Transition Thoughts & Reflections - Melissa

In today's guest post, we hear from one of the first bloggers I visited here in Blogistan. She is also one of the most honorable people I have had the pleasure to correspond with, here or anywhere else.

Melissa has lived most of her sixty-plus years accepting that there was, as she puts it, ‘something about her that was different’. Like many of us, she built the male façade in order to survive working in a world dominated by homophobic and trans-phobic men. Unlike others and myself, Melissa has never been in denial regarding the reality of her true nature.  Early on, she chose to live a celibate life, and by that choice, this tremendously caring person, with her gentle spirit missed out on the daily love and support she might otherwise have found.

Her engaging posts at “Melissa’s Meanderings” and her well-thought out comments are insightful and flavored with interesting stories.  Here is some of her story.

Halle

 Where Do I Stand On The Gender Spectrum?

Calie asked me to write a post for the T-Central blog project, about people who are in transition, preparing to transition, or not transitioning. I wasn't quite sure about this project at first, because I thought it could be seen rightly, or wrongly, as a way to pigeon hole people. I've never liked putting labels on trans sisters, for that very reason. I'm not concerned with whether you cross dress part time, full time, just for fun, or to fulfill a deep need to express the female that you believe lives at the very core of your being. To me, we are all trans, and because of that, we are some of the loneliest people on earth, and we all need each other's support.

So, in that vein..........Are you transitioning?......Oh, you're not?......But you plan to, right?.....No? As if transitioning is some kind of litmus test to determine if you are genuinely transsexual, or not. And of course it's not. Many transsexuals never transition. In fact from what I have heard, most never transition. That doesn't mean they don't want to, or that they aren't truly transsexual, but just that for whatever reason, they don't think it's the right thing for them to do, at least for now, and maybe ever. I have heard many transitioned transsexuals say, if you are truly transsexual, you will have no other choice, but to transition, because if you don't, you will commit suicide, and not transitioning and not committing suicide is proof that you were never transsexual to begin with. I think that is pretty smug thinking on their part. Not transitioning is not a guaranteed ticket to a pistol in the mouth, or a lethal cocktail of Seconal and Vodka. More likely you just live out your life, a perpetually sad and withdrawn person, forever pining over what may have been.

For the record, I am a transsexual. I didn't always realize that. From my earliest recollections, I always knew there was something about me that was different, and it had to do with my gender identity. I grew up in a family where boys were expected to be boys, and gender variance was not only frowned upon, it was strictly forbidden. I had two sisters, and every day I had to watch them freely expressing their femininity, while having suppress and hide mine. Hiding it was one thing, suppressing it was impossible. I thought about it every day, and whenever I was left alone, I would experiment with my sister's or mother's clothing, shoes, jewelry, or cosmetics.

As I got older, I got bolder in my experimentation, and one summer after high school, while living at my grandmother’s house in Pennsylvania, I got too bold. I thought that because I wasn't living under the prying eyes of my mother anymore, I could take my experimentation in feminine expression to new levels. I was working at my first job that summer, as a packing and shipping clerk in a shoe manufacturer's warehouse. It was the first time in my life that I had a reasonable amount of pocket money most of the time, so I decided to indulge in some feminine purchases. I bought some women's shoes and hosiery. I also bought a nightgown, some nail polish and a set of glue on nails. In the bath that evening, I shaved my legs for the first time in my life. I couldn't believe how indescribably good they felt without hair on them. I also couldn't believe how much better they looked. After my bath, I painted my toenails, and tried on the things I bought, then hid it all in a gym bag in my closet. For some reason or other, I thought that it would be a good idea to hide my artificial nails under my mattress. To this day, I can't remember why, but it turned out to be a big mistake. My grandmother changed the sheets on my bed the next day, and she discovered my artificial nails. They must have piqued her curiosity, because she then discovered the clothing and shoes, I hid in my gym bag. She never told me about her discovery, but I knew she found my secret things, because the sheets were change and the nails were in a neat pile under the mattress and the clothing was neatly folded in my bag. A few days later, my mother and father showed up at my grandmother’s house when I returned from work. They told me they were taking me back down to Maryland with them, and that I was to tell my boss I was quitting.

To make a long story short, when we got back to Mom and Dad's place in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC, they began to give me the third degree, over the things my grandmother found in my room. They were very hostile, and I felt like a cornered animal. I didn't know what to say. Dad was a retired Army officer, working for the Army, so he told my mother to take me to the psychiatric clinic at Walter Reed Hospital in DC. It was 1966, and the Army shrink I saw treated me like I had a perversion that needed to be cured with aversion therapy. All this did was make me feel ashamed of what I was, and pushed me deeper into the closet.

My self-image was shot, and for years after that, I believed I was one of those horrible embarrassing creatures, most commonly referred to in those days as a transvestite. It wasn't until I was in my late twenties that I began to accept the fact that I wasn't just attracted to female clothing, but that I envied everything about being a woman. I realized that I had just been playing at being a man, to hide my true desire to live as a female. It was then that I decided in a limited way, to step out of the closet, and into the real world of women. I had to be among them, dressing like them, talking like them, and acting like them, to see if I really fit in with them. It was then that I truly began to take my feminine grooming and dressing seriously. I studied women's fashion magazines, and faithfully read the women's section of the newspaper each day (yes, they really had a women's section back then).

I began to shop for clothes, with a mind to actually wearing them out in public. I went to a Merle Norman Cosmetic Studio and got a make-up lesson, and I started making appointments at exclusively female beauty salons, to have my hair and nails done, while dressed and groomed completely as a girl. It was during those trips to the salon, that I realized how perfectly at home I felt with the women there. It was not a sexual thing at all. It just felt so peaceful to be among other women, and interacting with them as one of them. The more I did this, the more I wanted to continue doing it, and I slowly began to accept the fact that I was not really a man at heart.

It was at about that time that I read Jan Morris's book, Conundrum, about her early 70's transition from male to female. I found a copy of it in the state library, because it was out of print by then. I cried throughout the entire book, and it was not the type of crying that you do when you are merely sad. It was with a profound sense of longing, and the horrible feeling that my life was being thrown away that I cried. It sent me into the deepest depression I have ever experienced. It was horrible!

I finished the book, but I could not stop crying. I continued to cry uncontrollably throughout the weekend. Just as soon as I would stop crying, I would start crying all over again. I was actually afraid I would become dehydrated, because I was shedding tears so profusely. When Monday morning arrived, I prepared to go to work, but I was still crying so badly that I couldn't. I was so scared by this time that if I couldn't shake this horrible depression, I might try anything to stop it, so I called a local mental health clinic, and asked for an emergency appointment.

I was still crying when I entered Dr. S's office. Unlike the ignorant Army shrink 17 years earlier, Dr. S was a wonderful man, who immediately put me at ease. I was able to open up to him like I had never been able to with anyone ever before. We covered my feelings about myself from my early childhood up to then. By the time my appointment was over, I had stopped crying, and I left his office with the assurance that I was not perverted, and that there was nothing wrong with my feelings. By the end of my second appointment Dr. S said something that was music to my ears. First he related a story about how a mother had brought her gay son to see him, convinced that he was a transsexual. Dr. S told her that he wasn't a transsexual, he was just gay, and that both she and her son needed to accept the fact that he was gay, and not feel guilty about it. He then went on to say that he had been practicing psychiatry for 13 years, and that many patients had come to him thinking that they might be transsexual. He said that I was the first patient to see him that he truly believed was transsexual. At last! I finally had confirmation! Now, what to do about it.

As wonderful as Dr. S was, he did not specialize in gender therapy, and knew of no one who did, and there wouldn't be a gender clinic in Richmond, until twenty years later. I only found out about it completely by accident a year ago. Dr. S was kind enough to give me the address of Duke University Hospital down in North Carolina, who he said was doing gender reassignment surgery at the time. Even though I was nowhere near ready for surgery, I wrote to them anyway. They sent me back a packet of information, telling me what was required of me to be accepted as a candidate for surgery. Mainly, that I had to be living full time as a female for 18 months, and be on HRT, and be under the care of a licensed therapist.

The elation that I experienced at having Dr. S confirm my own self-diagnosis, was short lived, when reality reared its ugly head. I had no gender clinic, or therapist who specialized in gender issues to go to. I had no money to pay for it all. I had started electrolysis, several years earlier, but had to quit after just twelve one-hour sessions, because it was putting a serious cramp in my budget at the time. $30 an hour was a whole lot of money back in 1980, when I was only making $19,000 a year before taxes, and had rent, insurance, a car payment and utilities to pay.

I was also fourteen years into a career in the maintenance department of an international chemical corporation's largest factory. That was a secure job, at a time when secure jobs were beginning to become scarce in the US, and it carried with it full pension rights upon retirement. Unfortunately it was an almost exclusively male work environment, staffed by some of the most homophobic cretins you could imagine, at a time when LGBT friendly corporate policies were just a dream. There was no way, I would ever be able to transition on that job, but I had no other marketable skills, so I couldn't go elsewhere. I tried to find other work, but when you are working full time with little time off, it's pretty hard to go job searching, especially when you want to find employment that might be trans friendly. I did take a day off from work one time, to enroll in class in doing acrylic nails. The people giving the class were in the business of selling acrylic nail supplies to freelance nail techs, and immediately viewed me with suspicion. I was the only male in the class, and they thought I owned my own salon, and was there undercover, because the cosmetology industry was lobbying the Va. General Assembly hard, to allow only licensed cosmetologists and manicurists to do acrylic nails.

Well, the bottom line is, I never found other more suitable employment, or any gender therapists, the cost of which wouldn't have been covered by my insurance anyway. So my dream of becoming a woman became just that, nothing more than a dream. I had to somehow satisfy myself with the knowledge, that I was indeed transsexual, but that I would likely never see my dream of being a woman come to fruition. The years began to tick by. I was 37 and already well on the road to male pattern baldness, when I sat in Dr. S's office crying my eyes out, and pouring my soul out to him. The thought of becoming a bald old man working in a factory until retirement, was very depressing, but a reality I was going to have to somehow find a way to live with. I did it essentially by shutting down. I withdrew from my social life, and became a recluse. I grew a beard, because even though I was balding I still had long hair, and without a beard I looked too much like a girl. I couldn't stand the way that freaked out the homophobic males I had to work with on a daily basis.

I went home each night and even though I had a beard, I still crossdressed. I had to. I had to claim whatever little portion of my life that I was left to me. I'm sure I was a sorry sight; a bearded lady, obese from smothering my discontent in food and drink. But that's how I coped. I went to work each day and pretended to be a man, then came home to my solitude where I lived within my walls as much as I could as the woman I wanted to be.

Dysfunctional? Absolutely! But I never felt like I had an alternative.

I finally retired at the end of 2007, and I've been living on my pension ever since. I'm now Melissa whenever at home, and sometimes when I go out too, depending on the venue. Because of the internet, I was finally able to discover an entirely new world for people like me. I stumbled upon blogger one day, and decided to begin my own blog. Immediately I attracted a follower in Caroline, from Scotland. She's one of the sweetest, funniest, and most intelligent and supportive people I have ever had the privilege of getting to know, and I dearly love her! Soon I had other followers, who actually thought the drivel I published was interesting reading! I had found a home. Then Caroline, sweetheart that she is, told me about a website, called Pink Essence, and I joined it. I wrote a little about myself, and told of my feelings of isolation in the area I lived in, ever since I was diagnosed as a transsexual. Soon a Richmond girl wrote back to me, and told me of her support group, and invited me to meet up with her and some of the other girls at a lesbian bar they meet at twice a week, as a prerequisite for joining the group. I dressed as myself, clean shaven and made up, and went out for the first time since 1980 that summer night last August. I'll never forget how liberating it felt to drive into that busy shopping district, park my truck in a public parking lot, get out and walk down the street to the bar in front of God and everyone, as my true self! I walked past an outdoor cafe, and passed a male and female couple approaching from the opposite direction, and even though I am 6'2" and well over 200 lbs, no one gave me a second look.

So.........will I ever transition? I will never say no, but at almost 62 years old (September 21 is my birthday), with a bald head that no transplant will ever make look womanly, and some medical complications, that are the inexorable result of years of obesity and undiagnosed diabetes, probably not. Still, I will take a back seat to no smug, fully transitioned woman. My womanhood is between my ears, not between my legs, and in full love of her, and what she has accomplished, regardless of her hormones and surgeries, so is hers.

Melissa XX