STORY OF A GAY AND A TRANS

 Hi Project, I’m a 39 years old gay, I can’t say gay boy because I’m not a boy anymore and I don’t feel like a boy. I have had my life and my stories but it’s not about me that I want to talk to you. Last night (the night between August 23th and 24th) surfing TV channels as I often do, I ended up on “Rai Tre” (a well-known channel in Italy), and I saw a broadcast about the “transition-path”, that is, about transgender people and transitions MtF and FtM. The broadcast was beautiful, honest, real, and for me it was shocking because it made come forcefully up to the surface of my consciousness the story I lived with a trans who was a guy at first. Obviously, given the need to respect privacy on such sensitive issues, I will not be able to go into details, but such memories are not only unforgettable but remain as a yardstick for many other things. I’ll avoid by necessity even too punctual definitions of times and circumstances. In a certain year, when I was no longer very young and I was single again after living together for a few years with a guy, I meet for work reasons a very young boy who had just come out of the school. I think he was more or less 19 years old. He’s a nice guy, I’ll call him Norbert. I only look at him because he is a handsome boy but he is completely outside my horizons, too young and then, frankly I still had to lick the wounds of my just finished coexistence. A couple of months go by and since the work reasons remain, I have the opportunity to meet Norbert several times, even three or four times a week. In short, a certain sympathy is created between us. Norbert is smart, reliable, he knows his work, he is almost amazed that I treat him with respect, as the days go by Norbert tends to talk more with me and even, sometimes, to smile, but very rarely. 

We start becoming friends, and he starts to trust me, and somehow I’m proud of it. I’m starting to think he’s a gay guy who has fallen in love with me, his way of doing makes me think so. I begin to wonder what to do, Norbert is a handsome guy but frankly he doesn’t tempt me, I think that with him I could never build anything concrete, at least because of the age difference, and so I decide that I have to keep him at a distance and that I have to cool his enthusiasm above all for his good because otherwise he could be heavily disappointed. I try to distance myself, but he chases me and doesn’t allow me to keep my distance. 
One day he asks me to drive him to a nearby town, and everything that needs to happen happens in the car, but not what I expected. He tells me to park the car in a lay-by and asks me out of the blue: “Are you gay?” I feel terribly embarrassed and I don’t answer, he continues: “I understood it immediately … so why are you running away?” I try to anticipate him and to prevent him from going further: “Because you are too young and furthermore I already have a partner (but in reality I didn’t have one).” He replies in a way that displaces me: “For me if you have a partner it makes no difference!” I ask him: “What do you mean?” He tells me: “I like you but in a way you can’t understand.” I look at him puzzled and he tells me: “I fell in love with you because I feel like a woman and you are the only person who treated me with respect, I don’t think a gay can fall in love with a woman in a man’s body, it wouldn’t work. Don’t be afraid, I know it.” I feel dizzy, I don’t know how to react, he realizes it and tells me: “I look like a guy but I’m a girl and I want to be a girl. You can’t imagine what I went through in school and also in my family.” 
The first impetus I had was to run away because I didn’t want to get involved in too complicated things that I didn’t know anything about, and then I didn’t want to have any contact with Norbert’s family, because I didn’t know what they would think of me. Norbert was of age but the complications were very probable and anyway unpredictable. 
At one point he says to me: “Don’t call me Norbert, call me Magda, because I want to be called so.” For me, calling him Magda was very difficult but with some effort I succeeded. When I got home my brain was boiling, I had left home in the belief that Norbert had fallen in love with me and I returned home with the certainty that Norbert was actually Magda and that she wanted me to help her begin the transition path, all this was upsetting and I was not prepared to face such situations. I was afraid of ending up crushed by too big responsibilities and completely losing my autonomy. I told myself that I absolutely had to get out of this whole thing, but then I didn’t have the needed courage. Magda understood my fears and tried not to feed them, she was present in my life and knew what she wanted from me but she was not an obsessive presence, she had a sense of limit. I expected her to let off steam to me by telling me about her life but she didn’t, or, if she did, she did it in a very limited way. She was looking for true solidarity not for a shoulder to cry on. We talked a lot but always in a very controlled and almost detached way, she didn’t want to scare me, but even from this titanic effort of self-control I could understand the ocean of pain that she carried inside. 
At work he continued to be Norbert, but when I accompanied her home Norbert was Magda, as the days went by our relationship, for me, ceased to be a concern and I began to wonder what I could concretely do to allow Magda to realize her dream. I tried to read up on it, I spent whole nights on the internet looking for sites that talked seriously about these things to feel less inadequate but then I realized that Magda knew a hundred times more than me about the problem and that therefore I certainly couldn’t help her that way. We talked a lot especially about her relationship with her parents. Her problem was to have the support of her parents. The parents thought she was actually a gay guy, but anyway they weren’t able to accept neither such a situation. Making them accept that their son actually felt like a girl and wanted to follow the transition path seemed to me absolutely impossible, I told it Magda clearly even though I knew this could be disheartening for her. Magda, however, was not of the same opinion and told me: “I’m preparing the ground, however, when the time comes, you will have to do your part.” 
In practice, in the previous days she had begun to mention the matter to her parents, who were however very perplexed and felt completely inadequate. She told me that she had told her parents about me, which made me very alarmed, and added that she had also told them that I was gay and that I could explain a lot of things to them. In practice, the parents were convinced that Magda was not a trans with the so-called gender dysphoria but a gay guy with too feminized internalized attitudes and had come to accept the idea that Magda could fall in love with a guy. She had tried to explain to her parents that the matter was completely different but they thought that meeting a “real” gay would allow Magda to understand that she too was “just” a gay guy. 
After not many days, Magda told me it was my time and that her parents were waiting for me in the afternoon. I didn’t have the courage to back down and went to Magda’s parents, who welcomed me with respect but also with suspicion. The first moments were of extreme embarrassment, I had to explain that I was really gay, that I had lived with a man for years, this to make them understand that I was a “real” gay, then I told how I had met Magda, but I didn’t know how to go on, because the atmosphere was freezing. Magda realized that the situation was taking a bad turn and asked her parents to express their doubts saying that I would answer all their questions. The parents made a huge effort and slowly we got to the heart of the matter. The father began with these words: “Norbert trusts you a lot and considers you a very serious friend and was very keen for us to meet in person, now we are here and we must try to understand each other, because we care a lot about our son.” Then, the four of us have been talking until midnight. 
The parents insisted that Norbert was just a gay guy maybe a little effeminate, and making them understand that Norbert was not at all effeminate and not at all gay was really very difficult, because their interpretation of things put them away from the idea of the concrete physical transition from male to female, which was the thing that scared them the most. They started from the idea that since Norbert had never brought home a girl and had never talked about girls he could be interested in guys and this for them meant that Norbert was gay. I tried to make them understand that a gay is a guy who feels 100% masculine who falls in love with another guy because he sees him as 100% masculine, while a trans falls in love with a guy because he/she feels like a woman and  falls in love with a man the way women fall in love with men and the two things are very different. Understanding these concepts was very difficult for them. They thought that a gay falls in love with a guy because he doesn’t feel up to being with a woman and that he sees his partner as a woman, that in a gay couple there is a gay-male and a gay-female and the like and they thought that an effeminate guy was very interesting to a gay because he was more feminine. And then they had a very strange concept of effeminacy, for them effeminacy was not linked to external aspects but to the intimate feeling of having a distinctly feminine personality, which is why they considered Norbert effeminate, even if he wasn’t at all. 
Eventually I told her parents that if they had called their daughter Magda instead of Norbert, she would have been happy. Her mother called her Magda and hugged her. The father said. “It will take me a while but I will get used to it.” Magda took me back to my car and was radiant, she was happy with me and how I had behaved and above all with the reactions of her parents who seemed to be possibilist. I swear to you, Project, that I would never have imagined an afternoon like that, but after that afternoon there were many others not very different. Magda knew how to move and her parents were basically good people whose life had been upset by things they weren’t in the least prepared for, they wanted Magda’s good but they didn’t understand how, in reality, this good could materialize, however, getting the parents to accept the idea of the physical transition was a much more difficult undertaking than expected. 
They feared that there could be serious health consequences for Magda, they too had begun to search for information but were disoriented. They accepted Magda’s trans feelings but only on a psychological level, for them hormonal therapies and surgeries were something inconceivable, almost a way of rebelling against God’s will. They had no religious prejudices but were afraid of pushing Magda towards a choice she might have regretted later. They were the same perplexities that I also had, but Magda was very determined and basically the transition path would be followed by experienced people and this comforted me. In the end, however, her parents reluctantly accepted the prospect of the physical transition as well. Magda was happy, because at least her parents had let her choose freely and hadn’t imposed anything on her.
Magda began her transition path which, however, let’s say unexpectedly both for me and her parents, ended in an early psychological phase, in other words before hormonal therapies and before surgery. Magda spoke long with an endocrinologist who clarified to her that she would have to continue taking estrogen for life and that ultimately her secondary sexual characteristics would have changed but she would not have lost the male genetic characteristic and would not have acquired the female one. The psychologist insisted that Magda’s choice to carry out the transition had be absolutely free and aware and that if she had any doubts, even small ones, she would do well to take her time to think about them very seriously. So there was a postponement and after three months Magda made the decision not to proceed further. In reality Magda felt she was in a female identity but somehow imperfect and completed by a residue of male identity, which was not completely rejected. 
Not carrying on the transition was a choice that perhaps could also have been inspired by Magda’s parents, this occurred to me many times, but I realized that she was calm and that the fact of not proceeding with the transition was ultimately her choice, because individual paths rarely follow strictly the theoretical standard. The suspension of the transition was followed by a period of psychological support therapy with a very competent doctor and, essentially, there were no problems. However, a profound melancholy remained, which was what psychotherapy was focused on: it was the fear of loneliness, the fear of never finding a partner. With the complete physical transition, Magda would have had a feminine aspect and “maybe” she could have found a guy but she couldn’t have children anyway and that would have been a huge conditioning impossible to overcome.
Without the physical transition, Magda-Norbert would have been interesting only for gays but also with gays in the long run, very serious problems would have arisen and anyway Magda’s dream would have been to find a guy who fell in love with her “as a woman”. Without the physical transition, Norbert remained Norbert in the workplace. My friends, who knew about me, thought Norbert was my boyfriend and didn’t believe me when I told them he wasn’t, because Norbert, or rather Magda, was somehow “in a very emotional way” my girlfriend. Our story went on for another two years, then Magda, incredible to say, found a straight man who fell in love with her and who had enormous courage because Magda was apparently a guy in all respects. I too met Magda’s boyfriend and he made a great impression on me. She thought that if she made the transition she could also legally marry that guy; at that time there were still no civil unions in Italy, then when it became legally possible, they made a civil union that also appeared in some newspapers as a “gay civil union” even if of a gay union there was only the appearance.
Then they went to live in Milan and now we only talk for Christmas, Easter and birthdays. Clearly Magda continues to work as Norbert but all in all I think she has found at least a relative tranquility, she has a boyfriend who loves her. When they did the civil union they left for a kind of honeymoon and came to see me, Magda was happy, I could see it from the smile.
I don’t think many gays have lived a similar story, generally the trans topic is a taboo even for gays. Last night’s broadcast led me to think that the more serious you talk about these things the more you improve the level of everyone’s life.
Freely do whatever you want with the email.An affectionate greeting.Daniel (Sorry, it’s not my real name)

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