Member-only story
My Transgender Day: A Transitional Farce in Five Brief Acts
An emotionally and physically tiring game of juggling
I am a late-in-life transitioning transgender woman. “What does that mean?” I hear the gender-uninformed cisgender person ask, possibly followed by: “What is cisgender?” To speed along the story I have put a brief glossary of terms below.*
I started my day with great plans that required multiple character and wardrobe changes. The new reality of my life demanded it. For personal and professional reasons I must continue to present as male most of the time.
It really sucks.
For sixty years, my role on the stage of life as a male lead was dictated to me by a rigidly binary world. It indoctrinated me into the role of Male from the moment of my birth. With a crack on my ass, the delivery doctors proudly informed my parents:
“Congratulations, it’s a boy!”
There was no looking back. The doctor and the world declared my gender as male.
Only they both got it wrong.
I was born with a birth defect.
Mother Nature had decided to wave the Magic Wand of Biodiversity over my mother’s womb causing my body to form male while my brain was wired female. Being born in the 1950’s was not the best time to be transgender. No one knew that the concept of transgenderism even existed. The word “transgender” wasn’t even used until the late 1960's.
The first 60 years of my life were both fruitful and distressing for me. I lived my male role to the hilt: sports, fighting, dating, career, marriage, family, empty-nesting, and visions of retirement. I truly believed that the doctor and the world were right. I accepted my male role as real.
That belief came to a screeching halt in my 60th year. Mother Nature had planted a gender time bomb that finally exploded and it shattered the gender lie.
I wasn’t a cisgender male, I was a transgender female.
Believe me, I didn’t want the new role. I refused to accept that it was real until the intensity of that denial almost killed me. Gender dysphoria (see glossary below) is an unforgiving bitch.
