Transgender Mirrors

Janie Black recently wrote a post which jogged my sleepy mind called Gender and the Wrong Body.
She wrote a very thought provoking post (here) which basically goes into the much debated ideas of why we transgender or transsexual people feel this way.

I'm going to greatly over simplify this topic by using the "born in the wrong body" argument.  Personally I can't use that as any rationalization for my status as a transgender woman. It could be argued I was born into the wrong body to hit the baseball the way I wanted or to play football the way I thought I should. OK, I can agree with those of you that are thinking "pretty shallow" Cyrsti.  You are right and wrong. Wrong in that those were important to me at the time.  Right, in that I learned to live with reality and they went away.

What never went away was the idea I was somehow living life from the wrong gender perspective. You could argue I was born into the wrong body but you know you have to go with what brought you here. I'm lucky the physical aspect of my body has allowed me to be healthy into my 60's and along the way has been pliable enough to explore the female gender.

Sure, like many of you I have thought of SRS very seriously and of course you know I started HRT sometime ago. So far I'm quite happy where I am although if my finances allow I would certainly be open to some sort of facial hair removal and even facial feminization surgery.  In my own way though, I see those as primarily vanity moves. No different than any other genetic woman. Would either help me to be more stealth than I am now? Possibly but neither would help me feel anymore feminine than I do now. Then, there is that word feminine. It's a stereotype. Right? Who knows if I feel feminine. I'm just being me, reflecting to the world. Which brings me to the word mirror. 

As I progressed down this transgender road, I found how I reflected my inner mirror to the world was much more important than my external mirror. I was lucky enough to cover the basics in public as a woman but just walking through a mall "undetected" just wasn't enough. Which brings me to the point.

No I wasn't born in the wrong body. Sure my mental processes don't match my physical gender but through my feminine socialization process I have been able to bypass the limitations of my physical self. I have been able to redirect a series of inner mirrors to give the public an accurate perception of my inner self.

All of this is a never ending discussion. No easy answer. It's as different and personal to us as life itself. Some of us have to go out and buy a vagina to feel whole. Some don't. Bottom line is though all that really matters is the inside and how you reflect it to the world. It took me years to figure it out. Now it's up to the world to accept it.