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| My trans friend Racquel with her fur-baby. |
Sometimes I am asked why I waited so long to finally make the serious transition into a transfeminine world at the age of sixty.
The partial answer is I did not want to face up to my truth
of who I really was. Instead, I internalized my gender desires as long as I
could. Another reason was, I had a powerful male self who did not want to give
up all the white male privileges he had fought to gain. Every bit of ground he
lost to his transgender sister was hard earned. Plus, he had a powerful ally
with him in my second wife who wanted no part of me to progress any further
than the cross-dressing stage I was in when I met her.
My excuse is for not transitioning sooner goes past just
ignoring the obvious. I just did not factor in the other major changes I would
have to go through just to see if my dream of living as a trans woman was even feasible.
Maybe I could never make it at all was a fatal flaw in my thinking because I
needed the inner confidence to live. At that point, I opened my gender closet
door and began to look around and my male self was dragged kicking and
screaming into the world. Early on he was being laughed at in drag when he went
out which hurt his male ego. Until he summoned up enough skill to stop the abuse.
All of this led up to finally realizing (for whatever
reason) I was more than a cross-dresser. I was a transgender woman. It all led
up to the scary, magical night when I decided to change my mind set when I went
out for a drink in a venue, I had frequented many times as my male self and had
always wondered what it would feel like to do it as a woman. As I said, I was
scared to death, and sat in my car for what seemed like forever adjusting and
readjusting my hair and makeup before I went in. I knew from previous visits,
when the nearby mall closed, the bar would fill up with single professional
women who just socialized with each other. As I steadied myself to go in, my
male side was still screaming no as my feminine side was excited to finally get
a chance to live. That night, for the first time, she had won the battle because
I had a great time and even stayed for an extra drink just because I could.
Little did my feminine side know, winning one big gender
battle would only make the war seem further away. Following the evening out,
she wanted more which caused severe problems with my marriage and life. Deep
down, I wanted to experience the thrill of feeling natural in my skin for the
first time, and when I could not do it, I became depressed and downright mean
to the world around me. Internalizing my gender issues became less and less of
a way to run my life. As a result, I started to sneak out from the house any
spare moment I had to attempt to reinvent myself as a transgender woman.
I learned I could and began to slowly carve out a new life
for myself with people who knew nothing of my past male self who was still
strongly resisting every move I was trying to make out of my closet. Sure, I
had my ups and downs with what I was doing but my overall trajectory was up,
and I was proud of myself. I had come so far from the early days I had admiring
myself in the mirror. Even the kicking and screaming from my male self was
beginning to fade. But I found not to be too confident because I still had a
long way to go on my gender journey to be a full-time transgender woman. Since
my trans woman friend Racquel always told me, I passed out of sheer will power,
I always had to work harder to make it in the world. I would forever have a
testosterone poisoned body my male self-had left me to work around since I did
not have the finances or will power for expensive facial femininization
surgeries like Racquel did.
So, I did the best I could and managed to build a small
tight knit group of women friends who accepted me while at the same time
instructed me on the finesse points of being a woman. All of it brought the final
curtain down on the kicking and screaming of my male self. I just wish he had
not been such a formidable opponent. On the other hand, his interaction kept the
bullies away from me for the most part and allowed me to get through the
military in one piece, so all was not bad.
The end result was, he never felt as if he was the most
natural person for me to be. That distinction always went to my feminine side
who never gave up winning my own gender war. She ended up just ignoring all the
kicking and screaming until it finally went away and the lack of extra noise in
my life was a welcome change.
