It’s Never Too Late to Make a Change

 

At 70 I’ve learned that as I age its never too late to make a change!!! 

 

 

  I transitioned late according to some people, changing my name and living openly dressed as a female aged 70. Coming out as transgender is not easy for anyone. But the issues are particularly thorny for someone my age to reconfigure a central tenet of identity decades after building an adult life with family and career. Most of my life people would try to control me with their judgment. My answer to them was for me to apply my own judgment.

That I am a person of value! Yes!, I was late with my transition by any definition. I started at age 60 and am 70 now. Thankfully I haven’t heard anything about my being “less than” for transitioning at my age. I have reflected on what my life might’ve been like had I transitioned earlier. Better yes! Definitely in some ways. But I don’t think I’d have made it. The load of shame I carried since I was 6 years old was so heavy.

Social changes have a tendency to take root among the young, and to then trickle up years (sometimes decades) later. To be in transition around the time I qualified for AARP membership was to be on some level a paradox; a person newly born at a seasoned age.
 Additionally, my being a late transitioning women having grown up in an era of rigid gender stereotypes, which I've been both oppressed by and in some cases internalized. My still being married and having two grown children who struggle to accept that the person who raised them is now becoming someone new.

There are pragmatic as well as physical challenges, too, particularly for someone like myself who is older and was born with a male anatomy. My jaw and shoulder widen over time, making a more “feminine” shape hard to achieve. Hair grew on my body while thinning from my scalp, necessitating my having to wear hair pieces... All of which has had a profound emotional consequence for me to coming to terms not only with my gender but with the indignities of aging and impending mortality. I've accepted the reality that I will not be beautiful, like the young ones I've met when I attend the support group I belong too... “After I went on hormones, there was a letdown...”  “I thought, ‘Where do I go now?’ I’m not going to look like a woman in her 40's or 50's. Still, the pull to live as the person I wanted to be, even for a short time, even under reduced circumstances, remains powerful... I waited till I retired before I started my transition so as not to disrupt and destroy a 30 year civil service career..
Trisha