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| Christopher Morley 1974 movie Freebie and the Bean. |
In a continuation of yesterday’s post in many ways, today’s post is about how I grew weary of looking over my shoulder as a transgender woman.
Looking back, all I can remember from the earliest days I
had cross-dressing in front of the mirror were the all too brief moments of
gender euphoria I experienced and the all too numerous times I spent looking
over my shoulder to see if anyone was going to catch me. Then life as I knew it
would be ruined. To stop this from happening, I became very good at hiding my
clothes and makeup away from the prying eyes of my slightly younger brother and
the rest of my family. I even resorted to hiding a small amount of clothes,
makeup and a mirror in a trash bag in a hollowed-out tree in the woods next to
our house in the country. Even with all of this hiding, I still found myself
spending a lot of time looking over my shoulder.
Somehow, I thought when I grew older, I would conquer all my
gender issues, and they would magically disappear, but they just grew with me.
The better I became applying makeup and selecting feminine clothes, the more I
wanted to do. Like a dog chasing its tail, the more success I had led me to
want to do more in the public’s eye. Sadly, as I grew into my high school and precollege
years, I was still stuck in the same old routine of dressing at home, hiding
from my family and looking over my shoulder. The only relief I remember was the
night friends and I went to a high school carnival and one of the male students
was parading around dressed as a pretty girl. I was fascinated but again was looking
over my shoulder to make sure none of my friends noticed how interested I was.
Which was exactly how I felt when I saw the movie “Freebie
and the Bean” in 1974. I did not know it or had never heard of actor “Christopher
Morley” who was an accomplished female impersonator. He had a part in the movie
which I found amazing because he was so believable as a woman. As with the
student cross dressed as a pretty girl, when I saw Morley, I needed to look
over my shoulder at my friends to see if they noticed my newfound interest in
the film we were watching. I guess I was pretty good at hiding my interest
because nobody ever said anything about it.
Moving forward, there were the early cross-dressing days
when I was still trying to perfect my everyday presentation as a transgender
woman. I constantly worried about someone sneaking up behind me and pulling off
my ill-fitting wig. What would I do then? Put it back on or just pick the wig
up and run out the door. Fortunately, I never had to find out when I figured it
was my inner female paranoia talking to me that I was not looking good enough
to pass her standards yet.
By this time, looking over my shoulder became a habit. There
was a time when my second wife and I moved to a small town in southern Ohio to
run a new restaurant there. In order to suppress all my cross-dressing desires,
I started to do the grocery shopping as a woman then go ahead and do a little lite
shopping for myself. One day when I was blissfully doing my thing as a
transfeminine person, I unexpectedly ran straight into my wife’s boss doing his
errands. As bad luck would have it, my wife and I were invited that weekend to
a small party at her boss’s house and I needed to really look over my shoulder when
I heard him mention to my wife about the “big woman” he had seen in a store.
Rightfully so, I was always guilty until proven innocent with my wife and she
turned directly to stare the look of death at me. It took me weeks of denial to
finally live it down.
Denial, lying and other mistruths became a way of life for
me with my wife before she passed away after twenty-five years of marriage. The
only thing I am proud of is that I did manage a full out purge six months
before she died. To prevent any backsliding, I even grew a beard. Needless to
say, I was miserable during this time but nothing like I was going to live through
later.
After all the tragedy I went through during this time, I
finally had enough of looking over my shoulder for decades and decided to follow
my instincts and come out to the world as a transgender woman. Not spending all
that time and effort was completely refreshing and allowed me to totally
concentrate on my new life as a trans woman.
