Over the last few months I have seen a huge number of posts here on the subject of when to come out, how long you can be on HRT before it becomes impossible to conceal what you are doing from others and when to go full time etc...
With a huge amount to lose if I got it wrong, I gave just as huge amount of thought to all of this as I navigated my way through a late transition. While everyone has to find their own way, after a particularly enjoyable weekend in Paris going about my life as a woman, including a real fun evening in a Lesbian night club, I felt like sharing my thoughts on all of these questions. I have already provided bits of what follows in different posts but this is an attempt to tell the whole story in one document. So this is a long post (mostly written in the train between Paris and my home town) but I hope it will be of help to those of you who are in a similar situation to me. Even more so, I hope it will be useful to those of you who are much younger and facing choices that will impact almost every dimension of your lives forever.
So, to begin and regarding coming out, for many years the only one who was into to my little secret was my wife and our deal from the beginning was that I would only broaden the circle of people in the know when absolutely sure that I was going to go through with this transition. The logic behind this was to keep my options open as long as possible as I felt my way through the complex adventure that a "late transition" generally is. Why? Quite simply because a very large number people are impacted by such a change late in life, from my wife and children (3 in my case) who also have to assume the fact that their husband or Dad is now a woman, to siblings, friends and work colleagues.
Given this, I started HRT two years before anyone else other than my wife was informed of what I was doing. During this period the most obvious change to my appearance was loss of body hair and breast growth and because of this I had to stop what had been my favorite sport, rowing. However that was it and nobody picked up on the very gradual changes. Due to a lack of any quallified resource within a resonable distance, at this time I was unfortunately unable to do anything about facial hair removal.
The catalyst for coming out to a larger group of people, kids and close friends, was my upper face FFS which I did summer 2011. Apart from the very visble post surgery trauma, the changes to my forehead and nose were so pronounced that there was no hiding it but, to my kids in particular, I also explained that I would only go through with things completely if I was sure I can transition successfully ie. be spontaneously perceived as a woman by others. While they were initially seriously blown over by my announcement, this particular detail made a huge difference. It was reassuring to them (and my wife BTW) because it dismissed any fears they may have had about being stuck with a Dad who looked like a "Man in a dress" and also gave them time since I wasn't planning on going full time until I was myself very convinced that I could pull it off successfully.
While notably more feminine in appearance after this first surgery, for the following year I continued to live as a guy in most aspects of my life, all the more so as I had still found no one to do my facial hair removal and getting this done is a vital prerequisite to going full time. Afterwards it's just too awkward as you have to let beard grow for at least 3 days before an electrolysis session. However from year end 2011, I stopped getting my hair cut and, apart from a little tidying up, I have not had it cut since.
Summer 2012, I finally found an electrologist a two hour drive from where I now live and I also did my lower face FFS. The second surgery made a very dramatic difference, so much so that when I finally started living openly as a woman in Oct 2012, close friends and even my eldest daughter initially failed to recognize me when we first met up again.
During summer 2012, just before my second FFS surgery, I also came out at work and initially my employers, a small management consulting company, somewhat ironically specialized in "complex change management"
, were quite supportive.
However, the atmosphere soured when I started to come to the office as a woman, especially with one person. Unfortunately, this person was due to take over as boss of the firm and end Oct 2012, I was told that they couldn't see me continuing with them and that they wanted to terminate me. They cooked up a story about a mission they claimed I had messed up 5 months earlier but also made it clear that they thought what I was doing could be damaging to the reputation of the company. However, in an act of pure hypocrisy, they also requested that I continue with the mission I was then working on until it ended, end Jan 2013. Based on this, I thought about fighting it but decided that it wasn't worth it. In a small company, if you are not accepted by your colleagues you simply can't operate successfully. Against that, I was totally devastated and really believed for a few weeks that, at age 55, I was finished professionally. My feelings were made even worse by the fact that I felt I had betrayed my wife's trust and telling her what had happened remains one of the most difficult things I ever had to do. It was one of the rare times in my life where I felt that I would be worth more to others dead than alive. Not a good place to be!
Happily the consulting mission I was then working on was going well and this finally provided the life belt I then desperately needed. There was a very interesting opening in the company which represented a little island of hope in what was otherwise a sea of desolation. I managed to focus on this, went for it and I got the job. End of the day, I moved seamlessly from my previous position to my present one, without losing as much as one day of work and picking up a nice little termination check in the process.
In my consulting job, while presenting as a woman in the office, I was still presenting as a man to our clients so, initially, my new employers were not aware of my situation.
However, given my position in the company, it would have been a major breach of trust to keep them in the dark so one month after I started I first informed our HR manager, a woman, and then my boss who is also CEO of the company.
They reacted very well all things considered . My boss did say that I should have told him before he hired me but when I answered with the question "Would you have hired me if I had?", he got the point and we both agreed to leave things at that for a few months to see how things worked out on the job before taking things any further.
Beginning of July he came back to me to say that he had thought about it a lot since our first discussion and that he was OK with me transitioning on the job and would do everything in his power to insure that it worked out for me. To explain this, his words were "I don't see what right I have to prevent you from being the person you really are". Given the professional nature of our relationship, that phrase is probably one of the most extraordinary things anyone has ever said to me and my boss got quite a fan in the process.
Since he gave me the green light in principle I came out individually to all of my other colleagues on the company management team (5 more people) and while reactions were varied, from openly supportive to fairly cool, I haven't yet picked up on any outright hostility. The next few months will be interesting though.
End of October I'll be doing a facelift which should really finish off the feminization of my face, tidying up the area around my chin and jaw following last summer's very aggressive surgery. Present plan is for me to come out to the rest of the company (1900 people potentially in the know) just after this or after the year-end holidays.
As is clear from all of this, it has been quite a journey and I still have to find the way to fit in GRS which I now really want to do.
However, from every point of view, I have never been in a better place in my life. I am finally living as the person I have wanted to live as from my earliest childhood memories and it has been done with minimum collateral damage.
In my mind,, things that were key to this were patience, actually having skills that were of real value to an employer and no doubt the fact that my appearance is now feminine enough for others to feel comfortable with me presenting as a woman. This gets me to the point I most want to insist on with this post.
I'll be 56 shortly and am a member of a generation for whom transitioning was mostly not an option when we were at the age of most of the people I see posting here. The words to describe my condition hardly even existed and where I grew up there was absolutely nowhere to go to so much as discuss feelings that were no different to those I see here in post after post. So, what did we do? Simple answer, we got on with life as best as we could. Sure there was a lot of unhappiness but I couldn't say there was only unhappiness because when you have no choice, you make the best of the situation you find yourself in. So, no threats of committing suicide if I couldn't get HRT or whatever, quite simply because I didn't even know that HRT existed at the time. Very hard to feel that frustrated about something you can't verbalize or visualize... Against that, the fact that information is now so readily available, with lots of visible "success stories" has certainly contributed to a certain "quick fix" attitude to the whole subject of transitioning. I get my magic pills and in a few months I'm living the life of my dreams...
Looking back, the real positive is that since transitioning was not an option, I used my early years to get a very good education which has definitely served me very well through life, playing a huge part in the pretty good story I can now tell. I think Cindy and others "veterans" here would probably say very similar things.
Overall, when you have a bit more to offer society than your "trans identity" ie. when you focus first of all on what you bring to the party rather than on your own personal issues, you can expect far more understanding from others in return.
So, to all the younger people in particular I would say think long and hard before rushing into a transition which will impact your life more than you can possibly imagine. Think that even if you "finally" get to live your gender identity openly, there is far more to life than gender identity. Being able to openly live in your real gender still leaves you with all the everyday issues of life, just that little bit more complicated when you are TG. There is the obvious material issue of simple day to day survival but, with a decent education and some real drive it can be a lot better than just survival. Regarding this particular point you should be aware that all the energy you are putting into your transition is that much less available in setting yourself up in the other dimensions of your life. The price of this through the course of your life is potentially very high.
Same goes for relationships. If everything is reduced to your "trans identity", you are going to find yourself more or less closed into a ghetto but when you develop all the dimensions of your human potential, you can find yourself in a much better place.
I am hoping that none of you will have to wait as long as I did to finally see my dreams come true but I also hope that you can see that there is a lot to be said for first getting yourself set up in life before taking on the challenge of a transition. Saying this can't be done, that waiting to transition is impossible may be true in a few very rare cases but for most of us, it is not only perfectly possible (many of us here prove it) it is probably the wisest course of action.
Wishing you all the very very best!
Donna
