I've been lurking around here a lot lately since I subscribed to the RSS feed on my phone. It gives me something to do in my idle time at work. I'm starting to feel like I know some of the people around the forums, but they have no idea who I am, so it seemed like a good time to go ahead and make an account. As indicated by my handle, I've been going by Jess for something like six months now. It was a little odd at first, because I totally bucked the trend of going with something phonetically similar to my given name, but it's second nature now and I actually feel rather odd answering to my old name these days.
About me:
I had a rather ambiguous childhood, having an insatiable thirst for knowledge and soaking up KERA and PBS like a sponge. I was actually teaching my teachers before I got out of grade school. My family bought me plastic dinosaurs and Hot Wheels, so I played with them. Hey, I even had GI Joes. I liked playing with them too, taking a lot of them apart at once and putting guys together out of "mismatched" parts to adjust their outfits to my liking. I spent much of my childhood being asked by other children if I was a boy or a girl. I remember the first time I had a cohesive thought about my gender incongruence. I was seven years old, sitting on a swing set, and I felt a sudden rush of melancholy when I put the words together for the first time in my head.
"I want to be a girl, but I'm not."
I never thought or felt that I already was or had always been female. I just had the sense that I needed to be. This ideation came long before the pubertal wash of sex hormones got hold of me, so it clearly was innate, rather than a fetish. I struggled with this notion (are my reasons legitimate?) for a long time before I came to terms with who and what I am, but I finally figured it out. I must have spent the following ten years fantasizing about all kinds of strange, unusual, and impossible ways that I could become a woman. By the time I was 15, I had told my girlfriend that I was trans. Not in those words... I had no idea what I was talking about, or how to say it, but I knew something could be done to fix it. She actually didn't care and I spent a couple of years shaving my legs and wearing her clothes before we split.
Things were all downhill from there. I was tired of school, so I got my GED, started doing construction contract work, did that for a couple of years until I got fed up with the inconsistent pay, and joined the military to get off the street, because I was going nowhere fast. I spent four years suffering intolerable depression, got married and divorced, and became a raging alcoholic while occasionally dressing up when I was able to get a moment alone. In my last year of service, I found my girlfriend from high school on myspace and sent her a message. She replied, and what do you know? After a seven year gap, we got back together.
After I got out of the military, I was incredibly bored with civilian life, so I set about making it a little more dangerous by buying a motorcycle. The bike ended up changing from a method of transportation into a lifestyle, as I turned into a respected builder in my own circle, got extremely fat, grew a massive beard and eventually had a couple of feet of pony tail dangling behind me. I had a few wrecks here and there, but nothing terrible until March of 2010.
I was working a split shift with plenty of overtime coming after dark, but in my few hours off, I needed to meet someone at a bar to sell some bike parts. I got off work, rode to the bar, met this guy, and he just happened to be so entertaining to hang around that I ended up drinking more beers than I bothered counting. When it got to the point that I absolutely had to get back to work, I hopped on my bike and rode like a drunken fool, took a loop entirely too fast, and catapulted myself off an embankment at 70 miles per hour. This exact situation to the T is what killed a friend of mine who shared my name and my birthday. This was an incredibly eerie coincidence that apparently didn't teach me a thing. I'll spare you the rest of the details, but suffice to say I was laid up at home on pharmaceutical opioids for a week.
It was during this week that my ego wasn't able to keep it's grasp on me. I was lying in bed one night and I told my girlfriend, "I need to transition." I hadn't mentioned it in over a decade, but all she said was, "I know."
You could say I did die that night, because the person who got wasted and destroyed that motorcycle doesn't exist anymore.
I started HRT the following month and the euphoric rush of it made it obvious that it was exactly the right thing to do. As so many have said, "Why didn't I do this sooner?" I was on HRT for six months before coming out publicly to all the bikers that knew and loved me. Interestingly enough, I maintain my place among them today and take very little flak for what I'm doing. If anyone gives me problems, someone bigger tends to step in and make them behave. It's a good thing too, because I'm 70 pounds lighter today. :-)
As of today, I'm out everywhere but work where a couple of people know and the rest probably just think I'm a flaming homosexual, which I probably am, but not in the same context. My job is thick with macho men completing industrial tasks and there are no other women in the shop, so this is going to be tricky, but I'm relatively certain the overall organization is progressive enough that things will be okay. If not, I suppose I can move on, but I certainly intend to be passing with flying colors before it comes to that.
There's my ultimate abridged life story as pertaining to gender. I've done a lot of stupid and dangerous things in my life, but haven't we all? I'm so happy to have survived all the years of self destruction to be where I am today. The world is finally starting to make sense.
How are you folks doing?
