Leaving me For Years

Image from Brock Wegner
on UnSplash

I become a little amused when someone thinks I overnight completed my gender transition from a fairly successful male to a struggling novice transgender woman. 

To put everything in perspective, it took me nearly half a century to figure out my gender issues and how I needed to deal with them. Perhaps you noticed I used the word needed and not wanted because deep down I knew I never had a choice in my life. My gender journey was pre-written for me and I just had to follow the script.

For me it meant dealing with years of extreme gender dysphoria which wrecked my life and several relationships along the way. It was an extreme struggle for dominance from the two binary genders which lived within me. Naturally, even though he wasn't happy or satisfied, my pre-destined male life just didn't want to give up all the male privileges' he had worked so hard to gain. While, on the other hand, my feminine side had to put up with the fact she felt so free and natural when she was let out of my gender closet. 

The struggle left me in a situation for years where I couldn't win. I was in some sort of a gender trench warfare when one side had a little success, the other side would come back to reclaim victory. Battles were won, purges were made but the war went on and on. First I tried to hide in the mirror but that didn't work when I began to escape into the world as a cross dresser. All of a sudden, I discovered I might be actually able to live a dream life as a transgender woman if I worked hard enough to do it. At that point, I sat out to take better care of myself and lost nearly fifty pounds so I could fit into the woman's fashions I so admired. Plus I started to take better care of my skin so my makeup was easier to apply and I looked more natural doing it. 

At that point, I tried to outrun my gender dysphoria the best I could by changing jobs and locations where I lived way too quickly. In a space of three or four years my second wife moved from our home in Ohio to the metro NYC area, back to a very rural area where we heated with wood and finally back home again. All I finally learned was I couldn't out run my problems. They all began and ended with my gender issues. 

Even with all the problems I mentioned, I still did not want to give up totally on my male self. In many ways, the life he had carved out from such a bleak beginning was just too comfortable. What happened then were the years I spent as a novice transgender woman. All of them were scary yet exciting times to live through. 

So no, my decision to leave the male world behind was not an overnight decision. It just turned out he was leaving me for years.