Staying Out of Your Own Way

Image from Joshua Rawson
Harris on UnSplash

As we follow our journey to live as our authentic gender selves we often encounter many roadblocks as well as twists and turns along the way. Naturally, it is very difficult to keep moving forward. Due to impostor syndrome or any other reason, I always had a difficult time accepting the gains I had made as a transgender woman. 

Also the entire backward process could have been due to the number of times I was rejected in public when I first began to leave my closet and explore the world. Looking back, I think too I expected way too much from my feminine presentation. For example, I wanted so badly to be mistaken for a cis woman, it became my entire goal. When, in fact, I was doing fine with being accepted as a transgender woman in the world.  To get to the point of accepting myself, I had to get out of my own way. I needed to realize what was real and what was false and proceed from there. In order to accomplish it, I needed to go through several other major transitions.  

One of the biggest transitions I went through I write about often. It was when I finally decided to quit obsessing just how I appeared as a woman and begin concentrating more on the reality of the situation. In other words, I set out to see if I could be accepted in a world of other women when I went to an upscale bar near a mall where professional women met when they got off of work. To try it, I needed to dress in my finest professional women's outfit I owned to try to blend in. Even though I had experienced some success in trying a similar move in the past, I was still terrified of what I was getting myself into. It was the first time in my life I was stripping myself of all the hard earned white male privilege I had built up and attempted to start all over again. I am certain much of my terrified thoughts came from knowing this had the chance of being a life changing experience. If I was successful, there was no way I could ever go back. 

The rest of the story that night was I was very successful. I learned I could breathe and enjoy my first experience being a woman in the world. Plus I was treated with respect by the staff of the venue I visited.  From there you would think, staying out of my own way would be easier but it wasn't.  The biggest problem I faced was I still had the misconception of which gender I was dressing for. I set out to please my old male self by trying to dress as a few of the sexy women I had admired over the years. The obstacle was my testosterone poisoned body just didn't lend itself to being sexy. All I did was turn out looking trashy. Once I figured it out and began to dress to blend, I started to get out of my own way and began to discover a stable path to discovering my true feminine self. 

From then on, all I needed to really do was try to determine how I was going to approach the inevitable...some day I would have to live my reality by letting my male past go. To get out of my own way and live fulltime as a transgender woman.