Member-only story
Many times in my life I have felt as if I was the elephant in the room and it had nothing to do with my physical size. I was a pretty good sized man at around six foot tall and two hundred fifty pounds which kept the bullies away when I was younger so I wasn’t a huge man.
All my problems began to surface in my unwanted male life when I went to family events and felt strangely out of place. As my male self I was the elephant in the room, or you could refer to it as the impostor syndrome. All along I was a woman pretending to be a man.
As life went by and I had more experience presenting in the world as my authentic feminine self, I felt even more out of place at family events such as my brother’s house. It was the place we always gathered for big sporting events with him (my only sibling) and his two sons. All was good until I started my hormone replacement therapy and started to appear decidedly more androgynous. Even then, before my breast growth started to happen along with me being able to grow my hair long, I was able to wear a loose fitting shirt and tie my hair back to still remain vaguely male. My last attempt “purging” my feminine self came approximately six months before my second wife unexpectedly passed away from a massive heart attack.
As I “purged” I vowed to grow a beard which would make it technically impossible to go out dressed as a…
