Looking back of from the senior years of my life, I have come to understand that there was only on absolute in my life and that has always been that I was a female and not a male. I am a woman, period. Accepting that than I had to decide, as any woman does, how I was going to live my life. I decided for myself if I was for the present moment being as butch as I could be or display some degree of femininity in my style.
My choice, while at the moment I didn't think it was a choice, was to accept my parents, the doctors, and society's label of being a male, so as a female I went butch for the first 53 years of my life until I could live that way anymore. I presented as an uncomplicated shy small town Dakota male who participated in male activities in school like sports and scouts and jobs like construction labor at the competitive level of just succeeding enough to be present on the sidelines and watch the guys on the field, like most girls who were not cheerleaders did. If I wasn't there it was in the band.
My style of dress blended me into the woodwork. I never made it to any of the beer parties in the shelter belts. My two boyfriends and I, were all socially invisible. When I did make it to my brother's college beer parties, I was a piece of the furniture. My parents' family friends of Johnnie Walker, Jack Daniels, and Bud Weiser turned my home into an emotional earthquake zone. I became a turtle constantly through most of my life just sticking my head out to see if the world around me was emotionally peaceful or not.
As a transsexual woman, accepting my world and living in it the way I did was my choice. I chose not to challenge my world for fear it would explode or run away from it because I felt that I had no place to run to. I just chose to camouflage myself and hide in plain sight. I was too female to be successful a male, and I got being butch right to the extent that I was never picked on for being a sissy. I was for being the new kid in town.
None of this did anything for my socialization and social growth as a person, nor did it do anything for developing any real romantic relationships. My strength was seeing things through so I graduated from high school. I never totally isolated myself from my family. I came home Thanksgiving and Christmas until my mother died and seeing the same old same old, I stayed away until those holidays came around again. I managed to graduate from college in five years while demonstrating against the War in Vietnam and LSD and meth and I stuck out doing my military as a conscientious objector as a physical therapy aid at a boarding school for developmentally disabled children.
I worked almost constantly until I retired at 62. I raised my children and I survived in my relationships with my female spouses until I didn't. I chose not to upset the balance in my life until that balance didn't exist anymore. Most of this was living a butch lifestyle which I was becoming alienated from more and more as time went by.
While I didn't understand it at the moment being butch was the best choice that I felt that I had. Rather it was, in the long run, I don't know. As a transsexual woman living and raising my own children and hers, genderwise, I was in a lesbian relationship, while both my wife and current partner only accept me as a male, now days a male cross-dresser, which I am not. They want and wanted a heterosexual male-relationship, but not really. If I would have been the typical beer-guzzling, skirt chasing, gambling male, out with the guys lots, no female task males that to some degree my father and stepdad were, that was the lifestyle for males in the working class society I grew up in, I wouldn't have lasted a month with either of them.
These two cis ladies wanted a trans female who lived who presented butch and pretended to be male, but was more female in nature in the way they lived a family lifestyle. They also want to be their own person without any male domination. I finally decided that I had to be my own person and that was a simple feminine country girl who lived without frills and would stand up for herself.
This is my fog of transition. Transitioning was short. It was simply accepting that I was a female and not a male. Developing my female personality will take an eternity. Changing my physical body by anything other than what happens when you try and project a female persona while only happen when it happens. Being 69 now who knows. But accepting my femaleness has changed how my genitalia reacts and tucking it straight in has reduced its length. I have phantom breasts from wearing padded bras 24/7/365 and my butt sticks out in back like a girl's does. My hair curls naturally and is thinning like a little old grandma's hair does. When you look at trans children who are allowed to live as their gender identity you do see physical changes take place that make them more like the gender they identify with. So I can't really say that no physical changes are taking place because of my acceptance of my femaleness. I have noticed that our self-images and life style choices and our jobs shape our physical appearances.
My sexual relationships are in limbo or non-existent and this may never change until I take hormones and have surgery to have female genitalia. I am not big on big breasts because I have enough trouble with my back as it is.
Our fog of transition is in our minds and our fears. That is how I see it. You have the current revised version of my fog.
