Who Got in Your Way

 

Image from UnSplash. 

Perhaps there was that special person or persons who stood in the way of you going along your formative gender path. In my case, I always tried to blame my second wife for being in my way of perfecting my male to female feminization project. My first wife was not a factor because I thought she was just along for the ride, no matter how bumpy it became and I always thought I could suddenly tell her I would be gone for several months because I was going to Thailand not to visit but for gender realignment surgery and she would say be safe.

That was all well and good until I met my second wife who I immediately fell in love with. I ended up divorcing my first wife and marrying my second in a fairly short time. Like my first wife, even though she knew I was a parttime cross-dresser when we married it was fine with her but unlike wife number one, she always resisted me going any further towards maturing into a transgender woman. Being as strong-willed as she was, I wonder how we made it through twenty-five years of marriage until she passed away.

Throughout the years, we somehow stayed committed to each other following many bitter battles over how I was wanting to live my life. She was much wiser than me over the years as she told me things such as I made a terrible woman (true at the time) and why didn’t I just go ahead and move away and live like a woman and save both of us the hassle. As I always point out, I did not know how to “make” a better woman because I had never been behind the feminine gender curtain to discover all the complexities of what I was taking on. As far as just going away and starting all over on my own, I was selfish or self-centered and wanted to maintain as much as I could of my male life which among other things paid most of the bills.

Through it all, faint glimpses of my transgender dream kept filtering into my life, and I did things like transvestite-transgender mixers and Halloween parties to experiment if I could make it at all. Once I received positive feedback from doing it, I was pushed forward to expand the boundaries of my marriage. Just to be met with an equal amount of pushback from my wife. The worst part about it was I understood where she was coming from as her marriage was unraveling right in front of her eyes at the hands of another woman. Who was me. I ended up resenting her in a couple of ways. First, because she was what I always wanted to be. Soft curvy body and all. And second because she stood directly in my path of achieving the same things that she took for granted, along with the rest of her ciswomen friends. Great makeup, hair and clothes could not hide the envy I felt for missing out on a feminine life I always wanted.

It took me awhile after she passed on at the age of fifty to realize who the real culprit was who was standing in my way of my male to female transition. All along it was all me who never responded the right way when my wife said be man enough to be a woman. As I said, I was too selfish to not want to give up all the male privileges I had earned over the years and wanted to live my life on dual gender impossible terms as long as I could.

I also tried therapy on the side to help the way I felt and even rejected their advice when essentially, they told me the same thing my wife told me. There was nothing they could do about me wanting to be a woman. She was a part of my inner self and only I could deal with her. When it came right down to it, I was scared of my inner woman and how she could ever carve out her own life in the world. It turned out, I just never gave her enough credit as over the years with help from strong feminine role models like my mom and wife, she was able to mold her own personality. Even though she had to keep it hidden for decades. Those same strong ciswomen showed her where there was a will, there was a way. Especially when you had to take the time and effort to get there.

Once I found myself firmly placed behind the gender curtain, the real work began to make sure I never “made” a terrible woman. I wanted to as much as possible, bring all the good feminine characteristics with me so I could do more than survive. I wanted to thrive as I made my way to my dream of living a transgender life. As I did, the major realization came to me that it was me and only me who was standing in my own way all those years when I was wondering what gender I was at all. Shame on me for not having the courage to face my true self in the mirror and not let my gender dysphoria get in the way. Worse yet, everything was screaming within me that I was doing the right thing when I approached my transgender womanhood. Freeing myself up to live was as if I was taking a ton of weight off of my shoulders.

Ironically, once I was approved to play in the girls’ club, the difference I had from the different upbringing I had made me a special sort of woman to the ciswomen who accepted me around me. Even though they knew I came with different baggage, the most radical advice I ever got was welcome to our world when I was complaining about hot flashes. As my body started to respond to the HRT or gender affirming hormones I was on that I had waited so long for. I don’t think the women ever realized how badly I wanted to be in their world.

If it was not for me being in my own way, I would have been in their world sooner. My proper place to be.