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| Yin and Yang from Gabriel Vasiliu on UnSplash. |
You might ask why I would write a post explaining why I was in such a hurry to transition into my womanhood when it took me nearly fifty years to come out of my gender shell. I finally discovered I was in a classic war between my yin and yang personalities.
Today, I am writing to explain the two forces I faced as I
decided when and how to transition. My own personal yin and yang of gender. I
guess it doesn’t matter which of the two forces I had to deal with, or if my
yin side was feminine and my yang side was masculine because both were prominent
parts of my life. Yang flourished because he had to early in my life and yin did
the same when she finally had a chance to live and exist. I found this description
from “Wikipedia” which backs up my theory:
“In Chinese creation
theory, the universe develops out of a primary chaos of
primordial qi or material energy, organized into the cycles of yin
and yang, force and motion leading to form and matter. "Yin" is
retractive, passive, contractive and receptive in nature in a contrasting
relationship to "yang" that is repelling, active, expansive and
repulsive.” It described me completely.
Yin and yang caught me chasing my tail as I would run back
to the mirror as quickly as I could to put on a dress, make-up, and convince
myself how pretty I was. It was yang’s primary form of escaping any potentially
troublesome situations. As I always explain, coming to terms with all of this caused
great torment, and now I wished I had someone to at least discuss it with
except the one good therapist I was fortunate to be placed with at the Veterans’
Administration in Dayton, Ohio. She was understanding and even had a basic
understanding of the LGBTQ community, so I did not have to educate her at all.
However, we did not ever get into the clash of my yin and yang genders. On the
plus side of our therapy, she never tried to equate any of my bi-polar depression
issues with my need to express my yin side of myself.
Ironically, I think my yang side was very active and
expansive in pushing my yin into the world. He provided the life lessons I
needed to get out and push my gender envelope by learning new things. Without
him, the initial exploratory trips to the regular venues I established myself
in as a novice transgender woman would have never happened. So many nights I
sat in my car for what seemed like forever before I summoned my courage to go
inside.
On the other hand, it was yang who did his best to ensure
his male world would never be taken away and he made a strong, experienced adversary.
The problem became was how I was ever going to join my yin and yang together and
form hopefully a good transfeminine person. The answer was I never had to
really give up all the life which yang brought to the table. It turned out, I
still was able to follow my love of sports, all the way to keeping my sexuality
when lesbians took over my life. Altogether the entire process of joining my
yin and yang proved to be easier than I thought. I just needed the courage to
do it.
It would be too easy to say all transgender women and
transgender men suffer from yin and yang gender problems, but the idea may go
along way towards explaining what we feel to an outsider. It is far out of my
pay grade to predict what anyone may do when confronted with such complex gender
problems a trans person has. In fact, when I go back to “Wikipedia”, it even
mentions gender in this form:
“When pertaining to human gender, yin is associated to more
rounded feminine characteristics and Yang as sharp and masculine traits”.
I don’t know about you, but the whole definition works for
me, and I wonder why it has taken me so long to stumble upon it in my research.
In some ways, yin and yang reinforces my idea that transgender people deserve a
special place in the world. Not one of scorn and discrimination. Maybe the
average person just needs to know more about us on a regular basis and not what
they hear from politicians. But they can’t even govern well enough to keep our
government open, so I can’t see much chance of that anytime soon.
