That Missing Something

 

Image from Alexander Grey
on UnSplash

Throughout my life it seemed there was always something missing. No matter how big or small the occasion was, I was never satisfied.

For the longest time I blamed my parents because of the way I was raised. Nothing was ever good enough for either of them. If I managed an "A" in any subject I studied should have somehow earned an "A+". So it was easy to blame my parents for everything. After I began to think about it years later, another idea began to be considered.

What if all those years later I was missing a key ingredient and that was gender. My excuse is it took so long for me to come to terms with the fact I was a transgender woman. Perhaps it was the reason I could never be completely satisfied with anything I was doing. An example would be the professional baseball games I was asked to go to by one of the companies I worked for. Here I was enjoying the game with other managers and I was busily admiring the beautiful women I saw and wishing I was them. A huge part of my life was missing and I couldn't totally enjoy anything because of it. I wish I could get back just a portion of the time I waisted dwelling on my gender issues.

Finally I was able to transition fully enough that I was able to not spend all my time admiring other women. Through experience I was able to understand what they went through to appear the way they did and furthermore no cis-woman was secure in her looks completely anyway. Women lead a multi layered existence and it most certainly takes awhile to learn all of the layers. Proving once again we transgender women have every right in the world to call ourselves "women". We just became from pursuing a different journey than those women who were born female. That extremely negative female you may know possibly missed a step or two in her development to cause her to react to the world the way she does.  She could be jealous of your trans-femininity. 

As we go through life, most certainly it is impossible not to miss out on many possibilities. It turned out to be impossible for me to experience the life of the girls I was so jealous of when I was growing up. They were developing the curves I wanted while all I was getting was hard angles in my body. It took me years plus the addition of hormone placement therapy to develop curves of my own. 

It turns out, the missing something in my life was my gender. When I finally began to live more and more as a transgender woman, I was able to figure it out. By the time I did, I couldn't do anything about the time I lost but I could take the opportunity to grow into the woman I always wanted (or should have) been. When I did, my entire life was more complete and the missing something just went away.

 

Gender Side Effects

 

Liz on Left from the 
Jessie Hart Archives

When a human being attempts to cross the gender frontier to live a life as their authentic selves, they naturally undergo many side effects. 

Perhaps the biggest side effect is just having to live as the gender you had always dreamed of living. Quickly you find the grass isn't always greener when you transition. My primary examples include when I suddenly lost a part of my intelligence when I started my life as a transgender woman and when I found out the hard way my personal security most certainly wasn't the same. The entire process most certainly was an eye opening experience. All of a sudden, I was more than the "pretty, pretty princess" my wife called me, I was discovering how a woman really lived. 

Other side effects came when I began to live more and more as my feminine self. Gender discoveries were coming fast and furious and were often as terrifying as they were exciting. My male self did not want to give up all the white male privileges he had won in the world. It seemed just the time he could have been situated to enjoy the positives of his labors, it was all taken away because he decided to live as a transgender woman. Side effects for my male self were all negative. 

When I was able to step back and view the entire gender trnasition experience as a whole, the biggest side effect was the entire process felt so natural. When I was having any of the self doubts concerning moving forward in my transition, deep down inside my feminine soul told me to just keep going and everything would be alright. I just needed to learn my own way how difficult the process would be. It seemed every layer of womanhood I learned would just be scratching the surface of what I needed to learn. How was I ever going to be able communicate with the world as my new self and would I ever be accepted to being able to play in the girl's sandbox as an equal. Just two of the burning questions I was facing day to day as I considered reaching for my dream.

Another huge side effect was the time it was taking me to move forward in the world. For every step forward I felt good about, the were two steps back I needed to worry about. Examples included, what was I going to do about a very non approving spouse and how could I ever live without the fairly high paying job I had worked so hard to obtain. As it turned out, biding my time while I learned more about what being a woman was all about turned out to be a good side effect because I was more prepared when the time came to actually begin my life as a full time transgender woman. By the time my transition fully happened, I don't think I had ever prepared better for anything in my life and I was in my early sixties at the time.

Now I can safely say, the final side effect for me was a positive experience. By transitioning I have been able to live out a lifetime dream and never looked back. 

Destiny as a Transgender Person

 

Image from Abbas Tehrani 

Throughout our lives transgender women as well as trans men suffer from everything from intense anxiety to full out gender dysphoria. 

Along the way we never consider none of being transgender was ever our fault. We were destined to be this way. Also, history tells us transgender people have been around since the beginning of time, so no whatever pressures society in some areas put upon us will not work. The transgender tribe will find a way to survive. How is the question for many of us locked in our dark and very lonely gender closets. If you are similar to me, I started by hiding my cross dressing from the world and then slowly expanding out into the world. Slowly but surely I was leaving my old boring male life behind as I was following my life's destinies. 

I can't say much of the process was ever easy because I was so entrenched in attempting to live a macho male life. Through it all, I kept trying to refine my femininity until I finally was able to blend in and exist in the world as a transgender woman. 

What I never factored in my life I was facing was I never had a choice to begin with. Every now and then, I write about the possibility of my Mom being on the "DES"" medication which was routinely prescribed to mothers who had the problem of poor pregnancies' which often resulted in mis-carriages and still births. My Mom suffered through three still births before I came along.  My research into "DES" says it was a synthetic form of estrogen which was later banned because it caused cancer in young girls and women. In addition, the medication was prescribed between 1940 and 1971 and I was born in 1949.  So, the question remains for transgender women is was the extra estrogen prescribed to our mothers while we were in her womb contribute to our gender issues later in life.   

As my life went by, I was fortunate in that I was able to barely satisfy my desires to explore the world as a transgender woman . Even when I reached the suicidal depths I suffered, a little voice kept telling me to keep trying and learning because everything was going to be alright. And it was. 

All of a sudden, the years of gender rejection turned around. Often for all the worst reasons. Within a couple years time nearly all of my small group of friends passed away including my second wife of twenty five years. By this time, I was mostly alone in the world as I was faced with rebuilding my life. The negative was I had to do it at all but the positive was I could do it as my long neglected feminine self. She seized the opportunity and never looked back.  In addition, she was helped along by the new acceptance of VA (Veterans Administration) of transgender veterans. All of a sudden I had access to relatively inexpensive care for my hormone replacement therapy. 

It seemed all the long closed gender doors were opening for me. Destiny was calling and all I needed to do was seize the opportunity. I couldn't believe it was all finally happening.