I am 23 months into my transition and during the last 23 months I have experienced some light duty bigotry and since I started my transition I have also been very passive, timid, afraid, in the shadows. So when I have experienced some bigotry I have done nothing except try to walk through it and develop that thick skin that we all must develop if we are going to succeed and to live another day. There's a lot of really evil people out there who hate us more than anything on the planet and death is simply not enough for us when it comes to killing us. Most of my life I worked really hard to be hyper masculine, over compensate, smash all that is feminine within my soul and while doing so I developed a very in your face personality. I couldn't fight worth a damm even though I was big and strong, a twelve year old could beat me up but I had the personality and the mentality to scare most men off who were threatening. All of that was just so unhealthy for me and it almost killed, multiple times. Recent events have brought me out of the mountains and down into the city where I am exposed to so many people. People in my little mountain town have known me for years and have adjusted well to my transition and from what I can tell have excepted me rather well after all these years up here. Now when I go into the city I find that there are some people who really struggle with me, but most people seem to want to get to know me a little. Today I was buying a new phone at a store that was located in a small building in a parking lot and a Mexican couple came in and I just so happen to have the only sales person in the store who was a Spanish speaker, great. I need to take my time and make sure that I get everything done right so I knew that these people were going to wait awhile. I looked back at them and I could tell right off that the male did not like my kind. He was so obvious with how disgusted he was with me that I really had to focus and not let this man influence my thought pattern while I was buying this phone. I looked at him a couple of times throughout the process and could plainly see that this man also had a chip on his shoulder and that he was probably the kind of man who was mad all the time, takes one to know one, I was like that for many years. I have been getting tired of people looking at me or talking about me and this guy is an ->-bleeped-<- and he aint hiding it. When I was ready to leave he purposely stood in my way so I would have to walk around him, he was marking his territory. I had had enough of this guy and made a potentially foolish mistake. I (Gretchen) for a brief moment forgot that I am a woman and not a man. As I walked behind him I nudged my shoulder into his back to push him forward and out of my way (stupid) this guy could have wiped the floor up with me. I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was starting to come after me and for some reason he stopped. Maybe he realized that beating up a transsexual wouldn't be such a good idea, I don't know but I regret making the eye contact with him in the beginning. I know better, but guys like him just make me mad. Not only do guys like him make me made but it his mentality that puts fear into me, it's his and the mentality of other haters that put us in our graves prematurely. This guy was one mean MFer. We have to be so careful not to put ourselves into dangerous and potentially deadly situations.
