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| Image from Sammy Swae on UnSplash. |
We speak a lot around here about merging your life’s past circumstances with the future of what you may be facing.
Depending upon the number of years you have spent living as
your birth gender, you may have an incredible amount of baggage to bring with
you from your past. Including the input of spouses, family, friends and jobs. What
to bring with you to merge with your new lifestyle as a transgender woman or
trans man is often an agonizing decision. One thing is for certain you can’t
bring all of your past life with you. However, no matter how you may want to
cut it, the basic building blocks of your life remain. Such as how your parents
raised you. My parents raised me to be a contradiction from the beginning. I
was expected to stand up for what I believed to be right, as long as it did not
interfere with what they thought was right. So being a childhood cross dresser
was being an individual in my mind but an embarrassment in theirs. So, I had no
chance of winning my gender battles.
On the other hand, I was taught the difference between right
and wrong but not enough that I could bring it with me when I needed to face
the biggest battle of my life, what was I going to do about my unwanted male
life. Deep down inside, I knew the right answer then just refused to face it.
For the longest time, I was guilty of putting ciswomen and
girls up on some sort of a pedestal as I viewed their lives from the outside
looking in. Basically, all I saw was they had the chance to wear the pretty
clothes and be pursued by the men or boys in school. I so wanted to be the
cheerleader on the sidelines rather than the defensive end I was on the
football team. Without seeing all the work, it took to being a good cheerleader.
In fact, I never saw any or all of the work needed to transition from being a
female to being a woman which I found to be a huge difference. Females are born;
women are socialized in the world which means not all women ever make it. If
and when you are attacked by a TERF about how you were born, rest assured she
has problems if all she could come up with was a so-called birthright.
Getting back to how you merge your past with your future,
the first thing you have to remember is not to forget about your present. Your present
is so important as you live a daily life, often between two powerful genders, male
and female. Your present is often the time when you are working hard to see how
your gender dreams will impact your life in the future and how much has it done
for your past. In my case, all I had really learned about being in the world as
a transgender woman was to apply makeup well enough, so I did not look like a
clown in drag, and I learned to shop in thrift stores to find the right fashion
to flatter my testosterone poisoned body. I knew nothing about putting my new improved feminine image into motion in the world.
Once I did get serious about looking around in my present-day
world back then, I wondered how I was going to ever merge my past with my
future. After I determined how badly I wanted to.
My main concern was how one sided my interests were. I was mainly
a sports addict with the usual male preoccupation with my job. Most certainly,
I would be sacrificing my job if I male to female transitioned but what about
my sports hobbies? It was then I became very serious about looking around to
notice who all was watching sports at the big venues I was in and I was
pleasantly surprised that all those years, I had been missing the number of
women who were involved. It turned out that unless I was trying to talk sports
with a man, my baggage was safe with other ciswomen, and I was not out of place
in my favorite team jersey. To make matters even better, when my wife Liz and I
got together and began going to “Meetup” groups, I was able to go to writers’
circles to interact with a whole new set of people. I highly recommend groups
such as that to expand your social horizons as a transgender woman or trans
man. The only negative experience I ever
had was with a lesbian social group who refused to accept me because I was
trans. Which was their loss, not mine.
Then I began to look at my future as just downsizing my life.
I was leaving friends behind who did not accept me all the way to going from
two wardrobes to one. As Liz once told me, it’s not often a human gets to stop
a life and rebuild it, so don’t mess it up. With me, I was fortunate to have
help in merging my past with my future. When I was with my new circle of women
friends, I just had to learn what to needed to omit from my past which would inadvertently
out me as a past male. I was able to talk about my family because I had a daughter,
which was a good example, I just could not share birth stories. But in reality,
I was in the room, just not doing any of the work.
Any way you cut it, when you do make the decision to cross
the gender border, you will naturally have to leave part of your past behind.
Just be careful, you do not leave any of the basic building blocks behind which
make you the person you are. From there you can build a new and better you as
your authentic self maybe you never thought you could be.
