Transgender Lables

 

Hunter Schaefer at the Oscars.

Spoiler alert, this post contains unfortunate stereotypes. 

The subject I am attempting to write about is about what actress Hunter Shafer said recently. I paraphrase but essentially she said she had turned down many transgender acting roles because she did not want to be stereotyped as a transgender actress in the future. She wants to be known as a woman only. 

In the first place, we all should be as fortunate as Shafer is to possess as much passing privilege as she has. I am sure in any situation, no one is saying "Hey! That's a guy," 

Now, that is the easy part of the post. Secondly, does she have any responsibility to the rest of the transgender world to keep the trans part of her name?  No she doesn't but the whole idea of exactly who is a woman was brought up again in the public's eye. In my case, I have always thought achieving the title of woman is a matter of socialization in life. Just being born female doesn't guarantee a person will ever make it into womanhood. The same goes for birthing children. My second wife never gave birth but in itself, that did not make her less of a woman. To be fair, many males never grow into being men either. Often becoming the toxic males we read so much about.

Then, there is the subject of gender surgeries. It used to be, some transsexual women looked down on all of us who did not have any surgeries at all. Viewing any and all transgender women as little more than glorified cross dressers or transvestites. At the time, as I was exploring what I wanted to do with my gender life, I saw no problem with fitting into their stereotype, even though I resented it and thought it was wrong. As the years went by, I resisted giving up all my male privilege I worked so hard to obtain and had no gender related surgeries at all. If it makes me less of a transgender woman in some people's eyes, so be it. I was still able to navigate the world as a feminine person, or, as my trans friend Racquel said I passed out of sheer willpower.

Of course I don't know Hunter Shafer but I respect her opinion to be referred to as only a woman, not as a transgender woman. After all, who would not want the same privilege after waking up in the morning and looking like her? On the other hand, there are zillions of women who don't have the same passing privilege's as she does and Hunter has been able to bring into some sort of focus what being a woman is all about. 

As we all walk our gender journeys, we have to come to our own conclusions concerning womanhood or manhood if you are a trans man. It is certainly more than how we look or what restroom we use. It involves life itself. For the sake of discussion, I hope Hunter Schafer's next acting role is of a so called cis-woman, she has paid her dues. 

Sadly being transgender will always be a weight we all will have to carry throughout our lives no matter how we look or how many surgeries we have undertaken. Personally, I don't need an actress to inspire me to be a woman instead of a transgender woman. I have made the decision for myself. I am just me. Looks don't make a transgender person. Your soul does. 

Doing the Heavy Lifting as a Transgender Woman

My wife Liz on left
from the Jessie Hart
Archives

 Even as a young novice cross dresser, on occasion I felt I was doing the heavy lifting as far as looking the best I could in front of the mirror.

Little did I know, the real heavy lifting was still to come if I ever wanted to achieve my dream of living a fulltime transgender life as a woman. All I knew at the time was I wanted to mimic all the girls  around me in their colorful, pretty clothes and fashions. I never considered how complex a woman's life really was and how much more I would have to learn before I could gain my chance to fully play in the girls' sandbox. 

During my life, at least two opportunities to grow as a transgender woman came quicker than expected. The first happened when I came to the conclusion I wanted to be more than the "Pretty, pretty princess" as my second wife called me. In essence she was referring to the correct fact I lacked the socialization in the world to earn womanhood. She resented the fact, if I put on a dress and looked attractive I thought I had arrived. To make matters worse, she did not want to lose her husband to another woman. Especially if the woman was me. 

To prove her wrong, I set out to discover what she was talking about. Through more error than trial, I found out the hard way about dealing with men from a woman's viewpoint. For awhile, it seemed everytime I turned around, I was facing a new struggle like the time I was cornered at a party by a huge transvestite admirer who was trying to move in and have his way with me. All the way to the motorcycle rider my wife started a conversation with when we were in a bar one afternoon waiting for a cross dresser mixer to begin. For the first time, in both situations I felt helpless to do much of anything about what was going on. What was I going to do if the motorcycle guy asked my wife to go for a ride and I was left behind as the "princess?" All my male power privileges' were gone and I had nothing to fall back on. 

These were the days before I found the small group of women friends who helped my socialization process and very much jump started my femininization past any point I thought was possible at the time. In addition, validation and confidence became key components of my personality. My new lesbian friends validated me and gave me the confidence I needed to exist in my new life. It wasn't so much they accepted me as another woman but did just accept me as me. Which was all I asked. 

Through it all, there were predictably good and bad times. An example came one night when my wife Liz and I went to a lesbian Valentines dance she was invited to through a group she was in. When Liz got up to get us some refreshments, I was basically attacked by a transphobic woman who wanted to know what my real name was. Like it was none of her business. Which is exactly what I told the hater. For the most part, I was lucky and escaped unscathed on most occasions. I thought I was going to have some problems one time when we all went to a women's roller derby event in Cincinnati and received a few evil looks but no one said anything and the dollar beers were great!   

The other quicker than expected moment of my trans life occurred when I needed to learn all over again how to communicate with the world. I found if I looked the part of a woman and wanted to interact as one, there were many basic differences I needed to learn. There were to be no more frontal male verbal assaults, only passive aggressive, often behind the back comments which were only the beginning. I even took feminine vocal lessons to improve my communication skills in the world. 

One of my biggest regrets is my second wife did not live long enough to see my development as a transgender woman. Even though I doubt if we could have stayed married, I hope we could have stayed friends. After I did most all of the heavy lifting away from being the "Pretty, pretty princess" as she called me.  

Living in the Transgender Present

Image from Alexander Grey
on UnSplash.

As I lived and constantly thought about escaping my unwanted male world, I daydreamed major parts of my days away.

It became very difficult to stop looking ahead and live in the present when all I could think of was the next time I could cross dress as a girl or woman. Over the years, I wish I could reclaim just a bit of the time I lost due to my day dreams of being a woman. The problem I ran into was when I started to journey away from my dark gender enclosure and was successful, the more natural I felt and the more I wanted to challenge the world as my authentic self. My overall life became more and more complicated and further disrupted my already fragile mental health. At the time, I was seeing one of the few therapists in my native Ohio who dealt with transgender issues at all. Along the way, during one of my sessions, she (my therapist) told me the truth. There was nothing she could ever do about my gender issues and somehow, someday I would have to deal with them. On the positive side, she also diagnosed my bi-polar depression for the first time and was able to separate my two main issues, mental health and gender. 

Then I reached a  point  where I had to decide how to exist in the present dealing with two major issues. I was prescribed several different medications to deal with my mental health issues but as we all know, there is no magic medication to deal with being transgender. The only positives which ultimately came from seeing the specialized therapist came from my wife. She thought I was trying to help the problem she saw in our relationship which back in those days was considered cross dressing or being a transvestite. Which still was a long way from just being viewed as a guy who liked to dress as a woman for Halloween. Naturally, my wife was afraid of what our friends might say. During it all, we hoped seeing a therapist would help. I can only imagine, if I had listened to my therapist about the long term life expectations of being transgender would be, how much different my life would have been.

With each experience, as I started to explore the feminine world more and more, I began to begin living in my transgender present. Every time I was successful in the world, the more confidence I began to experience and maintain. My whole world essentially flipped. When before I day dreamed about being a woman, now I was dreaming in a negative way about going back to a male life I increasingly did not want. To help even more, I had a new therapist who helped me keep my two main life issues separate and even provided crucial assistance in aiding my search for gender affirming hormones. 

In my mind, the hormones, or HRT as they were called then, helped me to cement where my life had become. I loved the external and internal changes the hormones had aided me in achieving. In a short period of time, I had come so far I asked my therapist for her help in changing my legal name and other gender markers. She came through with flying colors and with the help of my daughter, I came up with a new family based name which reflected my heritage. I chose the name of one of my maternal grandparents as my first name and my Mom's first name as my new middle name so my initials would be easier for my three grandkids to remember and use. 

From there on to the present, I have gone all out to live in my transgender present and make up for all the lost time I had in my life daydreaming away for my next trip in the cross dressing mirror.