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| Image from Priscilla du Preeze on UnSplash |
These days you may think finding any sort of happiness as a transgender woman or trans man may be impossible but it is not.
Take this morning for me as an example. As I was getting dressed and viewed my bare thighs before I put on my pants, I had forgotten how nice it is to view their increasingly femininized form thanks to the use of gender affirming hormones. In other words, I have developed my own hips, finally following years of hormonal usage. In many ways I took the slow cautious route when I started down the medical transition path on the advice of my doctor. He advised me to take minimum dosages until we could judge the effects on my body.
At the age of sixty, my body took to the new feminine hormones wonderfully and naturally. Soon I was put on higher doses of HRT and bigger changes began to take place rather quickly. I had set up a semblance of a timetable of when I wanted to shed all my male clothes and live fulltime as a woman but it turned out the timetable was a waste of time. What happened was I became very androgynous looking in a very short period of time. While I was developing an increasingly noticeable set of breasts, my skin began to soften which in turn softened the lines of my face. So much so that anyone who knew me from before would notice the difference.
Even though I was shocked at the rapid exterior transformation of my body, the whole process felt so exciting and natural I could not wait to do more and more as I accessed my new transgender womanhood. It all meant setting up new plans and timetables on who I was going to tell and when. By this time in my life I had outlived most of my family and close friends, so telling many people was not going to become a problem. I had even retired so I did not have to worry about transitioning at a job. All of this left me with two main people to come out to. My only daughter and only slightly younger brother.
I knew at the time, I had a better chance of succeeding at telling my daughter the truth about me than my brother. My daughter was much more liberal while my brother's in-laws were right wing Baptists and I figured he would sell me out to appease them. It turned out I was right on both accounts. I found my happy place when my daughter totally accepted me and was down when my brother did not. I took my fifty fifty win/loss record and moved on.
To this day my happy place continues with my daughter and her extended family. In fact, my wife Liz and I just accepted an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at my daughter's Mother-in-Law's house which makes up for the decade long snub from my brother.
As the holidays approach, I hope all of you can find a happy place to celebrate with family, blood relation or not. In the transgender community, often we find the best family in non traditional situations. It is a wonderful time of the year to discover or re-discover a new happy place for yourself.
