A Need or a Want

 

Image Courtesy Alexis Fauvet
on UnSplash

Beware, this post deals with semantics. Perhaps I should have put a "TW" or trigger warning in first. Semantics are difficult to deal with due to tendencies to paint problems or solutions with a broad stroke of a brush.

What I am getting to, is the question of being transgender  more of a need or a want. I have a tendency to think it is a need more than a want. Why? Because to me a want is more of a choice which anti transgender bigots who are trying to take our rights away often try to condemn us with. Down deep we transgender women and trans men know we never had a choice. Our lives were always destined to go down an often long and bumpy gender path to freedom. In other words, destiny equaled more of a need than a want.

As I look at the process, I can compare it also to the need to eat. Naturally we all have to eat to survive and that is exactly how I feel about my gender journey. The more I progressed down the path, the more I needed to keep going. Long ago in my journey did I stop thinking I was cross dressing simply because I wanted to. I learned the hard way I was so much more than a man who had an extra "hobby" which wasn't golf. Instead I was obsessed with the latest women's fashions and imagining how I would look in them. More and more, even though my wife knew I was a transvestite, I snuck away in our marriage. Essentially I was cheating on her with another woman who happened to be me. I always tried to live an honest life so lying to the one person I loved the most tore me up.

Through all the cheating I was doing, I never gave much thought to what was going on. Most certainly the whole gender process I was in was more of a need than a want. I needed to keep pursuing a feminine lifestyle which I had seen other transgender women around me try to do and were successful at doing. Watching and learning from them helped me to live a new life which was slowly but surely taking over my old unwanted male existence. No matter how I tried to tell myself I didn't want to be a fulltime woman and even with all the purges I went through, I kept coming back to the same place. I needed to live a feminine lifestyle.   

The rest of the story I write about often. My second wife tragically passed away from a major heart attack, leaving me so alone in the world. I was able to fall back to the other woman in my life who I needed also. My feminine strong soul took over and with the key help of several dear friends, I was able to undertake my key transition into a lifestyle I had only dreamed of. From there I never looked back. Secure in the fact my gender desires were more of a need than a want.

What I Intended to Be

Image from Jen Theodore
on UnSplash

Early on in my life, I was all in on pretending to be someone I thought I was not. (a girl) I was reinforced by all the lonely times I spent in front of an admiring mirror which was telling me I looked wonderful as a girl. All along, the mirror was just reinforcing what I was pretending to be. Feminine (or what I perceived it to be) dominated my free time thinking.  I wrote "what I perceived femininity to be" because as life went by and I acquired more experience cross dressing and/or being a transvestite. I was so protected back in those days, I didn't even have the time or access to really consider what either term meant. In either case, I discovered both were just labels anyhow.

The whole gender process I went through ended up taking me nearly a half a century to go through which sounds intimidating. The trip also was very laden with various ups and downs which I revisit frequently. I do it in the hope others who are considering such a venture can learn from my successes or failures. Similar to everything else in life, we have to learn from our failures and move on until we can finally experience the successes. I experienced more failures than successes before I finally  learned to present as well as I could as a woman in public. When I did, I needed to settle on one look and build my new self from it. 

From there I was able to move away from any thinking I was moving away from pretending and moving increasingly towards a life to be lived as it was intended to be. The main reason was the process felt so natural. Even though for the most part I was terrified to give up my old male life. Each step I took as a novice transgender woman proved I was on the right gender path. On the path I was able to carve out my own safe places to go to. I started out in gay venues. In which I quickly rejected for several reasons. The main one was I did not want to be mistaken for or treated as a drag queen. From that point I started to go to a few upscale bar/tavern venues similar to what I was used to managing in my restaurant days. I had one main positive going for me in that I knew the venues were primary revenue driven. And, if I did not cause any trouble and tipped well, I could survive if I did the best I could to dress to blend. I became a regular bar fly and was able to build from there. 

Again, the more I quit pretending to be a woman and started to believe I was one...transgender or not, the better I did. The new world I was in provided me many challenges to move forward into a feminine world I had only dreamed of. The whole process led me to quit pretending all together I was ever a male in the world and onward into a dream world of being a woman on my own terms. Sure I faced the haters who said I could never be a woman because I could never bear children to which I replied what about the cis women who for whatever reason can't have children either. For the most part, I never heard from them again.

As it turned out, life started all over for me once I made it to my early sixties and I was able to start all over and live my life as it was always intended to do.  

It's Complicated

 

Photo from the 
Jessie Hart Collection

Often I wonder why I chose such a difficult path in life. It all would have been so much easier if I had only followed the male journey which was set out for me. In other words, if I had been content to be the square peg fitting into the square hole would I have been happier.  Here I was stuck in a white world in a middle class family with all the expectations laid on me of a first born son. 

The problem was, for some unknown reason to me, I never had a choice. From the earliest age forward I always suffered from gender dysphoria. I just couldn't shake the fact I wanted so badly to be feminine. How much easier life would have been if I had accepted the male role I was thrown into without the uncertainty I faced if I had the courage to accept my true gender and build a new life. Compounding the problem was nothing changed when I became older, in fact things just became worse. The more I explored when I snuck out of my dark gender closet, the more I wanted to explore. The world just felt so much more natural when I was living as my feminine or transgender self. The more I explored and had to return to my increasingly unwanted male world, the more frustrated with life I became. Why was this happening to me.

What did happen was, when the pressure built to the point I couldn't handle it, I escaped to my secret feminine world which embraced me. The more I was embraced, of course the more I did not want to go back. The whole process caused me to dwell on the next time I could run to and escape the male world as a woman. When I was in what I call the "hell" times, I became mean and nasty and very difficult to live with. It became so bad, I even lost a job one time when I was being nasty to my crew. I often wish I had the time back when I was obsessing about being a woman as I was trying desperately to go forth and be a man.  How much farther could I have gone?

Again and again I am humored when I read someone who says all along I had a choice to be transgender and live with all the hell I lived with as I followed my path. I was driven hard to be a successful man as a father and a provider and gave it all up when I transitioned. The whole process was unbelievably complicated and stressful. Perhaps the worst part was I didn't completely understand what I was going through. The only thing which was obvious, come hell or high water, I needed to go through it. All I know is when I gave up all my hard earned male privileges to live a full time life as a transgender woman, I did the right thing. The ripping and tearing of my two genders fighting for supremacy just destroyed whatever life I was still trying to live. 

What I didn't understand was how complicated life would be as a transgender woman. I needed to look the part first, then learn all the nuances of a gender which is certainly the most complex of the two binary genders. Male and female. Just communicating with other women as an equal took me a long time to learn. Plus playing in a world built around passive aggression left me scarred on many occasions before I began to understand exactly where the claws were coming from. It was complicated but I was able to learn as it didn't take long for my long hidden female self to gain total control. 

It was my favorite time of my life. As I love to put it, I gained my right to play in the girls' sandbox.