 |
| Summer image from the Archives. |
Are gender issues a want or a need.
Initially I know I thought being a girl was a want, rather than a dream. During one of my classic if I had known then what I know now phases, all I knew was I loved my cross dressed image in the mirror and could not wait to see her again and again. The worst part is I could find no outside information on my gender issues. Mainly because deep down I knew I wanted to do more than look like a girl, I wanted to be a girl. Those were the pre-internet dark ages, well before the transgender label was even used. Perhaps, had I had access to gender information I would have known the way I felt went way past being a cross dresser or a transvestite, as we were known in those days.
In my mind, the separation between a gender want or need was I could enjoy cross dressing for awhile when I wanted to but wanted to be feminine because I needed to. Sadly, it took me years to figure out what was going on. I went ahead playing the same old male role I disliked so much as I tried to be accepted into a macho male world without becoming a toxic man. Naturally, it was a difficult game to play and wrecked havoc with how I treated the world. My gender issues and how I dealt with them made me so frustrated and mean, I even lost jobs because of them.
As the information age caught up to me, I began to understand I was not alone in the world any longer and there was even a label for my gender questioning. It was called transgender and it explained why I had never quite felt at home when I started to explore the cross dresser mixers I went to. Most certainly I knew I met a diverse mix of people. Including some of whom were headed for gender realignment surgery. To go that extent went way past being a want and into being a need. Especially if you were going to all the pain and expense to solve the gender problem they may have had. Even though I was intrigued by the transsexuals as they were called then, I knew somehow I quite did not fit it into their world. The same as I felt for the majority of the cross dressers attempting to express their femininity the best they could. I was stuck in the middle again.
I made the best of it by trying my best to research both sides of the spectrum I was observing. At the same time, I was doing my best to improve my femininization presentation so I could observe closer the transsexuals to see if their path could be mine. My biggest deterrents to following the TS route was my second wife who I loved very much and not having the insurance coverage to complete all the expensive surgeries. What I did have was the need to make a gender change. It had long since gone way past being a simple want. By doing so, I put myself into a gender pressure cooker which took me many years to release the pressure and escape.
Even still, the pressure release was not immediate and took me many years of exploration to accomplish. So many days and nights of being lonely and searching for my identity as a transgender woman finally came around to help me.
I was able to learn my gender issues were so much more than a want because I never had a choice. They were a need I had to survive.
