Guest columnist Mariel E. Addis: This is me

MARIEL ADDIS
Published: 12-30-2024 7:41 PM |
I sometimes look in the mirror at my unclothed body and think, “This is me!” I go to the closet and think, “These are my clothes!” I go to my workplace and think, “This is my job and these are my coworkers!” And I think of all the many people I know and hold dear and think. “These are my friends!”
I don’t suspect most people don’t make the above statements to themselves, but I have had a bit of a different life’s journey from most people. I came out as transgender around this time of year, some 18 years ago. I felt excited, free, happy, but those feelings wouldn’t last long. Soon? I became sad, depressed, as it appeared I wasn’t going to be living as the person I knew I was inside.
Slowly, I gained more courage and nine years later I came out again, also around this time of year. The immediate result was not good, but within a couple of months, I was taking testosterone blockers. A couple of months later I started living full time as female, although I suspect a lot of people may not have recognized that I had. Now, I am accepted as female in my family, workplace, church, and community. There are some naysayers, but they have become very few and far between.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a so-called Christian man with very little imagination, said recently in response to the female bathroom hullabaloo at the Capitol that “a man cannot become a woman” in reference to transgender women. In the same quote, he made a similar comment about trans men. In a way, he is sort of right; there is no magic potion or spell, no amount of prayer, and there are no sex-changing machines where you walk in one sex and come out the other. It would be nice if there were — it certainly would have made my life much easier.
I think what Speaker Johnson, along with many trans exclusive radical feminists, don’t realize is that transgender women are women before they ever don a dress, begin to take estrogen, or undergo surgeries. Someone, assuming they are of sound mind, doesn’t just decide to change their gender out of the blue; the decision to come out as transgender usually follows many years of confusion or conflict over one’s gender and a heck of a lot of soul-searching.
For many who believe in a higher power, it also frequently involves a fair amount of praying.
It’s critically important to consider what is inside the person that matters — one can’t always go by the person’s outside wrapper. All that most transgender women and men like me are trying to do is align what we, and others, see on the outside with what is on the inside. This simple fact is usually sadly lost, frankly ignored, in most national discussions of transgender issues.
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Looking at my own personal experience, when I consider people’s surprise to my coming out as a transgender woman, I often think, “How could they not have known?” Still, some of the people around me saw what they wanted to see, trusting their senses of sight and hearing perhaps more than their emotional senses.
Throughout my life, I tried to fit in with the other guys, and sometimes I was more or less successful at that. Still, I was cut from a very different cloth from most of my male friends, something that usually left me feeling like an outsider, increasingly so as time went by.
Now, when I’m with my female friends and coworkers, I feel like an integral part of something bigger, something previously out of my reach. Despite the open knowledge that I took a very different path to get to this female place, my friends, both male and female, recognize that I am a female person. I guess you could say I finally feel seen for who I am.
This is my life — and that amazes me every day.
Mariel E. Addis is a native of Florence. She left the area for 16 years but returned in 2013.