Starting with this post I’ll be rehashing some of what I’ve posted in the past, both on here and on Quora. I have two reasons for this. First, I started this blog more than two years ago and I’d like to think I had (and still have) room to learn more about being trans, being a woman, gender and so many other issues.
The second reason is a purely practical one. New readers rarely, if ever, go and examine old content, so mixing in old content allows those readers to see that content go by.
It was April 22, 2012 at a Ritual Committee meeting of our Temple. I was distracted and fidgety and frankly couldn’t wait for it to be over. From the prior September, or mostly like much earlier I had been in a steadily worsening depression.
It was difficult at first to tease the depression apart. My dad had died in 2010 and at first it just seemed like I was taking a long time to get over the grief. But I had lost my mom when I was in my 20s and while it was no cakewalk it neither hit me in that way.
By the end of 2011 it was clear that the stressor was the no longer containable issue of gender transition and gender dysphoria. Up to then I had managed to keep a lid on it but the pressure was building. By that meeting in April I was a pressure cooker left too long on the heat with bad gaskets to boot.
When the meeting broke I asked our rabbi if she had a few minutes and we went into her office. For the first time in my life I said the words out loud that I wanted and needed to be a woman. I expressed my doubts and how felt I was letting my family down, destroying it and how I would just be “fake” and so much else. There’s nothing like forty years of angst coming out in ten minutes for crazy making.
She calmed me down and told me it could be done, and that I would just have to do the best I could with my family.
Then I went home and told me wife who immediately thought it was somehow about her being inadequate, but after awhile I managed to have her understand that this was entirely my problem. With still more effort I explained that the marriage and my love for her were quite real; that this stuff was complex.
That’s how my first day ended after having admitted the truth after almost fifty years of keeping it a secret.
You can also read the original post: How I felt coming out
Also this story on You share: Coming Out: Becoming the trans woman I was meant to be
My Gifted Life 