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| By request, Liz on right at a summer picnic. |
Most all of this post comes from the early days of me being out in the world as a novice transgender woman.
Early on, when I was hanging out in the gay men’s venues, I
had a difficult time separating myself from the drag queens in the room. While
I appreciated their artform, I certainly was not a part of it. The only time I
had tried to ever perform on stage was at a crossdresser-transgender mixer I
had went to years ago in the Cleveland, Ohio area. I was a dismal failure, and
my performing career was over, for good. But I walked away from the experience
in my high heeled shoes with a newfound respect for what good drag performers
go through.
Life really began to change for me when I left the gay
venues and began to see if I could make it in a more normal universe in the big
sports bars, I was used to going to as a man and wondering how it would be to
experience them as a transgender woman. Surprisingly, I found less resistance
to me being there than I did in the gay bars where I sometimes had to fight to
get a drink. Not unlike the clerks I met in mall clothing stores, I found I was
no more than a dollar sign to most all the servers and bartenders I met. As
long as I followed the basic rules of smiling, never causing any trouble and
tipping well, I was cool to most all of the employees I faced and for the most
part, just another face in the crowd. Which is exactly what I wanted.
In the venues I went to, it did not take me long to become a
regular and I took advantage of perks such as restroom privileges. Plus, when
the bartenders knew me so well, it helped me with other new patrons who may
question my existence. I wanted anything but them thinking they were
encountering a man in a dress. To
preclude that happening, I worked hard at blending in with the other ciswomen
around me. I knew exactly what most of them were going to wear so I could wear
the same thing. When I did and my makeup and hair were on point, it gave me the
confidence to try new things as a trans woman.
I discovered at that time, my own little rating system I
used with the public. I felt a high percentage of the world was just going on
about their business and did not care about me one way or another. Then another
percentage who did notice me were curious (not evil) women who wondered what I
was doing in their world, and finally there was the group of haters who had
sensed I was different and wanted to confront me. Fortunately, they turned out
to be the smallest group I needed to face when I was out in the world because I
was certainly not what they thought they were getting when they saw me in
public. I was more than a fearful spineless person trying to act like someone
they were not. I was rapidly becoming more comfortable as my authentic self.
Perhaps the biggest learning experience I had was when I did
know I had the confidence to be myself and what the world saw of me was all
true. No drag queen, no parttime cross dresser, just me a transgender woman.
Since the great majority of the world had no idea of what a transfeminine
person was, I knew I would have to educate anyone who needed to know more about
me. On occasion, I needed to answer insensitive questions from people who had
known better. Like the nurse at one of my mammograms years ago, who blurted out
something to the effect did I still have all of my equipment down below. Like
it was any of her business. But, for the most part, people treated me with
respect. It was all in how I treated strangers. If I acted as if nothing was
wrong with me, most people went right along with the program and did not ask me
any invasive, personal questions.
Then came the portion of my life when I began to be able to
surround myself with people who never knew anything about my old male past. Amazingly
to me, they accepted me as I was and never asked any probing questions. The
only outliers were my transwoman friend Racquel who told me I passed out of sheer
willpower and my wife Liz who sent me down a permanent path to transition when
she told me she had never seen any male in me at all. She was particularly
profound at the time because I was still trying to live part-time in both of
the main binary genders. Liz knew what she saw was what she was going to get
when I went through my male to female transition and even started HRT or gender
affirming hormones. In fact, I took my first doses (I was on pills then) when
we celebrated New Years Eve together one year when we first met over a decade
ago.
I desperately wanted the world to see in me what they saw in
all women, just a feminine person trying to live her life as easily as possible.
It took me years to build the confidence and courage to shed my old male self
and do it but certainly it was finally worth it to live my truth. My motto
became, what you see is exactly what you get and if you for some reason don’t
like it, it is your problem. Not mine.
