Transitioning at 70 in a small town
I feel I first need to share some of my background before I share about my current experiences.
My gender issues go back to my earliest childhood memories. I grew up in the 50's and 60's in the US, I quickly became ashamed of my thoughts and emotions and learned to keep them to myself. At 19 as a university student at Wisconsin in Madison, everything eventually exploded and I had a psychotic breakdown. After six months of hospitalization and a lot of self harming, I was stable enough to be released and try again. I had no meaningful therapy. I told the therapist that I wanted to be a woman and that I hated my genitals. This was 50 years ago, in 1968, at a major US University hospital. No understanding whatsoever of gender identity issues, the therapist simply tried to talk me into seeing how great it was to be a man!
What saved me was that two years later I met a woman, nine years my senior, that was filled with loving kindness and compassion. We have been together ever since. But as you all know, the deeply implanted issue of gender identity do not go away. So over the years, I would occasionally cross dress with my wife's approval, in her clothes, and yet had a stormy emotional life with a constant struggle to find myself and accept myself. I had built up a deep layer of self hatred over my need to be female, thinking that I was mentally ill or perverse.
So along comes the internet, I am now 60 years old with the same struggle all my life. I begin to understand that I was born this way, I did not choose it, and that I was transgender, a new word to me. I begin a slow process of accepting myself, of finally allowing my original but denied personality as a woman to come out. My wife is supporting completely. I began to share with my now adult and married children, some of which live in California. Two and one half years ago on a visit to them, one of my daughters holds a coming out party for her father, where for the first time in his life he can present as a woman outside of his home. Last year on our visit there, I lived full time for two months as a woman, with total acceptance of my family there, and the society around, where I am just a stranger anyway. It was so liberating.
Coming back home to Israel in August of 2017 I made a decision. I had to find a way to have the confidence and enough control of my fear of rejection to come out here at home as a transgender woman. My wife and I have lived in the same small town, about 3000 people, in Galilee, Israel, for 35 years! I just could not go back to "maning" it up at home, and waiting for an annual trip to California to be who I really was. There was really no choice.
So I began my transition six months ago; gender therapist, HRT, and more and more female presentation.
I thought I would try small steps at first, no plan to just come out one day and declare myself a woman, maybe this way I could manage my fear. And it is working! Something has deeply changed in my spirit, a combination of therapy and HRT, that is setting me free from a life time of self hatred and fear over my true gender identity. So just today as I did some errands at the neighborhood grocery and our health clinic (where I am the first transgender patient!), presenting completely female. I am able to relate to all the people that know me for years full of happiness and gratefulness that indeed I am finally living the way I was meant to!
Thank you all for being there, this forum is truly a part of my transition.
