Why I Don't Go To Clubs

I'm willing to bet that my social life sucks more than yours. You could be ignored by all your friends while a dog is chewing on your ass and a mind flayer is sucking out your brains and your social life would be better than mine.

The fact is, I have pretty much no social life. There are a couple of reasons for this and all of them are pretty damn frustrating. First, I have social anxiety disorder, which makes simply being in social situations stressful, but worse than that I am transgender. For those of you who've had your heads in your keesters for most of their lives, that means I identify as a gender other than the one assigned to my biological sex.

I was born male, but I identify as female. This puts me into the unfortunate situation of having to either live my life pretending to be something I'm not or go through the incredibly painful process of transitioning so that my body can at least mostly match my mind. After a long time, I decided to transition, and am now working on that process. Unfortunately, it's a slow fucking process, so even though I've started taking steps to fix my problem, I still appear male.

Now, therein lies the problem. It is incredibly hard to have any sort of social life when no one sees you for who you are. I was at a club tonight at the behest of a friend. I had told her that it would be torture for me, but she thought I was just reluctant to go. I tried explaining, but ultimately it came down to me being accused of not giving it a fair shot, so I went. So, there I was, surrounded by people having a good time while all I could think about was how not a single one of them recognizes me. And of course I don't mean that they didn't know me (How could they? None of them have ever seen me before.), I mean they didn't see me as the person that I am. They see the costume that I'm forced to wear, a costume I would tear off if only I could find the damned zipper.

See, that's one of the major differences between being gay and being transgender: when you're transgender, you can't just come out of the closet. As open as I try to be about it (and believe me, I'm pretty damn open about it), I still have to be in the closet simply by the fact that unless I walk around wearing a big neon sign that says "I identify as female", no one recognizes that fact. Obviously, I can't speak for others, but I'm pretty damn sure that even the people that know don't think of me as being a woman, and that's a pretty damn painful thing to consider.

But I still try. It might be a huge set up for disappointment every single time, but I try. People offer to let me in, and I try. I usually fail, but I keep trying anyway in the hopes that, at some point in time, I'll get through and SOMEONE will see me and not the guy I look like.