Member-only story
Image from Abigail Keenan
on UnSplash
When someone asks me why I ever would give up the male privilege I reluctantly earned to pursue a life as a transgender woman. The entire process required me to jump into an existence I didn’t know really much about. Regardless of spending a lifetime of closely observing almost every girl/woman I saw.
One of the simplest responses I could ever come up with, as well as one which was easiest to understand, was I just unhappy with who I was.
In many ways the whole process started when I was very young when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I always answered without fail and didn’t tell the truth. Instead of the usual doctor or lawyer answer everyone wanted to hear, all I could keep thinking was how badly I wanted to be a woman when I grew up. Imagine the shock I would have received if I had told the truth. So I did the natural, for me, and held my ever increasing gender dysphoria to myself. I built a very dark and lonely gender closet while I was very unhappy. Even when I achieved some success in my male dominated world. It was difficult enough to achieve happiness in my family to begin with but nearly impossible when I added in anything to do with my gender dysphoria. Keep in mind, all of this occurred back in the days when being a transvestite or transsexual was considered to be a mental health issue.
Even still, I knew I wasn’t crazy, all I wanted was to be was feminine. As I went through a life which included graduating with two…
