Living in the Transgender Present

Image from Alexander Grey
on UnSplash.

As I lived and constantly thought about escaping my unwanted male world, I daydreamed major parts of my days away.

It became very difficult to stop looking ahead and live in the present when all I could think of was the next time I could cross dress as a girl or woman. Over the years, I wish I could reclaim just a bit of the time I lost due to my day dreams of being a woman. The problem I ran into was when I started to journey away from my dark gender enclosure and was successful, the more natural I felt and the more I wanted to challenge the world as my authentic self. My overall life became more and more complicated and further disrupted my already fragile mental health. At the time, I was seeing one of the few therapists in my native Ohio who dealt with transgender issues at all. Along the way, during one of my sessions, she (my therapist) told me the truth. There was nothing she could ever do about my gender issues and somehow, someday I would have to deal with them. On the positive side, she also diagnosed my bi-polar depression for the first time and was able to separate my two main issues, mental health and gender. 

Then I reached a  point  where I had to decide how to exist in the present dealing with two major issues. I was prescribed several different medications to deal with my mental health issues but as we all know, there is no magic medication to deal with being transgender. The only positives which ultimately came from seeing the specialized therapist came from my wife. She thought I was trying to help the problem she saw in our relationship which back in those days was considered cross dressing or being a transvestite. Which still was a long way from just being viewed as a guy who liked to dress as a woman for Halloween. Naturally, my wife was afraid of what our friends might say. During it all, we hoped seeing a therapist would help. I can only imagine, if I had listened to my therapist about the long term life expectations of being transgender would be, how much different my life would have been.

With each experience, as I started to explore the feminine world more and more, I began to begin living in my transgender present. Every time I was successful in the world, the more confidence I began to experience and maintain. My whole world essentially flipped. When before I day dreamed about being a woman, now I was dreaming in a negative way about going back to a male life I increasingly did not want. To help even more, I had a new therapist who helped me keep my two main life issues separate and even provided crucial assistance in aiding my search for gender affirming hormones. 

In my mind, the hormones, or HRT as they were called then, helped me to cement where my life had become. I loved the external and internal changes the hormones had aided me in achieving. In a short period of time, I had come so far I asked my therapist for her help in changing my legal name and other gender markers. She came through with flying colors and with the help of my daughter, I came up with a new family based name which reflected my heritage. I chose the name of one of my maternal grandparents as my first name and my Mom's first name as my new middle name so my initials would be easier for my three grandkids to remember and use. 

From there on to the present, I have gone all out to live in my transgender present and make up for all the lost time I had in my life daydreaming away for my next trip in the cross dressing mirror.