Well it’s a first for me... a blog?
I have had many firsts in 2015, and a few first for the people I love and who are around me I guess.
Coming out as transgender is not easy to say the least, but honesty is the best policy and if people can’t handle that I have to say it’s their issue not mine.
Being transgender is not a choice a person has as it happens pre-birth in the womb a kind of birth defect, people can never see when looking at a new-born child. I do not have odd coloured eyes or a missing limb or anything that show I have a defect. I was assigned male the moment I “popped out” and took my first breath.
Society dictates if you have a male appearance then hay your male, and if you have an outward female appearance, you are a girl. However, the mind of that child may not match the label attached to the body. This is the case for me, I have hidden the fact that I feel wrong in this body and as a child had to have voice therapy to speak male… I loved playing as a girl but sadly told boys do not do this or boys do not do that, so quite naturally you start to build a defensive wall around your feelings masking how you feel and wanting parental approval you soon learn to hide from everybody who you are.
Sadly as you weave this life of lies you find you become trapped in a prison of your own making, I learned to copy and mimic male’s around me, and over compensated a lot of the time not knowing what appears to others as male behaviour and for that I’m so sorry. If there were a bully in school, I would copy them to some degree in order not to be picked upon. Growing up I expressed a reckless attitude and live life as a male even riding in to danger with outlaw motorcycle gangs, all the time hiding the real me away. I pulled it off well I must say, I looked that bad ass my girlfriend walked straight past me in the street, we were shoulder to shoulder and she didn’t know it was me, I called her and she turned and went very defensive with this stranger in front of her, I was bad ass for sure. It was a turning point I had gone too deep as the undercover cops say and gone native…
In bars, people would move out of my way as I entered the place leaving half-drunk drinks rather than stay near me. Bar owners would buy back the beer’s their assistants had sold me, and ban me from the establishment as “they don’t want my sorts in their bar” yep I was a bastard for sure, turning younger lads in to mini copies of me… I had an army behind me willing to do whatever I needed doing. At one point I was banned from every bar in a local town as an “undesirable” and that’s close on 20 bars… When you build a wall make sure it’s an Impenetrable Wall was the way I had learned to cope. I hid behind mask after mask I was unhappy and behaving in such a way family and true friends were afraid.
I could leave the life I had carved out quite easily as I had many masks to hid behind part psychopath I guess and part normal, not being the real me leaves daemons in all sorts of places. Coming out I had to face a few of these for sure and the hangman’s noose was one way out I had planned if it all went “tits up” having bought a good strong rope of sufficient length and even selected a tree it was planned with Military Style. I even had a backup plan of a hose and the car window and an out of the way parking spot. To get to this point in a person’s life, just shows what I have lived with for so long and how damaging putting up walls and protective barriers can be.
I thought of coming out 25 years ago but I wanted a child so I put it off until they were grown up. Then came the second bundle of joy a few years later so again I put it off, it was easier to put it off than to come out as transgender at the time so 25 years later I have two of the most wonderful people I call my children, who are now adults in their own right. So my time has finally come it was a now or never situation, and being the strong person I have become I choose to give being me a go. I could lose every single thing I had and the love of those I held so dear to my very soul.
If anybody is reading this blog and is transgender take heart as live is worth living and living as you.
I announced it to my wife who had been the girl to walk past me all of those years ago not knowing it was me… She was shocked and took some time to process the news, things were going to change and not perhaps how I had thought… it was all to play for as they say.
Time is a great healer and after a month or so, she decided 33 years of marriage and knowing me for considerable more was worth fighting for. I had managed to stay alive for 50 + years with these feelings and if I live for another 50 years as who I should have been, who was she to say no to me as a woman. We worked out a plan to out Nicola to the two children, I received the “I thought you had some bad news to tell us” they were 110% behind me and had guessed there was a little something in my liberal views over the years. So no big deal the earth didn’t stop revolving or anything, the next person was my Mom she is 85, what the hell is going to happen in this situation… well shock was one thing, quickly followed by we knew you were different as a child… the rest of the conversation was full of support and excitement, my Mom wanted to know what outfits I had, and decided I needed better ones to go out in, and insisted she took me shopping as they say Moms know best…
I will let you know more of Nicolas journey in my next blog.
Keep reading and post comments if you wish.
As the story of my life is continuing.
Nicola
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