Cis Gender Dysphoria

Every now and then we transgender women and trans men suffer from tunnel vision in our daily approaches to life. By the way, "cis gender" to me means a person born female or male. For the sake of simplicity, I know these binary birth terms do not apply to everyone.

Last night, I was listening to a cis feminine singer talk about how she worries about how she looks and it interferes with her life. To the point of her questioning the whole cult of beauty. I immediately thought I feel the same way...only worse.

Years ago, when I was first considering making the jump from cross dresser to trans woman, I was told several times by my cis woman friends, "Welcome to our world!." As I saw it then and now, women live in a much more complex world than men.

After all, all women (cis or transgender) worry to some degree about their appearance. Outside of the Walmart queens, the typical woman has some sort of problem with her breasts, hair, legs or other parts of her anatomy. Let alone make up, skin and just what is the proper outfit to wear?

I guess being part of "their world" means accepting a larger share of gender dysphoria.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

As we make the journey out of the closet, often our only friend (or enemy) is our mirror. Alas, though, the mirror tells us only what we want to hear. Again, good or bad. Most of the time, we don't look as good as we think we do...or as bad. We also don't realize the feminizing experience for the novice cross dresser or transgender woman is a trip full of more trial than error. The great majority of us don't have guidance on what is potentially our best, most flattering, style choices. Many end up as the 40 year old mall cross dressers in mini skirts and heels. Before we learn better styles.

The only way to get out of the mirror is to forge our way into the world. Which is easier said than done. Here is Connie's example:

FABULOUSCONNIEDEENovember 29, 2018 at 9:29 AM

"Again, we can only truly see ourselves when we see our reflection in the eyes of others. We first venture out, away from the reflection given by the mirror in our own homes, to be seen. Still, that is not enough, as we are only displaying ourselves as that same image we saw in the mirror. Exposing ourselves to others as more than that two-dimensional reflection finally allows us to see our full selves through other people. This is as true for our gender as it is for anything else about us."

Thanks! A great point to be sure. What happened to me was, the more I got out, the more I grew into my own feminine personality and away from just the outwardly appearance. 

From that point I learned I wanted to pursue my life on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) as a transgender woman.

Get Out of the Closet!

At Monday's transgender - cross dresser meeting, it occurred to me my coming out process was once again backwards when compared to so many others.

During the meeting, I normally have the chance to sit back and consider everyone else's experience and relate it to mine.

After my wife passed away, it left the door wide open to basically fully explore my life as a woman and I totally took advantage of it. Nearly every spare moment was used to go out cross dressed and see if my feminine dreams could become a reality. Then, I met two close cis female lesbian friends who refused to even acknowledge any maleness in me. They kept pushing me to never look back, in many unspoken ways. For example, I was always an invitee to anything from lesbian mixers to football games.

Then, came along my partner Liz who I just happened to meet on an online dating site.  As most of you already remember, Liz is also a lesbian identifying cis female. Even more than the other two women, she refused and still refuses to see any maleness in me at all. This even was back in the days before I started HRT hormones and was still wearing wigs. In fact, she was with me the New Years Eve when I took my first dosage.

Of course now, I wonder what took me so long to accept the inevitable, deep down inside the girl within me was finally going to get a chance to live her life.

It just took others to really see her.