A Labor of Love

 

Image from Mayur Gala

Once I stopped being a victim thinking I was the only male in the world who wanted to be feminine, I quit being so negative about my life as a whole. That is when I started to enjoy wearing my mom’s clothes and experimenting with her makeup. All I really knew was that the process of cross dressing took away the problems I was experiencing in everyday male life to the point of even relaxing me. The only real issue I had was when the next time was I could find the privacy to do it.

I even went to the point (in warm weather) of stashing a small collection of clothes and makeup in a hollowed-out tree in a woods next to our house. I was in my own world and enjoyed the privacy I had to feel the clothes and dreaming that I was one of the attractive girls I saw at school and envied very much. At that time, I did not understand how I would take on a lifetime of work to pursue my labor of love.

The first task I needed to accomplish was when I was financially able to do it, was shop for and acquire a whole new set of clothes so I could present better in a world of ciswomen I needed to compete with in many ways. The first task I needed to complete was to slim down my male body as much as I could so I could fit into more stylish clothes I was suddenly finding in all the thrift stores I was shopping at. I liked the stores for two main reasons, the first of which was price of the items displayed and secondly, I never had any problems using the changing rooms to see if the items I was looking at actually fit. Plus, the challenge of doing so much shopping was something I loved. The only problem was where I was going to store away all my fashion treasures from the prying eyes of my wife who would wonder where they came from. Fortunately, we had a huge old house with plenty of places I could store my clothes.

After I began to dramatically improve my worldly presentation and use the public as my mirror, I found myself in a position where I could blend in with the public. To test myself, I even did tricks such as wearing sunglasses where I could see the eyes of the public when they could not see mine. That way, I could tell if they were staring at me or not and I was overjoyed to learn I had passed the test, and the public was ignoring me. From there I could widen my horizons on where I was attempting to go as a novice transgender woman. I was in love!

My love ironically did not last long because very soon, I discovered the public actually wanted to interact with me. Suddenly, I needed to work on a presentable voice so I could attempt to basically communicate mainly with other women since men did not want to have anything to do with me since I left the men’s club, I used to be part of. The fact remained; I did not miss male interaction at all. It was something I never had in my male life either as I always preferred the company of women. Surprisingly to me, as I transitioned, I was having no problem gaining feminine company. Probably because ciswomen for the most part were curious about what I was doing in their world. Plus, the women did not carry the paranoia about their sexuality that men had, they were not scared of me. Finally, I was showing the ultimate honesty about who I was which many women appreciated. For any number of those reasons, I loved the interactions I was having and being able to learn more from them about being a woman than ever before.

The fact I was loving my life at this point as a transfeminine person led me to realize that for the first time, my life was headed in the right direction. I felt so natural and even happy when I followed my gender path to a point where I was allowed behind the gender curtain to see if I really wanted to give up all my male privileges and keep moving forward to my ultimate goal of starting gender affirming hormones or HRT. If I could be approved by a doctor to do it. As I always say, I was approved and the changes were magical and I was in love again.

Before you begin to think my love revolved just around me and not another human being, my future wife Liz came into my life over a decade ago and changed everything. I was in my sixties and was thinking about spending the rest of my life alone when Liz and I met on an online dating site. We got along and she turned out to be the final push I needed to leave the male world behind. She was the missing link I needed to turn my transgender life around, and I love her very much.

It feels good to say that I love someone else more than I love myself or my gender transition for the first time in my life. According to my second wife who died many years ago. It would be interesting to see now what she would have thought about the feminine person I have become.

My final point is it is said you must love yourself before you can truly love someone else. Maybe I needed to learn my true self as a transgender woman before I could love someone else. It certainly took me long enough to love myself, a lifetime for me which spanned over half a century. Once I realized my path was a long labor of love, I learned the hard way I needed to be patient. Which was difficult for me, but I made it through and learned from my labor of love.