All I Ever Wanted

 
Back when I was young I always struggled with which gender I would wake up to be. Of course and sadly the answer was always the same. I never changed and yet again I would have to face the day battling the male gender I never wanted to be a part of. Regardless I learned the rules on how to be a boy and grudgingly survived in the world. 

Photo Courtesy 
Jessie Hart

Against my deep seated desires to be a girl, I learned and played on athletic teams throughout school up to the end of high school. The example I always give is how I yearned to be a girls' cheerleader when I was playing defensive end on the football team. Again, all the yearning in the world couldn't help me jump the huge gender divide I was looking at. The only thing sports did was keep the bullies off my doorstep. It was all so frustrating. 

Also very frustrating was knowing I probably would have my life as I knew it interrupted for several years by military service. No longer could I use my small collection of  shoes, clothes and makeup to relieve the gender stresses I felt. Somehow I made it through Army basic training and was fortunate when my request to be accepted into the Defense Information School was accepted. The next two and a half years of my life turned out to be the most interesting of my life but still didn't bring me to my ultimate goal of living a feminine life. I'm always careful to say a "feminine life" because deep down I knew I was a woman but just couldn't live it to the fullest for obvious reasons. On the rare occasions I was discussing my entire gender situation with transphobes or TERF's, I was always careful to explain females were born but women are socialized. Plus the age old argument that that only women can birth children is not true because of the number of women who can't forever what reason bear children. Others try to make the whole process more complex but I just gave you my simplified approach. 

Along the way, I learned I could and did get socialized as a woman. It meant giving up all of my hard earned male privileges as a beginning and then learning to communicate with the world as a woman. Which meant, as I am fond of saying, I earned my chance to play in the girls sandbox. I was laughed at, threatened and stabbed in the back many times before I finally learned my hard earned lessons. 

Through it all, my journey never waivered. All I ever really wanted was to be a woman. The whole process made me to difficult to live with, I don't understand how my first two wives put up with me. Here is an example.  My second wife and I often used to try to out-run the late summer Ohio heat by vacationing in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. On one such trip, when I had a good job, a loving wife and seemingly all the positives my life could offer I was still miserable. My wife sensed it of course and kept pushing me for what my problem was. I never did tell her my issue was a wanted to be making the trip as a woman. 

Giving up all the hard earned male privilege's I earned was in a word "difficult" but so worth it. With the help of hormone replacement therapy I have been able to feminize my external body to match my feminine soul as well as add more emotional awareness to my life. I never thought I would make it this far and the whole journey was so worth it. It's all I ever wanted.