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| Image from Elana Korcheva on UnSplash. |
When we come close to completing a major portion of our gender recovery project as transgender women or transgender men, we suddenly learn we have more to do. It seems our work is never done.
In my case, my wife Liz and I were talking about the rare
chance I had to stop my previous life as an unhappy man and start all over as a
pleasant trans woman. As she wisely said, not many humans ever have the chance
to stop, start over and live their lives again. Then I began to think of all
the people I called “Trans-Nazi’s” who just gave off the vibes of being evil
people.
I first ran into them on an on-line site I found when I
first bought a home computer and started exploring cross-dresser or transgender
web sites. Back in those days, complete sex change or gender realignment surgeries
seemed to be rarer than they are today and those individuals who went through them
were expected to move on completely from their former male life and start all
over as a complete woman.
On the site, many of the transsexual women banded against
the cross dressers and even the newer transgender women for some sort of
supremacy simply because they had more operations than the other person. It did
not matter to them when someone such as myself pointed out that my gender was
always located between my ears, not between my legs. I was always placed in the
gender “pretender” crowd which never made me happy as I waded into the “discussions.”
As you can imagine, quite a few of the “discussions” grew quite heated behind
the screens of gender computer warriors. On occasion I wondered why we were
spending all this time and energy fighting each other when so many others in
the outside world wanted to attack us anyhow.
Once I made it away from my computer and into the twisted
reality of the old transvestite- transgender mixers that “Tri-Ess” and others
put on, I was able to meet some of the “Nazi’s” one on one and changed their
name to me as the “A-Lister’s”. They were the predecessors to the girls in the “Mean
Girl’s” movies and reminded me of some of the less than pleasant popular girls
who set themselves up on some sort of a pedestal when I was in high school. During
these social mixers of course, I was left out from being with the “A” girls
because I could not match their spectacular femininity. Again, I could not
understand why they decided to not bring the best of femininity with them
instead of the worst. But the result was that I just wanted to tag along when
they went to special gay venues after the regular activities were over and most
of the attendees had given up and returned to their rooms.
It turned out, once I got to know one of the “mean girls”,
she wasn’t so mean after all and I was invited to her restored home in nearby
Columbus, Ohio. She threw very small and diverse parties, and I learned a lot of
what I thought I wanted to do with my future as a transgender woman from her. Unlike
me, she was headed towards a complete gender realignment surgery, and through
our discussions she helped me to determine what the best path may be for me. In
her own way, she taught me to be gracious and giving in her femininity.
In other ways, her get-togethers were teachers for me. Such
as the time I was in danger of being sexually molested and over-powered by a
much bigger man who had attended the party as an admirer (and was only saved by
my wife after he cornered me in a narrow hallway.) Plus, the first time I found
I could be attracted to a lesbian and her with me on a night when my wife did
not attend with me. We ended up leaving the party early and going to a big
lesbian/gay venue, but it all ended there because I was married. The only
problem I had was being able to make it to all the parties I wanted to because I
had to work many weekend nights in the restaurant I was in.
Since I needed to make a living, I found other ways to spend
my increasingly beneficial time learning what my future may be like as a
transfeminine person. Even though I knew I would never be as attractive as my
unintended mentor, I needed to find out if I could still make it to my dream
goal of womanhood on my own terms. Too much was riding on my ultimate decision
not to research it totally. Which meant trying to establish myself as a new
person in straight venues I was used to. To my surprise, I was able to with relatively
no problems as most of the world did not care if I was trans or not.
More than anything else, during this time, I was trying to
rebuild myself into a person that never gave away any of her male past, unless
I was forced to like when I came out as the person, I always was to my
daughter, who accepted me and my only blood relation still alive (my brother)
who did not. Which resulted in an ugly breakup which on occasion I go into. The
easiest thing to say is that we have not interacted for over a decade now.
Through it all, I decided to listen to the person I trusted
the most, which was my wife Liz and try to build my new feminine life as close
as I could to my mentor (Michelle) so long ago in Columbus. I wanted to be a
kind and giving gracious woman. Who used her extra time in life to love and
cherish her new family and forget my largely toxic background.
I just had to take my extra time and make it as worthwhile
as possible.
