Trust me, raising a trans girl to be more manly does not work. My father and an older male cousin he took in did everything they could to teach me to be manly. I was taught how to throw and catch a baseball when I was seven, I got jujitsu lessons at ten, and I pushed my little four foot ten inch body to and beyond its limits to prove myself in junior high school P.E. and on the endurance runs in Boy Scouts when we were prepping for the 50 mile hike award.
I slowly learned how to fight back when I got picked on. I got that from mom, who grew up in Brooklyn.
I topped out at five foot eight and took up bicycle racing in my twenties, and golf in my late thirties. I learned how to walk like a man, get fitted for a business suit, smoke cigars, tie a necktie, and constantly outmaneuver those manipulative people who thought they perceived some vulnerability in me.
The simple fact is, I have been pretty successful at being a man. The problem is, a lifetime of fighting has taken its toll on my health. I started having anxiety and panic attacks around ten years ago, and after a lot of thinking and trying different things I had that magic moment when I pulled on a pair of my wife's shorts at home one day, and it stopped a panic attack dead in its tracks.
Dressing female cured my high blood pressure, and now that I have health insurance set up, I am getting ready to get a referral to a gender therapist.
Bottom line is, when you are a girl in your heart and in your head, no amount of learning to be macho is going to make you a man. You can learn to put on a pretty good imitation of one, but at best, you are a very good actor portraying a character, and doing that all the time will eventually wear you down and kill you.
