Transgender Doors

 

Image from Nathan Wright 
on UnSplash

Anyway you look at it, doors are meant to be opened. No matter how scary and difficult the door may appear, to try to see what is beyond it is a part of being human.

As a transgender woman or trans man we have many doors to go through to live as our authentic selves. The first door I remember distinctly was the one when I fought to free myself from the mirror and venture out into a feminine world. The entire process was scary and required maximum effort for me to succeed. Primarily I needed to always remember to keep trying, no matter what the circumstances. Along the way, many times, I needed to turn my tears of public failure into eventual success. 

Another door I needed to go through in the beginning was the fact I was going to have to succeed as a transgender woman on my own. My wife knew I was a transvestite or cross dresser but constantly remined me she never signed up to live with another woman. I understood and went about learning all I could about being a trans person on my own. To do it, I needed to do many things I am not proud of, then and now. Primarily, I was going out on her to be with another woman who turned out to be me. Sadly, I would go to any lengths to further my goal of exploring the world as a feminine person. 

As I began to see progress in my presentation as a transgender woman, it just so happened I found many more doors I needed to open and go through. First and foremost I needed to decide I was transgender and what the term meant to me. I needed to leave the transvestite term behind, as well as any idea I was anything more than a very serious cross dresser. Taking the whole process a step further, I had to face the one fact I had always secretly known about me, I wanted to do much more than just look like a woman. I had known for many years I had lost any attraction to just wearing the clothes and needed more. I also learned each door I had the courage to go through showed me how natural the process was for me. 

I learned also some doors opened easier than others. Basic communication with the world was an example of a very heavy and difficult door. First I needed to establish my own self confidence before I could even attempt to communicate with others. Especially other women. I learned to look strangers in the eye and not care if they thought I was transgender or not. Once I did, I needed to establish my new personality which involved opening a whole different door. I most certainly did not want to come off as an unfriendly or somehow evil person. After all, how many humans have the chance to rebuild another person from scratch. The pressure was on not to screw it up since I had such a wonderful knowledge of how both primary genders operate. I desperately wanted to be a person someone would want to know. 

Even though I found many doors I needed to open and negotiate, I loved the inherent excitement of gender discovery. No matter how heavy or how scary I managed to keep going forward to my goal of living full time as a transgender woman.

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.