barbie Doll for your birthday when you would rather have a baseball bat and a catcher’s mitt. Imagine being told to wear a dress to school when you’d rather wear a pair of blue jeans. Imagine growing up not fitting in with the girls because you think differently from them, but also not fitting in with the boys because you don’t look like them. Growing up is a long row to hoe for everybody. Multiply that by ten fold if you were born in the wrong body.

TM is a straight male in his thirties, from in the western U.S and has a steady girlfriend. He normally does not share intimate photographs of himself, but has chosen to use Enlightened Male as a forum to broaden knowledge and understanding about transgender people.

During the course of our correspondence, I asked TM what he thought about his body: “I used to hate my female body. As I am slowly developing a more male-appearing body, I am becoming more comfortable in my own skin. I am OK for now with having female genitalia.”

TM likes being nude in the right setting, and in private he enjoys exploring his changing body. He has never experienced a nude beach. His fantasy is having a beautiful, complete male body and sharing the experience of being naked with someone else. He has had chest surgery to have a male chest and has been on testosterone for several years, so other than the genital area, he is a male. The genital reassignment surgery will come at a later date.

So now you have been introduced to TM. For this essay he has provided pictures of his body; and what follows in his own words is a glimpse of his heart.

I am a transman. You pass me every day on the street. I look like an average guy and you have no idea that I was born a female. It’s not that I don’t want you to know, it’s just that you really don’t need to know. Because I am just me.

Even though you don’t need to know that I am trans, there are some things I do want you to know. And that is what this segment is about. I hope that you can understand a little more about people like me and have a new appreciation for people that may be different than you.

I want you to know what “trans” means. To put it bluntly, it means that although I was born as a female, I had a ‘sex change’ and am now a male. You can also refer to me as a ‘transman’ or ‘trans-guy’. Technically, ‘transsexual’, ‘transgendered’, “FTM”, or “female-to-male” all mean the same thing, although I personally don’t like some of those terms because of various stigmata that seem to come with them. Really, though, I am now just a ‘guy’ or a ‘man’. . . . By the way, ‘Trans’ can also mean that someone was born male, had a ‘sex change’ and is now female. You might call them ‘trans-women’, ‘trans-ladies’, “MTFs”, “male-to-females”, or just ‘women’. I honestly don’t know what most trans-women prefer to be called, so I will leave it at that. And this is not about them, so although we have our similarities, I will let them tell you about themselves if they so choose. For now, I just hope you learn something about me. And although I can’t help but speak for my kindred ‘brothers’, please understand that not everyone in my situation may agree with me or share my same sentiments and ideas.

I need you to know that I am a normal human being, just like you. Really. I am not a creepy child molester, or a perverted sex addict, and no, I wasn’t abused as a child. I am a well-adjusted, normally-socialized person with friends and family, some of whom do not see eye-to-eye with me, but isn’t that the way it is in your family, too? I had normal friends in grade school, normal teenage crushes, and graduated from college with honors. I have an advanced degree and am highly trained in a specialized field where I interact with regular people and colleagues daily.

I hope you realize that there are actually many people out there who are not like you. Some of them will be trans-people, and though you may not believe it yet, you probably won’t be able to tell who they are by looking at them. In fact, it is very possible that you have coworkers, acquaintances, or even close friends who are trans and you don’t even know it!

I’m a guy, just a regular guy, for all practical purposes. If you met me, you wouldn’t know that I wasn’t always just a guy. But in the real sense of the word, I am truly a transman. I was not raised as a boy or brought up to be a man. I was not socialized as a male, coached as a male, or treated like a male. Therefore, there are things that go along with being a man that I know I will never know or understand. For example, one of my friends once commented that the worst thing about being a guy was having erections at inappropriate times, such as during church. I don’t “know” about that, in the Biblical sense of the word. But though I was raised female, there are oh so many things about being a girl or a woman that I also will never understand. So I find myself in a unique position, crossed-over, so to speak, in a place that only other trans-people can really truly know. If there were more than two genders in our society, I would probably fit into one of them. (Other books have been written on this very topic, which you can read if you are interested.) I know that I am not 100% male, but i am certainly not female either. Gender is probably a spectrum, and I fall onto the male side. Perhaps I am 90% male, I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter much anyway. Essentially forced to choose one or the other, I had to choose what fits me best, and that is the male gender. I blend in well, fit in fine, and rarely think about the fact that I am trans. But every so often, in the world of men, I find a detail that I don’t understand. I am OK with that. I understood very little in the world of women.

Having the heart of a man, I now have the appearance of a man, too (unless, of course, you see me fully naked, which you are here privileged to do). The congruency in my life allows me the freedom to do what humans do … interact with other people, help people, and be fulfilled in life. It allows me to think less of myself and more of others. It relieves the selfishness of being so absorbed with myself that I could not focus on anything else. Some people say that to change your gender is an act of selfishness that only causes hurt to other people. If only they could understand the anguish trans-people go through, and realize that often the most unselfish choice is to go through the struggle, the pain, the hurt, and the rejection to finally be who we really are.

Love, Transman

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