The Essence of Being Transgender

 

Go Buckeyes! Image from the
Ohio State Union...

It is very difficult to explain to another person why you are a transgender woman or trans man. 

I can only compare it to why a cis-woman just knows she is a feminine person. To just say I was born this way is a huge over simplification. To begin with just being assigned female or male at birth does not necessarily guarantee you will ever make it to being a woman or a man. Many people just don't for whatever reason. Perhaps you have encountered a person or two (or several) in your life who never seemed to grasp the ideals of their supposed gender. In most cases, they became unhappy and unfulfilled people. 

Transgender people have it harder since we were forced into boxes we did not want to be in. Or, the old square peg into the square hole status. First we trans individuals had to figure out what our problem was then try to have an idea what to do about it. In most cases we had to come out fighting to claim our limited space in society.

In many cases we faced other women who pushed back on our transgender essence...even trans women who wanted to say you were not trans enough to be included in their little clubs. These women were not unlike other cis-women (natural born females) who resisted our inclusion into their worlds. These transphobes or TERF's did and can attempt to make life miserable for unsuspecting transgender women. I have never figured out what their true problem was or is. I faced it head on one night at a lesbian Valentine's Day dance Liz and I went to. A lesbian came up to me and rudely asked what my "real" name was and was very nasty before she finally gave up and went her own way.

I have never figured out why other women would not want to be more inclusive of us and broaden their population base. Especially with all the attacks women are facing on all sides in politics and with personal safety. I write often how quickly I learned what could happen when my personal safety male privilege was taken away. I was cornered by a huge man at a party and had to be rescued by my second wife one night and then much later was stopped by two men when I was alone at night outside a gay bar in an a dark, lonely urban setting. I learned quickly never to be alone again in those situations. 

I guess the problem of explaining essence is because it is so vague. It has always been so difficult to tell others I have always known I am transgender simply because I was. I am as much as a woman as anyone else. I just had to take a different path to arrive at my goal of jumping from an unwanted male life to a fulltime feminine one. 

If they don't listen or can't understand, it is their problem. Not mine.

Gender Pilgrimage

 

Gender Pilgrim Troye Sivan

At the age of seventy four I often look back at my life and wonder how I was able to navigate the ups and downs of a gender pilgrimage. 

The way I have been able to separate my path is to roughly divide it into three segments which over simplifies the process but at the same time, makes it easier for my noggin to grasp. 

The first and most foggy time of my gender life was my early childhood. I don't remember exactly when I had a concrete idea of wanting to be a girl. I finally came to the conclusion it was around the age of ten. It was about this time when I started to explore the delights of feminine clothing from my Mom's wardrobe. From then on I started to save my allowance money as well the meager funds I earned from delivering newspapers to the rural customers we lived around. I had a powerful motivation to earn my own money and purchase makeup or clothes depending on what I could afford. 

The whole process set me firmly up for a nearly half century of cross dressing. As you can guess I had plenty of time to try different things while I experimented more and more deeply with being a woman and leaving my male life and privileges behind. I write often how I went about meeting other transvestites for the first time all the way to being approached by men. I was on cloud nine for weeks following an adventure I had after being made over by a professional at a cross dresser mixer I went to. Afterwards when I tagged along with the group I called the "A" listers, in a bar we ended up at, I was the only one approached by a guy who wanted me to stay and have a drink with him. The entire evening validated my desire to be a woman more often and at the same time made me hell to live with.

Sadly, I was destined to live this way for years, twenty five to be exact as I punished my wife for how I felt. I drank too much and tried to outrun my gender problems by changing jobs and moving to different states such as New York from our native Ohio. Instead of making my pilgrimage easier, I was attempting to make it ever harder. It almost killed me in the process as my mental health declined. The ripping and tearing of living between the two primary binary genders was just too much. I had to decide which way to go and made the choice to live in the future as a transgender woman. The problem was I was in my early sixties when I decided to leave my cross dresser phase and begin HRT or hormone replacement therapy. 

Of course now I am in the third phase of my gender pilgrimage and feel so relieved to having left all the turmoil of my male life behind. I know I did not make the wrong choice because I feel so natural with my life now. Out of an extreme level of caution, I certainly did well but on the other hand, I don't regret the male life I was able to live. Among other things, he gave me a wonderful accepting daughter and helped open the door to a relationship which led to a marriage to my wife Liz. 

I look at it this way, I was fortunate to have earned a dual gender citizenship by living on both sides of the border. An often long and difficult pilgrimage made it all possible.    

The Light

Image from Junior
Ferriero on UnSplash

 
Sadly, most transgender women or trans men experience complete darkness in their gender closet before they are able to come out and explore the world.

Of course in the pre-internet period, gender information was very difficult to come by and it wasn't until pioneers such as Virginia Prince came around did printed material begin to surface on a regular basis. As well as the so called transvestite mixers which began to crop up in other areas except the East coast. For those of us in the Midwest and other places, finding and meeting other like minded cross dressers seemed to be the impossible dream. The light in the gender closet was dim to say the least. 

Perhaps the worst part of seeing the light was determining exactly what it was. Could it be a beneficial beginning to escaping the severe gender dysphoria I was facing, or was it merely the light of a train rolling uncontrollably towards me. At any point of time, discovery of my feminine desires could lead to severe consequences to the male life I had worked so hard to survive in. It took me years and even decades to figure out the light wasn't the train. Partly because of all the time I wasn't sure it wasn't the train.

Those were the dark days of my gender despair. The days of venturing out in the public's eye only to be laughed at and rejected which led to ill-advised "purges" of my feminine wardrobe. Somehow, deep down, I knew the "purge" would only last a few days and the fleeting freedom I felt wouldn't last. I was right and before long, my desire to rebuild a feminine wardrobe and wear it became strong again. This time I wanted to climb on board the train and ride it to a new found transgender freedom, away from my old male self.  Rather than the light at the end of the tunnel being a negative, I deeply wanted to turn it into a positive.

It was approximately this time of my life, in my thirties and early forties, when I met others whom I could identify with as far as my gender struggles went. I found I didn't have to drive far to Columbus, Ohio for small mixers with a diverse group of people ranging from cross dresser admirers all the way to transsexuals. All of the sudden, the light became a beacon on what my life could become if I worked on it hard enough. I found achieving my possible goal of living a feminine life meant so much more than just appearances. My second wife kept pounding on me to be more and I took a long time to realize what she was saying. Surviving as a trans woman would mean learning to live a new multi-layered life.

Even though I had made it a huge priority to study women all my life, I needed to use the light to take my studies to another level. Think of it this way, I was pursuing a new masters program in gender before I could put the male past behind me and move forward.

Finally I arrived at a point where my closet door had opened widely and my long hidden feminine self was able to take over. She was able to take over the light and enable it to be so much brighter.