A Piece of Clay

Through out life there is the argument of nurturing versus nature being the major influences on how we develop as human beings. In other words, an example could be which parent did you more closely identify with and did that decision have an impact on your gender decisions later in life. So many of us in my age range grew up with distant fathers whose generation leaned towards more of a provider roll, versus an emotional one. For example, my Dad was always a wonderful provider but emotionally distant. 

My Dad was also very much a self made man rising from the depths of the depression,  serving in WWII all the way to retiring as a bank vice president. What does this have to do with nurturing as a parent, he just wasn't able to embrace that part of parenthood which left my Mom to do it. Perhaps at that point I became more interested in how she applied her makeup and presented herself to the world rather than being allowed to tag along with my Dad as he built his own house. 

All of those reasons sound like an oversimplification to me. I'm sure my slightly younger brother as well as the rest of the neighborhood boys one way or another were raised the same way and didn't turn out to be transgender, or at the least have gender issues. 

My First Girls Night Out, I'm on the top left.

On the other hand, our highly unique lives have given us a chance to see both sides of the binary gender spectrum. As difficult as it was to carve out a fairly successful life as a pretend man, in many ways it was terrifying to make the transition to live full time in a feminine world. The more I did, the more I learned I had so far to go. Partly because I felt men were basically much more simple to figure out than women. Men dealt in power systems built on job successes all the way to athletic ones while women dealt with complexities in life revolving from personal relationships all the way to family issues. As I was invited along to my first "girls nights out" I truly discovered how the genders operate on different ever changing  ways.

How the entire process works in positive ways for many transgender women and men is that we have a chance to re-invent ourselves. How many humans have an opportunity like that? It's similar to the cup being half full or empty. Sure it's painful to lose old family or friends but the opportunity to build new relationships (and better) ones is always a possibility. In the end we are just a big piece of clay to work with. 

How we work that clay of course is up to each of us. In many ways we are gender hybrids which is the reason so many people don't understand us as transgender women and men.  If we work our clay right, maybe they will.