Sometimes we just feel different or disconnected but we don't know what it is. I was born in 1946 in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I am the oldest of five. When I look back at my past I was mostly disconnected. Through my preschool years, I was just a kid, and I interacted with other kids and I just lived without thinking much about myself, my environment, and my family. I saw what I saw and I didn't think about it so when I think back I never really saw it. When I was 5, I didn't notice what was there, I noticed what wasn't there. We went to another town for the winter, and when I came home, my dog, and my friends were gone. The neighbor girl was not around because her mother got polio and she was just not around to play. My mother was pregnant with my little sister, but I didn't I just don't recall it.
I was aware of myself, but I felt lonely because for some reason my brother who was 1 1/2 years younger than me didn't seem to want to play with me. He and the one other boy, would just run off and leave my nearsighted self to run after them in the woods behind our house. I was not adventuresome. Girl clothes were just not there for me, so it was not like I had a choice, and I was always trying to figure things out. In my school classroom pictures, I was the shy kid off who set herself of a little part. I did not think of myself as a boy or a girl because I was just there. I was dressed like a little boy because those were the clothes my mother bought me, and I just accepted them without question, just like I accepted a lot of things in my life. I just went through life doing what I was doing, because I never saw any other choice.
I was shy, self-conscious, and without a clue. I didn't fit in with the rough and tumble boys and well the girls' world was across an invisible barrier. There were just a few kids in my neighborhoods and age wise I didn't quite fit in. So, when we played games I was just another one of the kids that was there, but I was in my own little world.
When hormones started shaping my world, my dad was away undergoing cancer treatment and he was to come home later that year and die within a few months. Wet dreams happened and the boys stood around on the playground and told dirty stories. I stood at the edge of the boy circle and I didn't get the point of the dirty stories. I was clueless. I was very self-conscious about wet dreams and masturbation and tried to hid it. It smelled and I always felt down afterward. My mother left an almost used up lipstick in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and I experimented with it, and I fantasized and daydreamed about magically becoming a girl.
My dad kept his magazines and detective books in the folks bedroom which was off limits at all times. I had no idea about how boys and girls were different in the genital area, so in my daydreams, I would just have female genitals and lose my male genitals. Basically, on road trips, I would squat to pee instead of stand like my dad.
I didn't ever hate my body, I was just disconnected from it. Like, I was out to lunch when it came to being a male and dating. Over the years, I have found that as a female, I don't have that problem, though I haven't had sex with a man because I don't have the girl parts and while my facial hair is light and not noticeable any man who gave me a hickey on the neck would get whisker burn on his lips. So while sex as a woman feels natural to me, not having the female parts is a barrier which I fear would put my life in danger. I also have fathered six kids and tried to help raise 4 more and dealt with children as a school teacher for over 30 years so I have had enough of it. I still have a 12-year-old son at 69.
The point of all this is that I know I am a woman, period end of discussion and have lived as one for the past 7 years, I still have problems with being disassociated from dealing realistically with it. Confusion and self-doubt is a part of our existence that we can't run away with. Now I see myself as a woman who spent most of her life living butch, but not by choice, but because that was the way my life was, that is until it wasn't.
I accept the fact that I do what I do because I am a woman. Now for yourself, do you self-identify as a man or as a woman. Are you dressing female because you are a woman or are you a man who wants to live as a woman? There is no judgment here, it just gets to the roots of who you are.
For me, it was accepting that I was female, then deciding if I wanted to still live a butch lifestyle or did I need to live a feminine life style. I tried being butch and it just didn't fit who I am. I need to be seen and accepted as a woman now a granny, and develop my own feminine style of course limited by my body which has a lot of male characteristics which I can distract others from. I was a plain Tom before and now I am a plain Jane.
Passing as a granny seems to be natural for me because people have problems understanding when I say I am my son's father. Maybe people just can't accept the concept of there being a transsexual granny. If I look like a granny, I must be one. So my male name on my driver's license and the M and my big feet, and my voice, which has definitely male tones so I am made as a male when people hear and don't see me.
I travel with my female partner, our son, and her two daughters who are still at home. I am 20 years older than my girlfriend so I become her mother and the kids grandmother. Once this idea has formed in people's minds, evidence to the contrary just doesn't matter. It doesn't even seem to matter to the people who do know including the police and social services and the kid's schools.
I still have my doubts and my fears and I am not outwardly sensual. I am just my female self. I don't think I pass, and when I do seem to pass it blows my mind. And my partner insists on calling me Michael and using male pronouns even in the bathrooms, and no one seems to care.
So just live out who you are. Discover what your gender is and what lifestyle you have to live that makes you comfortable and you can make work.
Personally, I have avoided a lot of issues that other trans people have to face every day. My parents are dead. I am out to everyone on social media, but only my current family has to deal with me on a daily basis because the rest of my family is hundreds of miles up to over a thousand miles away and so are my former students and lifetime friends. I live in low-income housing and off of Social Security retirement so I am not dealing with work relationships. I am a homebody so the bar scene is not a part of my life.
But, I do have a lot of public exposure. My kids friends come over, and I am constantly fixing the neighbor kids' toys because I still have the tools I have accumulated over the years. We don't have a car so we walk or take the bus. I go to the library, vote, and was called to court duty. Life has brought social services into my life and I have had to deal with the police, but not lately, because that has settled down. The last seven years that I have been out, we have had kids in elementary school, middle school, and high school and I have been my female self every minute. I have also had to deal with the kids parents and with housing inspections and doctors and dentists, and optometrists. I have never been in a men's restroom in the past seven years or a men's changing room while buying clothes.
I have been meant with being ignored, people not sitting next to me on the bus, catcalls once, indifference. But there is no open hostility anywhere. When I asked to be called Miss or say I pronounce Michael as Michelle it's accepted.
When you have kids you never live in isolation.
I don't believe it, I don't understand it, and I don't always realize it, but when people see me I pass or am accepted as a female or it is perfectly acceptable for me to dress as a woman, even if people label me as a man. All anyone ever sees me is as a female. And I have found that the older I get the more invisible I become. Maybe people have always seen me as a female and didn't quite buy the male part. Even while dressing butch and teaching school, I never felt that I had male authority or maybe I just worked with strong-willed women who didn't defer to male authority. Or maybe because I have always been a woman, I never knew how to exercise male authority or my body language sent out female vibes. I was teased and picked on a lot as the new kid, but never called a sissy.
I guess I am trying to relate to your story through my own hoping that you will be able to relate to some of it.
When my first family fell apart and I was free to start living as a female at home and around my house, I had a lot of fear, about being out in public as a female. Having been married at that time for 29 years I was comfortable in the ladies section of stores and just pretended to be picking things up for the other females in my family. Now I am uncomfortable in men's sections of stores. It took me 9 years and retirement for me go to full time all the time.
Unfortunately, I waited until I started to bald in the middle and back of my head, get gray, and loose most of my teeth. I can look like a passable plain Jane granny, but I must wear my hair in a ponytail all the time or wear a hat or a scarf.
So, you have to do what you have to do with your now. Except for about three years, I have had a family to care for so I don't have the money for hormones, or surgery or counseling. So if you are single, you can spend more on yourself. I have always been a people pleaser, though most people won't think so, so I have made boundaries which I am still afraid to cross.
Trans people can grow old and time many times is unkind, so you have to decide what to do with your present. Making the changes you need to do in your life are not any easier in the future than they are now. If you are afraid to make the changes you need to because you are afraid of what you may loose. That loss may happen anyway for other reasons and the loss may be harder to understand and accept than the loss would have been if you had made your gender changes. If your spouse walks off and leaves you because of your gender changes, she just may find another reason to walk off and leave you anyway and you will have lost that time in your life. If you are afraid that your children will hate you because you change your gender, they may just find other reasons to hate your which are less understandable.
These are the things I have learned in my life. I put off my gender changes until later in my life and came to understand that perhaps I could have started at least 5 or ten years earlier because waiting didn't change anything.
