All I Ever Knew

Circa 1940 image
of Virginia Prince

 Every once in a while I receive the question when did I know I was transgender.

The easy answer is I always knew but I needed to figure it all out. The more complex answer is I needed to figure it out after a series of transitions during my life. Two major ones occurred when I made the jump from from a very serious cross dresser all the way to a novice transgender woman. The second problem I had was back in those days, terminology to define a transgender woman or man had not yet been invented. Basically back in the pre-internet days when all we had was the preaching of Virginia Prince and her Transvestia publication which I could not wait to receive in the mail. Seeing all the pretty cross dressers just made me want to do more to improve my feminine appearance.   

I worked harder on my appearance than any thing I had ever done before and slowly began to see improvement over my testosterone damaged male body. It was all I ever knew. 

As I entered my transgender womanhood, I felt deep down inside I was doing all the right things, even though I was jeopardizing all the facets of my male life I had worked so hard to put together. What would I do when my family, friends and bosses discovered my deep secret. It ran so much deeper than just wanting to wear women's clothing. I wanted to be a woman and live a feminine life. 

During that portion of my life, I basically went into attack mode, doing every thing I could to learn how being a transgender woman would affect me. Every free moment I had, either I was out in the world as a woman or day dreaming of the times when I could. Naturally, I learned a lot, good and bad about what life had in store for me if I kept on going towards my gender dreams. I found the grass wasn't always going to be greener on the other side of the gender border as I lost all of my male privileges but hadn't gained any of the female ones. 

Soon I learned, it was truly all I ever knew. Somehow I was born to be feminine and not masculine. Which meant years of struggle to right the gender wrongs I was living. The struggles on occasion were crushing and keeping going was very difficult but I did. Probably because I was behind before I even started. I was born into a very male dominated family which had very few girls to play with. Plus, I never had any feminine characteristics myself to begin with. Add it all up, then include me never having any girl time with anyone all teamed up for a rough start for me on my gender journey.

Even still, my gender path was all I ever knew and staying on it finally made me successful.