So, I got a lovely comment from a charming fellow who calls himself Saint. I moderated the comment cos it isn’t in line with my comments policy. However, I am going to dedicate a post to ‘educating’ Saint because a friend thinks maybe he can be taught. I don’t.
I think that Saint has his head so far up his arse, and thinks that he knows so much better than me, that this is a worthless exercise for educating him. It may however send a wake up call to some of the people from my past who have said similar things to me.

Ryan… [edit - he stated my girl name here]…
I doubt that I would be welcome to comment here, so let me cut to the chase.

Don’t do it.
Don’t condemn yourself to a life of misery.
You won’t find the freedom and acceptance you are looking for. You’ll be happy for a while and then still find something missing.
Don’t surround yourself with people who are egging you on down this path or else are just doctors and shrinks blithely doing their job with no concern for you as a person.
Find those who love you enough to tell you the truth.

Honestly, I felt like numbering the lines for convenience.
First line… use of my girl name. Not acceptable. That includes calling me Ryan/Rhian, Ryan ([girl name]), and whatever other variation you come up with. My name is Ryan, use it. I don’t answer to anything else. I have submitted the paperwork to register my name change, but here in Australia my name change is legal, if this is the name I choose. So respect me and my decisions. I honestly don’t give a shit if you have an issue with the particular name I have chosen. Would you refuse to be my friend if I had been born Ryan, and you hated the name? NO. Its not about the name, and who else might have it. Its about respecting ME.

I doubt that I would be welcome to comment here, so let me cut to the chase.

Yes, you are right. You are not welcome to comment here in such a disrespectful manner. We usually call it ‘concern trolling’, but you aren’t trolling me are you? You really believe this shit.
Saint isn’t the only one who is not welcome to show me such disrespect. People that email me privately to tell me that they won’t argue, but they don’t believe me, send me lists of mistakes I have made in the past, submit me to patronising diatribes about how I can’t have thought this through… those people aren’t welcome either.

‘Don’t do it’

Don’t do what?

Don’t condemn yourself to a life of misery.

Oh, I see. Ok, hon, I won’t. I promise never ever to convert to Christianity, go straight, or try to live as a woman again. *Pinky Promise*

You won’t find the freedom and acceptance you are looking for. You’ll be happy for a while and then still find something missing.

Seriously, if I was looking for ‘acceptance’, physically transitioning certainly isn’t the way I’d go about it. I’d have sticked with the Good Christian Girl Marrying A Good Christian Boy Plan. Serious. I would have picked a closet fag, and settled down, and then prayed every day for God to smite my uterus to prevent me ever falling pregnant.
I’m amazed that you think I will be happy for a while, and then be miserable later. I don’t buy that. Physical transition is likely to be one of the most difficult periods of my life. It will be physically, socially, emotionally, and mentally gruelling. It won’t be euphoric. It won’t give me ‘Happiness’. It will eventually stop my constant feelings of dissonance and dysphoria with my gender, and after time my life will have room to be truly happy, instead of so many moments being jarring notes of wrongness.
I won’t be unhappy because of transitioning, and there will be moments of joy, moments of contentment, moments of happiness, but I do not expect to have Happiness, with a capital ‘H’.

Don’t surround yourself with people who are egging you on down this path or else are just doctors and shrinks blithely doing their job with no concern for you as a person.

Trust me, no one is ‘egging me on’. Seriously, are you on CRACK? There are people that respectfully support my decision, but this isn’t the kind of situation that people peer-pressure others into.
As for the Doctor and Shrink ‘blithely doing their job’… it is their job to do what is best for me as a person. A Doctor, or a Psychiatrist has a far better understanding of how my mental and emotional well being is impacted by the situation I am in, than any jumped up cissexual bigot from the internet might have dreamed up.

Find those who love you enough to tell you the truth.

I suspect that a lot of people who put themselves into this category are not the same as the people I would put there. In fact, I am sure of it.
My physically transitioning to the other sex actually impacts NO ONE BUT ME, and maybe at a stretch my mother. A colleague I came out to put it best. “Well, you are still Ryan, though; its not like it will effect anything here.”

Those people that think that my emailing them about this, and inviting them to become a part of my new life means that I somehow need them, and thus will tolerate their bigotry, patronising and condescending attitudes, cruelty, or other bad behaviour are in for a rude awakening.
Hearing the kind of crap that Saint posted from Saint doesn’t bother me at all. After all, who is Saint anyway? Some nobody on the internet.
Its the people that I grew up respecting, and loving, and now feel the need to say and do the same things, that I have lost respect for. Less than half the communiques I have recieved from those people have been respectful of my autonomy and maturity.
I don’t expect a party, I don’t expect people to say “Oh, you are TRANS!? GREAT! Congrats. Lets have a party!”
I do expect people to at very least say “I think its a bad decision, but its YOUR decision.”

If I have learned nothing else from the past four years, I have learned that in the end, at crunch time, no one will be there for me. I have me, and no one else, and if I can’t love me, then I may as well give up and kill myself, instead of submitting myself to living death.
I don’t need anyone. Not even my mother. If these people can’t love me for who I am, I will walk out of their lives, and that will be that.
In 20 years, if I were to go back to living as a woman (assuming I survived that long, which is unlikely), and these people that seek to control my life now, are dead, or distracted by their grandchildren, and great grandchildren, what will I have, but a fuck load of regrets?
Nothing.
I want to be ME, and I will be me. I don’t care about what others think of that. Because I have to live with me forever but they see me four times a year, maximum.