Once I Started

 

From the Jessie Hart
Collection...The Ohio State
Student Union

I discovered quite early in life my gender identity was in flux. From the first time I felt the allure of feminine clothes to the first time I glanced at my girl self in the mirror, I knew I could never go back. In the classic feelings  of if I knew then what I knew now, I would have saved myself a ton of gender angst and unrest. Primarily I would have understood why the gender euphoria I experienced when I dressed as a girl was so fleeting. Before I knew it, I was back to my same old struggle to be everything male. I know now all of these feelings were the very beginnings of my desire to look more than like a girl. I wanted to be a girl. Long before the term was even invented I was transgender.

If I was wise enough to write down my deepest secret somewhere and hide it away, I am sure I would have told my future self to relax and enjoy the trip because in the end I would have no choice. No matter how hard he tried, my feminine self would in the end win and I would end up living full time as a transgender woman. Of course there was no possible way I could know all the twists and turns my gender journey would take me. My younger self would have known I would experience transitions in the middle of living in a major transition itself. My primary go to example is when I was living as a very serious cross dresser, I decided to transition again. This time to hormone replacement therapy and into a transgender life. There was no way my early self could predict what she was really asking for. She wanted me to uproot all the hard earned, unwanted gains I had achieved in the male world and finally realize they were all for not. Once I started I should have realized I should have fought harder to let my inner feminine self win and get on with living a better life. 

The major problem I would experience was all of the male gifts I experienced as I lived life as a guy. The biggest gift I experienced was the birth of my daughter who I love deeply to this day and she has been behind my transition since I told her tentatively years ago. I consider the whole experience as I said as the pinnacle of my life as most of the other so called accomplishments were rather shallow, such as success in my working world. 

My fondest hope I should have ever asked for was the wisdom of knowing my dominate gender was female in nature and even though trying to change it nearly killed me, I could never change who I truly was. The whole process was nearly miraculous in how a new wonderful feminine world was opened to me.  Once my she was given the chance, she quickly took over and established herself . Once I started my transition early in life it was a long project but one which was worth it in the long haul.

Transgender Survivors versus Victims

 

Image from Jen Theodore 
on Unsplash

There is a huge difference between being a survivor in life than a victim. Perhaps an over simplification of the two is a survivor takes what is given to them, lives with it and in the end result make it all better.  On the other hand, a victim becomes a martyr in their own mind and is slow to make improvements. It is very easy for a transgender woman or trans man to be a victim. After all, why were we "chosen" to live such a difficult life. Often it takes years to realize we are not victims after all. For some reason we were given the opportunity to explore two sides of the binary gender spectrum. 

By years I mean the struggle we go through to just fit into a society which seems increasingly hostile against us. I went through some of it yesterday when I was running my errands.  My first stop was at the Post Office where I stopped to mail one of Liz's (my wife) packages which contained her handmade beaded jewelry she makes. I could only describe the woman at USPS behind the counter as older and somewhat bewildered with her meeting a transgender woman probably for the first time. But, since it was the weekend of  Transgender Day of Visibility, it was a good as time as any to be exposed to the real world. In a matter of seconds I dropped off Liz's package for it's trip to California and the clerk turned her attention to her next postal patron. 

Ironically, on my way back home, I needed to stop and reward myself for all the errands I attended to. So I stopped at a coffee shop drive through for a special coffee brew. One for each of us. As I pulled up to the window at the drive through, I was waited up by a cute, tattooed obviously young queer girl who was very nice. Perhaps she noticed we were distant cousins on the LGBTQA spectrum. To keep the line moving, I quickly paid and exchanged pleasantries with her and was on my way. Looking back, she reminded me of my transgender grandchild. I left with the hope she has a bright future of life ahead of her.

So, in the matter of two stops I had seen both ends of the public gender spectrum. One bewildered older person and one friendly energetic queer person. By now you may be wondering what all this has to do with victims versus trans survivors. I learned long ago, I couldn't run and hide if I was ever able to progress in the world as my authentic feminine self. I needed to overcome all the nights of coming home crying after being laughed at or stared at in public. I think being a survivor to me was when I came to the realization if I could never be mistaken totally for a cis-woman, I could still live a life as an out fulltime transgender woman. I wish I could tell you where I came up with the strength to be a survivor rather than staying home and feeling sorry for myself. Perhaps my best trans girlfriend at the time said I passed out of sheer willpower. I believe it was because deep down I felt what I was doing was right and felt so natural. Just to be able to go out and free myself from my gender closet encouraged me to not be a victim. Perhaps for the first time in my life. 

The urge turned out to be so strong for me to live as a woman, I was able to overcome the false idea that women have an easier life than men. When in realty, the opposite happened. I learned a cis woman's life was a many layered often difficult existence and I wanted to learn more and more. As I did I became more of a survivor than I ever thought I could ever be as I lost all of my male privileges. No more could I expect to be respected because of my white older maleness and be called the hated and unwanted "Sir" word. I needed to start all over again in a feminine foreign world and prove once and for all I was a survivor versus a victim. Now we all need to be survivors to battle all the gender bigots seeking to erase us. Perhaps now more than ever before.    

Girls, Girls, Girls

Image Courtesy 
Motley Crue

This morning following a quick trip to the post office, I happened to hear the group Motley Crue sing their song "Girls, Girls Girls".  Hearing it always takes me back to experiences with girls I had when I was growing up. I would say my formative years but then I think I am still in my formative years in many ways during my senior years. 

I grew up outside of a small to medium sized town in a pre-suburban rural area where there were relatively fewer children in the neighborhood. As I remember, only around six and only one of them was a girl. It was definitely a male dominated structure including our family lives. There would be no discussion at all of the possibility of not wanting to be a boy at all. The problem I had was I had very few feminine role models to interact with in my own peer group. Since I was exceedingly shy, my gender issues which I was becoming increasingly aware of became even worse. Much of the problem was I was too isolated from girls and watched them from afar. 

Since I did live in a rural area, the school I went to was small also. In fact I went there from Kindergarten through the ninth grade with basically the same students which meant the same girls. When I hit the eighth grade and puberty began to set in, more and more I began to realize I didn't just want to socialize with the girls, I wanted to be one of them. I remember vividly how a few of the girls would wear their mini skirts, cross their legs and tease all the boys who wanted to admire them. I so wanted to be like them.

Little did I know, the older I became, the stronger my desire to be a woman would be. As I was a disk jockey for many events, I wondered how it would be to be a female groupie for one of the major musical groups they followed.  I was really triggered when my second wife and I went to one of the many Jimmy Buffett party/concerts we went to in Cincinnati. Of course there were tons of scantily dressed attractive women to look at. Even though I was a "Parrot Head "and loved the music, I couldn't get over how much I wanted to attend and look just like one of the attractive women I was admiring. As I did many times back in those days, I just tried to drink my feelings away to no avail.

Sadly, these days, "Jimmy Buffett" still comes to Cincinnati for a fun riverside concert but even though I could go now as a transgender woman, it would be very difficult due to my problems walking any distance at all. It seems my desire to be among the  "girls girls girls" in a big party situation will have to wait for another lifetime.  In the meantime, I can still listen to the song with the satisfaction I made it to my goal of living as a transgender woman.