“Am I ‘Girly’ Enough?”
Reflections on the 4th anniversary of my transition
This month marks a couple of milestones for me. My father, who I loved very much, was born 103 years ago this week, on July 5th, 1917. He passed in April 1997, and my Mom in October 1978, but let me tell you: no matter how long you live, you will never be so old that you think you know the answers to all of life’s problems. You will never reach a place on your life’s journey that is so remote from your youth that you don’t sometimes wish you could pick up the phone and call your parents. Just a few minutes to chat, a couple of times a month.
You might want to ask your Dad for advice about how to fill out Social Security or Medicare application forms. Or, maybe you want to ask your Mom if she thinks you look better in a dress, or a skirt and blouse? Does she like your hair color? You are reminiscing with your life-partner about Fourth of July family reunions you each attended, 50 years ago, and you’d like to tap your parent’s memories about your grandparents, or one or another of their crazy siblings (your aunts and uncles).
I want to, just one more time, tell my Dad “I love you, thanks for everything you did for me.” And then let him know that he has a daughter. Dad died 19 years before I began my transition, so we never got the chance to explore this last stage of my life together. I think he would have been not even surprised, though.
I related some other history about my Dad in the piece “Do you ‘feel Gay?’” Dad asked me once, in May 1980, if I was gay, and he asked it in such a gentle, loving way that I feel pretty sure that he would have been okay with me becoming Laura-Ann, too.
Oh, the son that my Dad thought he had, and that you can see holding that bowling ball (which I still own, 46 years later), is still here in my memories, and I have no intention of trying to deny that he wasn’t a part of me. I have too many photos of the 29 years of happy times spent with my wife Lynn, to ever think that “Larry” was a part of my life that I want to forget.
I have found a place of peace and reconciliation within my mind, and deep in my soul, where the guy that I had to be for 59 years, can co-exist in relative harmony with Laura-Ann; the girl, or woman if you prefer, who I had to keep locked up for 54 years, in the deepest dungeon of the mind that I could build to conceal her from the world.
“Integration” is the word that my gender therapist uses to describe this process of finding a stable balance between past, present, and future for those of us who transition later in life, and who ultimately will have fewer years to be their authentic selves than they had in their assigned-at-birth gender.
My life-partner Pauline calls this stage of gender transition, “Trans 201,” this being the next stage of the transition journey, after you settle in to your new life. You graduate from Trans 101 when you step off the cliff and start transition — coming out to people, starting HRT, getting your legal name and gender changed, getting your surgeries if you need to (not all transgender people elect to have surgeries; in the 45 and older age group, less than 1/3 of trans people do).
You graduate from Trans 201 when you achieve these steps:
- You resolve all of those new-girl, post-transition questions: “why the hell did I do this?! I lost my job! My boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife freaked out! My parents and my kids won’t speak to me! My best friend spit in my face!”
- When you no longer need to keep reminding yourself three times a week that you transitioned because to not do so might have resulted in you becoming a suicide statistic.
- You realize that you don’t have to throw away the memories of happy times you had in your former gender to live authentically as yourself.
- You can look in the mirror and see the kid, the teenager, the young adult, and maybe the middle-aged adult that you were in your assigned-at-birth gender, and, the person that you are now, and, the elderly person you will be at 85 (if you are lucky enough to live that long). If you can see the fusion of all of those faces, no matter the name and gender identity labels they carried on whatever day of their life you have tapped the image from, and you are joyful in the seeing thereof, you have graduated Trans 201.
I mentioned earlier that I had a couple of milestones this week; the other one is that today, July 9th, I am marking the 4th anniversary of the day that I started my medical transition.
I came home from the pharmacy that afternoon with my first prescription for HRT: spironolactone 50 mg tablets, and 0.1 mg/day estradiol valerate patches. Taking HRT is a step that involves irreversible physical changes to your body, so I swallowed that first spironolactone tablet, and stuck that first estrogen patch on my tummy, knowing that there was no going back. A lot of what I wrote in “Walking in the Median Strip” is about HRT, so no need to re-hash the technical stuff from that post here.
But now we come to the heart of this post, and the question, “Am I girly enough?” HRT is central to this question, of course. The deeper question, “Why did you transition in the first place?”, has about as many different answers as there are transgender people, but in my case, and for the sake of brevity, I’ll just state that I’ve known since I was five years old that my true name is Laura, and that something inside me is female.
After my wife died in November 2013, that inner girl re-surfaced after 30 years of being suppressed. I struggled with severe gender dysphoria for two years, while at the same time trying to cope with soul-crushing grief and depression following Lynn’s death, until I thought I was losing my sanity. On January 9th, 2016, I joined a trans women’s support group, and between May 25th and June 4th, 2016, I suffered a near-suicidal 10 days of crisis-level gender dysphoria, culminating in my decision to give up any further pretense of being “Larry,” and accepting that Laura-Ann was who I really am.
I’ve had no regrets at all, except maybe one: I could have asked my health care provider for a referral to gender therapy at any time after Lynn’s death, and saved myself two years of anguish, except that I didn’t know that I was transgender, and I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as “gender therapy,” until I started making friends in my support group.
I only joined that group after months of trying to work out what my cross-dressing actually meant, and going on-line to try and find answers. It may sound crazy, but it’s the simple truth:
I started cross-dressing when I was 8 years old, and didn’t fully realize why I was doing it until a few months shy of 60. I lived more than 20 years of my life in terror — that someone would “find out” I had a thing for wearing women’s clothes and make up, and had no idea why. Transphobia and homophobia were so deeply entrenched in the society I grew up in that most LGBTQ people dared not so much as acknowledge the reality of who they were, not even to themselves in the privacy of their own thoughts.
So how has life been, after four years of living full time as a transgender woman? Simply put, it’s been wonderful. For sure, it’s what I needed to do, and I am so much happier than I ever was in the eight years that I lived alone, before my marriage to Lynn.
But here’s the fly in the ointment: when I look in the mirror, I see Laura-Ann, and I see the girl inside, looking out at the world through my eyes. But if I step back and look at the rest of myself, it gets a lot harder to see that girl. I am 6'-2" (187 cm) in my bare feet, and I weigh about 310 pounds (141 kg). I’m huge. Maybe not as tall as the actress Gwendoline Christie, but also not nearly as beautiful or talented as she is, either.
And my proportions are all wrong. My shoulders are too wide, my hips not wide enough. My curves are all the ones you don’t want: I’m shaped like a barrel with a head and arms stuck on almost as afterthoughts; if there’s a woman under there, I can’t seem to see her, except in my face, close up. My hands are just not “feminine” looking; I can hide that somewhat when I get acrylic nail extensions, but who knows when nail salons will be open again? My last nail salon visit was in early February.
My hair is hopeless: I’ve lost a lot of hair just from getting old, and much of that loss is in all the places that signal “male pattern baldness.” But if I go back to wearing a wig, that’ll tag me for sure as trans. I own three very nice wigs, real human hair they are, but the fact is, Pauline and all my other friends in the trans community have told me that I look better, and less “clockable,” in my own hair, as sad and as sparse as it is, than I do in any wig I’ve ever owned.
I haven’t worn any makeup except lip color in at least a year, and it’s been nearly two years since my last tube of mascara dried up.
So here’s a question for any older women reading this, whether you are trans or cisgender:
Do you ever just feel like you have reached an age where wearing makeup is more trouble than it’s worth?
Where you think to yourself, “I’m tired, I worked 46 hours this week; I just want to go out to dinner and enjoy my Friday night off without having to spend an hour on makeup, and then have to be careful to not wipe half of it off with the napkin while I am eating.” Or is that something that no cisgender woman would ever say to herself?
Being transgender, I didn’t get the same social conditioning that I would have had I been raised as a girl; this being one of the tropes that transphobes — especially trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) — often use to justify their opinions as to why trans feminine identity is not valid in their worldview.
I dress pretty plainly. My favorite summer outfit is a light or dark blue chambray, 34" A-line skirt and a short sleeve polo shirt. In winter I wear long sleeved tops, and heavier knit skirts with tights and boots. But I only own a couple of dresses, none of them have hemlines higher than knee length, and I rarely wear them. I’m 63, not 23, and at my weight I know I’d look pretty ridiculous in a skirt or dress with a mid-thigh length. The women who model for Torrid are big, genuinely size 30/32 or even bigger, but they’re all in their teens or twenties, and they’re still gorgeous, even being plus-size, with hair and that youthful skin texture that I’d kill to have.
Let’s look at another myth: cars that men and women are supposed to prefer. As a woman, you might assume I’d be driving something “flowery,” like, say, a Toyota Prius or a Soccer-mom style Honda Odyssey minivan. And I do, in fact, own a 2019 Prius Prime plug-in hybrid, which is my daily driver. But, my other ride is about as far away from a Prius as you can get on four wheels: it’s a 22 year old Dodge Ram 3/4 ton, Cummins diesel pickup truck with a manual transmission.
I love both vehicles: they are superbly engineered for the purposes they were designed for: the Prius Prime for moving people as far as possible on as little gasoline as possible, and the Dodge for “no-compromises” hauling of 4,000 pound pallets of cinder blocks, or towing huge trailers weighing up to 12,000 pounds. I bought mine for towing my 25' sailboat that weighs nearly 8,000 pounds.
“Gendering” of motor vehicles is a marketing ploy designed to make certain vehicle types appeal to certain categories of people, but bottom line is that a car or truck is a machine designed to fulfill a set of specifications that are much more to do with functionality than aesthetic. With a few exceptions. Owners of Corvettes, Rolls Royces, Low-rider ‘60’s muscle cars, and 1950’s Chevys and Cadillacs with gigantic tail fins probably have something more than practical function in mind for their rides.
So, where does all this wrap back around to some kind of answer to “am I girly enough?”
Occasionally, I drive a huge, loud, diesel pickup truck. I am in some serious ennui regarding makeup. I dress like Laura from ‘Little House on the Prairie’ rather than what most people’s idea of a glamorous, chic, Vogue or Cosmo cover model should look like. I have a physique that makes me look like I’d be more at home felling trees with Paul Bunyan than sipping tea with Dorothy, Blanche, Sophia, and Rose.
I sometimes feel like people see me as more like a female version of Rubeus Hagrid than they might possibly see me as an older Hermione Granger. How can I ever be girly enough to even just fit in? I’m not asking for “passability,” something that I know is hopeless for me. Sometimes I am really envious of trans men. There seem to be a lot more men out there that are shorter than the 5'–11" average for men than there are women that are 6'-2" and 310 pounds.
But the amazing thing is, my angst regarding the issues discussed above isn’t based in any significant way on my external reality.
For example: I hardly ever get misgendered, except on phone calls; this being a more-or-less inevitable consequence of the deepening of my voice when I was 14, thanks to testosterone. When I go grocery shopping, when I go out to restaurants or bars, when I go anywhere that I have to interact with strangers, I am always referred to as “ma’am.” When I go out to dinner with a group of my trans women friends, we are usually asked, “How are you ladies doing this evening?”
Very few of the trans women I know are “passable.” Almost all of my friends are as tall as I am, or taller, most of them have to wear wigs, as they’ve either lost too much hair, or they are still part-time and can’t let it grow out. And even those of my full-time friends who have had facial feminization surgery (and really know how to do make up skillfully) still have other physical body cues that make them at least a little “clockable.”
These are all the same cues as I discuss above: too tall, voice too deep, hands too big, overall shape of face non-feminine, shoulders too wide. Yet even my part-timer friends, when we go out to public restaurants, are treated with exactly the same friendly service as any cis woman, and some of my part-time friends look pretty rough, pretty weather-beaten, and even less passable than I am, if that’s possible.
So I want to speak directly now to those of you who are transgender people, who are either part-time, or have only just begun your transition, and for whom the idea of going out into public spaces in your true gender presentation is frightening.
As I said earlier, I, and some of my trans women friends, have too many non-feminine body cues to ever be considered “passable.” But, we all share something pretty special; it’s something that, if you haven’t already discovered it in yourself, you need to. It’s just plain courage, and the belief in yourself that you are worthy of feeling “proud to be trans.”
If you can think of your transgender status as a gift, instead of a curse, you are already most of the way to the place I am talking about, if not already there.
Once you arrive in this place, you will march into your local grocery store, your favorite restaurant or bar, or any other public place of business, including your place of employment, with your head held high, an authentic smile on your face, and your inner light shining joyously for all the world to see and marvel at.
You will be projecting your inner self openly and joyously, and people will almost always respond to this in a positive way. If you hear a whisper behind your back, “Jeez, is that a dude in a dress?” you will turn around, smile at that person, and say, “No, I’m a transgender woman, and proud to be one. If you’d like to listen for a minute, I’ll tell you about myself.” Nine times out of ten, that person will run away like you are a plague carrier, but the tenth time, you might get someone with an open mind, and perhaps even make a new friend.
I have only once, in four years, been laughed at. This incident happened in my local grocery supermarket one day, in the dairy aisle about 20 feet from me. Picture a family of three: Mom, Dad, and a daughter about 13 years old. The daughter was staring at me, her shoulders shaking, her hand over her mouth. She reached up and tapped her Dad on the arm, and whispered something to him, not just staring, but actually pointing at me. The father gave me a glance, said something to his daughter, and they moved away.
It was obvious that she had clocked me as trans, and was acting like, well, a typical 13 year old. I was once in 7th grade myself, and I well remember how uncivilized, uncultured, and just plain rude most of us were at that age. It did surprise me that this was a girl and not a boy, teenage girls generally being at least a little less horrible than teenage boys, in my limited perception.
And that’s it. Four years as Laura-Ann, looking much more like ‘The Incredible Hulk’ than ‘Wonder Woman’ (I know, I’m mixing a Marvel character with a DC character). Yet, I seem to be perceived simply as a woman somehow, by most, if not all, strangers that I meet.
I have been clocked several times by little kids, all of them boys age 4 to 6, and asked, very innocently, if I am a boy or a girl. I assume they are confused by my size and other body cues not matching my clothes or the woman’s purse I carry. They are trying to understand, and the question is not in any way mean-spirited.
The last time this happened, the child was a nephew-in-law of my daughter, age 8, and they had been wearing one of my granddaughter’s Elsa dresses (Elsa being Disney’s Ice Princess from “Frozen”), almost all day at a family reunion. Later that day, I was watching Frozen with several of the kids at this reunion, and they leaned over to me and said “I wish I was a girl.” I started crying right there (quietly) on the couch. They had voiced to me, someone they barely knew, something that I myself had been crying to tell someone for 54 years. By the grace of God, their (or her, someday?) parents were letting this child explore their gender without any pressure from above. Their Mom and Dad will support them no matter where they end up, and I bless them for this.
I will wrap this up here. I can’t think of anything more to say. I still haven’t answered the original question, “Am I girly enough?”, but maybe I can state, with all honesty, “I’m as girly as I need to be.” I have a joyous life, a daughter and grandkids that I cherish, a life partner and plenty of good friends to share these blessings with, and a place on this beautiful Earth to call my home.
Before she died, Lynn made me promise her that I would carry on after her, and find a new life and a new love to have happy times with, and I have kept that promise, despite having to go through this big life change of gender transition at age 59. To all of you, stay safe, and please wear your masks. The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging and there’s no end in sight.
