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Transentful Heart

1-5-2026 - By Haddie

In 2026, I don’t expect it to be any easier to be transgender than it was in 2025. It was very hard in 2025. I’m not going to list the issues. If you are transgender yourself, you are almost certainly aware of more than you want. If you aren’t as well aware, I’ll link to an article for a a year in trans edition here , maybe even something offering hope in the darkness.

Needless to say I am just venting about my own problems and perspective, by no means am I trying to play some sort of game about having the woe-iest of woes. If that’s what you’ll take from this, please complain about my complaining in your own private spheres.

I fucking resent my country, my culture, and most everything the world has become as I’ve grown older.

I’m openly transgender online (she/her pronouns, it/its also works if in good faith). I make it part of my profile wherever I go, which is admittedly very few places. I’ve roleplayed and interacted with folks as femme for almost two decades. My real identity is only connected by my real one in the vaguest of threads and primarily by financial transactions that require my real identity, not person to person. 

I’m effectively in the closet off the internet. I have made no legal efforts to make changes to my identity. I don’t take hormone replacement therapy for several reasons, one of which is a general distrust that medical support can be turned against me. I live in Texas, United States, if you didn’t know. Hell, I even have a home laser hair removal kit, partly related to cost, but we got it last year (2025) in anticipation of the state of Texas seeking every avenue to hunt down trans-affirming care users. 

My spouse knows I’m transgender. She’s known I was transgender to some degree since very early in our dating, though the degree and recognition has changed over time. She’s comfortable with my identity and supportive of the efforts we’ve taken to assuage my gender dysphoria where we can in the home. 

A few real life acquaintances know I’m transgender. I’m comfortable with them knowing, but the awareness is theoretical at best, as I don’t spend time much time outside my home with anyone else. Two friends maybe have seen me in a skirt, and only at my house, once.

The boldest I’ve come to “coming out” in public is make my nickname into my official moniker for work. I am lucky enough to have a reasonably gender neutral nickname to use and a reason to use it. I don’t work at a progressive company and don’t list my pronouns anywhere. While I have to be on webcam regularly, it’s not a constant effort to play a boy and I’m also lucky enough to be ambiguously masc, at best. I don’t correct people on whatever pronoun or gender terms they use for me, which means I can cling to the vague idea that some people recognize me as a woman, even if it’s tenuous at best.

I am so resentful that I have to be this way. I’m 36 years old. I’ve known what was ‘wrong’ with me when puberty started to hit in early middle school. I say ‘wrong’ with me because my main exposure to transgender concepts at the time, raised in the 90s and 00’s in Oklahoma was the serial killer in Silence of the Lambs and the vague understanding that drag queens were gay men, not women. I spent years repressing and resenting myself for what was clearly my own issues. Even in my forays into forums and chatrooms as I grew up only emphasized how there might be other people who could be happy with transitioning, it was laughable that I could anytime as a child. My parents are conservative. They wouldn’t be supportive.

I’ve told my parents a few years ago and they were baffled and claimed to support me. 

They voted for Trump and every conservative on the ballot. 

My anniversary for not speaking to them is on January 12th 2025. I told them why. And even told them since that we can correspond via email. I have not gotten any emails. I don’t think I need to say it, but I will.  I resent my parents.

I resent the life I’ve lived. Much of it due to my own cowardice. My inability to step out of my relatively comfortable life - trans dysphoria notwithstanding. I have a healthy amount of self-loathing so suggestions to bootstrap the problem are unnecessary. I understand how to apportion some of my own responsibility.

It’s been hard for decades knowing what I couldn’t be brave enough to have. It’s harder still knowing it’s fucking worse now. Even if I had been born 20 years later, I wouldn't be transitioning. It’s harder and harder, not easier and easier. I’m so fucking resentful of the world, and I have to swallow that down to maintain a ‘normal’ life. Every day I lose, it’s added to the debt accrued for decades. Insert self-depreciating joke about disassociating away from my emotions all the time here, because I’m not in the mood to make it.

As a trans person, it’s pretty reasonable for me to like Against Me! a band headed by trans woman Laura Jane Grace. In one of her songs “True Trans Soul Rebel”, a wistful telling of a young woman’s should be lives, I’ve always misheard some of the lyrics. “Does God bless your transentful heart?”

I feel gods damned for just how transentful my heart is. 

I’m so tired, and I know so many others are too. I know I am not the only one feeling transenful about it all. 

I don’t know what 2026 is going to bring. I feel my hyper vigilance and depersonalization against trans dysphoria has been slowly slipping from my grasp.

Even this post is just a sign of my slip. If this ends up online, it’s because I’m failing to bottle up my anger and desperation and despondency. I needed a place to say something. Anything. 

This is my post to lean into anger. I don’t help anyone, myself included by being depressed. I am, of course, but I don’t want to wallow. Call it a meager attempt to bootstrap, but I’m so fucking angry. 

I’m starting by sharing my transentful heart here first. Maybe I’ll be able to share that transentment and act on it more more in 2026.

Gods know there will be enough to be angry enough about. 

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