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| My Trans Friend Racquel. |
During my male to female gender transition years, I always stressed to the max about my appearance as a transgender woman or cross dresser.
Every now and then, I go back into my very early blog posts to
see what I was fixated on and quickly noticed I was all about how I looked. In
those days, I thought being a woman was all about looks and beauty and I wanted
to overcome my testosterone poisoned body to achieve what I could.
The big test of my so-called beauty pageant was when I began
to free myself from the mirror and break out of my closet into the world. By
doing so, I found I had a lot of work to do if I was able to make it in the
world as a transfeminine person at all. My first big test was too present well
enough that the teen girls would not notice me and send me home in tears. During
that time, my makeup had to be just perfect, and I did not want to ruin my
mascara and carefully applied eyeliner by crying. Even when my makeup and hair
was done just right, I struggled to think I was anything close to being
beautiful. I just wanted to be presentable and live my new experience as a
transgender woman.
It wasn’t until my second wife began to call me the “Pretty,
pretty princess” when we fought about my cross-dressing desires, did I begin to
think about what she was really saying. Since she was an attractive but a no-nonsense
makeup woman, and she was my idol in so many ways, I tried to tone down my
makeup the best I could to please her. On occasion, she would even go out with
me as my feminine self, so I wanted to do the best I could to not embarrass her
or myself with how I looked. Of course, the problem continued to be I could not
get away with wearing no makeup like she did which led to more fighting.
Many years later, after she passed away, I began to build my
own feminine self from what I had learned about beauty and how it related to
other ciswomen around me. The first thing I did was becoming a better student of
women than I had ever been before. I needed to remove the male blinders I still
had to get a realistic view of the world I so desperately wanted to enter and
be a part of. I discovered I paid an inordinate amount of time admiring the
beautiful ciswomen I saw and not notice the vast majority of women who were
doing the best they could with the physical attributes they had to work with. An
example was, I was always worried about my height as a trans woman until I
began to notice plenty of other tall successful women in the world I was in.
I became less of the “princess” and more of the trans
feminine person who was just trying to blend in an survive. It was about this
time when Racquel, a trans woman friend of mine told me I passed out of sheer
will-power. My willpower took me into a world of lesbian women when hers took a
different path into facial operations and men. I guess, in our own ways we were
successful transitioning into the world at large with her as a tall, slim
beauty and me on a completely different level socializing at lesbian mixers
with my friends. By doing so, I learned valuable lifetime lessons on how to
live my life without the validation of men at all. If they liked me fine, and
if they didn’t (which most did not) that was fine too. Afterall, I was not the
ideal girl to being brought home to see the family for the holidays.
Years later, after I met my wife Liz and we became serious,
it was difficult enough for me to meet her family for the holidays. Her dad was
an extremely right-wing gun rights supporter, and her brother never talked so I
did not know what they thought about me. I will never know, since dad passed
away years ago and her brother lives south of Cincinnati in Louisville, Kentucky.
All I know is, I was extremely ill at ease during holidays with the family.
Now, all I know is that I present well as being old with non-age-appropriate
long hair. I can’t do anything about my age and love my hair, so it is not
going anywhere. Perhaps I am making up for all the years I had to have my hair
cut short in my youth and military days.
As with all other ciswomen, over the years, I have learned
to work with what I have been given physically. I was extremely fortunate to
have found people who accepted me for who I am as I presented as myself out of
sheer willpower.
