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 the woman I am within leads to anxiety and depression - something which can only be bottled up for so long. This is not a choice to be who I am. I can not suppress or choose not to be who I feel inside I truly am - not without depression and anxiety returning to rule the sanctum of my inner mind. So the only choice is the choice to either live in a state of dysphoria and depression or to embrace the additional challenges and responsibilities of integrating my life as a woman so that I may at least have an unfettered mind.

Did it bring me to a life that was "easier"?

Well - life is never easy - and choices are never absolute - but at the end of the day - if you can say that your mind is in harmony with your body - then at least it makes it possible to then go on and live your life without having to deal with the dichotomy between body and spirit each and every day.

The right choices in life are those in which you can come to the end of the day, look back at them and say... "I made the best choices I could and I can live with what those choices have dealt unto me"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Penultimate Post

It has been a while since I have blogged on here.... a long while.  The gaps between my blog posts have slowly widened as I have begun to find myself, more and more, just simply living my life as a woman.  The dysphoria is all but gone.  This blog was a tool, as much for those who have read it, as it was for myself.  I was able to make sense of my life and this journey, as much as anyone might hope, through the self reflection engendered in the process of writing out my thoughts.  Often, I would re-read my own posts from months or years prior and see how different my perspectives have become and my thoughts have changed as I grew slowly into the person I have always been. I call this the penultimate post because it is the next to the last post I will write for this blog.  This blog is not going away, nor am I.  My transition is not ending, just as each and every one of us never end our own life's transitions, whether you be transgender or not.  What is going away is the need for
Read more

Connecting The Dots

Again, it has been a while since I have posted on here.  A lot has been happening around and within me.  Living now full time as a woman publicly has brought a sense of peace and contentment to me internally in ways I have never felt before internally. No matter what hardships I may incur as a result of this life change, it is a decision I could never regret.  To have such a personal sense of peace like no other is at once reaffirming and calming.  There is no way that anyone who is not transgender could understand the feeling of dysphoria in not being able to live authentically to their own sense of self.  Likewise, there was no way I could have known how comfortable it was for those born into a gender that fits from birth.....until now.  Now I understand what I was feeling before; the anxiety, the withdrawal from society, the angst and pensiveness.  The lack of comfortability in others who felt ill at ease with me as a person playing the male role has been replaced with the world r
Read more

Dream Myself Awake

I don't usually wake up startled in the middle of the night, sit up in my bed in the stillness of a dark room and wonder why my heart is racing and my skin has broken out in a sweat.  I can't say that I could recall exactly it was that I had been dreaming of either.  I can say that it wasn't anything positive or uplifting.  Far from it.  This doesn't usually happen to me so what exactly happened? Yesterday started out like any other day in recent times.  I woke up, logged in to work and set out about my day.  At some point, I found myself with some free time and so began to pick up where I left off with items associated with my name and gender marker change.....  Another credit card company to call, another financial institution to correct some error on the new and present name I am proud owner of, another lawyer to contact about legalities that need to be synced up. Usual stuff.  Well, it seemed usual.  In all truthfulness, everything has been wearing on me, and w
Read more