October 2009: I emailed half of my Year 5 class saying that I 'wish[ed] to be refered to as a girl' from there on out in October. People were taken aback by it but -- for the most part -- didn't care that much. I was going to tell my parents eventually but one day I left my laptop open with the email on the screen and my dad saw it. To put it briefly, that put pay to any of my plans to come out.
March 2013: After a few years where I alternated between being fairly open about things to my peers (while in primary school) and then being incredibly self-repressive (while in high school, starting from 2011), I was fed up. So I wrote a fairly angry letter addressed to no one in particular and left it under my bed. My mum found it and confronted me about it, whereupon I broke down. Amazingly, absolutely nothing was done about the concerns raised during that conversation, so my life continued on its average path.
November 2014: I snapped one day while talking about problems I was having with my social life with my mum and broke down, telling her that almost all of my problems could be traced to my gender dysphoria and the effects it was having / has on my life. Consoling me, she said she would see if she could get me a referral to a psychologist. Alas, nothing was done and my mum never mentioned it again, even when no one else was around. To be fair, I didn't want to be That Gal and bring it up because I thought my mum would get the referral straight away, so some of the blame for nothing happening could be apportioned to me here. Then again, I overheard some transphobic comments (not about me) being made a week later so I can only imagine she must have found the idea so confronting that she repressed it.
June 2015: Things start getting a bit more spicy at this point. Once again I broke down in front of my mum, and once again she said she would look into getting me a referral. The twist here is that she was going to, but opted not to because she thought I was getting along fine -- the problem was that I wasn't. Several things I could have brought up where my dysphoria ruined x or y for me were stifled by my dad, who said each time he heard of a social concern I was having that he didn't want my mum getting stressed over 'these things', therefore preventing me from notifying my mum of any issues and thus consigning me to the echo chamber. I was quite incensed at everyone after this happened, and my life started spiralling downhill. I thought I had no chance at ever successfully coming out to my parents after so many charades, so I internalised everything.
September - October 2015: It was a September night where I hadn't yet started my English homework despite the time being 11PM. The task was to write a story about 'belonging'. Almost as soon as I saw the question the story had to answer, I set to work writing about how the protagonist overcomes their gender dysphoria by discovering themselves, thus allowing them to reveal their true selves to the world and, hence, belong. This generated a red flag for my English teacher, who realised that there was a pattern with the topic of my stories. She summoned me in the middle of class where she asked me if what I was writing mirrored real life. I was expecting something like this to happen but I wasn't prepared for how quickly she realised what I was trying to convey, so I said that it didn't. It was fairly obvious that I was lying but she let me go anyway. A few days passed and I just realised that I was done with everything and figured I had nothing to lose by telling the truth, so I emailed her the truth and, to cut a long story short, she helped me get into contact with the school counsellor.
Over the last few weeks of school and the first week back, after I told her everything I'd been through, the counsellor helped me set up a sort of 'meeting' with myself, my parents, and someone from the Gender Centre. Unfortunately I was so petrified of telling my parents again -- after my past attempts -- that they had no idea anything was going on until the week of the meeting. The aftermath of the meeting was disastrous. Not only did it fail to achieve anything or note, but I found out that weekend that my parents were very upset with how everything had gone -- ironically, particularly singling out the fact that I hadn't told them I was seeing the school counsellor -- and going so far as to describe what I had done as 'worse than murder'. I ended up getting to see an external counsellor after all of that but nothing came of that either because of the limited amount of sessions I had before the school holidays. Notice a pattern?
August 2016: Once again, I broke down -- this time in front of both parents! -- and... once again... they said they would help me. I was told I could return to the external counsellor but I was essentially being gatekept by the unfortunate reality that finals were quite close, so I've achieved absolutely nothing since August. I was told that I should put dealing with issues of this magnitude beneath studying for finals, so, reluctantly, I have done so. I have no clue what on Earth is going to happen after finals, but it surely couldn't be any worse than the stagnation I've dealt with all this time!
