I can guess from the way I have organized my life, that having freeing myself from fear and having some financial security came first. Then I spent years living as a butch female. While I am not effeminate, I am not overly masculine either so whether I tried traditional male or female employment I did my job the best that I could but avoided exercising any male prerogative or authority.
I didn't have any masculine ego enjoyment either. When I fixed the little things that I could on my car or washing machine or put in water and sewer line for my mobile home, I was anxious all the time and relieved when I got it to work. In doing the laundry, doing some of the cooking, diaper changing, and not having any boys' night out I socialized myself as a female, the same in my job as an elementary teacher working mostly with other women. I overcame my fears and acquired some women's clothing which I wore in the few private times during my life.
I fathered children but mentally was more of a female during sex than a male mentally and I was always disassociated from my male part. It worked or it didn't and I felt uncomfortable when it did. I guess I was a failure at being a butch female emotionally desiring to be more effeminate.
So over the years until my family fell apart, while I kept trying to fill the male role with my children, my sense of responsibility was in the role, but my heart was not. I wanted to be more of a girlfriend with my ex and less of a husband. She wanted a man, but she was unable to live with the male ego. Over time, I lost her as a friend, and she could not stand my butchness, but she wouldn't allow me to be effeminate either. I realized over the years after our breakup that she had never been emotionally honest with me, and had always put up the emotional front that served her purposes. When she left and I was alone, Michelle took over all of my private nonwork life. As far as my underwear went it was to be female all the rest of my life including bra and panties under my dress shirt and male pants. My hair was extremely long all the time except for the last few months of what became the end of my full-time teaching career. For about 12 years, my hair was longer than most of the other women on the job.
I still was very self-conscious and fearful of being exposed as a female, but I couldn't suppress it anymore. I made contact with other transgender women in the city 80 miles from where I lived, but that was short lived because I formed a new relationship with a woman I meant on Susan's chatline and we have been together for thirteen years. She won't accept me as a woman, but as a male crossdresser both in private and public. But I grew up in a dysfunctional family and had been making emotional compromises all my life. She is also a person who really can't live with a masculine ego or masculine authority so somehow I meet her emotional needs at some level.
So now at 68 I am full-time female without hormones or surgery because I am big sister and have always put my families needs above my own.
I don't have the money to spend upon getting breasts or for hormones. I know I am a woman and accept it and I have had some counseling for depression and my temper and have told my counselor I am a transsexual woman, she didn't deal with transsexual issues. She mostly listened and told me I was coping nicely. And I just felt why did I need that anyway.
So now I am waiting for my Medicare Advantage Insurance to come around and provide some transsexual female transitioning services and a finding someone to council me that is in my neighborhood because I have no car and ride the buses.
I have decided to be a woman in my everyday life and not worry about what anyone else thought. I am a vanishing 68-year-old senior citizen and one of the four women along with my partner and my young son. Because my partner is 20 years younger than me to people who don't know, I am grandma, my partner is my daughter and her two daughters and our son are my grandchildren.
When I have to come out as our son's biological father at school at times, if anyone cares, nobody indicates that they do. Neither do all the kids that come and go from our house, nor do the neighbors or their children.
But as an adult child of alcoholics I always fear when the other shoe will drop. All things considered, I wish I had started transitioning 10 years earlier than I did because my first family exploded anyway so in the long run it would not have made any difference because not being my true self didn't prevent anything.
Except on the internet, I don't have any transsexual friends. Yet on the social media I am out to everyone that knows me or remembers me including all my family, friends, past students. Most of them are thousands of miles away our only contact is on the internet so I am not sure what our relationship would be on a daily basis. I have never been ranted at my any of them, and only one or two don't accept my friendship on social media. Our interactions are civil. However, if there are any emotional barriers, most of them are not being dealt with except for my eldest son, and my youngest sister. Such is the state of things.
I am not sure if I answered the question or not about what I valued most in considering my transitioning, but I guess, the last thing I seemed to have valued is my own real needs. I have to be reminded again and again, that most people look out for their own needs first even in family relationships. And it served no useful purpose for me not to look out after mine. That others put themselves first and they want me to put them first, but in this order of things my needs usually come in last if they are even considered at all. I have to be myself and everybody else has to take it or leave it.
