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| Image from UnSplash. |
When you cross the binary gender border from male to female, anyway you cut it, you need to be ready to build a huge bridge.
In my case, I don't think I had any idea how far I would have to go until I seriously started my journey. When I was the "pretty, pretty princess" as my second wife called me, life seemed to be so simple. All I needed to do to live as a woman was to look like one. My wife also told me I made a terrible woman, and her view had nothing to with my appearance. I knew right then, I needed to find out what she meant and add it to the bridge I was starting to build. I discovered a lot.
I was far from being any sort of a gender architect and had a long way to go. Mainly because I started with so little cross dresser privilege. I had few feminine traits to work with when I started and needed to learn the basics in fashion to disguise my testosterone poisoned male body to do my best to present as feminine in the world. When I did, I began to build a stable base for my gender bridge to stand on. To do so, I needed to cast my mirror aside and begin to explore more and more of the world as a novice transgender woman.
About that time, my bridgework became very complex. I began to be accepted in small, diverse circles of acquaintances which included everyone from lesbians to a big burly motorcycle rider who I had a small crush on. I learned to build a support structure from all of them and my bridge began to come together. Even still. with all of my newfound success in the world, I found I needed to keep building to be successful. Along the way, I needed to adjust to losing part of my intelligence to toxic men, all the way to be mansplained about the simplest of things by other men I considered to be beneath my level. I adjusted to all of it and considered it to be a rite of passage into a woman's world and went on. Plus, at the time, I was making the transition from basic cross dresser to novice transgender woman. I needed to strengthen my new bridge to make it.
Bridge building never became much easier for me until I gained the expert guidance of other strong women. Their acceptance was invaluable in making my way in the world as a transgender woman. Basically, they showed me how to value myself as I was. At that point I found it much easier to walk from my old male side of my bridge all the way to the new, scary side of the bridge and live fulltime as a transgender woman.
I learned when I tried to cross my bridge, and it held, I knew I had built it correctly. Much of the time, my life was not easy, but I again considered it all a rite of passage to gain what I always considered to be my ultimate dream of transgender womanhood.
The bridge was huge and intimidating but I stayed the course and learned the basics of gender bridge building. The effort was worth it.
