Transgender Journey...Down but Not Out

 

Image from Alexander Grey
on UnSplash.

As transgender women and transgender men, it is easy to feel down and out as we try to navigate our new gender paths.

As I sometimes look back on my journey, it is easy to remember the good times and forget the bad. The most important thing about reliving the bad is having the appreciation for the world I am able to live in today as a fulltime trans woman. Every time I make simple trips in the world to the doctor’s, the Veterans Administration or the pharmacy, I always have to look back at remembering the not so good old days when I was struggling for acceptance. Either one of a couple things has happened. Either I have become better at my overall feminine presentation (wrong) or my confidence has taken me to a point where I don’t particularly care what the world thinks about me.

Either way, I look back to when I considered myself a very serious cross-dresser as I still was researching which fork in my gender path would I take. Back in those days, I took hours to prepare for an outing in the world, and I often wondered what I would do if I had to go out in the world everyday and compete with ciswomen everywhere. It was easy at that time to put those thoughts behind me as I was so obsessed with my feminine looks that my second wife kept calling me the “Pretty, pretty, princess.”  Naturally I loved the “pretty” part but rejected the “princess” part of her very pointed critique of me. One day, she even went as far as separating appearance from being a true woman for me when we were fighting about me wanting to go out. It was one of my all-time down moments when she told me I made a terrible woman. It hurt because I was not trying to make anything, I was just trying to express my true self, but I could not properly put my thoughts in a form she would understand.

I guess you could say, back then, I was definitely in my mental transgender formative years when my mind was trying to catch up with all the cross-dressing I was doing. Sadly, before I could formulate what a better version of my transgender self would be, all I experienced was an extreme amount of frustration. I could not understand what I was doing wrong when I was being successful in situations such as transgender-cross dresser mixers I was going to. The problem was the extreme gender euphoria I experienced at the mixers when I was mistaken for a ciswoman was not worth the resultant crash and depression, I felt when my life went back to its same old boring male self.

It all resulted in me being boxed into rarely getting out of my gender closet to explore the world and I was moody, resentful and not the easiest person to live with as I tried to internalize my gender feelings from my wife. A prime example was one year when we took a vacation from our native Ohio to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. On the trip up there, I progressively grew more depressed and mean until my wife asked me what was going on since I was supposed to be having a good time on vacation. Predictably, I lied my way out of it and did not tell her the truth that I rather be spending my vacation time as a woman rather than a man.

Somehow, I pulled myself back together and the vacation continued without incident, but I remember it as another low point. Little did I know at that time, destiny would finally come back to me on my gender path, and I would get my wish to go on extensive vacations as a transfeminine person.

Along the way, I have had many other low points which I write about often. Such as when a woman called me a pervert for simply using the women’s room in a venue, I had been a regular patron of for a long time and had no one say anything negative to me at all. Then much earlier than that when I was struggling to blend in with the world at all, there were all the stares and even laughter I needed to put up with on my journey to present. I was reduced to tears more times than I care to remember mainly by groups of teen girls struggling to find their own femininity. I was certainly at a low point when all of this was happening to me, and I did not have the tools yet to know which way to turn. All I had was this little voice in the back of my head telling me to keep going and my low points would disappear.

All of it did go away for a while until I hit my dark age when nearly everyone I cared about decided to die within a two-year period. The group included my second wife and three of my closest male friends. Who were the only ones I had. To add to my low point, I was desperately lonely and ended up relying on that little voice who at this time was growing louder and more insistent that she had all the answers for me. This time, I had very few other alternatives to fall back on. As one person told me after I had lost my restaurant along to everything else, you will land on your feet. Not knowing my feet would be in high heels when I did it.

I am sure that everyone’s lives have its share of highs and lows and I can not say a transgender woman or trans man lows would be even more dramatic, but it seems possible because we have so much to lose as we pick up our lives and move them across the gender border. Until we find ourselves living behind the gender curtain where we always wanted to me.

Hopefully if you are in the midst of a low time, you have a little voice telling you everything will be OK. If not, remember life is but a circle and what is down will eventually come up.

As always thanks for reading along and comments are always welcome.