All the Gender Baggage

Image from UnSplash

 Sometimes I feel just like "Paris Hilton" in a recent hotel commercial when she had to reserve an adjoining room for all of her extra baggage. Completing a male to female gender transition often produces just as much baggage we accumulate from a life time of experiences.

Often, the older we are the more baggage we have to account for. In order to hide our feminine instincts and try our best to live as a male, we had to resort to extra ordinary measures to protect ourselves from bullies and bigots in the society around us. By doing so, our baggage became immediately very bulky and/or heavy. The problem was compounded by adding spouses, family and employment as we went on to live our lives. Before we knew it, we needed an extra room (similar to Paris Hilton) to keep and hide our baggage.  The problem becomes, when we finally decide to change our outward gender, what are we going to do with the male person who helped me to get to the transition point.  

In my case, my baggage involved having a wonderful daughter I didn't know would accept the authentic  new me, a very successful job and a loving wife of twenty five years to deal with among other things. To make matters worse, I knew my job would not accept me transitioning along with my wife who said our marriage would be over. She didn't sign up to be with a woman.  What happened to me was my daughter accepted me when I came out as transgender to her, I left my job to start my own restaurant and my wife sadly passed away. I guess you could say destiny opened the doors to put my major baggage issues aside and move towards living my impossible dream of living as a full time transgender woman. The closer my gender transition came to reality, the more baggage I discovered which needed to be considered and taken care of.

The more I was able to live my new exciting feminine life, the more baggage I found which needed to be considered, added on to my life or just discarded of. My biggest piece of  extra baggage I needed to deal with was my love of sports. Over the span of my life I had used my love of sports to drive a wedge between me and any possible bullies. I tried along the way to play football and became a fan of the sport as well as having a passing interest in baseball and basketball. I found out quite early in my life transition, I would have a difficult time bringing my interest in sports with me. It took me several ill fated attempts at enjoying myself in male gay venues to get the idea I was going at my problem all wrong. To be accepted as a sports fan all over again, I needed to go where there were other possible woman sports fans. In other words, big sports bars with many televisions and large cold draft beers. Not exactly the environment I envisioned myself in during my formative gender years but on the other hand the whole experience felt natural and I had solved one of my huge gender baggage issues. Very soon I was accepted as a regular patron in several popular venues and I was able to enjoy myself.

The other big issue I needed to deal with was my sexuality. Since I had never been really sexually attracted to any other man, I wondered what would happen to me as a new transgender woman. The answer didn't come long in being answered when I did briefly date men and still didn't have much of a spark except when I had the luxury of being on the arm of a man and enjoying the ease of acceptance I received in public from society.  Looking back, none of the lack of real acceptance from men mattered because my acceptance from cis-women soon dominated my life. I never had to worry about my sexuality changing because it didn't. 

In any other items of interest I had when I was desperately trying to live as a man were left behind. All the experience I had gained restoring an old house was a prime example. I became decidedly unhandy around the house. 

Once I had decided which baggage I was keeping and which I wasn't, life became full again and I could concentrate on building a new life by writing more and enjoying myself.