How to be Transgender

What a question...right? All of us most certainly have a different but yet oddly similar answer to the question. Along the way here on the blog we have created quite the niche with transgender women who have decided to complete their gender transition later in life. A commitment such as that requires quite the sacrifice. Often we have to give up long time family ties losing beloved former friends and family who refuse to accept our new authentic selves. 

Photo from the
Jessie Hart Archives

Along the way, we had to learn our own ways what it meant to enter a new and very foreign feminine world. I know in my case, often the whole process was terrifying. It occurred to me  I was giving up years and years of effort to be a person I never really wanted to be. I know none of that sounds different than the path you followed. Other examples include time in the military and the time and effort you had to put in to grow up fast as your transgender self. After all, we didn't have the benefit of a mother, sister or peer group to aid in shaping our new world. For me it was very difficult to learn I would never be able to recapture a past as a girl I never had. As I write many times, I was guilty of trying to dress as a teenaged girl stuffed into an oversized male body still loaded with testosterone. 

By living my mistakes I learned how to become my unique form of transgender woman. More than likely many of you did also. Many of us are fortunate to have been shaped by the cis women around us. For each disapproving spouse there are so many more who often begrudgingly come to accept the new woman in their relationship. I know with me, even though my second wife never accepted my transition to a transgender woman, she still shaped my transition in more ways than she ever knew. Her comment I was a terrible woman was an example. It came after a practically successful time for me when I presented as a woman. It turns out she wasn't referring to my appearance at all but more about the remaining male ego I still dealt with. It took me years to finally realize what she meant. I'm sure many of you, similar to me, considered yourself to be students of all things feminine. It was difficult to figure out what was good and what was bad for me and entered into how I felt I had to progress towards how to be transgender.

Many of us also who were raised in the pre-internet generation feel our gender growth was stunted in many ways. Leading us to feel we lost the chance to work on a gender transition earlier in our lives if we only had the information to learn from. Since we can't go back in time, we just became better in working with what we had to work with. Sometimes we pashed too hard when we tried to explore outside our restrictive gender closets and had to dial our goals back just a bit until we could get back on track and put our lives back together. 

Together was the key term. Since we have lived longer, the more gender baggage we had to consider bringing with us as we crossed the gender frontier. For instance I had to decided what I was going to do about my lifelong passion for sports. I ended up solving the problem by discovering and being able to socialize with several other women who enjoyed sports as much as I did. How to be transgender for me suddenly became a positive experience for me. On the negative side, my brother who I used to watch many games with vanished from my life when he and my sister in law refused to accept my new feminine self. Of course there were many more important baggage items to consider such as property, jobs and family to name a few. It all is the exact opposite to what young transgender folks face. Their problem is how do they face the future of difficulties with employment and benefits as they build their lives. It seems nobody wins. 

The bottom line is how to be transgender is never easy and is for gender survivors only.