My Gifted Life

This is the first of some lookbacks on my first ten years since starting my process. The shortened timeline is as follows:

• April 2012 – came out to wife and rabbi as transgender and sought help. Shortly thereafter found my therapist for the gender disphoria
• October 2013 – started hormone replacement therapy
• March 2014 – went full time, i.e. I was presenting as female in all aspects of life, from then on I used female pronouns and requested that people use my new name Rachel
• October 2015 – vaginoplasty and breast augmentation
• About a year or so later I had surgery to widen the outer vagina which was causing me pain

During these ten years or so I’ve adapted to my new life. I’m fortunate that I appear to pass well enough to cause no attention in public and people leave me alone. I lost a number of relatives and friends over my transition, but that was bound to happen. Doesn’t make it feel better mind you, but it’s unavoidable.

These days I’m mostly calm, not depressed except on rare occasion and have even made some new friends, I have a small social life which gets me out of the apartment once or twice a week.

Changes over time

When I was first out I thought little of sharing my status with people I met. As time has passed along, I find myself much more reserved about sharing. I generally will tell friends sometime fairly early but no strangers need to know and I certainly don’t go into the ladies room and announce it, not that I ever did that.

I used a fair bit of makeup at the start of my journey, but that has reduced in time. That comes down to a few things. Being retired means I don’t need to dress up for work, which to me meant makeup as well as nice clothing. I miss that, primarily because it felt nice, but honestly I don’t have the energy to get fancy most days. Now I’ll use makeup for a social event or other special occasion and for some things like lipstick I regularly use them, but there’s little fuss in putting on lippy.

Dealing with the world and in particular with men is a very different proposition then it used to be. Of course, I encounter all the typical male behaviors like mansplaining and such. I usually can kill those by quickly showing I know what I’m talking about. It helps that I still have a little male aggression in me. I also particularly love when they try and explain something that I have a serious background in like electronics.

But women walk this very fine line with men. To be blunt, men at times are very sensitive creatures. Women are constantly having to work around potential blow ups over what are sometimes minor issues. I’ve taken, sad to say, to deflecting and hiding my own opinions on occasion to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. But then they claim women expect men to be mind readers, it isn’t that, we just think it’s so blindingly obvious that it need not be said. As someone who’s been on both sides of the divide I find it mildly funny.

But heck, there are whole comedy movies based on this….

But because of this, even relationships with male friends have changed. There are issues that women encounter regularly, i.e. like daily, that men don’t believe is happening. I had a particularly extreme problem during a conference call. Let’s call the coworker in question Bill. The group was having a discussion about some systems processing software. I would explain why we should do it in a particular fashion and Bill would interrupt my first sentence. Perhaps the most annoying part was that Bill didn’t have nearly my expertise in the subject matter. Ah well! He stopped interrupting me though.

Problems at Work

Work was somewhat a contrast between theory and practice. Some people especially a particular woman in another department didn’t want to share the ladies room with me. So, I’d go anyway but come out with radiation burns where their eyes bore holes in me. Bathrooms settled down after a little while.

Things seemed to be ok but there were a couple of obvious transphobes in the department. They asked that we keep out interactions to business and I was ok with that. It wasn’t until months later that I found out that a substantial portion of the department had a problem with me. The HR people had told me everything had gone well with my predecessors, so I was taken by surprise. Most alarming was my department manager having a problem with me. I left the department as soon as possible.

I reported my manager’s behavior to HR and they offered no support. It was a very disheartening time. I managed to stumble through a few more years and left on medical leave. I wasn’t physically up to working with the parkinson’s and I was getting no pay increases because my they claimed my performance didn’t justify it. I was given various impossible things to accomplish if I was to be promoted. If my health had been better I probably would have stayed but who knows, at the rate things were going they might have found a reason to lay me off anyway. Heck the manager who went from being my friend to literally my enemy was trying his best to invent a reason to get me fired for cause.