Are You Man Enough

Part three of my transgender coming of age post revolves around the toughest part of my life.

Backtracking just a bit, to the point when I discovered there were more than just one type of cross dresser. It was the most enlightening point when I went to my first "mixers." As I wrote before there were everybody from macho crossdressers to wonderfully feminine creatures. Of course, cliques were formed in the overall group. Basically, the more feminine group went out and partied after the meeting while the others stayed in the hotel.

Very quickly I determined I was going to tag along with the group which went out and partied. Ironically I didn't quite fit in with most of them either.  They were basically the "mean girls" of the group. So I did my best to look like them without acting like them. My biggest moment came the night about four of us went to a late night tavern and to the surprise of everyone a guy tried to pick me up and not them.

While all of this was exciting, it tended to make my life so much worse on a day to day basis. It was difficult to wait until the next experience. I began to wonder if I could exist full time as a transgender woman. Plus, what really happened was I took all of my frustrations out on my wife.

She was supportive of me being a cross dresser to a point. But drew the line when I went too far. Tremendous battles followed. Both of us valued the relationship too much to give it up without a fight.

One of the biggest fights came after the time I was mistaken for a cis woman when I went to a mixer in New York. After the fight, my wife came up with one of the most profound statements of my life:

"Why don't you be man enough to be a woman."  Naturally, I was floored. She had built up to the moment by telling me several times I would "make" a terrible woman. It took me years to understand she was right. On some occasions I could approximate what a woman looked like but was far removed from understanding what being feminine was all about.

After all, females are born but women are a learned societal deal.

What happened next was the gender dysphoria pressure was increasing so much I started to go out beyond the agreed to parameters of our relationship. I was allowed three days a week to go out as a girl. When my wife got a job which included working some nights...I was out the door close to the time that she was. So, on certain weeks (depending on my schedule) I could be out five days out of seven for a few hours a day.

Again, all this did was increase the internal pressure on me. Finally to the point when I took a whole bottle of pills one night. Obviously, they didn't kill me, so I decided on taking a different approach. I grew a beard.

Included is the hated "before" transition picture.

I was very unhappy and it was about this time several personal disasters occurred for me. I lost three very close personal friends in a two year period before the biggest shock of all. My wife died unexpectedly from a sudden heart attack.

I was lost. But from all the turmoil gradually came the idea I was free to be the real me. I was under Veteran's Administration health care and it was about that time the VA announced it would cover hormone replacement therapy. Unbelievably, all the doors seemed to open for me. I was even old enough to semi retire and not have to find a job I had to transition on.

My moral to the story is a life can change in an instant. I am a prime example. 

Welcome to Hell

As I continue my Cyrsti's Condo post from yesterday, the best place to pick up the story is when I was honorably discharged from the Army. All of the sudden I had this incredible sense of freedom.

As in all freedom's though, this one carried a price. It all started with the naive notion I could continue to come out to others as a transvestite (the common term for a cross dresser) in the mid 1970's. As I have written about several times, I was soundly rejected by my Mom and from there mostly headed back into my closet.

By "mostly" I meant, only my wife really knew anything about my cross dressing desires except for a few Halloween adventures when perhaps I looked a little too accomplished as a woman in front of a few of my friends. Amazingly though my normal macho exterior I worked so hard for carried the day.

As you can probably guess, the yearly Halloween adventure and dressing up at home behind closed doors wasn't nearly enough. The formula was fairly simple. The more I cross dressed the better I became at it and then I felt more and more natural which led to more gender confusion.

Virginia Prince 1940

About that time I learned of Virginia Prince and her Transvestia Magazine. I quickly learned I was not alone and I felt it was time to meet others like me. I also found there were mixers going on within driving distance of me.

As I attended the mixers, I learned quickly there were layers of different people. All the way from the cross dressers who were desperately trying to hold on to their masculinity by smoking big cigars in drag all the way to impossibly feminine figures.  This created yet another quandary for me. Where did I fit in?

I was far removed from most of the macho cross dressers but was curiously attracted to the fabulous feminine creatures. Of course at that time (and in many instances still do) I ended up in a middle niche I carved out for myself.

The problem this all created for me was it caused me more extreme gender dysphoria pressure. My answer was increasing my alcohol consumption, getting a divorce, losing a business and moving from Ohio to the New York City area. In other words, I was out of control...sort of. Out of the chaos came another marriage to a woman who knew of my cross dressing desires and who I was destined to be married to for twenty five years. She passed away quite unexpectedly from a heart attack at the age of 50.

The problem with all of this was, slowly I was coming to grips with the fact I was probably more of a new term I was learning more about. Could it be I was transgender? 

Being transgender meant all kinds of potential problems and changes.

The pressure became so intense it led me to try to commit suicide.

More on that in my next post.

It's Not a Choice!

One of the most frequent questions I used to get when I met a stranger was, when did I know I was transgender.

After many years of fumbling around with the answer, the most correct one finally came to me...I have always been this way.

Now, having said that, certainly there were milestones in my life I could look back on which confirmed my gender dysphoria. 

As a youth, for some reason I never gave much thought to why I wanted dolls for Christmas instead of BB guns. I also didn't really know why my attraction to girls in school seemed to be different than most of the other boys.

I don't remember acting on any of my cross dressing or girlish desires until I was ten or twelve. In fact, I had a paper route which I used the money from to primarily buy feminine clothes and makeup. When I did, I could stay out of my Mom's wardrobe and makeup. All I had to do was find a good way to hide my stash.

As I grew more accomplished during my high school years, I was also able to keep the bullies away by playing sports, working on cars and dating the occasional girl. All of which just seemed to widen my internal gender gap.

Very soon out of high school (in college) it looked as if the Vietnam War would make a major influence in my life. As it turned out I was drafted out of college and had to face the problem of not being able to do anything about my gender issues for three years. For you purists, I enlisted for three years to be able to better choose my Army job.  As it turned out a good choice when I landed a job in the American Forces Radio and Television Service.

Why was that important you ask? Because my job landed me in one of the least military areas in the Army. Thanks to that and a Halloween party in Germany, I was able to dress as a woman and eventually come out as a transvestite for the first time to my friends and future wife.

For awhile I thought I had won the lottery as some of my gender pressure was dialed back. As it turned out though, the true struggles were just beginning.

I will get into those in the next post as well as explaining how fighting my gender dysphoria nearly killed me.

It took me years to learn it was never a choice.