Dear Me!

By Amanda J.

This is another of those posts that’s languished in the pile for months; a post largely finished but going nowhere because there was just something about it that didn’t feel right.  The title of the post, of course, has several meanings – the most obvious one being an exclamation of surprise or sympathy.  Let’s face it, our lives are full of surprises and opportunities for sympathy and I could probably fill several posts on either – surprises amongst those we tell about a hitherto hidden side to our personality or the surprise we get when we look in the mirror and realise that our transformation skills have improved to the point where we’re no longer looking at the archetypal ‘bloke in a dress’.  Or what about those occasions when we’re in desperate need of sympathy?  Circumstances preventing us from spreading our feminine wings or the desperation when we realise that the ‘harmless’ recreational CDing we thought would be no big deal was the exact opposite when we finally came clean to our wife.

Or perhaps we could bend the definition to be synonymous with something like ‘beloved me’.  Self-indulgent of course but I’ve often looked in the mirror and realised how much the woman smiling back at me means to me and how much I can miss her if I’ve not seen her for a while.  They’re similar emotions to those experienced if I haven’t seen someone I consider to be a dear friend for a while so perhaps justified.

And with a further bend of the definition of ‘dear’, we get to ‘expensive me’ which, given the amount I’ve spent on indulging the inner woman over the years only to purge most of it in several buy-wear-purge cycles, is a 100% accurate assessment.  Better than thinking of myself as a ‘cheap tart’ I guess!

There are probably many more ways that we could interpret ‘dear me’ but I have to declare that it’s none of the foregoing.  The two words of the title were, in fact, the opening line of a post which I originally entitled ‘A Letter to my Teenage Self’.

I’m sure we’ve all done it – got dressed up in our finest, looked in the mirror and sighed as we allowed ourselves to wonder how, ‘if we’d known then what we know now’, our lives would have taken a different route.  I was in my 60s before ‘Amanda’ truly emerged as a complete person that people could recognise and interact with.  Given that my first foray into CDing took place in my early teens, I spent almost half a century fighting the strange feelings that I had whilst desperately wanting to meet the mystery woman who was blighting my life.  And so, as I originally sat down to write this post, it was very much from the angle of giving my teenage self an insight 50 years into the future and giving myself encouragement to explore this side of me at a much earlier age.  And then, who knows what joys would have supplanted the anxieties and frustrations I experienced in reality?

The unfortunate truth, however, is that whilst, as I said above, I’d largely completed the text of that post, the only part of it that I decided to keep was the opening line – Dear Me.  Dear Me!

I still have vivid memories of that day in the mid-1970s when, at home alone, I entered my parents’ bedroom and saw a pair of my mother’s tights lying on the bed and felt an irresistible urge to try them on.  The amazing feelings experienced soon drove me to go further and my reasonably long 1970s hairstyle helped the effect no end as I tried on various of my mother’s outfits and started to realise that I was not like other boys my age.

As I mentioned above, ‘Amanda’ didn’t fully emerge until a couple of years ago when I was finally able to look in the mirror and realise that I’d uncovered a persona that I was 100% happy with and one which, if my circumstances were different, I felt could be a viable way to live my life.  Imagine if I’d managed to uncover that in my mid-teens; rather than having to fight the ravages of testosterone, I’d have been dealing with a far more compliant face and body and, quite frankly, it would have been ‘no contest’ between a teenage Amanda and the visage that I’ve never particularly enjoyed seeing either in the mirror or on photographs.

And, having uncovered the teenage Amanda, what next?  A ‘sex change’?  I have to admit that I thought about that quite a lot in those days, particularly as I became aware of April Ashley who looked absolutely stunning in her youth (and, let’s face it, throughout her life).  The idea that I could be turned into the beautiful young woman that I wished I’d been was, quite frankly, mind blowing and I wanted to know more about that magical operation.  Of course, in those days there was no internet but the local library had copies of Jan Morris’s ‘Conundrum’ and ‘April Ashley’s Odyssey, there was a short feature on the news when Renee Richards played Billie Jean King and a Sunday colour supplement article about the real life ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ robbery, complete with photos of Elizabeth Eden whose beauty further cemented my belief that going under the knife would be a dream come true.

And then what?  I have to admit that I never really got very far beyond the ‘sex change’ in planning my alternative existence.  Of course, I could have romantic notions of being a successful businesswoman or a contented wife & mother, driven by the belief that the magical operation I would have undergone banished all of the anxieties that plagued my life but that’s when things with the original post started to fall apart.

Don’t get me wrong; there are few days that pass without feminine thoughts flashing through my consciousness, not least the persistent wish that I’d been born female.  And the whole thing has cast a shadow over my life, from trying to banish the thoughts and live as society expects someone with my chromosomal combination to do to dealing with the crushing guilt arising both from the feelings that what I was doing was wrong and from deceiving those closest to me.  Telling teenage me to stop dithering and just ‘go for it’ sometimes seems to be almost a no-brainer.

But only ‘almost’ and definitely only ‘sometimes’.

First off, there’s the social situation that prevailed in the mid-1970s.  Homosexuality had only been legal for less than 10 years and the climate for any form of ‘gender bending’, whether occasional CDing or taking steps towards full and permanent change, was oppressive.  There was very little compassion shown to those who did progress on the pathway to what we now call transition and as for guys who liked to dress as women, no mercy was ever shown.  All were considered fair game for sensationalism by the tabloid press and without the anti-discrimination laws we have now, successful careers (or even mainstream jobs) were more or less out of the question.  Even my own mother, who was, I believe (or at least hope), unaware of my proclivities, would declare that ‘there must be something wrong with a man who wants to dress as a woman’ every time CDing arose in conversation or on the TV. And as I read, and reread, the original post, I started to realise that this could well have been a story without the happy ending I originally envisaged.

But what about the persistent wishes that I’d been born female and that magical ‘sex change’ operation?  These days, of course, we refer to the operation as ‘gender reassignment surgery’ or ‘gender affirmation surgery’ and whist the whole ‘sex v gender’ and ‘affirmation’ concepts are becoming increasingly controversial and divisive, the terms do at least paint a picture of dealing with what is already there regarding changing one thing into another.  The 1970s view of the magician-surgeon waving his magic wand and miraculously turning a man into a woman (with the implication that all that goes with the respective sexes is also magically changed) have thankfully largely consigned to history, albeit sadly with plenty of examples of the perils of getting it wrong coming to the surface these days.  The simple truth, as I came to realise, was that whilst the ‘sex change’ that I sometimes craved would have given me a woman’s body, it could not have changed me into a woman if I wasn’t one already, at least in emotional terms.  And I wasn’t and I’m still not.

It was easy for me to dwell on what life hadn’t given me but then I started to think about the hand that life did deal me.  I have enjoyed a comfortable life with a family I love.  The consequences of an operation that would have robbed me of the ability to reproduce are obvious but, even putting any of those thoughts to one side and instead thinking in terms of being an ‘out and proud’ CDer, my life would have taken a very different path.  When I originally came out to Mrs A in 2013, she said that if she’d known at the outset, she wouldn’t have married me which, in turn, means that my kids would never have seen the light of day.

And that’s quite an interesting point.  Because while I’m thinking of the impact of something that now makes me happy on my life if I’d realised the implications at the outset, Mrs A’s viewpoint was the complete opposite – avoiding something that she found devastating even thought the impact would have been identical for both of us – our kids would not have been born.

By the time ‘A Letter to my Teenage Self’ was largely finished, the idea that, armed with the knowledge of what was to come, I could carve out a completely different trajectory to my life to the one I actually experienced had long been dealt with by a press of the delete key.  But there was still a strong sense that showing a photo of ‘Amanda’ as she is now to a bewildered teenager would somehow be a life enriching act.  Maybe it would but I realised that it would also mean that all of my life’s experiences would be rendered irrelevant as they would not be lived in my teenage self’s subsequent life.  Oh, the perils of time travel!

But is there any advice I could give to my teenage self that would make his life better without destroying mine?  After a lot of soul-searching, I believe that there is.

It would be easy to tell teenage me to ‘be careful what you wish for’ – to highlight the ‘cons’ of all of this when all I could see at that age were the ‘pros’. In my mid-60s, I am now able to be thankful for what life has given me rather than lament what it hasn’t and, moreover, to realise that any deviation from that would almost certainly have very negative consequences.  But would a headstrong teenager accept that advice or try to fight it – in the context of time travel, would teenage me accuse mid 60s me of trying to prevent the course of my life deviating from its actual path?

And that thought put the onus back onto me to think of what I’d really change in this side of my life if I could and there really only is one thing.  As I said earlier on, I spent nearly half a century fighting this before finally accepting who I am and that fight has been emotionally exhausting.  It’s a fight that caused me to live with constant shame & guilt and a fight that caused me to deny the reality of who I really am.  It’s a fight that has taken me to the brink of breakdown and one that has blighted my life as I tried in vain to suppress it.  And all because I refused to accept that this is who I am.

Humanity is obsessed with labels because labels imply order.  But just because my chromosomes denote ‘male’ doesn’t mean that I have to be identical to every other male on planet earth.  Equally, the fact that I derive contentment from the total transformation of myself into what society recognises as a woman doesn’t mean that I have no option other than to be, or to become, a woman.  It’s just another facet of who I am.  Some guys dress as women for sexual reasons but that doesn’t mean that that’s why I do or that I have to be viewed as such by others.  I could go on but I’m sure you get the picture – I’m just me and that’s something to be proud of, not ashamed of.

So, teenage me, here’s my advice to you.  When you enter our parent’s bedroom and see those tights, try them on and enjoy the experience.  And as you discover more about your feminine side, embrace it – yes, most other boys will not feel the same way as you do but that’s because every single one of us is unique and we should live our life doing what works for us, not according to some blueprint that others have decided is ‘normal’.  You will feel guilt and shame – unfortunately, it goes with the territory as you come to realise that there are others in your life who are more important to you than you yourself are – but never feel guilt or shame about who you are because every single trait you have, even the unconventional ones, makes you the person that others will come to know and love.   Look forward to the day that you look in the mirror and see the ‘complete’ you smiling back, I promise you that that day will come and it’s mind blowing when it does.  And while you wait for that day to come, don’t lose hope or make rash decisions; life is full of ups and downs but go with the flow and the rewards will be waiting for you.

So to draw this ramble to a close, I have absolutely no regrets about my life.  Perhaps, like the original draft of this post, I should have consigned this one to the bin and just allow my teenage self the opportunity to make exaclty the same mistakes in life that I have – in fact my very existence depends on it!  But maybe one day fate will determine that I do meet my teenage self, at least in a metaphorical sense – perhaps a shy, bespectacled teenager, wracked with guilt & disgust at what he’s been doing will find this post as he looks for answers.  And if that day comes, I can only hope that my experience and thoughts will help him, or her if that’s what they prefer, to live the fulfilled life that I have.  I can ask for nothing more.