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| Image from Milada Vigerova on UnSplash. |
As any of you transgender women or transgender men already know, it’s time for you to buckle up for a rough and bumpy ride along the way. To coin a term used in Ohio commercials, “Buckle up, It’s the Law”. To which I added, it is the transgender law.
It all begins early in life when we learn we have gender
issues to work out of. Then we must go through the cruel reality which fully sends us into masculine bodies we wanted nothing to do with. Or the
opposite for trans men. In my case, I had no need for all the muscles, angles
and hair my body was adding, but there they were and I had to buckle up for a
lifetime of sometimes unpleasant experiences.
Adding to the problems, many of will not survive puberty as
femininized boys or masculine girls but at least the “tomboy” label can get
girls by. When they want to play with the boys, which is frowned upon if you
are a boy wanting to play with the girls. In my case, I remember Christmas when
I wanted a baby doll and received a BB Gun instead. Hear I was stuck in a life
I never wanted. I had to buckle down to change it more than anything else I
ever wanted to do.
Not being a feminine boy worked wonders for me as a boy
around the bullies at school but was a difficult pill to swallow during my
early days of trying to look like a pretty girl in the mirror at home. Back
then, I could have never imagined all the work I would have to put in to shake
my male external image. It would be so much more than just learning to apply
cosmetics correctly or finding a feminine wardrobe which would fit me.
What I started to do was take better care of my skin by
using good moisteners I could sneak past my wife and then started a crash diet
in which I used to buy better fitting clothes in the thrift stores I was haunting,
looking for bargains. It worked because I began to be able to present more
effectively in the shopping malls I was going to. Which I never thought I could
earlier when I was laughed out of them. By then, society was changing or I was because
the teen girls who used to harass me began to leave me alone. But only when I
was able to femininize myself to the point of almost blending in with the rest
of the ciswomen I encountered. I considered it step one to achieve if I was
ever able to make it to my goal of being a functional transfeminine person. Or,
I had to at least look the part the best I could. It turned out that was going
to be the easy part for me and I had better buckle up for what was coming up
ahead for me.
Step two it turned out was going to be the longest step I
would have to take, as I finally entered the world as a trans woman and started
working for my future. Following several false starts and in-advised adventures.
By ill-advised, I mean the nights I was asked to leave several redneck venues I
went to just to see if I could. I did not make it and got asked to leave, which
I did with no incident as I continued to settle into a life I respected, and it
respected me as I began to carve out a new existence. The only way I did make
it through this step was to consider every failure as a learning experience to
never try again. I was fortunate that several of my experiences turned out to be
potentially dangerous situations that a ciswoman would know from experience to
try to stay away from. Such as dark city streets late at night and huge
cross-dresser toxic admirers in small hallways at a party I was at.
During stage two, it would have been certainly better to
learn from what ciswomen told me than trying to find out for myself. It was all
part of my effort to see if I really wanted to step aside from all the male privileges
I had learned and start all over across the gender border to find out if the grass
was greener on the feminine side. Which is what stage three would teach me, as
I had to buckle up for the first time in my life for circumstances beyond my
control such as death and dying around me. For some reason, I had always thought
I would be the first to die because of the destructive lifestyle I was leading
but I was very wrong.
Death and dying meant that my wife of twenty-five years
along with four close friends all would pass away ahead of me with a short two-to-three-year
span. Knocking me into a deep depression, and a battle with loneliness. I had
gone from being a very shy person in my early life to being a very social one
and I did not want to go back. But the problem was, I had never had an easy time
making friends with other men as a man, how would I ever do it as a woman. The
answer was quite easy when I began to live it. I found I naturally interacted
with women much easier once I was playing in their sandbox, and I became very
social again. Which in turn brought out more of my feminine self but first, I
had to summon the courage to buckle up and put myself out into the world.
It all worked for me and took me to stage four in my life.
The stage where all my challenges seemed to disappear temporally. Many times,
life still caught up with me, and I had to do my best to stifle my old male urges.
But them again there were still many parts of my male life I needed to bring
with me. I could not live for half a century without doing so. I guess you
could compare my stage four to a giant-sized kitchen mixer when I needed
desperately to turn out a quality product.
It was certainly never easy to buckle down and live a
radical new life as a transgender woman for me. It was especially difficult to
do since I was very much an easy-going person and learning about a new life was
an interesting experience. If I was going to give any advice, I would say expect
a dose of the worst and embrace the doses of the other. One way or another buckle
up for your new life.
