I want to begin this letter with an apology:

I’m sorry I don’t keep in contact as much as I’d like to, and by the end of this letter I’d like to change that. I can come up with plenty of excuses: Being busy, being sad, being tired, being on another time zone, but what it comes down to is I am bad at managing my time, and even worse at taking the initiative to reach out to people. I hope that, by the end of this letter, you may be able to find forgiveness over my radio silence at times, and seeming disinterest. The fact is, I think about you and the rest of my family all the time. I talk about you, I miss you, I remember happy memories when I feel alone..but I don’t pick up the phone, send a card, dig up the courage to ask when a birthday is, because I feel stupid for not knowing in the first place.

So from the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry.

The majority of this letter is to open up to you about a few things  that, if you think back very hard, you will find is not all that surprising at all. I imagine that by the end of this letter, I will have been working on it off-and-on for several days, if not a few weeks. I need to spend a lot of time answering questions before they appear, and do my very best to make myself be as accessible to you as you have been to me. It is not my intention to hurt anyone. It is not my intention to be rebellious, weird, different, abrasive. I can only hope you understand just how hard it is for me to say this all to you, and risk ruining most of the relationships I have left with you, my family.

The main point of this letter is to say that I am a transgender person.

Some of you know thanks to facebook the extent of some of this coming-out.  I found unsurprisingly that there still seems to be a lot of confusion about just how far this identity runs, what that means for me and my future and how I want the world to see me.

I wanted to come out appropriately, most of all. When I came out on facebook, it was only to some people, and I basically wrote it all there for anyone to maybe read, then ran away covering my ears for fear of the repercussions. After some nervous conversations with a few select people, I realized just how insulting that must seem to some of you, and to those reading this now who had no idea in the first place. Because there are so many questions, I want to do my best to address as many as I can right now, and take this opportunity to involve you, my family, as much as humanly possible.

When I was a little girl, I know I was happy and fun and bubbly and adorable with bows in my hair and unicorns and little horse dolls. But also, there were the dinosaurs. There were the wrestling figures, the toy cars. There were the temper tantrums at being told “no, you can’t get those boys’ shorts, they’re for boys”, there was the baggy shirts and desire for shorter and shorter hair. At the time, I didn’t know what was going on in my head. For some people like me, they can say without a doubt, “I knew exactly who I was inside, I was just too afraid to tell anyone!” For me, it was a sense of extreme discomfort and confusion, and confusion as to where it was all coming from. For me, I thought I was just ugly, too ugly to be a ‘correct’ girl. But if you think back, you will know as I do that nothing has ever sat right with me about being a girl.

For the past two years I have come to grips with just who I am, and what makes me feel happy and comfortable. This goes against the grain of what I feel that you guys expect me to be. I was born Krista Louise Busini and maybe “that’s all I’ll ever be” to you. This is a line I’ve heard a few times, and I try to remind myself that it comes from a place of love, but it -hurts-. It hurts really bad to be trapped into something I never chose to be a part of to begin with. It hurts because that by writing this letter, I throw insult to the environment and love you have given to me my whole life. I unintentionally may be spitting at a privileged life full of love and support. I am so terrified of ostracizing myself from you, because I know this is tough to read. I know that even though in your hearts you knew I wasn’t ‘quite normal’, you never really expected this.

Mostly thanks to the media. The media likes to paint an ugly portrait of transgender people. We see the tabloids, “Woman turns into a man! Bizarre transformation!” and, “Man dresses in lady’s clothing, caught by his dad!” and all the garbage about Cher’s son. It’s made out to be this highly sexualized, crusty circus-freak type thing, when for me, it’s so much cleaner and simpler. I just feel like a guy. I just don’t feel like a girl and I never have. My whole life I would feel a fluttering joy whenever people mistook me for a boy. I would ‘cross-dress’ with my friends, Monique made up boy names for me and we’d spend the day like that. That same butterfly of glee and freedom rises in my chest and fills me up today, when my partner Kevin says, “kris said he wanted some coffee” or “Yeah, they’ll be joining us shortly”. I feel like I fit. I feel aligned and correct.

Why did I deny coming out for so long? Why is it so hard for me to do so now? Because due to whatever self esteem problems I’ve always had, or maybe rooted in reality, I feel that this is all one big problem to some of you. That’s from now on I’ll just be a freak. That it’s just an inconvenience I should swallow, and that it’s selfish of me to ask for understanding on this part of myself. I tried for the past two years to just pretend it wasn’t happening, that what I was learning about myself was not true..but transgenderism, as it turns out, is not something to be cured. This is a genetic part of me that will never, ever change, because it has been a part of me without a name for as long as I can remember.

The first question you may be asking is, well, how far DOES this run? I identify as transmasculine, or gender queer. What this means basically is that I don’t subscribe to the “Well I’m not a woman so I must be a lumberjack man” mentality. I don’t agree with that black and white picture of gender. I see myself as still possessing effeminate traits. But yes. The tilt to my gender does angle heavily toward the masculine.

For example, my loved ones here have been, for the past year, using the words “they” and “he” to describe me. The -ta from the end of my name has been taken out by my request. Some trans people have chosen a completely new name for themselves, but I didn’t feel that was right. I love the person I grew up as. I was not tortured or victimized, you all loved me so much, and I will never deny that.

My coming out now aligns with my conviction that this is the right path for me. I’ve begun going back to church (Unitarian Universalism), I feel comfortable in my career and my place in life. I’ve been living for the past two years as the person I’ve always felt I was. Here’s what this means. It means that soon, I will no longer be living as or identifying as a female. What that means, is that I will be undergoing hormone replacement therapy to cancel out my body’s female hormones with male ones. It means that I will be physically developing as a male. It means that I will be a male.

This is the part where I want to make clear that this is not a choice. I am not deciding to become a boy. This is me allowing myself to be who I am, and it is the only route that I can take, because I am done lying about who I am. In transitioning from female to male, I am going to become a second-class citizen in the eyes of many people. I am going to be opening myself up to discrimination and hate. I am going to lose my right to marry in some places. I am going to jeopardize my job security. I am opening myself up to abandonment and rejection by some family and friends. I am diving headfirst into what is really a whole world of social trouble, and it is not something that I would choose to do.

This is the next step of my life, of my existence and of my development as a human being, and this was always going to happen, because it was never my choice.

I don’t want this to be scary for you, because honestly, the scariest part about this whole thing was writing this letter. Pursuing medical help for my Gender Identity Disorder (which is the name for what I am going through), eventually coming out more and more publicly after that happens, and settling into the life I was born to lead is not scary at all to me. It feels satisfying. It feels hopeful and bright to me. The scary part is the idea of losing some of you, disgusting some of you, making some of you angry with me.

I could go on and on. I have so much to say about gender as a societal construct. I could talk about the many cultures in which three genders are prevalent, in which gender is more shiftable and socially acceptable to move between, I could talk about transgender friends who lead extremely happy lives. I am happy to talk about these things with you, but first, I just wanted to say all of this, and invite a personal dialogue.

I am sure there will be many questions, mostly regarding the details of the next few steps in my life. I am happy to answer these on a one-on-one basis, to the best of my ability.

I am happy communicating via letter and e-mail. Telephone is harder for me because I end up stuttering and nervous and I never say it right, but I would love to hear from you.

The bottom line is, I love you. And I hope you can understand.

My address is

Kris Busini
xxxx
E-mail is krisbusini@gmail.com

Phone is xx

Sincerely,