Life is Too Short to be Ordinary.

 

Image from Frolicsome Fairy
on UnSplash.

I saw this quote on a television show I watch regularly and it resonated as a transgender woman with me. Here is the quote: “Life is too short to be ordinary.”  I immediately thought that a trans woman’s or trans man’s life is anything but ordinary in the world we live in today.

I also thought of a few of the final battles I had with myself before I finally gave in to my feminine desires at the age of sixty and decided to try to enter the transfeminine world permanently. It was never a move I took lightly, which was probably one of the reasons it took me so long to make my final choice to join the girls’ club and leave the good old boys’ club behind.

What I attempted to do was weigh all the good and bad I had accomplished in my long life and use it to make my decision. To be fair, I did have many male experiences which I felt I needed to take into consideration as positives I would have to leave behind if I proceeded with my male to female feminization efforts. The end result was I found that I did not live an ordinary life for several reasons, and one of them was because I spent so much time on the gender path I obsessed about. The others involved just the ordinary life’s challenges that everyone goes through such as maintaining a family, a marriage and trying to be successful in a profession you can tolerate. I kept coming back to my gender issues which set me apart from the great majority of the world, in a good way.

Along the way, I had come to appreciate the difference between the two main binary genders by actually having the chance to live them. It occurred to me that I was having a chance very few humans have the chance to do and I should make the best of it and keep going. At the time, I was spending approximately half of my time in the world as a transgender woman anyhow, so the jump to going fulltime was becoming less and less intimidating to me.

One of the main final factors I needed to consider was how natural I felt living in each gender I was trying to maintain. After hours of thought and contemplation, I came to the realization I had never felt natural as a man. I had to struggle to make any long-lasting friends and it seemed all my accomplishments were for my public persona only. As I always say, I was never a man cross-dressing as a woman. I was a woman cross dressing as a man. From that, I realized I had always felt more comfortable as a feminine person and time was running short for me to grasp the opportunity to change for good. I was sixty at the time and it did not take a genius to realize I had lived more years than I still had to go on this earth.

Finally, it struck my stubborn head that I had been blessed to live everything but an ordinary life and I should follow my natural inclination to stay in a feminine mode. When I did, it was as if I was allowed to take a ton of rocks from my shoulders. As I assumed the life I always should have lived, I began the finishing touches of my new existence by being approved for HRT or gender affirming hormones by a doctor I read about in a local LGBTQ newspaper I saw. My body’s reaction was simple and to the point and I could hear it saying what took you so long as the changes from the hormones were so natural and immediate. In fact, the changes came so fast that I needed to move up my timeline for when I would transition completely away from my old male self.

It does not seem possible that all those gender changes were over fifteen years ago now and my world changed as positively as I ever hoped that it would. The path I took was completely personal and had its share of stop signs and blind curves but somehow, I made it. Probably because my inner self felt it was the only way to go. If working from a male background to being a transfeminine person was the way my path took me, I would gladly go along for the ride. The ride turned out to be uniquely interesting along with being extremely scary when I gave up and lost all my male privilege before I learned the essence of having female privileges.

I was fortunate that I was blessed with a healthy long life. Long enough to see the circle come around from gender darkness to light. So, you could say, my life was long enough to make it interesting and look around all those steep walls and blind curves to see what was on the other side waiting for me.

If the world would let it be, gender is just a human need on a spectrum like so many others and trans people are just trying to live their lives like so many others. And I know gender is much more than a black and white reality to all of us. You can view yourself anywhere from a weekend cross-dresser all the way to a post-op woman and all should be accepted under our complex umbrella of people. It’s just another way we are far from ordinary and difficult for the average person to understand. It is also difficult to explain to a loved one when we do not fully understand what is going on ourselves, which often takes a long time to happen.

Rest assured that even if your life may be different and/or difficult at times, I will be far from ordinary.

Thank you all for your comments, claps and new subscriptions! Without all of you, none of what I try to pass along would be worth it.