One thing I think we all need to think about in our struggles as trans men and women is that this struggle without gender identity is going on at all stages of human development from young children to preteens to teenagers to young adults to mature adults to seniors. That at each stage of development our challenges are different and the degree to which our bodies will adapt and can be changed to meet our gender identity to the extend that we will blend into either the male or female population and go unnoticed.
We all come to terms with fact that our gender identity does not match our biological body at different ages and the baggage we carry of trying to live lives that match our physical body is also different.
I knew that I was somehow different for a long time, that somehow I identified with being female more than male, but I was alone in my isolation and having been born in the middle 1940s it was very intimidating for anyone who had a male body to start behaving like a female in the rural Dakotas. It was very emotionally difficult for me to even accumulate a female wardrobe even in private. I was 53 years old and found
Susan.org and living alone for the first time in nearly 30 years that I could declare to myself within the privacy of my home that I was a female and begin living as a woman at home. Now I dress openly female in both private and public within a family and living off of Social Security, I will never be able to totally pass as a women because of my over 50 years of living as a male and a life time of living with male hormones.
Because most of my life has been spent living under a male identity all of my job records, educational records, medical records, government records, medical records, are stamped with the male gender identification. I happen to like the female form of my name Michael, which is Michelle, so I have become Michelle (Mike) on Facebook and can even pronounce Michael as Mishelle. Myche, Michelle, Myshelle, Michael, can all become my alias and I can identify myself as a transgender female so as to blend my past with my present. Most of this is because most of my past has disappeared and all people where I am at see me presenting as a female. I may not blend, but as a senior citizen, I find that as far as the rest of the world cares I am vanishing in most but not all cases.
My testimony to transgenders younger than me is that you can live to be a senior citizen and not live in fear of your life and that the longer you wait to become who you truly are the more baggage you carry and the harder it is for you to truly blend in as either male or female. As a senior you also realize that as you become less and less able to defend yourself physically you face the danger of being physically assaulted just because you are old so that living as a transgender hardly poses more of a threat.
Those transgenders who start their transformations younger than when I did have to worry about how they are going to survive and support themselves while living their gender identity. They also have more struggles living with worrying about being outed and what that might mean. Teenagers have the most opportunity to have their bodies adapt to match their gender identities but face living with having natural children of their own unless they have their sperm or eggs banked. But with their spouses will probably have to come out as transgenders in order to have natural children using these banked sperm or eggs.
What I am basically saying is that because of the vast differences of our transgender lives we need to not be judgemental of each other and the choices we make. We are all part of the same struggle which is even more complicated by the people we a sexually attracted to and the fact that many of us have grown children who learned later in life that we, their parents, were transgender and this makes for us blending our lives more difficult.
Some of us have more and some of us have less lives to blend between our male and female existence. Why should we show as much intolerance among us, as is shown towards us, by many in the straight world?
We shouldn't!!! We have to grant others the tolerance we wish for ourselves and remember that how others live and think is not a reflection upon ourselves.
