118
After three months of my resumes being out and no jobs being offered,
I decided I needed to move on with my personal life. Given the
success of the hormone treatments I had been having during the past
two years, I decided that the best long term decision for me would be
to 'normalize' my sex as female. As part of this decision, Samuel
recommended I let my family members know and thus have a good measure
of which ones would be supportive and which ones wouldn't be.
Ultimately I had no problem with this as, since I hadn't felt a high
level of support from my family over the decades, I really wasn't
worried if the intermittent contact I had with them was the only
victim. Of my family members, I assumed that my father and mother
would cut contact with me for sure, but I saw that more as a relief
than a problem, so it was a question of which of my siblings might
cut contact with me, themselves.
Daina didn't like the idea at all and felt I should wait until I
found a new job and saved money for a few years and then decide how
to lead my personal life. As jobs weren't immediately apparent, I
didn't agree with her.
I spent a week crafting a common letter for all my immediate family
members. I noted my years of having 'an issue', lightly giving some
of the physical details but avoiding anything that would cause
someone to abruptly stop reading, and then ended the letter with my
decision to live the rest of my life as female. I then took this
base letter and made five variations for each member with a touch of
personalization. I printed and reread them just to be sure and then
added my signature to each and mailed them off by the end of
September, Nineteen Ninety-Four.
As no surprise my father again disowned me, having my eldest brother
call me to let me know. For his part though, my eldest brother
didn't have a problem with it. My sister didn't have a problem with
it either, though surprisingly my not as older brother wrote back a
letter saying he felt it was a 'betrayal'. His point was that, if
mother had told me to keep it a secret for all of these years, I
should have continued with that. Then he noted, upon reflection
and after discussing it with my eldest brother, he had decided to
'forgive me' and accept my decision.
To my shock, my mother's reaction was the most extreme: She was fully
supportive.
At the time I was thrown for a loop by this as I had been planning on
not having to hear from her again. But in retrospect, after being
the only family member to care for her when she had fractured her pelvis,
she had concluded that she had to stay on my good side and keep me
available in her life in case anything else happened where she would
need help. That's my interpretation of her response. But
what she did was want to know the details and started
to send me frequent holiday cards in the vein of 'To My Darling
Daughter, --'. When a friend later saw these, he thought she was
being sarcastic with the cards, but I thought she was just over
compensating for all the years since she had told me to keep my
'situation' a secret.
With notifying family members out of the way, I decided to verbally
notify my friends in town. Of those friends, the ones I was most
fearful of losing would be the one's who had supported the anti-Gay
rights 'Amendment 2' in Colorado. It turned out I didn't have to
worry. All of my friends who were still in contact with me had
chosen to know me given my 'personality, talents, and interests', not
based on my gender. So for them they just saw this as another
interesting facet of the person that was me. The one friend I feared
losing the most was my long time friend in Colorado, Jeff, as a few
years earlier a member of the Denver science fiction club had come
out as a transsexual and Jeff soon stopped attending their meetings
with her there. But when I brought it up to him, he noted that it
wasn't the club member coming out as a transsexual that had lead him
to leave the club, but that she had then spent the rest of her time
at the subsequent club meetings as an ardent feminist, taking the
club off of its focus of science fiction & fantasy interests. So
Jeff's only concern was if I was going to be undergoing a 'change in
personality' as well as legal sex. I assured him I wasn't. I was
just going to be the same person with a different letter on my
driver's license. That was fine with him.
Given that I had been out of contact with my high school friends for
years, I decided not to bother tell them as I felt it would only end
up as grist for High School Reunions to take place years later.
Otherwise, I didn't see the point.
When I reported to Samuel of the news of notifying my family and
friends and how it had gone, he was pleased and, in fact, very
surprised that there hadn't been any fall out with anyone I knew and
cared about. I agreed and even joked wistfully that, yes, even
my mother hadn't cut contact with me!
As time went on, I did lose contact with some of these Colorado
friends, but it was due to the normal drift of life interests and
nothing to do with my legal change of gender. Of my Colorado
friends, there was only one who I lost: Daina.
No comments:
Post a Comment