Creating Gender Tension

Image from Tim Mossholder 
on UnSplash.

 
I am aware of the natural tension which goes on between the binary genders of male and female. 

I am also aware of the added tension which goes on when a transgender woman or trans man tries to cross the gender frontier to live on the other side. For me, at least, the tension became ridiculous and ruined my mental health which was already fragile. Before I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, I was diagnosed with being bi-polar also. At the time, the diagnosis seemed to be a double-edged sword because I was wondering why I suffered from deep mood swings and blamed the swings on my gender issues. When I found I had deeper mental health issues, in many ways, it was a relief they were not tied in with my cross dressing. On the other hand, ideally, I could treat being bi-polar with medications and move on with my life.

My worry was any future therapy I might seek out, would involve the therapist attempting to tie my mental health in with my need to be a woman. Even though it was true, my gender needs did conflict with my mental health and cause tension, they were both separate entities and needed to be dealt with separately. I was fortunate in that I had two long term therapists who agreed with me, and I was treated as such.

However, my gender tension never went away, and, in many ways, I just learned to live with it. What I did was, resort to what I did when I was younger and try to cross dress my way through my transgender life. Predictably, when I was cross dressing, life was good and when I was not cross dressing, it was not. I was mean and tried to take it out on the world around me. I became so mean on occasion; I lost a job because of it. What no one understood was, I was being tougher on myself than anyone else. In typical male fashion, I was internalizing my feelings until they exploded. I even used therapy as a crutch with my second wife who had to put up with me. The best way for me to explain it is, I would never quite tell my wife what my therapist said. The prime example I can give you is, very early in my sessions with a certified gender therapist, she told me there was nothing to do concerning me wanting to be a woman. Sooner or later, I was to just have to follow my instincts.

There was no way, I could tell my wife that when I was supposed to be undergoing therapy to save our marriage. So, I ignored what the therapist told me and predictably, the gender tension continued and even became worse. I did my best to tread water and try to live a life divided between being a man part of the week and a trans woman when I could the remainder of the week. It nearly killed me as I tried my best to maintain an impossible life. My best was not good enough and I attempted an ill-fated suicide. When I woke up the next morning after taking all the pills I had and chasing them with alcohol, self-preservation kicked in and once again I made the wrong decision and resolved to purge most of my feminine fashion and make up, then go back to my male life. 

We all know the majority of gender purges don't work. Certainly, it did not work for me, even when I grew a beard to satisfy my second wife that I was not doing anything related to cross dressing at all. Once again, my gender tension rose to a very ugly level, and I was very unhappy. Little did I know, my life was due to change in a very tragic and dramatic way when in approximately six months, my wife passed away from a sudden heart attack. 

The life changing experience led me back to my feminine self and I never looked back. When I did, the gender tension I was suffering from disappeared and I felt free.  

Nobody Understood

 

Virginia Prince

What really hurt me when I first realized I had gender issues was when I had no one to share them with. I was all alone with my problems, or so I thought.

I lived in fear of discovery all the time from my parents or my slightly younger brother. Even then, I knew discovery meant an unpleasant trip to a psychiatrist. The closest friend to me who may have shared a few of the same feelings, ended up moving away. With him, both of us were allowed to experiment wearing his mom's old clothes and putting on her makeup. It was the closest I would ever come to having anyone to share my true life with. Ironically, we never talked about the cross dressing we were doing. We just did it. 

As I said, my friend and his family ended up moving far away and years later, I often wondered if he had any gender issues too which stayed with him. Plus, as I always point out, I spent my youth and the years leading up to college in the information "dark ages", or the time before the internet became so popular along with social media. All I had was my cherished copies of Virginia Prince's "Transvestia" publication to get me by. At the least, "Transvestia" showed me there was a community of others with the same gender leanings I had. Also, in my well-worn issues I saw meetings or mixers within driving distance of me which I could go to. I was excited when I learned I could actually meet other self-proclaimed transvestites in person. The problem was, once I learned I could meet them, was I brave enough to do it. 

You all know, I was brave enough to meet them but then I encountered another problem. No one at the mixers still seemed to understand me. I was too much of a woman for the cross dressers and not enough of one for the transexuals. This was back before the transgender term and meaning was even used and popularized, so once again, I was stuck with no one to understand me.

Finally, the world began to catch up with me and I understood where I was when it came to the cross dresser - transgender community. Even better, with the help of the internet and social media, I began to stay in touch with others with similar views. Suddenly, in many ways, everybody had some sort of an understanding about how I felt. It may have taken me a lifetime to do it, but I made it into the only community who knew what I went through.  

Maybe the problem with the world as we know it these days has been influenced by people who have never met a transgender woman or trans man at all. To understand a trans person, it certainly helps to have followed a similar path. Even briefly. 

In recent years, I went from no one to understand me to having a whole group of people who have not taken the time to even accept me on a basic human level. It seems, I have gone full circle to arrive nowhere. 

Once Your Eyes are Opened

 

JJ Hart, Club Diversity, Columbus, Ohio

In my case, once my eyes were opened as a transgender woman, I could never close them again.

Perhaps it is because I went through so many trials and tribulations to arrive where I wanted, or even desperately needed to be in my life. Since I had so few natural feminine traits to work with, I really needed to work hard to achieve a feminine presentation. I tried all sorts of ill-fated ideas before I ever got it right. Yes, it was me making the routine cross-dressing mistakes such as attempting to dress as a teen aged girl when I was thirty and had a testosterone poisoned body. All I accomplished was directing unwanted attention to myself. 

 It took me awhile to realize what I was doing, and my eyes were finally opened to what I was doing. The perception I had was I was dressing for men, when in fact, I should be doing the opposite and dressing for the women around me I needed to co-exist with. I learned the hard way, women ran the world I wanted to be part of, and I needed to do my best to get there. All of this meant I needed to keep my eyes open and do the best I could to study the women around me. Or how did the women react to the world around them, good or bad. 

Sadly, blocking my way were women such as my second wife who wanted no part of living with another woman, transgender or not. She was content with letting me learn on my own what women needed to survive in the world. Looking back on it, her process for me was the best way to go because once I learned something in my new transgender womanhood, I never forgot it. Also, magically, once I opened one door to my new life, my eyes were opened to another door. 

As I opened a new door, I knew I could never go back to my old male life which was bringing me down. I felt so good and natural in my new life, there was really no choice to be made. The only problem was what was I going to do with all the male baggage I had acquired over the years. Similar to most of you, I had the usual assortment of spouses, family, friends and employment to deal with. Fortunately, I started my transition process with the person who turned out to be the most accepting of all my family and friends. I am speaking of my daughter and her immediate encouragement helped pave my way to more attempts at telling the world about my authentic self. I ended up going one for two in the family process when I was roundly rejected by my brother and his family. He opened my eyes to what transgender rejection could really be like.

Still, I persisted, knowing I was on the right path and my eyes were not deceiving me. It took me awhile, but I finally gained the confidence to look another woman in the eye and communicate one on one with her. To do so, I needed to not concentrate on how I sounded and instead put an emphasis on what I said. In order to survive, I needed to keep my eyes open at all times because certainly every other woman was not going to be my friend. 

I did keep my eyes open and learned the hard way to keep my head on a swivel. There were many claws I needed to be aware of. Quickly, I was hardened to what the new world was like around me. More and more, I could never go back to the male privileges I had before. Even though, I lost much of my intelligence according to most men and especially lost my personal security, I still wanted more and more of my transgender womanhood. 

You might say, I acquired new 20-20 vision and it was perfect in many ways. It was a long and difficult learning process, but it was the best life I could have ever imagined, and I just felt I had done it sooner.