About Being Transgender

Sunday, May 21, 2006

For many, if not most, transgender individuals, the path towards accepting that one is TG is fraught with dangerous obstacles. They come in many varieties...friends and family who are non-accepting, jobs that deny ones right to transition, financial despair and religious intolerance. Perhaps most difficult to overcome is one's own self...the preconceptions that society has drilled into us, our fears of exploring OUR unknown regions, the "otherness" of considering and accepting and traversing a path that may alienate us from the things we love.

In my case, as with most other TG individuals, I lived my life in utter, total and devestating denial. The internal battle raged daily...submit or succumb..and...generally I lost that "battle" each and every day. The giving in was followed by an intense period of guilt..to oneself, one's spouse, one's family. Being a good Jewish kid...well...that served to intensify the guilt I was feeling. I would auto psychoanalyze myself, try to pick apart the constituent elelments of what I was feeling, delve into the etiology of my "malady". I would speculate that I was possessed by my anima, or by some disincarnate entity. Whatever it was...it wasn't going away. Every day...that internal battle was still raging. Imagine going through this every day of your life from the time you were about 4 or 5 years old.

I thought it was some kind of arrested development and that, with a concerted effort, it was something I just needed to outgrow...and COULD outgrow. I just wasn't giving it enough effort. I mean...here I was...bascially trying to live an authentic and genuine life...and...in most every other way, I was. I had been a part of the counter culture for most (okay ALL) of my adult life. I was accustomed to living outside the boundaries, to being criticized, ostracized and marginalized. So...why was THIS so difficult for me to deal with? I have to assume that societal conditioning, when we consider sex and/or gender, is SO STRONG that it becomes a bastion of resistance in an otherwise individualistic and autonomous life.

I had given myself until I turned 50 to "cure" myself. I appealed to every spiritual nook and cranny for support and answers. None worked. In fact...as I approached my self imposed deadline, the urge to cross dress became more insistent each and every day. I was living in the cross hairs of an ultimate compulsive/obsessive reality and there was no escape. It was like quicksand..the harder I struggled to extricate myself,the deeper I sank into this morass of compulsive/obsessive behavior.

Well...flukes of the universe are sometimes our salvation. Or, perhaps, I had subconsciously set the stage for my own crisis event. Whatever, and however...I had left a bra receipt where it could easily be discovered...and...of course...it was. As was my wont..I denied and denied...but...it was no use. I had been caught and there was no escaping that fact. 40-50 years of denial and an era of self persecution ended that day. It was the first day of the rest of my life...and...despite some ups and downs (mostly financial in nature), I have been living a life I had previously not even dared to dream. It has been like walking on clouds, bathed in the light of understanding and acceptance, living a blessed existence!!

More to follow...

trickster108