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| Image from Klara Khokhlova on UnSplash. |
Perhaps, similar to many of you, you have been described as selfish when you pursued your gender desires. I know, I was by my second wife as she told me many times my desire to be a pretty cross-dresser in my life was not all about me.
During this time of my life, sadly or not, all my spare
thoughts and time dedicated to my cross-dressing activities, so yes, it was all
about me. I did my best not to be that way, but I was failing miserably. Especially
when I figured it out, I could leave the house as me and do a portion of the
household chores such as grocery shopping. I figured by doing so,
I was helping my wife and at the same time helping myself.
The more proficient I became at doing my new portion of some
of the weekday household chores, the more I felt that nothing else mattered to
me than my quest to explore my inner femininity. Increasingly, I broke the
rules and made excuses to leave the house and explore the new, natural and
exciting world I was experiencing.
As years always do, mine flew by in a blur as I became more
proficient in perfecting my feminine appearance and it began to be more
apparent to me that the life as I was living as a man would have to be
sacrificed at some point if I wanted to pursue my dream goal of living as a
transfeminine person. That is when I began to fall back on my ill-fated male
habits of internalizing all my feminine feelings. Hoping that eventually, they would
just go away. Compliments of my latest purge of my cross-dressing belongings.
Very soon, it became evident that all the purging in the
world would not rid me of my deep-seated gender issues and nothing else began
to matter, not even the massive fights my second wife and I were having when she
caught me out of the house as myself. I would go to any extent possible to try
to mend the wounds from my breaking the promises not to ever go out again unattended,
all the way to promising I would go to a therapist in Columbus, Ohio who
specialized in gender care to attempt to solve my “problem.” Even then, I would
not listen to the therapist who told me that my gender issues were not a “problem”,
and there was nothing she could do about them. I made the mistake again of
thinking there was something radical I could do about how I was attempting to
live my life. I could keep trying to sneak out of the house and try to learn
more about my possibilities of living life as a transgender woman, while at the
same time continue to live with my wife. She always know I was a cross-dresser
but was completely dead set against me going any further towards being approved
for gender affirming hormones (HRT) and living as my authentic self.
Perhaps the biggest problem was I was not sure what my
authentic self really was. I knew I loved my second wife as much as the day I married
her years before, but I really was not sure of how deep my transgender issues were
going to run. Plus, all the research I was doing into a new life, jeopardized
my old life which at times was not so bad because I was accumulating all the male
privileges such as wife, family and job that I did not necessarily want to get
rid of. The whole situation just mentally tore me up as I did not know what gender
I was going to be from day to day. Was I going to try to be my true self or go
out into the world again and “act” like the strong man I was not.
It all led me to feeling completely detached from the world
and wanting to end it all because I felt so worthless to everybody. Fortunately,
after I hit rock bottom, I got help from a good therapist and was prescribed medications
which helped my on-going Bi-polar disorder and anxiety. It turned out my anxiety
was triggered in many ways by my gender issues so that was easier to solve, but
my depression was not so my new meds really helped. Giving credit to where
credit is due, my help came through the Veterans Administration health care
system and as luck would have it, I was teamed up with a therapist who knew
what she was doing when it came to depression and LGBTQ care.
By this time, my second wife had tragically passed away from
a major heart attack leaving me totally alone with my thoughts. Quickly, since
nothing else mattered, I took the path of least resistance into my own form of
womanhood. All those dues I was paying as a cross dresser working with my
appearance came back to help me when I could hit the ground running in my heels
(not really) and concentrate on rounding out my persona of the trans woman I
wanted to me in the world of alpha cis women around me. I was able to see and
learn from what they did to make their lives more fulfilling as women, and I
wanted to do that too. I was having fun while at the same time was secretly learning
everything I could from the ciswomen around me.
Most certainly, nothing else mattered when I sought out
approval for my gender affirming hormones from a doctor I found in an LGBTQ newspaper.
Along with the hormones, I was putting my new life together by legally changing
all the gender documents I could with the VA and in the civilian world. Very
soon, my old male life was in my past and my “dead” name faded away.
The only thing that did matter was building a new life with
my third wife Liz, a lesbian ciswoman who accepted me for what I was. I could
not let a second chance such as that pass me by.
