Transgender Challenges

 

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For me, the challenges of being a transgender woman ran deep and came often.

The first challenges I faced were just keeping my small collection of feminine belongings secret from my younger brother and parents. From there, my dealings with my cross-dressed self and the world only would intensify as I grew up. Very soon, the move from closet to the mirror would not be enough to satisfy my gender curiosity, and I began to leave the house when I could dress in my clothes and makeup for small walks to our rural mailbox. As puberty took its toll, finding anything to wear became my biggest problem because I was outgrowing my short mom’s clothing. She was only five foot two.

Somehow, I beat the challenge of keeping my deep gender secret to myself and kept up my routine of taking every spare moment to satisfy my desire to be a girl. Of course, it took me awhile to come close to perfecting anything which came close to being acceptable when it came to applying makeup and even shaving my legs. Which I was probably sneaking around and doing before most of the girls I was around who I envied so much. As it turned out, the magic of makeup really escaped me until I had the courage to accept the challenge of having a professional makeup artist do my makeup (and explain what he was doing) at a transgender-cross dresser social I was attending in Columbus, Ohio years later. The makeup pro taught me the basics of foundation, contouring, eyes and lips among other helpful tips. All the compliments I received showed me I was indeed on the right path I had chosen in life, and I could at least expect to fit in with other ciswomen in the world on a regular basis.

Then, as I always point out, the real work and challenge of what I was setting out to do set into my life. At the same time my male counterpart was beginning to establish himself as a successful person in his chosen career. As much as my self-destructive personality kept trying to tear down all he accomplished, it never worked, and he succeeded anyway. Which meant he was increasing the amount of potential baggage I would have to account for if I was ever going to reach my goal of living as a successful transfeminine person.

What hurt me was when I miscalculated what it was going to take to live the life I always dreamed of. The challenge was making the jump of just looking similar to a ciswoman, all the way to having a basic idea of how she lived her life. A great example of how my cross-dressing fun and games became very serious when just after I decided to go full time as a trans woman and had given away all my male clothes, my wife Liz’s dad passed away and I needed something appropriate to wear to the viewing and funeral. I was fortunate that I had several items of clothing in black, so I could be properly dressed for the occasion. A long way from the day-to-day life I was expecting to challenge me as I went through my male to female femininization project.

It turned out to be a huge step in my life when I finally accepted the challenge to live the life, I was always destined to live. I was no longer the lost kid in the mirror desperately cross-dressing his life away dreaming of a world he could not be part of. I was a full-fledged adult with a rapidly clearing view of the challenge ahead if she wanted to survive. Perhaps you noticed I used the “she” pronoun as I increasingly adopted it as my referred self. It made me feel more complete as a transgender woman. If I did not believe in myself at this point of my life, how could I convince the world who I was anyhow.

The next big challenge to me was seeing if I could be approved for gender affirming hormones or HRT which I am still on (thankfully) to this day. Before I did anything with the hormonal challenge, I knew I would have to seek out a doctor’s approval to see if I was healthy enough to do it. I was able to find an ad for a doctor in nearby Dayton who said he specialized in hormonal care and I made the appointment which would change my life forever.

In our first meeting, the doctor gave me a brief physical, asked me a few questions about what I knew the HRT would do to me and started me on a minimum dosage to see if there would be any ill effects. There were not, and very soon I was on a larger dose of the magical hormones my body seemed to take to naturally and the changes to my body were on. In fact, the changes began to happen so fast, the challenge then became to move up my timetable on when I was going to give up what was left of my male existence. It was becoming increasingly difficult to hide my growing breasts, softening skin and long hair from the public and all the internal changes such as emotions from myself. I finally had enough and embarked on the greatest challenge of my life at the age of sixty. I put nearly half of a century of a part-time cross-dressing life behind me and never looked back.

Destiny helped me too, when the Veterans Administration health care system which I was a part of began to treat gender dysphoria in veterans with hormonal care. I needed again to go through the approval process and made it again as it seemed as if the challenges would never end. It was worth it because it tied me in with the VA’s mental health system for my depression and anxiety issues. As luck would have it, I was paired up with a mental health professional who I was with for years and helped me with all my issues such as having my legal gender markers changed within the VA and society at large.

I guess the challenge of any first-time experience can be traumatic for any human being. It just seems unfair that transgender women and transgender men have more than their fair share of challenge.