Once I Started

 

From the Jessie Hart
Collection...The Ohio State
Student Union

I discovered quite early in life my gender identity was in flux. From the first time I felt the allure of feminine clothes to the first time I glanced at my girl self in the mirror, I knew I could never go back. In the classic feelings  of if I knew then what I knew now, I would have saved myself a ton of gender angst and unrest. Primarily I would have understood why the gender euphoria I experienced when I dressed as a girl was so fleeting. Before I knew it, I was back to my same old struggle to be everything male. I know now all of these feelings were the very beginnings of my desire to look more than like a girl. I wanted to be a girl. Long before the term was even invented I was transgender.

If I was wise enough to write down my deepest secret somewhere and hide it away, I am sure I would have told my future self to relax and enjoy the trip because in the end I would have no choice. No matter how hard he tried, my feminine self would in the end win and I would end up living full time as a transgender woman. Of course there was no possible way I could know all the twists and turns my gender journey would take me. My younger self would have known I would experience transitions in the middle of living in a major transition itself. My primary go to example is when I was living as a very serious cross dresser, I decided to transition again. This time to hormone replacement therapy and into a transgender life. There was no way my early self could predict what she was really asking for. She wanted me to uproot all the hard earned, unwanted gains I had achieved in the male world and finally realize they were all for not. Once I started I should have realized I should have fought harder to let my inner feminine self win and get on with living a better life. 

The major problem I would experience was all of the male gifts I experienced as I lived life as a guy. The biggest gift I experienced was the birth of my daughter who I love deeply to this day and she has been behind my transition since I told her tentatively years ago. I consider the whole experience as I said as the pinnacle of my life as most of the other so called accomplishments were rather shallow, such as success in my working world. 

My fondest hope I should have ever asked for was the wisdom of knowing my dominate gender was female in nature and even though trying to change it nearly killed me, I could never change who I truly was. The whole process was nearly miraculous in how a new wonderful feminine world was opened to me.  Once my she was given the chance, she quickly took over and established herself . Once I started my transition early in life it was a long project but one which was worth it in the long haul.