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| Image from Gabriel Silverio on UnSplash. |
When it comes down to it, it is your life to live and no one else’s. But life comes in the way.
The problem is often for transgender women and transgender
men, it is easier said than done to live our own lives. Especially for those of
us who had to wait until later in life to go after our dreams of transitioning
into a feminine world. Perhaps, you were like I was and called selfish for my one-sided
obsession about even seeing if my male to female dreams could ever become a
reality. My second wife was fond of telling me my cross dressing should not be
all about me.
The longer I pursued life on my new transfeminine gender
path, I realized she was right. In order for me to move ahead in a world which
felt so natural to me, I had to be selfish. It was the only way I could make
the difficult decision to take a leap of faith and try to jump the gender
border.
Back in those days, the only thing I could hang my pantyhose
on were the annual Halloween parties I was going to dressed in my feminine finest.
During these early parties, I learned a few of the basics I would need to
survive as a trans woman later in life. Such as how visibly trained the human
animal is to the genders, and if I was to go to the feminine side, everyone
(male and female) would be noticing me. My new visible role in the world took
some time and effort to get used to, but I did finally do it when I learned to
dress to blend with the other ciswomen around me. It was my life to live, and I
was coming closer and closer to deciding how I wanted to live it.
Before I did, I discovered I still had a whole lot of living
to do before I made my decision. The problem was my male life on occasion was
not that bad. Which gave me false hope that I could save it. All it did, as I
juggled two genders at once, was to make my life a mental health hell as I
struggled to maintain any sort of life I wanted. On one side, I had the increasingly
financially successful male self-making it harder to give up all that he had earned
and the male privileges which came with it. Struggling with my feminine side
which felt she was in a more natural position to thrive. The end result was whatever
decision I made just had to be the right one. With so much at stake in my life,
I needed to go back to being very selfish with myself to make it.
In the meantime, I went into a heavy experimentation period
of my life as a novice transgender woman. My goal was to try to live every
moment that I could discover what a ciswoman has to go through in her life. So,
I could tell if I wanted to do the same thing. I wanted to be more than the “pretty,
pretty princess” that my second wife always called me when she was trying to
make fun of my femininity to learn what she was really talking about. It was a
struggle, but eventually I did by setting up my own version of a transgender
bucket list of things to do. What did a ciswoman know that I did not became my
main goal in life when I shed my male clothes and went out in the world as a
trans woman. Overall, my plan worked well for me except the times I tried too hard
and ended up in redneck bars where a single woman should have not been to begin
with.
I did so much, I wore out my bucket list of obvious things
to do and began to examine the difference between male and female privilege in
society. Losing my male privilege brought about no real surprises such as
having my intelligence challenged and learning to be more careful with my
personal safety. While the main feminine privilege I felt was the freedom to be
myself in the world and went way past just having doors opened for me by men.
Needless to say, I was in love with the whole path I was on as a transfeminine
person and could not wait to get back to it anytime I had to leave and go back
to my increasingly unwanted male life. I
was stubborn but then again, I slowly realized I could never go back to the
life I had lived before. No matter how successful it was.
As I reached the age of sixty, I could put it off no longer no
matter how stubborn my male self-had become. When my second wife passed away
from a massive heart attack, he was left with no allies in my life to fight
with and was done. I had paid my cross-dressing dues by doing the best I could
with what I had to work with appearance wise and had gone out of my way to experiment
with how ciswomen live by putting myself in actual situations in life which I
could expect to happen. After all of that, I just needed the final push off my gender
cliff, and land in a world of my own choosing. Without a perpetual balancing
act.
In other words, I guess you could say I went too far in
paying my own dues during the approximately fifty years it took me to lead a
life to discover who I always was. I decided long ago tt was too late to cry
over what I did or did not do and to look forward to the time I have left in
the world. At the least, I found living a life on both sides of the binary
gender border was as scary as it was interesting. How many other humans get to
experience what a transgender women or transgender man gets to see in one
lifetime.
Sure, we experience our ups and downs but so does everyone else
and we can have such an interesting path to claim a life which was always meant
to be ours.
HEY YOU! Thanks for joining me in my journey and commenting
or clapping for my posts. You make it all so worthwhile.
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