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| Image from Erik Mclean on UnSplash. |
Even though many of us share similar paths to our dreams of
becoming successful transgender women or transgender men, often our paths
diverge and we end up going different directions.
Most of us start out on our own without the help
of an
understanding sister or mother and must fill out our gender workbooks as we go
along. There is no one to tell us what to wear or how to act in our younger
years as a cross-dresser. We just know we have conflicting ideas on what we are
doing. On one hand, we cannot wait to put on the pretty dresses we found that
still fit us, but on the other hand, we felt guilty doing it. It was somehow
taking away what was left of our fragile masculinity.
At that point, most of us were willing to sacrifice that masculinity
for the intensely intoxicating appeal of looking at ourselves as pretty girls,
especially before puberty got ahold of us and testosterone poisoning set in. We
all know what happened then, our bodies grew angles instead of the curves we
admired on the girls around us and life would never be the same again. From
that point forward, many of our paths seem to diverge. Over the years, I have
heard from several readers who put down their urges to be feminine with no
problems until much later in life. While others followed a more focused
stairstep path which meant meeting and learning from other cross-dressers or
transgender women searching for their true meaning to life. I know when I first
discovered there were others like me who shared gender issues and I could go
meet them; there were many layers of people who attended the socials. Anyone from
cigar smoking men in dresses still going overboard to preserve their
masculinity to completely femininized transsexual women whose next stop was
gender surgeries.
It was then that I began to see and appreciate the different
layers of the gender community I was seeing in person for the first time. I
could almost compare it to the amazing number of cosmetics I saw the first time
I went shopping with my own money to buy my own. The entire idea of going to a
mixer of my peers did not work for me at all. I became more confused about where
I fit in on the gender spectrum than when I started. I knew I was much more
than a part-time cross-dresser but was not committed enough to consider complicated
and expensive gender realignment surgeries which were still fairly rare back in
those days. The direction I decided to take was one of experimentation which I
found set me apart from many of the other gender conflicted individuals I had
met.
I certainly would not recommend the direction I took because
it involved a certain amount of risk and way too much alcohol in the mostly gay
venues I initially was going to. What happened was, I used the fake courage of
the alcohol to allow me to take ill advised chances in places I should not have
been as a single woman. Especially a transgender one. I was fortunate when I
escaped unharmed in a couple of situations I should have never found myself in
as I was dressed way to provocatively for where I was going and one time in
particular found myself having to be bailed out by my second wife who had
warned me ahead of time about my mini-dress being way to short. I attracted the
unwanted attention of a cross-dresser admirer who was huge and had me trapped
in a small hallway with nowhere to go when my wife grew curious and came in
time to rescue me. Believe me, it took me a long time to live that incident down
with her.
Even when I became a regular in the big public straight sports
bars I was going to, I would not recommend my methods of establishing a path to
gender freedom as a trans woman. Being a single woman in a public place can
sometimes be dangerous to the point where you don’t see many ciswomen do it.
They always bring a friend or two for safety which it took me awhile to finally
come to the point where I could do it too. My only recommendation is to act
like you have a friend coming to join you by acting as if you are talking to
them on a cell phone, or “save” a seat next to you with your coat if it is wintertime.
Better yet, you can solve the problem completely by sitting at a dining room table,
but what fun is that?
Another way to attempt to find companionship is through the
use of social media. I tried that too and had to sort through a tremendous
amount of trash before I hit the jackpot with the person who turned out to be
my third wife Liz. Unbelievably, she contacted me on a social media site which
I was listing under woman seeking woman. Better yet, it turned out we were
within driving distance of each other and began to correspond until I became
brave enough to talk to her on the phone. I was so ashamed of my voice to do
it. I finally jumped off the deep end and had success as we started to date. That
was over twelve years ago and we married and are going strong I am happy to say.
I see and hear from so many transgender curious people who
are on the gender edge in their life with no evident way out. My only recommendation
is that at some point you need to take chances if you ever want answers in your
life. The only certainty is if you do nothing, nothing will happen. I’m sure I
don’t have to tell you that you do have to be careful though with all the
scammers out there these days and all the negative people you may encounter if
you decide to go public. With the political arena and anti-transgender laws
which are being passed in many states such as my native Ohio.
No path is right and who is to say, your path is not right
for you even if you decide to stay in your closet which is safe and not risk giving
up things such as spouse, family, friends and employment. Maybe you can experiment
too as you discover which path is right for you. As I said, be careful of the
stop signs and bumps ahead.
