THE OTHER DAY I realised that it has
been almost 12 years since I first transitioned
to a male gender. Somehow, the ten year mark had
quietly slipped by without my noticing and now
with tempered pleasure, I calculate that I have
lived as many years as an adult male as an adult
female (using 18 yrs as the starting age). Now
entering my 41st year, I can truly declare that
from this point on 1 shall have lived (as an
adult) more years as a man than a woman.
So how does it feel? Well, like nothing
really. I am so integrated into my "new" role
that life seems pretty normal to me and I would
venture even quite dull. Though there is always
the ever-present unconscious knowledge that I am
"different". Perpetual caution accompanies any
occasion where I am mixing with new people and
to this day I still feel awkward amongst
predominantly male company. Somehow, when I'm
with genetic men I have this nagging feeling
that I'm a complete fraud - an understandable
insecurity I guess.
When I first transitioned at 29, I blossomed
into a very youthful guy with trim figure and
carefree face. Often mistaken for an adolescent,
I had on several occasions to prove my age
before being allowed into a bar! These days
however, age has finally conquered the illusion
of youth that the hormones provided for my first
five or six years. When I look into a mirror I
see a balding, overweight man who is truly
middle-aged. Though the facial hair is
thankfully abundant, so is the grey hair that
streaks through it.
I presume that one is seldom prepared for
aging and somehow there is an unexpected sadness
in the realisation that I have chosen to age as
a man rather than a woman. I will never know
what it would have been like to become an "old
lady" as nature intended. Not that I would ever
wanted to be! It's just that there were two
paths open, and only one could be explored.
Aging as a man, as with most things in life,
is quite different to the female experience.
Having transitioned at 29 meant that there
wasn't a hell of a lot of things that I hadn't
already experienced as a woman and then would
re-experience as a man. The amazing consequence
of this, of course, is that you have the gift of
having experience or known things from both
gender-viewpoints.
Yet, precisely because I transitioned at 29,
I have never experience growing old (or at least
middle-aged, let's not jump ahead!) other than
as a man. And so it is completely new. It is the
first major life - even that confirms my
existence solely as a male - with no prior
female counterpart. And it feels a little bit
scary.
The only thing I can liken it to is the
feeling I had when my parents died a few years
back. Beside the expected grief, there was this
strange realisation that I had become an orphan,
as we all must inevitably. The foundation of my
childhood had been taken away for my family
roots died along with them. I felt adrift,
cut-loose, on my own. Similarly, as I become
older as a man, I feel that the bedrock of my
earlier, female existence has slipped away,
casting me adrift anew to sail alone into
unchartered waters.
I have, as a consequence, truly become a man
as I had hoped, for there is now twelve years of
male history behind me that forms a new bedrock
to anchor me. And as I age (fairly gracelessly)
I experience life with no underlying female
equivalent, thus releasing me from the sense of
"duality" that plagued my earlier years.
I'm forty-something; somewhere a little
frightened but also somehow a little more at
peace than ever before.
