Whipping Girl

If there is a better book on being Trans, I haven't heard of it. The book; "Whipping Girl" written by Julia Serano, is part manifesto, part autobiography and part text book.
This is the best book I've read in a long time; and I've read a lot in the past year.
This beats "True Selves", "Tans-Sister Radio", "She's Not There", and "She's Not The Man I Married'; though I really do recommend each of these books. They are all different in their own right and each a good book.
However, Julia Serano is able define, deconstruct, reconstruct and generally re-write everything you ever knew or thought you knew about gender.
Of the many, many quotes that I found stunning, here are but a few.

"....for example, a few months after I had begun living full-time as a woman, a male friend of mine asked me if I had ever accidentally gone into a men's restroom by mistake. At first, the question struck me as bizarre. When I gave him a perplexed look, he tried to clarify himself. He said that he doesn't ever think about what restroom he is entering, never really notices the little "man" symbol on the door, but he always ends up in the right place anyway. So he was wondering whether I had accidentally gone into the men's room by habit since my transition. I laughed and told him that there had never been a single instance in my life when I had walked into a public restroom - woman's or men's - by habit; my entire life I have been excruciatingly aware of any gendered space that I enter."

I was stunned. Though I've not fully transitioned, I have felt this same way each and every time. I've always known that I was using the wrong restroom. Every. Single. Time.
Damn it. Every time.
This is hardly the most noteworthy part of the book, however. There is so much everybody could learn from this. I've just bought it on Kindle for PC so I can read it again. There are things in this book that can help me explain us to others.
 If you'll allow me, here is another quote:

"...many of us tend to think o fourselves as brains or souls crammed inside of a shell - a shell that is our body. We delude ourselves into believing that the shell itself is not important, not connected to our consciousness, that it's merely a vessel that contains us, or a vehicle that we move about with our minds. But the truth is, our bodies are inseparable from our minds. This becomes evident whenever hunger, thirst, or physical pain grows to the point where we can think of nothing else, or when mental grief or stress manifests itself in physical aches and exhaustion. All of us who have experienced the physical difference between feeling healthy and feeling ill, or perhaps most profoundly, between pre and post puberty, have a deep understanding (whether we acknowledge it or not) that our body feelings make a vital and substantial contribution to our senses of self.
You could say that my decision to transition was primarily driven by my choosing to trust my body feelings - in this case, my subconscious sex - over my conscious understand of gender. So perhaps it's no surprise that the most immediate change in my body feeling sthat I experienced upon starting hormone therapy was an easing of my gender dissonance - the chronic gender sadness that I had carried around with me for as long as I could remember. I am not sure whether this was a direct effect of having female hormones in my system or a more psychological effect of knowing that my body was finally moving in the right direction. Either way, the relief I felt was beyone measure, for the first time in my life, I slowly began to feel comfortable being in my own skin."

Again, this is exactly what I what I felt when I started HRT. If you'll go back to my earliest post, you'll see that I said "that the hormones might be medicine for my body, but it is food for my soul."
Also, lest my previous post make you scratch your head, wondering how could I be in the depths of depression, yet feel like I am finally making progress with my dysphoria, stop scratching. The depression is caused by the box i've put myself in over these years and the society that doesn't want to let me out.