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Image from Fab Lentz on Unsplash. |
Adjustment to gender change was never easy for me.
Two of the biggest initial problems came when I realized
that I had too few feminine characteristics to help me start. Being seen as a
so called “normal” male did help me keep the bullies away but provided me no
help when I was attempting to cross dress as a girl for the mirror. Plus, all
along I knew the problem of looking like a girl was just going to get worse as
I grew older and enter puberty. In the worst way, I wanted to add curves to my
body and not the masculine angles I was getting. By this time, I was building a
secure dark gender closet to protect me from the world, and it saved me many
times from being caught.
The other big problem was, I did not know what I was doing
when I was trying to femininize myself. I had none of the peer support (or
criticism) from the girls around me to aid me in the way I appeared in the
public’s eye. My makeup alone I feared made me look like a clown in drag. It
took me years of work in the mirror before I had the confidence to go out in public
as a cross dresser or novice transgender woman. Which was just beginning to be
understood.
I also needed years to develop the courage to even try to go
out into the world. Eventually, after quite a bit of failure, I experienced
enough success to finally build confidence to build myself to a point I could
own who I was. Being true to myself meant entering a room and feeling confident
in my identity. It also meant
when I was ridiculously dressed as a teen and was getting laughed at or
attracting unwanted attention, I still had to own it until I could make it home
and change. From that point forward, I began to seriously adjust my wardrobe
and fashion choices to dress to blend in with the other women around me. By
doing so, I finally left the male in myself behind. I understood women ran the
world in their own way, and to enter, I needed to change my thought pattern
about my gender life significantly.
Out went the very short miniskirts and shorts and in came
leggings, boots and jeans. I was haunting the thrift stores so often, I thought
a few of them were beginning to know me. Ironically, I received pushbacks from
others in the cross-dressing community for my fashion choices. Several went out
of their way to tell me I could wear pants anytime I wanted as a man, why
would I want to wear pants when I was a woman. I came to the point where I
responded I did not need clothes to define my transgender womanhood. Or my
gender is between my ears, and my sex is between my legs. Plus, it was not
as if I was that butch when I dressed as a woman. I normally always wore my
heels and makeup with my slacks and blouses when I went out. I did not know it
at the time, but I was developing my later life as a femme transgender lesbian.
As stubborn as I always was, I still was insecure in my own
way and needed reinforcement in my transgender womanhood. That is when going
out to the new venues I had discovered helped me along. Repeating the same
movements repeatedly as a trans woman, helped me along towards my goal of
living fulltime and I could see the results of my efforts in life very
personally in the public’s eye. When I discovered my lifelong dream of living
as a woman could be within reach, I needed to go for it.
At that point in time, my battle of genders really set in.
To put it mildly. My male self was not ready to give up what remained of his
life at the age of sixty. Essentially, he wanted to know if I could afford to
make the transition and give up all the white male privilege, he had worked a
lifetime to build up. On the other hand, my up-and-coming feminine side was
arguing at my age, it was now or never as far as a gender transition was
concerned. The hardest part of my gender work was already done.
I had spent the greatest part of fifty years having to
adjust to gender change, and I was more than ready to attempt the final jump to
start HRT or gender affirming hormones to aid in the process. Your results may
vary but, in my case, my entire life was never easy. As I view it now, it was
worth the effort to adjust to a gender change.
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