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For me, the challenges of being a transgender woman ran deep and came often.
The first challenges I faced were just keeping my small collection
of feminine belongings secret from my younger brother and parents. From there,
my dealings with my cross-dressed self and the world only would intensify as I
grew up. Very soon, the move from closet to the mirror would not be enough to
satisfy my gender curiosity, and I began to leave the house when I could dress
in my clothes and makeup for small walks to our rural mailbox. As puberty took its
toll, finding anything to wear became my biggest problem because I was outgrowing
my short mom’s clothing. She was only five foot two.
Somehow, I beat the challenge of keeping my deep gender
secret to myself and kept up my routine of taking every spare moment to satisfy
my desire to be a girl. Of course, it took me awhile to come close to
perfecting anything which came close to being acceptable when it came to
applying makeup and even shaving my legs. Which I was probably sneaking around
and doing before most of the girls I was around who I envied so much. As it
turned out, the magic of makeup really escaped me until I had the courage to accept
the challenge of having a professional makeup artist do my makeup (and explain
what he was doing) at a transgender-cross dresser social I was attending in
Columbus, Ohio years later. The makeup pro taught me the basics of foundation,
contouring, eyes and lips among other helpful tips. All the compliments I received
showed me I was indeed on the right path I had chosen in life, and I could at
least expect to fit in with other ciswomen in the world on a regular basis.
Then, as I always point out, the real work and challenge of
what I was setting out to do set into my life. At the same time my male
counterpart was beginning to establish himself as a successful person in his
chosen career. As much as my self-destructive personality kept trying to tear down
all he accomplished, it never worked, and he succeeded anyway. Which meant he
was increasing the amount of potential baggage I would have to account for if I
was ever going to reach my goal of living as a successful transfeminine person.
What hurt me was when I miscalculated what it was going to
take to live the life I always dreamed of. The challenge was making the jump of
just looking similar to a ciswoman, all the way to having a basic idea of how
she lived her life. A great example of how my cross-dressing fun and games
became very serious when just after I decided to go full time as a trans woman
and had given away all my male clothes, my wife Liz’s dad passed away and I
needed something appropriate to wear to the viewing and funeral. I was fortunate
that I had several items of clothing in black, so I could be properly dressed
for the occasion. A long way from the day-to-day life I was expecting to challenge
me as I went through my male to female femininization project.
It turned out to be a huge step in my life when I finally
accepted the challenge to live the life, I was always destined to live. I was
no longer the lost kid in the mirror desperately cross-dressing his life away
dreaming of a world he could not be part of. I was a full-fledged adult with a
rapidly clearing view of the challenge ahead if she wanted to survive. Perhaps
you noticed I used the “she” pronoun as I increasingly adopted it as my
referred self. It made me feel more complete as a transgender woman. If I did
not believe in myself at this point of my life, how could I convince the world
who I was anyhow.
The next big challenge to me was seeing if I could be
approved for gender affirming hormones or HRT which I am still on (thankfully)
to this day. Before I did anything with the hormonal challenge, I knew I would
have to seek out a doctor’s approval to see if I was healthy enough to do it. I
was able to find an ad for a doctor in nearby Dayton who said he specialized in
hormonal care and I made the appointment which would change my life forever.
In our first meeting, the doctor gave me a brief physical,
asked me a few questions about what I knew the HRT would do to me and started
me on a minimum dosage to see if there would be any ill effects. There were not,
and very soon I was on a larger dose of the magical hormones my body seemed to
take to naturally and the changes to my body were on. In fact, the changes began
to happen so fast, the challenge then became to move up my timetable on when I
was going to give up what was left of my male existence. It was becoming
increasingly difficult to hide my growing breasts, softening skin and long hair
from the public and all the internal changes such as emotions from myself. I
finally had enough and embarked on the greatest challenge of my life at the age
of sixty. I put nearly half of a century of a part-time cross-dressing life
behind me and never looked back.
Destiny helped me too, when the Veterans Administration
health care system which I was a part of began to treat gender dysphoria in
veterans with hormonal care. I needed again to go through the approval process
and made it again as it seemed as if the challenges would never end. It was
worth it because it tied me in with the VA’s mental health system for my
depression and anxiety issues. As luck would have it, I was paired up with a mental
health professional who I was with for years and helped me with all my issues such
as having my legal gender markers changed within the VA and society at large.
I guess the challenge of any first-time experience can be traumatic
for any human being. It just seems unfair that transgender women and
transgender men have more than their fair share of challenge.
