So I am passing. That is transgender-speak for I Appear To Be A Woman. People who do not know me do not know. Period. It's one of the main reasons we transition.
I have been so for almost 5 weeks. I started HRT not quite 10 weeks ago. This was kind of unexpectedly fast for me. Really. I mean apparently I was just not all that manly to begin with. Which of course suits me. The faster the better.
I almost buy it. Myself I have a long life of looking at this face to erase. Part of my psyche just won't see a girl some days. Some days she's easy to find.
Everyone else sees a woman. Except really old friends. They have the same problem I do. Two souls are blurred together in one body.
I wrote two previous diaries early in my awakening and I think a few weeks into HRT. I had written stories in other forums about this experience and it always helps to reach more people. I think the most rewarding comment I ever got on this topic was someone's comment that they had no idea being transgender was about more than sex. I realized that the notion that we are titillating ourselves by becoming women was probably the most damaging perception to overcome. It makes our very frightening journey seem so trivial and easily-dismissed. When the truth is we start to transition because, it seems in most cases, our condition is killing us or has tried very hard to kill us.
The fear I first felt as a closeted transsexual was intense. My desire to not be seen at all. The life we live before (at least when one gets to my advanced age of 40+ years) is often a chore that we carry on because we know it, it is familiar, it seems to almost make sense. it's what we are 'supposed' to be doing. But those lives never work. My story is not unusual in that it involves a very broken home and a relationship I stayed with out of a complete lack of confidence in my ability to survive outside of one. I could not visualize my male self on my own. I had no vision of him at all anymore.
I awakened as it were 5 months or so ago. I had lived over 4 decades not knowing what exactly was wrong with me but knowing I had behavior I dared not reveal to anyone. It seems now in retrospect I was almost seized with an irresistible urge to be as female as I could, whenever I was permitted to. Or alone. It was an impulse that had no words to it. More about that later.
When I admitted to myself what I must be, I found a strange and awesome door in front of me. It is true (and part of why I finally realized I am a transwoman) that I often dreamed of what it might be like to live a woman's life. I kept this speculation deep in a compartment but it was never far from my mind. I would fixate on references to such a thing whenever I saw them, which brings to mind the myth of Tiresias.
The main aspect of the Greek myth of Tiresias is that for seven years this blind prophet lived as a woman. I recalled seeing that reference in my college years. One of many such things I looked at with awe and wonder and as completely impossible. I remember another reference, I can't find where, where this period was possibly discussed and Tiresias gave his opinion on which life he preferred. Which I do not recall and it may have been a different myth modeled after that one. Especially given the kind of fantasy and sci-fi I drowned myself in throughout my life. I was often away on an intergalactic cruise when people were trying to contact me. I tried to stay away from planet Earth and probably because I did not belong here, didn't get to talk to anyone about what was going on inside me, and of course I think I was probably able to find relief from the growing anxiety of being trans by simply pretending I was elsewhere.
I am now living what I thought was a myth. Or a science-fiction story. It is sometimes a little startling to me to wake up and almost see a woman in the mirror. Startling in a no freaking way kind of way. In a I Am Not Just Getting The Only Thing I Ever Wanted way. I guess as the reality of this became apparent to me and my 'real' life as a man disintigrated it became easy to see that this was the only thing that mattered to me. My identity. I truly realized how ruled we are by our need to hold to the identity that is inside us that we cannot speak to or bargain with. When it is wrong we are not happy. When it's permanently wrong --- we are miserable. Any of us. So Tiresias' experience would have been 7 years of gender dysphoria. Regardless of what anyone wrote in a myth he would have emerged from the experience fully convinced that he liked being a man. Unless of course he was trans.
I guess it just seems too good and too easy to be true. Really? This is it? I'm a girl now?
Every other (rather significant) problem I currently have seems pretty mild next to the biggest thing ever being basically solved. Yea I have a ways to go. But I can be me all day long and never get called mister again . . . once I either convince everyone I work with or move on. The latter is likely. It seems time to change things around soon maybe in a year or so.
It Is Different, Guys
The main reason I wanted to write this diary was prompted by a comment someone made in a diary about gender issues. I don't remember the exact quote but I was annoyed that someone implied that it's somehow unwise to imply that one gender is treated differently than the other. I kind of wanted to re-affirm that this is in fact the case and I'm living it.
It is different to be a woman in this world. Believe it. I was expecting it. I knew to expect it. It was not unwelcome or undesired just . . . what was to be. I had to live the life of a woman to live the life of a woman. Kind of self-reducing logic there.
It is merely that I now know the exact color of this statement. I know the real difference to be experienced. It is visceral and no longer theoretical to me. It is my life.
At work a tolerant atmosphere has brought me a lovely and delightful circumstance of being an out and transitioning transwoman: a little circle of friends to whom I am kind of a life-size Barbie doll. Ladies of course. They love to help me get dressed up. I am honored that they want to welcome me in as it were and I kind of get a kick out of letting them get me to try various styles and go shopping with them. It cannot be a bad thing but it is amusing. I don't have to grow up to be a girl.
Outside of work I can tell two things right away. Other women talk to me as if we all know each other. It is delightful. And guys are of two kinds. Nice and creeps. Wow did that happen fast.
I have already had a kind of scary experience that I think could have gone very badly. It has taught me a lot about avoiding going out alone. A transwoman lives in fear most of her life anyway but it is a different kind of anxiety. I'm now visible and I can tell. The world barely noticed me as a man it seems. I was just some guy. This is a whole different level of alertness.
What can I say though? This is the only me I can be.