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| Image from Jason Hoehne on UnSplash. |
During the many years I have written my blog, I always have been careful to give credit where credit is due, to the ciswomen who helped me go behind the gender curtain.
Initially, I thought most of the women interacted with me
because they were curious about what I wanted to do in their world. But lately
I wonder if how I acted had anything to do with it. What I mean is, by that had
anything to do from the point I had reached on my gender path as I transitioned
from cross-dresser to transgender woman. As I had reached the point of meeting
the women who showed a casual interest in me, I had already taken my appearance
and movement levels as a woman to a higher level. I did not have to worry about
any of that and could concentrate on the matter at hand, communicating with
mostly other ciswomen.
When I did so, I was not giving them a chance to wonder who
I was as I was not coming off to the world as a clown in drag anymore. I was
announcing myself as a person who wanted to be let in behind the gender
curtain. Something I had dreamed of for years. By the time I was behind the
curtain, I felt so natural that there was no way I was going back. I thought, open
that curtain, I was coming in and you couldn’t stop me.
That was the point in my life I could put my potential male
aggressiveness behind me because I found more women were willing to help my
gender cause rather than hinder it. I encountered very few negative TERF’s or
radical feminists who rejected me totally as some sort of self-imposed
gatekeepers to the feminine world. So, my very fragile confidence as a transfeminine
person was rarely questioned, and life went on. Basically, how I wanted it to.
It was about that time also that I began to learn all the
nuances of a woman’s life I would need to survive in it when I jumped into playing
in the girls’ sandbox. Somehow, I needed to prove I was not the terrible woman
my second wife always called me after the fights we had about me progressing
from being a cross-dresser to a transgender woman whose next step was being
approved for gender affirming hormones or HRT. The only clue she gave me was
she was not talking about my appearance as a woman. Thankfully, even though my
feelings were hurting deeply, I needed to somehow figure out what she was
telling me. It took me years, but I did.
What she was talking about was I did not have the basic
experiences of a woman yet to build a new life as a trans woman. I was stuck in
quicksand trying to get the feminine experiences I needed when no one would
help me get there. Finally, I decided I needed to find out for myself if I was
ever to not being a terrible woman. There were two labels I rebelled at in
life. The first that early on I could be called mentally ill because of my
gender issues and the second was that I made a terrible woman when I was
clueless in what that meant.
The good news was that later in life I learned both were
wrong and I escaped my own brand of quicksand and was finally able to leave
most all the male baggage behind I wanted to lose and use the rest of the
blocks to build a solid future as a transgender woman. Perhaps it was easier
for me to build a new feminine life because the weight of my old life was behind
me and I was happier. Humans are like sharks and can sense when blood is in the
water with another unhappy toxic person and ciswomen are especially good at it.
I think they sensed with me that I was honest in my path, and it was OK to open
up and let me in.
Ironically, the only real problem I faced was concentrating
on taking the old “don’t mess with me” male scowl that I had perfected over the
years off my face. The last thing I wanted to do was to come as far as I had in
my male to female femininization project was to ruin it all with a simple
facial expression.
When I made it to the point where going behind the women’s
gender curtain was not going to be a problem, I needed to make sure I was not
screaming open up, I am coming in to anyone. That would have been like
announcing my arrival in a woman’s restroom. I learned to do it with a small
smile just like the other women do in the most sacred of women’s only spaces.
Now that I have made it through the major obstacles of
feminization, I learned to evolve myself into the person I always dreamed of
being. I escaped all of the quicksand of a gender transition by staying on my
feet in my heels as I needed to be quite selfish at times to make sure I stayed
in my deadly serious gender game. It was nothing I was ever happy about but on
the other hand, I was stuck in pure survival mode looking for the best way out.
Whatever you want to call it, surviving a gender struggle is
no joke and all the transphobes need to walk a mile in our existence to
discover just that. In the meantime, you may just have to use the “Open Up” on
them to let you in.
