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| Photo from the Jessie Hart Collection |
Relax, this is not another post about food. Following my post called "Cake" I almost went searching through out the kitchen looking for baking supplies to augment my non existent baking skills. This post on the other hand, concerns the gender sweet spot we encounter when we finally are able to align our inner feminine gender selves with the exterior we show to the public.
As we all know, attacking the problem of presenting a respectful exterior self to the public as a brand new gender is very difficult. We face all sorts of issues from the lack of peer pressure to having (or acquiring) a knowledge of clothing and makeup In other words, we had no mothers, sisters or girlfriends to provide feedback on our journey to public womanhood. Through it all the pressures of maintaining some sort of a male existence while at the same time trying our best to express true womanhood seemed to be an impossible task.
For those of us left literally alone on the gender frontier, often the mirror became our only friend. The problem was the mirror only showed us what we wanted to see. Not what the public was seeing in reality. The process led me to suffer tough love when I tried too many fashion statements. To put it mildly, they were ill fated and led to public rejections. The extra pressure of trying to disguise my testosterone poisoned male body was intense. Following more failures than successes , I finally found what I was searching for... a chance to live my life as my authentic self. The basic lesson I learned was when I began to dress for other women and stopped dressing for my outdated ideas of what men thought women should look like.
What my new path set in motion was a chance to live a life I had only previously just dreamed of. Even though I had set my new life in motion, it turned out I still had a ways to go before I found my sweet spot where my internal and external feminine genders aligned. I knew I was coming close to alignment when gender euphoria set in for any number of reasons. Primarily, one of the main changes I went through was when I was forced into communicating with the public as a transgender woman. To more than a few women I knew I was a curiosity but it was all good because we were learning from each other. They had a chance to learn why a man would want to join their "club". On the other hand, I had the opportunity to learn from the women how it was to communicate one on one with another woman.
The more I was able to explore finding my sweet spot, the more I knew I could never go back to my old male self. Even though I knew it was a certainty I could not go back, I still stubbornly held on to my past. For what ever the reason, it finally felt as if I was jumping off some sort of a gender cliff. I was on a very slippery slope until I hit the very edge and I let go. I was fortunate in that I had friends to catch me when I landed. All were women and I can never thank them enough. The whole process was similar to going to some sort of a finishing school.
Locating my gender sweet spot was a lifelong journey and was often very difficult. Deep down I knew the process was something I just had to do and it all became worth it.
