For too many years I dressed as a woman because I wanted to BE one.
My crossdressing led to two divorces and nearly cost me my life.
The ache in my heart about wanting to be female never went away. I did not know at that time that my gender identity WAS female. I just thought I was a crossdresser or, as my mother said, a sinner.
I was never any good at being male. I made love to my two wives the way a woman would have, gentle and honestly.
I wrote for popular magazines and later edited them. But my desire to be a woman never went away.
All my close friends were women or gay men who I met in community theater.
Finally, when I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2013, I moved from Florida to Burbank, California where no one knew me and began living as an imitation woman fulltime. In four years of effort, I earned the money for surgery and lost forty pounds.
When I returned to Florida for my gender affirmation surgery in 2017 at Tampa General Hospital, my friend Cindy, who has undergone her surgery in 2015, helped me heal after my operation.
When I look on YouTube or social media, the transwomen I see are all youthful and unbearably beautiful. I have been a woman all my life but was afraid to have the surgery to finish the job.
So, I am not young, beautiful or an influencer. But boy am I glad to be a woman.
