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| Image from Nicholas COMTE on UnSplash |
Looking back at my long (50 year) gender journey, I wonder now how I became so deadly serious as I considered myself more than a casual cross dresser.
I came a long way from just experimenting with my mom’s
clothing to where I am today. As I live fulltime as a transgender woman. Many
days, if I have the time to even think about it, I wonder how I went about
connecting my dots during my travel from the male to female gender. But, before
I go any farther, I should mention two things. First of all, I have nothing
against cross dressers, as I spent too many years being one to attempt to put
myself up on any sort of gender pedestal. Secondly, I don’t consider myself a
female in the strictest sense of the word. That is why you might notice I use
the transgender or transfeminine word more frequently. In addition, I strongly
feel the woman word (and man) are both socialized terms as many females or
males never make it to being true women or men. Now, since I got all of that out
of the way, what does that have to do with being deadly serious about anything.
Not much, but I always like to clear the air.
In my life, I can only remember being deadly serious about
two things, the first was following an often-vague path to my own version of
womanhood and the other was Army basic training. In the Army, your secondary
MOS or job classification is infantry which means I received the same training
as everyone else who were going to Vietnam for a very uncertain future. So, the
bottom line was, I took my military training deadly seriously. Just in case I
needed it later. Fortunately, I never did. Naturally, pursuing my feminine path
was destined to be just the opposite.
It seemed, the more I tried to do as a novice cross dresser
or transgender woman, the more I wanted to do. I forced myself away from the
easy gender experiences I was trying, into a true interaction with the world
and my challenges became much more serious but not quite to the deadly stage. I
think the reason was, I was still experimenting with people as strangers. Not like
somebody I would see more than once. I was naïve and thought people would not remember
me for what I was, a man in drag or a dress. When other people began to see me repeatedly
it was good for both of us because I needed to up my presentation game and quit
changing wigs every time I went out. To succeed in the new world I was
creating, people needed to see I was deadly serious about being accepted in the
new mainstream venues I was going to when I gave up on going to the gay venues
I tried.
More importantly, I lived through all the bumps and bruises
I suffered as I silently fought back against the gender bigots I faced. Some of
which were not so silent as I attempted to enter the so-called women only
spaces such as restrooms. One night, I was called a pervert by an irate cisgender
woman before I backed her down. She was the one I had to threaten with LGBTQ sanctions
on her business if she did not leave me alone. Which she did.
The more comfortable I became in my transgender world, the
more deadly serious I became about doing more. Soon I was to the point where I
was like a runaway train heading down a one-way track as my manhood was coming
to an end. One of the final acts of severing what was left of him came when I was
approved for and started gender affirming hormones or HRT. My body took to the new
hormones flawlessly to the point when I wondered why I hadn’t been on them all
along.
The reason was relatively simple, as the changes from the
HRT would preclude me from going back to the male life I had worked so hard to
establish. Would I be deadly serious enough to risk all I had built up such as
a long-term marriage, a family and friends plus a very good job which I could
have never transitioned on.
Finally, after years of introspection, I made the decision
to go as far as I could without surgery into a transgender life. With all I had
to lose at the age of sixty, I decided “playtime” was over, and it was time to
be deadly serious again and never look back as I had reached my dream of living
in a transfeminine world.
