Maybe It is About You

Paula from https://paula-paulasplace.blogspot.com sent in this response on my recent post about gender transitions being selfish:

Photo Courtesy
Paula Godwin

" I am reminded of an occasion when my wife said to me "Not everything is about gender" I feel for very similar reasons. My whole world had become centred on my own gender identity ~ for me at that point everything was about gender, and how I could resolve my issues.

I had become very selfish and my need for resolution was all consuming. Although I loved my wife and wanted to preserve our marriage, I needed to sort myself out before I could try to do that, and by the time I had sorted myself out it was too late.

Of course transition is selfish, we do it for ourselves, it is our resolution to an existential problem, and there will be casualties along the way, casualties in the form of relationships, careers, status etc. Sometimes we have to be selfish just to survive."

Thank you Paula for such a thoughtful comment.  Sadly you are correct when you consider what a transgender person has to go through to complete a gender transition. We do normally have to undergo an almost complete interactive experience to follow our path to our authentic selves. We even take it to another level when we expect our spouses to come along in our journeys. Often to the point of wanting them to provide gender secrets they learned the hard way as they were progressing towards their own woman hood. My theory is no one is born a woman or a man, it is a socialization process. In nearly no one's case do they have any experience to start with with another transgender woman or trans man. So it takes extra time for spouses or friends to adjust and accept the new you. Too many don't stay around long enough to realize the improvement you realized with your transition. With the weight of the world lifted off our transgender shoulders we become better humans.

It is also true we have to be selfish to survive. The will to open the gender closet door and explore as our previously hidden true selves just becomes too much to live with. One reason for the extremely high number of suicides in the transgender community. In other words we find ourselves between a lifetime of living between a rock and a hard place. Often a beloved spouse is the rock and our gender dysphoria is the hard place. I found myself living that life for years and it nearly destroyed me. My old male self just didn't want to give up all the privileges I had accumulated and my second wife flat out refused to live with me as another woman. Similar to Paula I had to be selfish just to survive. I am of the opinion also you have to learn to love yourself before you can fully love another. 

Another of the hardest problems to explain to an non understanding person is we had absolutely no choice when we decided to complete our gender transition. Proving we are not going through a phase or some sort of fetish is often a long or even impossible process. This process proves once again we need realistic and/or sympathetic characters in the media or in the public eye to prove once again we transgender folk are not so different from anyone else. The only problem is at one point the gender process had to be all about ourselves for survival.