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| Image from Max Anderson on UnSplash. |
Stepping out into the real world and leaving my closet and mirror for the first time was difficult for me. For lack of a better term, I was leaving everything I worked for in my male life behind.
As much as I hated my dark, lonely gender closet, I found it
to be a safe place to be when I needed it the most. My ability to put on a
dress and makeup soothed my soul, if only on a temporary basis helped until I
needed to take another high heeled step into the real world where I so desperately
wanted to be. To put it mildly I was scared to death when all my male
privileges I had worked so hard to learn were stripped away and I was starting
all over again. It was different when I could not rely on a menacing facial expression
or an occasional bluster to get me by.
Stepping out into a new feminine world for me meant I needed
to immediately begin to work on building a new personality which would grow
with me as I worked my way towards my dream goal of living fulltime as a
transgender woman. This was the same period of time that I was obsessed by my feminine
appearance, so I had a lot on my mind. As I struggled day to day about what
gender I was going to be. All too soon, life meant so much more to me than
buying a new dress or skirt all the way to how I needed to change my old male
movements when I wore them.
As I was forced by being in the public’s eye, I needed to understand
exactly what I was getting myself into. So much more than the pretty clothes
that I saw the girls around me wearing. If I needed to be more like them, I had
miles to go on my gender path to get there. All I knew was at that time, most
of the ciswomen I encountered were nice to me. Every little bit helped me learn
what my future could be like if I kept stepping out and away from my old male
past. Plus, problems kept occurring with my second wife and my male self who
saw the changes in me as a threat to their future lives. My second wife saw her
husband slipping away and my male self-saw his whole future gone if what I was
doing continued.
Through it all, I was able to establish myself as some-sort
of a successful cross-dresser before I transitioned into a transgender woman
one fateful night when I thought enough was enough and I had to do more to continue
up my gender path. Before I became lost entirely and had to reassess where I
was. What I learned was that I was actually further along towards my transfeminine
goal than I thought I was. I learned the hard way when I was able to be
successful when I went out for the first time to enjoy a drink with a group of
ciswomen from a nearby mall who just would go out and socialize after work. It
was something I always had wanted to do as a transwoman, and I was amazingly accepted
into their circle. I guess you could say that night I really stepped away from
my old male self and loved it.
Before I knew it, my new shiny shoes (flats this time) were
stuck in gender quicksand as I had stepped into a place that I never wanted to
get out of. One thing was for sure, if anyone came along with a rope trying to
rescue me, I would have turned them down. I was having too much fun challenging
the world as my new transgender self to ever turn around and go back to a
boring life as a man that I had stepped away from.
Sure, there were still many times that either I was scared
to death of where I was going or was out and out rejected by the world, but
those times were getting fewer and fewer apart. I was headed towards my dream
goal which was slowly coming into focus as a doable project. I say project
because I had never attempted such a thing as jumping the gender border to
slide behind the gender curtain in my life. When I finally accomplished my goal
of being allowed to exist in so-called women only spaces, I certainly was not
going to give up all that I had earned.
By this time my second wife had passed away, and my old male
self was seeing the writing on the wall, and his days were numbered too. Which
left me all alone to make my key life choices. Still after much thought and
consideration, I finally gave in totally to my feminine side, and I set out to
build a different yet better life with my new ciswomen lesbian friends. All of
them helped me round out and refine the woman I always wanted to be. Most of
the work I had already put in, so I did not have that far to go. Mainly the
only place I needed to go was with my dealings with men. Even that turned out
to be relatively easy because most men left me alone because I was not
attractive enough or just wanted me as some sort of a fetish object. All my
problems went away when my lesbian friends taught me I did not need a man to be
validated anyhow.
As stepping out as a transgender woman in the world became
natural to me, a whole new universe of life came alive for me. Especially when
I was approved for my long-term dream of starting HRT or gender affirming hormones.
Something that my second wife always recoiled at the idea of, but on the other hand,
my current wife Liz loved. The essence of being on my hormones just carried
over into me stepping out into a new world with confidence I had never known
before.
