During my life, I have spent an inordinate time admiring the ciswomen around me. Among many other things, when I was a kid, I envied the girls with their long hair and pretty dresses and wondered why not me.
Image from Brett Jordan
on UnSplash.
The reason of course was that I was caught being a male in a very male dominated family and I could not get out. The closest I came was sneaking off to cross-dress in front of the hallway mirror in the house I grew up in. As I looked around, I knew it was going to be a long drawn out process for me to ever escape the male curse I had been given without asking.
Sadly, before I got to the “why not” gender phase of my life, I needed to go through the victim phase first. At the time, I kept thinking I was the poor, poor, pitiful me for wanting to be a girl and certainly I was the only boy in the world who wanted to do it. It became a comfortable place for me to be, and it took some time to work my way out of it with absolutely no help. Left alone to its own thoughts, my head developed new ways to deal with my frustrations by building bridges I could not climb…yet. Before I could climb them, I needed to stop building and begin climbing to places I had never been before.
In the pre-internet days, transgender role models were very difficult to come by and for the longest time, I had none. It was not until I finally broke out of my dark gender closet and made my way to “Tri-Ess” socials for cross-dressers and transgender women. When I went, I was looking for friends on the same level as I with my cross-dressing or role models to help me get to the next level. If I was fortunate to find a role model, I needed to soak up as much knowledge as I could about what it took for them to get to the place, I possibly wanted to be. There would be no more pitiful me, I needed to put my shyness aside and do it. When I tried, I found that the whole process was not as easy as I thought it would be.
The first thing I discovered was I did not fit in with many of the cross-dressers and I gravitated towards the more accomplished transgender women who attended. The group was equally as difficult to be a part of because some were mean and acted like the old “A” list girls in high school. Which did me no good at all if I was ever going to learn anything at all about climbing the gender ladder to the next level.
About that time was when destiny and pure courage set in to help me. At one of the socials, the group provided two professional makeup artists to help any interested people on their makeup skills. To do it, I stepped up, removed all my makeup and essentially said, here I am, fix me. I got the male artist, and he was really good at explaining what he was doing as he transformed me into the prettiest me, I had ever seen. Finally, I had reached a stage in my presentation where I could attempt to be admitted into the “A” girl's sorority (without the meanness). I looked so good that when we went out after the mixer to a couple of bars to continue the evening. I was initiated when a man in one of the bars tried to pick me up and not them. Much to their surprise.
After my ego rush calmed down, the next thing that happened was that I began to be invited to smaller, more diverse parties much closer to home. At the parties, I could expect to meet a wide variety of people from impossibly feminine transgender women to lesbians to men looking for cross-dressers. All I wanted was to know the transgender women better so I could learn their story and figure out if I could take the same path. I was determining if my why not me was indeed possible. I found out that although all their paths were different from mine, my gender dream was still a possibility. If I followed the right paths to do it. I did not have the fancy pensions and insurance to fall back on for gender realignment surgeries (or facial feminization surgeries) either, so I would have to transition out of sheer will power. If I was ever going to find the true me, I would have to make do with what I had.
It then became clear to me that in order to see if the true me was going to survive in the world, I would leave the mixers and gay/lesbian venues behind me and try out the real world. It was only then that I decided to try the best I could to live the life I envied so much when I viewed ciswomen everywhere. It meant taking off all the old male tags of my lifetime worth of baggage and replacing them with female tags. It also meant planning ahead to when I could donate all my male clothes away to the thrift stores and plan to to determine how I would dress everyday as a woman. Not just for special occasions when I went out. It was a good thing I had hoped and planned for this moment for so long as I moaned “Why not me!”
As the gender euphoria began to fade again for me, the reality of living life everyday as a transgender woman set in. In a surprisingly short amount of time, everything settled down into a new routine I had only ever dreamed of. I even had a growing support system of ciswomen around me to help me along when I needed it, but for the most part I did not since I had planned my whole life for this moment.
Hey you! Thanks for joining in with my experience in life. Comments are always appreciated!
