A Clean Transgender Slate?

 As I sat here this morning it was one the few days I didn't have any clear idea of what I was going to write about. It also helped that neither my problem knees or back weren't really bothering me for a change. I was ready to face the world...or the computer.

Photo Credit : Jessie Hart

Of course as it usually does, my mind started to work overtime and I started to wonder if any transgender person really does ever have a clean slate when it comes to their lives. It seems to me the baggage we carry from our youth and/or the continuing gender dysphoria we experience stays with us in various forms for our entire life. 

On occasion I find my writing to be a source of personal therapy and any response I receive between here and the Medium writers format is a form of icing on the cake,  Take for example the response I received from Lsjaffee on my recent post "Whose Fault was It?" Which made a reference to the pregnancy drug DES:

"The irony is that my mom took DES because she was conditioned in the 1950s to think that women at 30 couldn’t get pregnant. Like you, I wonder what impact it had on how I turned out. But in her case, she was homophobic and transphobic (the latter I discovered late in her life when dementia ate away what little brain cells she had yet). Yet I had sympathy for her when she, in a rare moment of clarity, described being groped on the subway when she was a teenager, or how her father mentally abused her mother. It was in a letter from my mother to my grandmother that I found 10 years ago cleaning out a drawer that revealed she took DES. I tucked that revelation away until 2 years ago when I tried making sense of why I am. It’s definitely clearer now."

That comment alone helped me to take another look back at my past and showed me one of my posts could be therapeutic to others. How all of that relates to a "clean transgender slate" remains to be seen. In fact, now my devious mind is stuck on being paranoiac about landing in a transphobic nursing home in my final years of life. Finally, I am working my way out of all the needless anxiety which it fosters.

Along the way also, a "transgender clean slate" has meant to me being able to ignore the people in my life who decided not to accept my transition to my authentic feminine self. My prime example is my brother and his in laws. After my wife passed away, who took it upon herself to cook for the entire family on Thanksgiving, my sister in law inherited the task. It just so happened it was just before the holiday when I decided to come out of the closet and tell what was left of my world I was a transgender woman. Before I came unannounced to the family gathering as my new authentic self, I decided to give my brother the benefit of the doubt to see if my invitation still stood.  It turned out I wasn't and we went our separate ways. Sad but true. 

Through it all, I knew I wouldn't be able to come through my transition unscathed but more or less I did.

It's the only reason I was able to reestablish myself in the world as the person I was always meant to be and set up a new :Clean Transgender Slate."