Guess who Gilda's going to post about?
. No, not Grace. She's a distinct second to the strongest woman I know.
My sister, Sissy, was put through an emotional hell starting in her preteen years up until when she started high school because, it was assumed by everyone around her, she was an overtly effeminate gay boy, despite her protestations to all involved that she was, in fact actually a girl in the wrong body. I can't imagine the strength of character it must have taken to look at herself, in a physically normal male body, and to tell herself that what she felt inside was the truth, and not the evidence of her body, and what everyone around her told her on a daily basis. She knew the truth, and clung to it in the face of what should have been overwhelming pressure to conform.
This invited, amont other things, molestation from a trusted family member, ridicule from her father, frigidity from her mother, and continual teasing and bullying at school. The only people who'd ever let her be herself were both gone, my sister Katie dead in a car accident and me gone to college and living on my own.
At 15 she should have been an emotional cripple, angry, bitter, frustrated, depressed. And she was, to some extent angry, frustrated and depressed, but was still strong enough to do what she needed to pull herself out of the hole life had put her in. Knowing that we'd probably lose, she endured months of a custody fight, testifying in court repeatedly, showing a strength of character I've never seen in any person, being called evil, sick, and insane to her face by people who professed to love her. And she never gave up, eventually with help of the best lawyers her sister's filthy rich father-in-law's money could buy gaining her independance from the people trying to force on her something she could never be.
Having gained custody a week into the beginning of the school year, we were prepared to give Sissy some homeschooling to give her time to learn how to be a girl. She already was in her mind, in her heart and soul, but she didn't have the fifteen years of training she should have had at that point, and the testosterone had already had some two years to start making recognizably male mature features develop. When she arrived in our care, she looked like any other skinny 15 year old boy. She needed training and practice to be completely convincing, and we were prepared to give her that time, the months she would need.
She arrived in her new home on a Wednesday, stubborn with us as she had been with her parents, and with four days of experience being a girl full time, she began her sophomore year of high school, in a school where she had no friends, knew nobody, which was ten times the size of her school back home, before she'd ever taken a hormone supplement or had any hair removal procedures done, when she was literally, physically a male in a dress, know that the consequences would be severe if she were read as male, she went anyway. Reckless or brave? I vote the latter. She was certain she would get clocked. Yet she proceeded with an aura of confidence that said, "This is who I am" that overrode any problems she might have with her movement and manner of presentation, going into the girls' bathrooms instead of the staff room which had been offered.
I can't imagine the degree of courage it took to do that. I found high school difficult and scary, and I didn't have the extra stress of hiding my birth sex from the world while navigating the climate of a school the size of a small city. She came home shaking and crying that first day, half convinced half the school knew already, that every person who looked at her for more than two seconds could tell, and then went back the next day and waited for the other shoe to drop. It wasn't until a couple of months in that she finally relaxed and accepted that she was being accepted as a girl. She did this all before she'd had a single medical treatment other than some laser hair removal.
And she got straight A's the whole time.
At 20 years old, she is happy, assertive, gregarious, and so far as I can tell, very nearly fearless, despite a nearly debilitating physical weakness in the upper body brought on by hormonal reassignement in her teens. As I write this, she's out on a date with a young man nearly twice her size, knowing that more than a few men have killed their transsexual girlfriends for no other reason than that they were transsexual (MTF's are murdered 12 times as often as genetic women). And it makes no difference to her, it isn't an obstacle to her enjoying herself and looking for a partner she can consider an equal.
That's strength.
Gilda