Lauren Patrice Gable: I become a woman

I was born January 25, 1968, and it was determined that I was a boy.

They called me Laurence Patrick Gable.

While growing up, I did not understand being a boy. I was shy, not in the least athletic, read books, watched TV, and felt wrong.

I managed to get through high school by being shy and being interested in English. The summer after graduation, I took a typing course.

Larry Gable, 11 years old

In 1979, at age eleven, I dressed in one of my mother's white dresses, and her shoes, and padded a bra, and felt the most impressive feeling I ever had.

I realized at that moment that I wanted to be a woman.

After high school I was a magazine writer and I lived with my mother and stepfather for 5 years in Sarasota, Florida.

I began wearing my mom's dresses and shoes in secret. My deep craving to be a woman continued and it could have damaged my life for the next few decades. I didn't know anything about gender identity.

From 1988 to 1992, I dressed in my mother's clothes every chance I got. When I moved into my own apartment, I bought women's clothes of my own.

At 24, in 1992, I married a pretty girl named Pamela, thinking it would help me learn to be a man.

However, I made love the way a woman would have. I cared more about making my wife feel loved and I was mild when most men would have been powerful. I had no idea how to be a man.

In 1994, Pam discovered me wearing women's clothes and we divorced.

Larry Gable crossdresser

Living alone for the first time, I spent nine years as a writer and editor of a monthly magazine while secretly dressing in women's clothes at home. I tried to stop crossdressing from time to time but always went back to attempt to feel like a woman. I continued to dress for years, and eventually got married again at age 35.

At 35, in 2003, I attempted marriage again with a woman named Jane. At first, I pretended to be a man but ultimately while I became an editor in chief of a series of business magazines, I began secretively to cross-dress again.

I hated having secrets, but I didn't know what to do about it. I was careful not to tell my new wife, Jane, but I dressed secretly in hotel rooms and at home while she was at work.

At 45, in 2013, Jane had discovered my secret and could not deal with it. She suggested she could have recreational sex with a man, but we divorced. I gave her the house, a car, and three cats and began to produce a radical plan.

I was diagnosed with Gender dysphoria in 2013 and my doctor suggested that I try living as a woman for a few years to see if I still wanted gender affirmation surgery.

I resigned from my job in Florida and drove to Burbank, California determined to live as a woman in a city where no one knew me. I rented the apartment as a woman and started living as an imitation woman 24-hours-a-day.

I created an online store called Hollywood HQ and sold books and DVDs on Amazon. I was able to always pass as a woman, but I was a fat.

Burbank: imitation woman

I worked hard, buying books and DVDs at garage sales, and selling them online. It took me four years, but I managed to accumulate the money I needed for my transition and to lose forty pounds.

My company was so successful that by late 2016, I could finally afford the transition. I had lived as a woman for 4 years in Burbank.

With the trials and secrecy that existed furtively for 49 years, I determined to make the transition to become a woman in 2017. Because I knew good surgeons who worked at Tampa General Hospital, I moved back to Florida for my surgery.

Gender affirmation surgery matched my outward appearance more closely with my own gender identity.

It was a unique and personal process that included changing clothes, names, pronouns, and behaviors to fit my own gender identity.

The reason I had always aspired to be a woman was because my gender identity WAS female.

Gender affirmation surgery was necessary. It took me 49 years of failed manhood to take that step. I also took legal steps to transition, changing my name and gender markers on government issued identity documents.

However, gender is a term connected with my own sense of my behaviors, appearances, and feelings, often in relation to my sex or to other members of my society.