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| Image from Brett Jordan on UnSplash. |
As I traveled up my very long gender path with all its stop signs, I realized there were no awards for just participating coming my way. In fact, just the opposite was true.
Every time I was able to cross dress in front of the family
mirror and not get caught, I experienced major gender euphoria but no awards
because I knew I would just have to go back to my boring male life which I
wanted no part of. Since my feminine self was deeply hidden from the world,
there were no awards when I mastered a certain make up look or did not run my
panty hose. On the other hand, I could expect some sort of gratitude when I achieved
good results as a boy. I hated the total imbalance of the system I needed to
live under with no available choices coming my way soon.
It wasn’t until much later in life did, I began to
experience any participation awards at all. In the very beginning after trips
to the big malls I was going to, even on the nights I was laughed at and
scorned for my appearance, I felt at least I had tried and needed to go back to
my cross-dressing drawing board to come up with ideas about what I was doing
wrong. After setting aside my stubborn ideas of trying to dress sexy like a
teenaged girl, and dressing age appropriate I was able to blend in with the ciswomen
around me and not cause any undue attention to myself. I gave myself a bigger
reward when I reached that major milestone in my life back then as a part-time
cross-dresser.
Then, I became frustrated because it seemed the awards began
to become harder and harder to come by as I started to overachieve as a
transfeminine person seeing the world for the first time. Those were the days
of trying to overcome a portion of my guilt for sneaking out of the house
dressed as me by trying to do things which helped the household such as grocery
shopping or better yet, trying to find my wife a garden gift at one of the
nearby antique malls I went to. She was a huge gardener, and I thought an
occasional gift would please her but probably pleased me more because it helped
soothe my guilty conscience and gave me an imaginary award to put up on my mantle.
I wish I could say I had a lot of awards, but they were very difficult to come
by. Plus, my collection would be destroyed every time my wife caught me out of
the house, and I became discouraged and decided to purge all my feminine
belongings only to have to start all over again. Until I realized purging was
fruitless and my desire to be a woman ran too deeply than just having the clothes,
shoes and wigs that I had collected.
Overtime, with all the purges I attempted, I became better
at keeping key items of my wardrobe I would need if (ha-ha) the urge to be a trans
woman hit me again. I was not the sharpest tack in the box and still had not
realized being trans was apart of me and would never just go away.
In the meantime, I continued to go out at night in the world
and collect my participation awards as I learned what it really meant to be
myself. To do so I needed to leave the gay bars behind that I was frequenting
where they only thought I was a drag queen and try out the real world for a
change where at the least I could be accepted as a woman from a different past.
To do so, I needed to hitch up my big girl panties and do a deep, scary dive
into the world I wanted so desperately to be in. I was growing increasingly tired
of living a lie as a man and wanted out. In the beginning, I still took what I
thought was the easy way out. By going to venues, I frequented often as a man
and had wondered how it would be to live it as a transgender woman. It also
helped that I was able to see how single women were treated in the straight places
I was considering going. The last thing I wanted to do was to feel unwanted or
afraid being a single woman in a venue full of couples.
After much thought and caution, I tossed my misgivings aside
and considered what was the worst that could happen. My frail ego would be destroyed,
and all my participation awards would be destroyed was my first thought. Then, I
relied on all my new-found confidence as a transgender woman to succeed at my
first big moves in straight venues in the world around me. To my amazement, I
was treated well in my new world, and no one laughed at me or treated me with disrespect
as I left my unwanted male privileges behind to learn what all the female
privileges were all about.
I learned immediately one of the benefits was just being treated
nicer. Even to the point where I was invited to staff girls’ nights out when the
bartenders were concerned, I was lonely. Which I was. Better yet, one bartender
set me up with her single lesbian mom whom I remain friends with to this day.
Ten years later. There would have been no way that I could have made friends as
easy as I did as a woman than I ever did as a man. A major reward for all the
years of work I had put into succeeding on my gender path to my dream.
Another major reward I have received over the years comes
from all your comments and feedback to my experiences. Originally, the idea was
to write a blog (before I even knew what was one) to help others with similar
gender differences so they could learn from them. Thanks to you, the idea has
grown way past my expectations.
Thank you!
