Quote from: TRyan on April 29, 2014, 10:11:43 PMHow would you answer this question?
Let's flip it around. How would
you answer it?
I too am a touch older than I'd like to be. It's certainly more challenging for the older crowd to transition - at least in some ways; we're less malleable physically, we've lost many years of youth, we're sometimes married and parents and have careers and commitments. But in other ways, it's better to transition later in life - we've lived as male and know for sure that it's not who we are, we may be more secure in relationships, housing, finances, etc.
But all that's beside the point. And I've come to realize, through therapy, that analyzing the "why" when it comes to transgender issues is kinda pointless. It just
is. So it's more a case of accepting who we are, and figuring out how to deal with it.
Transition is a far better way of dealing with it than hiding it away again, especially since you know that hiding it makes you less than happy. And these days, transitioning when older isn't a huge deal; plenty of people do it, and plenty do it rather successfully. As an older woman, you're sometimes less beholden to looking "magazine pretty", and I for one am not too upset that I'll miss out on my teens and twenties (and thirties
) as a young woman - those years can be difficult for cis-gendered girls, let alone us. So yeah, I'm happy to pick things up in my forties, an age where many women are confident enough to just be who they want to be, not who the male-dominated media tell them they should be.
Plus I don't entirely regret my time spent as a male. While extremely uncomfortable at times, it's something I think I'll look back on as a female and think, "Wow, I've seen both sides of the fence." That's something that few people have, and I think we should consider ourselves lucky in that respect.
Perhaps the best answer is, as Ms. Grace noted above, "why not?"
