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| Image from Mathilda Khoo on UnSplash. |
Just feeling good being me took me years to learn. In fact, I needed to go through three male to female transitions to get there.
First, I needed to go through all my cross-dressing years
and feel the angst of how I looked above everything else. In fact, when I go
back and read some of my very early blog posts, all I basically mentioned was
my presentation as a woman and not how I felt as one. It probably was because I
did not feel transfeminine at all at that point in my life. Or, in other words,
I had not matured yet in my journey to transgender womanhood.
I wonder if I had known what a long and winding route, I ended
up taking, if I would have still attempted it years later. But it turned out,
life had a different path for me than nearly all the other people I knew. Since
I was deprived of having any input on where I wanted to go with my gender
struggles, I was left on my own to find my way. Many times, the only clues that
I got came from the dreams I was having that I was actually a pretty girl and
was very disappointed when I still woke up in my male life. I was not feeling
good at that point until I could make it back to my makeup and dresses to
cross-dress in front of the mirror. That was all well and good, except the time
feeling good, or gender euphoria I learned it was called, did not last very
long.
Somehow, the good feelings took over regardless and I
pursued a feminine life even harder. It did not matter that the more I tried to
do to transform myself into a pretty girl could result in disaster if I was
ever discovered. I don’t know how I never was, except mom maybe knew and just
did not want to bring it up thinking I would outgrow it. It turns out the only
thing I outgrew was her clothes and I had to be resourceful to find fashion
items that I could add to my wardrobe and wear. Like one day in junior high school,
I found a discarded stretchy elastic skirt that fit me, and I brought it home
with me and cherished it for years to come. I was fortunate in finding me a
pair of girls’ shoes in my size at the store where I had first gone shopping
with my own money for makeup. I could even afford them along with being able to
buy a new pair of panty hose. To come up with the money, I worked a rural
newspaper route and put the money I earned together with money I earned from
doing chores around the house. I was on a mission to succeed feeling good as me,
as a girl.
The mission was due to be paused as military duty came my
way during the Vietnam War as I ended up serving three years in the Army. My
new task was to put my cross-dressing life on a back burner as I went away to
serve. Even though I was bitter at the time since I was drafted by the government
to do something I was totally against, I got a lot of good from it as I traveled
the world (covering three continents in three years) and learning powerful
lessons about life. Army basic training in particular taught me what I could do
to survive on a temporary basis without a skirt and makeup to fall back on.
Even on those long-forced marches I was on, during a not so
mild Ft. Knox winter, I learned to always look ahead and not behind me. I used
the lesson on the days when I encountered a gender hater or TERF (cis woman
gender gatekeeper) who wanted to berate me because I knew I could outlast them.
The TERF just couldn’t grasp that I was not there to threaten their femininity,
I was there to be me and live mine.
After all that learning experience, I still had a long way
to go to feel good about being me. As I always say, I was similar to most other
men in not understanding what really goes into a ciswomen’s life. It did not
matter that I had spent my life admiring women from afar, I was still a novice
at trying to go behind the gender curtain to truly understand a woman’s life.
And I would not come close to feeling better about the gender disconnect in my
life until I did.
I left the world of gay venues and started to enjoy my new
life in either one of the very few lesbian bars which were still open at the
time, or one of the big straight sports bars I was used to going to as a man. All
I knew was I was being accepted as the transgender woman I always wanted to be
as a regular in those venues and I loved putting my old male self completely in
my past. The new strangers did not know anything about him and the positives
and negatives about his life, and I wanted to keep it that way. Until I found a
few friends I could trust. At that point only could I begin to fill out my life’s
story to them. While at the same time never alluding to the fact that I ever
lived a male life at all.
I was a little slow, but my life came full circle from being
a part-time cross-dresser to a transgender woman, back to just being who I was
always meant to be (me) and I could feel good about who I was for the first time in
my life.
Earlier in this post when I was mentioning my military experience,
I wanted to take the time to thank Dana and Bobbie for their input on my Fourth
of July post. They were both in the Navy and Bobbie in particular is very
active in the state of Michigan pushing equal rights for the LGBTQIA+ community.
I know too there are other trans vets who follow along and I appreciate you
too! All of you who just read and or comment are always deeply appreciated.
Trans vet or not.
