Gender Affirmation Day

 

Image from Ava Sol
on UnSplash.

Recently, I had a rare opportunity to meet and enjoy the company of a small group of family for breakfast which I like to call a gender affirmation day.

Precisely, there were four of us including my daughter, son-in-law, my wife Liz and myself. For the morning, I chose a breakfast only small chain venue which we had never been able to go to before. Since it has been a while since I have seen daughter and son-in-law, I was very happy to see them. In addition, I have three grandchildren who did not come since they are adults now and have their own lives to attend too. Plus, the oldest, is a nuclear engineer and lives in Maine and the next two in age (both boys) are traveling in Japan. The youngest is some sort of a bio-engineering student at “The Ohio State University.”

Getting back to my experience, I was dressed very casual in my favorite jeans, new OSU T-shirt and comfortable tennis shoes to face the world at large in a place I had never been to at all. Plus, I did put on some light makeup and partially tied back my increasingly long hair. We were lucky enough to beat the Saturday morning breakfast rush and got a seat as the place was filling up. As I always do, I try to find out if anyone is paying any extra attention to me as Liz and I made our way to our seats. Nobody did except this pesky kid (boy) who would not stop staring at me after we sat down close to where he was sitting. Through it all, I managed to ignore him until his family finished eating and left before we did. Leaving me to completely concentrate on my food and the pleasant conversation that was going on.

As I always point out, being transgender in my daughter’s extended family is not much of an anomaly after all. The nuclear engineer in Maine is trans and my first wife (who is my daughter’s mother) has a transgender man cousin. Diversity runs in the family, whether the naysayers, which are a few, like it or not. My first wife’s in-laws are very redneck conservatives, the same as my ex-communicated brother’s. So, I have not talked to him in over a decade.

My daughter was and is one of my strongest allies and used me as an example to all three of her kids on diversity in the family. She has always been by myside during my male to female feminization journey and I love her deeply for that and how she turned my out-of-control life around when she was born. As a point of reference, she will be fifty years this year and I am trying desperately to come up with something special to do for her but she I like most all of the other ciswomen in my life, they do not have a grasp on what they did for me.

Since now, I spend so much of my time isolated from the real world and because I have mobility issues, I don’t have a chance to match wits with the public anymore and face people such as the pesky kid who would not quit staring at me. It is a good thing he was not sitting at an angle where Liz or my daughter could see him or there could have been some sort of an altercation about having manners. That would have been bad because I am used to fighting my own rare battles. As most kids do, he got bored and turned his attention back to his breakfast. Per norm, is mom was too busy on her phone to be paying any attention to her kids and at least they were not screaming.

Since my daughter’s world is so busy with work and acting as a home care person for her mom, it is difficult for us to put together the time to get together, and I can take advantage of a powerful shot of gender affirmation. Because I can still benefit from it so much and I have always been just me to her and the rest of her extended family no matter what gender I was living as. As a matter of fact, it took me longer to adjust to them accepting the authentic me than them to me. One of the reasons was because the pressure of living an unwanted life was over and I was free to be happy. They knew me better than I knew myself.

More than likely, I won’t have to wait as long as I did this time for another shot of gender affirmation from person who went through my transition with me because my daughter has access to many old pictures of my family I need for my book I am writing for them about my life. She lives in Dayton, Ohio about an hour away from where I live in Cincinnati so it’s not like we live right around the corner from each other. Plus, her big birthday is coming up on Labor Day, so perhaps we can pick up the photos then and if her mother-in-law throws a big party, there will be more gender affirmation for me to selfishly enjoy. Maybe my second wife was right, my gender struggles were all about me.

In many ways, gender affirmation is just another term for having an extended period of gender euphoria. It is just another way of saying that I need to be relieved of my transgender insecurities because they run so deep. Maybe it is because I was forced into that male box, I wanted no part of for so long yet eventually learned to master in so many ways. Or me just wanting to be a transfeminine person was so difficult for me to accomplish, I could never forget the struggle and still bear the scars from him fighting me for control.

Regardless of my insecurities, I still try to keep them hidden around my supporters and do my best to show my appreciation for the gender affirmation they have given me.