Member-only story
You Won’t See a Trans Story Like Mine on TV
The media puts trans women in a box. I dare to step outside it.
UPDATE 2023: I wrote all these essays back when I was immersed in trans ideology. I detransitioned and I’ve changed my mind about many things. https://youtube.com/@RayAlexWilliams?si=JIEdBcopAIxOPtEW
Some of my earliest memories involve a kaleidoscope of cross-gender fantasies. At a young age, I had dreams of being treated like a girl in Sunday school, dreams of gangs of girls making me dress in girl’s clothes, and dreams of magically transforming into a girl. From a young age, I was fascinated by all things feminine: the clothing, the mannerisms. I stole whatever scraps of women’s clothing I could find.
These fantasies and predilections were often flavored in terms of the erotic. I was a young boy with a healthy imagination and was beginning to explore what it meant to inhabit my body, including living with testosterone flowing through my veins. Some might take this to mean that my trans identity is nothing but a fetish. But that would misread the nature of the phenomenon and oversimplify the complexity of the my story.
What if I had been aware of trans people at a young age? What if my next-door neighbor had been a trans woman? What if I had read books about trans people? What if my family had been open to me exploring these gender fantasies? My story might have turned out differently. Instead, my strict Christian upbringing strongly discouraged femininity in boys, and so, almost by necessity, my cross-gender fantasies were channeled through the lens of the erotic, instead of a supportive language of gender affirmation.
For most of my life I had walked in public without garnering attention, but now I could feel people staring, and the whispers from children, “Is that a boy or girl?”
But what is borne of necessity does not determine the destiny of desire, for when I eventually grew into my late twenties, after my ex-wife had left me — for unrelated reasons — I was finally able to turn my fantasies into a concrete reality. And when realized in the full complexity of a normal life, it turns out the erotic funnel…
