Advisory: I sort of choke and swallow hard before posting an article like this on the eye of paradox, in spite of the fact that I have a history of being rather candid about my experiences as a “transgendered” individual here and on deviantart. I know that many of these posts have the potential to hurt me, professionally, and yet they serve the essential and undeniable need for self-expression that is ultimately the only way I can justify my existence. I would not be surprised to find that these posts drive more people away than they ever manage to enlighten, and shade my other writing with a transferred contempt. I am sure many people who do read through them must think, “this has to be exaggerated,” though I must confess that my best effort to put these feelings into words fall short—hence, I keep revisiting them, trying to vent the agony in “a whisper of hollow words to dress up the shattering, inarticulate screams of a forever breaking heart.” If you choose to read this, to know what I cannot allow myself to show on the surface, just know that I overcome this pain in every moment I manage to present that calm, composed facade. I am not looking for pity, and I can’t say I feel sorry for myself; I am not sorry to be me—there is just no easy way to present myself to you.

By Alexandrea Victoria Morgan (Author of David Bryan Roberson)

There are few things worse you could ask of me than to express myself in writing. For one, I have long since reached the point where I am no longer sure I want to. I would rather do the impossible in one miraculous outburst; I mean, seriously altering reality. Less seems nearly pointless. For another, if I truly speak my mind, I doubt you would enjoy it. Having been strangled, nearly choked to death on lies, I’m not inclined to be redactive. Nor do I wish to explain myself; I’m not trying to make excuses.

If you want to understand, you can begin with the fact that nearly everything I did as a child, as a natural expression of myself, was condemned and silenced. I have spent most of my life since destroying myself for the sake of people who were kind to me, trying to be someone I am not because nature gave me the wrong body. In trying to conform to reality, I discovered that there is no alternative to being me. I can think, and act, like someone else, but if I try to stop being me, I just stop existing.

Believe me, the experience is frightening.

One of the things I’ve often heard, from people who I have trusted with my story, is the suggestion to write it down and share my experience with others. For some reason, the idea makes me hesitate. I live in the hope of expressing myself, because I long for the experiences my circumstances deny me. The things I have been through are not things I wish to speak of. They are all terrible, upsetting things. In addition, there is no need for me to describe most of them.

There are many books, and stories on the Internet, written by or about transsexuals. There are even online comics. Reading any of them, I could be reading a story about myself. Until they get to the part where they go through transition and gender reassignment surgery, or, honestly, long before that.

In addition to being a “girl in a boy’s body” I was the child of a broken home. My biological parents had been married when I was born, but a mere three years later they got divorced. I was put up for adoption, a year later when I was four, and spent the next year in foster care while the state waited for my biological father to claim me.

It was during that period of waiting that I was frightened out of identifying myself as a girl and warned that my “misbehaviour” would cause people to reject me. I was too young to understand the real difference between boys and girls, but it had always been girls that I identified with strongly. The foster family I was placed with had a son and a foster-daughter close to my age, and my preference for her company over his led to a confrontation one summer afternoon.

I was in the backyard playing with her when the boy and his friends came out to swim in the wading pool his father had set up that day. As usual, they began to mock me, when I expressed my preference for playing with her, and insisted I join them in the pool. When the taunts finally progressed to them calling me a girl, I responded by declaring I was one.

I remember my growing anxiety over the fact that everyone insisted on seeing me as a boy. I initially treated it as some kind of game, but over time I grew tired of it and on that day I finally refused to play along. I was not prepared for their reaction.

The boys decided to “set me straight” and dragged me kicking and screaming into the pool, shoving me under the water repeatedly as I tried to escape. It was a terrifying and violent experience, which is part of why I remember it so clearly, and it left me with a desperate fear of the water and anyone who treated me as a boy.

It took time to learn how to restrain my natural impulses and act according to what people expected of me. By the time I was adopted, the experience had scarred me for life. I was incapable of trusting anyone with my true thoughts and feelings. When my new family noticed my feminine traits and confronted me with questions about my behavior—or offered even a mild rebuke for “acting like a girl”—I took refuge in lies. When my mother straight out asked if I wanted to be a girl, I could not answer her honestly.

To this day, I can not remember where I gained the fear of being institutionalized and subjected to shock or aversion therapy. I was aware, at the time, that it was a real threat, and later research confirmed it. Having suffered an accidental electrocution when I was five I knew what shock therapy would do to me, and that fear helped to ensure that my distrust extended to doctors and counsellors. The way people reacted to my unguarded behavior reinforced my belief that I must never let my true thoughts or feelings come to light. The promise of abuse, the threat of violence and possibly even death were all very real to me.

I never wanted to live like this. In many ways, I wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be sane and normal, to be comfortable with my self. I did everything I could to accept that I was a boy. I observed and studied boys intently; I struggled to understand why they did the things they did. I learned how to be friends with boys and avoided girls. It was hard to be confident because I could never trust my own instincts. Although I could hide them from everyone else, my true thoughts and feelings asserted themselves constantly and without warning.

When they did, the plain and simple fact that I was not a girl was agonizing. I understood girls without trying; often better than they understood themselves, because I recognized myself in them and I never took myself for granted.

There was a time when all I had was the stories I wrote myself into. I embraced the chance to assert myself and when I got access to the Internet the freedom I had there was intoxicating. Unfortunately, there is nothing worse than a taste of life when you are starved for living. The most difficult thing to understand is the effect not being who I appeared to be had on me.

In spite of the most convincing performances I could give, I always knew I was acting. I could emote, but I was disconnected from my own feelings. I found it easier to feel the emotions of people around me, and so well could I perceive this, I could feel that these feelings were never directed at me. I was the boy my family loved, but because of him, they never knew me. I gave him life out of love for them and felt like I was nothing.

It would be wrong to say I did not feel loved, but the price of their love never escaped me. That was just the point of the knife, and it was only a matter of time until it cut through me. Before I started to write, I read to escape, to experience life vicariously. It was through the characters I identified with that I found my true self image. The picture that emerged was startlingly distinct, but it made sense that if my sex could be wrong, all the other details of my body were suspect. It was in dreams, however, that I first found myself in my proper body. The relief that I felt was like ecstasy.

Until that moment I had been oblivious to the pain I endured daily. My heart shattered when I woke up to find myself back in the wrong body. I began to doubt my grip on sanity. As hard as I worked to be a normal boy, I had no choice but to see this longing to be a girl as abnormal. I could not deny how I felt, what my instincts and intuition all pointed to, and I knew that if I had been given a choice, I would have chosen to be female.

I quietly investigated the possibility of finding a way to assert myself, to act on that decision, testing the power of wishes, prayer, magic and medicine. The study I embarked on was meticulous and exhausting. My interest in transformation was anything but idle, and, leaving no stone unturned, led to a comprehensive analysis of every human notion of existence, reality, science, religion, occult arts and medicine that might be applied to resolving my problem.

Let me be explicit; I was looking for a practical solution, and the best option with proven results was something colloquially referred to as a sex change operation and most frequenty mentioned in obscene jokes. I could tell immediately that the world was a harsh and dangerous place for transsexuals and, even worse, that the transformation was far from perfect. The proper term was gender reassignment surgery and combined hormone therepy with genital mutilation. I set that option aside as a possible, desperate, last resort.

The pursuit of a better option forced me to explore the limits of human understanding, which encompasses a significantly broader scope than the limits of human knowledge. I would be happy to find an answer in science or medicine, and I think that some distant day in the future they will be able to perform a true sex change, but honestly, my best hope for a solution in the present is a miracle.

Do you know what is wrong with both medicine and miracles? You can grow old and die waiting for what you hope for to come to pass. I got the point when I hit puberty. Suddenly, my body was transforming, and in entirely the wrong way! The suffering I felt became excruciating. I endured it in silence for fifteen years. On January 20, 1999, I put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger.

At the last second, my thumb pushed the safety. As much as I needed my suffering to end, death was not what I wanted.

The thing that pushed me over the edge, ironically, had been finding out what it would cost to transition through GRS. Six months of counselling, at least six months of hormones and a year of cross dressing, before I could go under the knife, and the whole time I had to support myself and pay for hormones and surgery. I was clinging to my sanity in abject poverty, and that was the best hope I had?

It was over. I was done. I overreached. I still don’t know how I survived that.