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| Image from UnSplash |
Throughout life, I found many dots I needed to connect to save my life as I knew it.
The first dots were the ones I had to connect to live at all. They were the ones which connected me into an unwanted male world. As I mentioned in yesterday's post I was born into a heavy male dominated family where competition between the men in the family was a given. My Dad had two brothers who were always in a friendly battle for which one had the best job, house etc. My best guess is my only brother and I carried the competition to our own level by playing sports. All this time, I secretly would have been happy playing with the girls in the neighborhood but naturally never had the chance.
Those days, I had fewer gender dots to connect since my main cross dressing activity was with the full length hall way mirror. I was able to hide my deepest gender dreams away and happily dress as a girl when ever I had the opportunity. When I did, I compared it to playing one of the old mechanical pinball machines. As I viewed myself in the mirror, it was like I hit the one thousand point bumper in the machine and gender euphoria swept in.
The older I became and the more sophisticated my cross dressing world became, the more dots I needed to connect to survive in the gender complex world I was in. As I progressed, the mirror wasn't good enough for me and I wanted to try more dots. Those were the exciting days of going to transvestite mixers in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. Those mixers really showed me all of the potential dots I could connect with to live my life. Was I gay, or a cross dresser, or transsexual or transgender? So many questions to ponder and answer. For once, the mixers showed me other examples of choices I could possibly have.
Ironically, the military service I had provided me three years to pause my connection of dots to try to figure out which direction I was going to go. When I was discharged, I knew deep down I was transgender but was afraid to lose all that I had worked so hard to accomplish as my male self. Through out my relatively short life, I had acquired two college degrees, an honorable service discharge and fathered a daughter. All before I was twenty five. I had connected many dots except for the largest ones which concerned my gender.
Finally, as I treaded water through the years, I took the leap of faith and connected my final gender dots. Possibly the biggest dot was being approved for gender affirming hormones. When I did connect, a whole new world opened for me.
Now of course, as I approach three quarters of a century in this world, (75 years) , I wonder how many other dots will I have to connect to make it to the finish line.
