Very early pre-transition photo

[kathyk]

So many of you girls had great starts to transition at a young age, and I'm overjoyed that you have the strength to do it.  So as I scanned some old photos to organizing and store them I found this.  18 years old in 1969, and already aware that I was very different.  Too bad being trans back in those days was considered terribly abnormal, and so it was ... a distant thought.  Six years later my psychiatrist said I should live as a man without thinking of my difficulties.  He said I'd have no problems.  Wow, was he wrong.

[Jessica Merriman]

Too bad being trans back in those days was considered terribly abnormal

No kidding Kathy! These kids do not know how good they have it today. Therapist's who understand (for the most part), better meds and state of the art procedures whose results are just amazing. Imagine if we had the freedom of choice at 14 to 18 back then. What a very different life we would have had. No hiding, fear or all the rest that came with it back then.

[kathyk]

Well Jessica, it's a little sad we weren't able to transition at 18.  But other than not telling my wife I had gender issues, I'm not ashamed of the last 45 years.  There are so many memories that will always be with me, and I ended up with two wonderful sons. 

And even though I envy the lives these younger girls can have, I don't wish I were one of them.  I did all shorts of ->-bleeped-<- in the 60s and 70s they will never be able to do, so I'll take that as a trade off.  Anyway, guess age made me a bit too old to understand their new and far different struggles.  After all, we couldn't tell anyone about how we felt for fear of our lives, and in some ways that hasn't changed.

I look back at Christine Jorgensen and think about how much she must have gone through.  It'd be nice if I understood myself in the late 1960s as she did about herself in the 1950s.