The Woman Within

I took a walk this evening, alone along the dimly lit streets of west suburban Boston. The blustery wind and drizzle laden overcast skies fit my mood as I scuffled along the slick sidewalks. We had come down here to take care of business and for me to confront my parents over what had been slowly escalating over the past weeks, months, and years. Joanne was at her mothers this evening, having parted ways after a dinner out together and picking up our Amtrak Tickets at the Train Station for our upcoming trip to the SCC Transgender Convention. I was alone and I had time to think – think and relive the conversation that I had the day prior with my parents and mainly with my dad. The stiff wind and drizzle stung my face as I walked – just as the conversation I had with them stung my inner soul. It had escalated when my father's short temper, was provoked in his derogatory abrupt retorts to Joanne one evening last Friday during a phone call with my dad. Joanne had simply called t...

A question was raised the other day by a transgender woman whose wife asked her why she wanted to be a woman? Guys, she said, have it so much easier in society it seems than women. She wondered if the choices we were making to be the women we felt we were inside made life easier for us given the challenges we had to face... My answer... Guys perhaps do have it easier in regards to presentation. They certainly don't seem to have to worry about the makeup and the hair, the clothing and the accessories quite so much as the women. They seem to receive less societal judgment and bias which makes things a bit easier. With all of this in mind, I used to question my own identity and my desires to be the woman I am inside. Understanding the additional tedium involved with being a woman and understanding that I had created a successful life as a male did not make the logic more understandable. The choices in life to be who I am inside do not make life easier except internally. To NOT be th...

A series of recent events has left me feeling alone inside - as if my years in childhood were spent with another set of parents than I see today. Life was simpler when I was young... simpler because I could not see beyond the simple eyes of a child. Simpler because I felt my parents truly loved and understood me. As an adult now, the veil of naivety has become tattered with holes and the windows into their souls and there intentions I could now see. How earth shatteringly sad it was over the past few years to have become enlightened to this dark side and to see through the thin veil which my mind's own eye created in defense for them. Where do I start in all of this? It was a life of lies and deceit - by my own parents - to protect themselves and to shine in a trail of deceits and fabrications. As a child, I always wondered why my sister held a different last name than I. When I asked my sister, she said simply that she liked that name and when I asked my mother she told me sim...