Playing the Short Gender Game

 

Image from Jayson Hindrichsen
on UnSplash.

During my life, I always have taken the easy way out and thought about important things such as my gender as a short-term issue.

I write often of my love for the mirror when I was young. I hated seeing my male self-reflected back at me but completely enjoyed it when the mirror came to life and I was cross dressed as a pretty girl. Perhaps it was then that I started to think of my life as a short-term basis. Would I eventually outgrow my desire to be a girl when I became older, or if I did not, what would happen to me then. To make matters worse, the Vietnam War was ramping up and I had the constant threat of military duty to think of. Normally when I did, and the coast was clear, I ran back to the mirror and escaped behind a dress and makeup.

As I wrote about yesterday on Veterans’ Day, military duty finally caught up to me when my draft lottery number was fifty-two, so all the short-term thinking and worrying I did was a waste of time. I was going to have to put all my love of being feminine behind me and survive the best I could. It turned out that all the worrying I did about my gender issues and sexuality was wasted too. As I stayed very short-term in my cross-dress thinking, destiny took over in my life, and I started to do more and more in the world to express my new feminine self. Even though I found myself living on the edge more than once, I learned to live there until the next challenge came along. These were the years of changing jobs and moving my family way too much.

As I frenetically moved through life, I was moving too fast to slow down and see what the real issue was. It was gender, and sooner or later I would have to deal with it one on one. Until I did, I would be living a lie and a very messy one at that. Out of the one transgender woman I personally know who told me she was never gender dysphoric, I would guess she would tell me also that she never encountered any messy moments in her life when she transitioned. If she did not, she is one of the few that I know who didn’t.

Many of my messy moments stemmed from me being selfish and wanting to maintain my twenty-five years of marriage to a woman I really loved when she was against me going any further as a transgender woman and starting gender affirming hormones or HRT. By attempting to have it all in my life, my mental health suffered, and I made many mistakes as I tried indirectly to out myself to the world. The biggest one was when I insisted on going into my own restaurant dressed as a woman and being immediately recognized which I could have been fired for.

By this time, I was in a downward spiral which I could see no way out of. It all led me to a suicide attempt and more dissatisfaction with life. Through it all, I had a little voice within me saying everything would be OK someday if I just followed my transfeminine instincts. But before I did, I was stubborn and had a lot of life yet to live. Just when I thought I could not go any lower, I did. I lost my wife and three out of the only four male friends I had to death. Which sent me even lower into depression. I was at a point the experts say with drug addicts who must hit bottom before they can start the path upward. Just change the wording to my male self was at the bottom of his journey and it was time to give my inner female a chance to live. Because, at this time, there was no longer time for short term solutions, my male self just had to be done.

Fortunately, I was able to salvage all the years of practice and learning I put into my femininizing projects and did not have to start from scratch when it came to working on my presentation as a transgender woman. I could look at the long-term benefits of my male to female gender transition. It was such a relief to be able to finally change my thought processes around and not play the short-term gender game at all.