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Forty-something

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 I 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, on several occasions I had 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 want 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 experienced 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-event 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.

Jasper (2002). Forty-something. Torque, 2(1), 5-6.