I've been asked more than once what living full time as a woman felt like. This morning at 3:00 AM, these were my thoughts:
Three years ago January I began to take the early and tiny steps to find myself. The notion of living authentically wasn't my dream, escaping the darkness was. Eight months later I began low dose HRT, and the dawn could be glimpsed if I looked carefully, but even that was too much for my bride. In fairness I did not discuss or involve her in what I was doing. I was afraid, and I was wrong. This choice, she declared, would not stand!
It was not a choice to change and to seek myself. The only choice was to live or to die.
Within months I was in transition to woman. Still she took my clothing, destroyed my medications, called me names, made me cry. Still I continued, without much hope, but because I could feel myself becoming. Bit by bit, day by day I changed and became something, someone new.
I saw myself in the mirror, I shaved my beard, a woman - child looked back at me. She did not leave me, she gave me acceptance and solace. In the spring, I quietly signed up for a trans conference. It was the end of my marriage.
My name was now Julie Anne Blair, my driver's license had the cherished gender designation. I had contacted human resources in Washington DC and gotten nowhere. It was discouraging. That trans people were recognized under the civil rights laws of the United States was one thing, finding the protocols be live and work within those systems authentically, was quite another. An angel appeared from the office of equal opportunity. She passed me to a brilliant lawyer who guided the process of becoming myself at a Federal Science Center, and together we wrote the process for transgender people to follow in federal service. A date was selected, the process was completed, miraculously I was embraced. Today there is no daylight between who I am and how I live.
So how does it feel? It's not all rainbows and unicorns, it is still life. I have moved from a five bedroom four bath home on acreage, to a three bedroom two bath home in the city, to an aluminum trailer parked in front of the house where I once lived. I am often alone, and sometimes lonely. My beloved library is mostly not available to me, but I keep a volume or two nearby. But I have people in my life who love me and who I love. I have shed the persona and embraced the person. I have learned much and changed more. Twenty eight months of HRT has given me a new and more comely shape. Sixteen months of electrolysis has mostly cleared my face of unwanted fur. I usually feel pretty. I usually feel whole.
I'm not fond of holidays, not because I have nowhere to go, but because I am still learning how to act. Do I bring flowers to my hosts? Do I allow myself to be embraced? Do I tell my story one more time? I think I do, not because it is mandatory, but because it is not. I will be accepted regardless of my presentation by those who want to understand, and I will not be accepted regardless of my presentation by those who do not.
My larger issue is accepting that the years and decades I spent in denial were not squandered needlessly. Some were wasted - The two decades of drug and alcohol abuse did nothing except keep me from my destiny. That I waited until the psychic pain was debilitating did nothing to speed my arrival to self. But in a larger sense it took all that to beat me into submission and to require that I begin to seek, to become a pilgrim on the road to who I am.
"Someday we'll find it,
The rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers and me"
Thank you Kermit,
Julie
