“From a very young age, I instinctively knew I wasn’t like others.”

Even if I had been able to find the words to express my feelings of being different, there wasn’t anyone to talk to or who would listen. Anything perceived as “different” was seen as a sign of weakness, and being weak meant having a target on your back. So I learned to keep my thoughts and emotions in check, to keep them buried inside, to not let anyone suspect what I was really thinking and feeling, even hiding it from myself. 

My sexuality developed in a normal way: I liked girls. I loved how they looked, dressed, smelled, acted. Deep inside, I also envied them. Not only did I want to be with women, I wanted to be like them, too.

It may sound twisted, but it wasn’t until I’d had success in my personal and professional life that I really began to experience the pull of my trans feelings.

You see, it was during this time in my life that I truly learned about love: what it meant, how it felt, how important it was. Before this, my most easily felt emotions were anger, hostility, frustration, and fear. But being a husband and a parent finally taught me what it meant to love someone more than myself, to put their needs and happiness above my own.

Having achieved what I considered success in my job, finances, and family — combined with this sense of self­-worth — opened the door for me to finally release the feelings that had been building up inside me for years. No longer was I living in survival mode as I had when I was growing up. I was happy and felt a real sense of security.

So without external stressors keeping my internalized issues suppressed, my mind decided it was time to face who I really was.

Initially, I thought maybe I was simply a cross-dresser, and when I brought it up to my wife, she seemed okay with the idea. I took her lack of disgust as full acceptance and shared some of my deeper thoughts and desires. But as I watched fear bloom across her face, I shut everything down, going into denial and working even harder to suppress my feelings.

I stayed in suppression mode for 11 years, but there wasn’t a single minute of a single day that part of me wasn’t thinking about it, trying to cope with it, trying to figure things out.

Eventually, my wife pushed me to explore the feelings, and so I did.

My first time out in public dressed fully as a woman was at a local transgender support group. There was no sexual component to the experience, but there was a sense of truth, of somehow being right.

I continued to visit the group periodically, all while working desperately to keep it hidden from my kids or anyone other than my wife. And then I was almost discovered by my youngest, so I stopped, once again going into denial mode.

I told myself my attention and energy were needed by my family, that my desires would have to take a backseat to the needs of others. I took up hobbies as a way to keep my mind off what I once again had locked away inside me but wasn’t getting emotional relief from anything. My spirit needed something more.

During this time, I found myself struggling more and more by the day to suppress my true self. Though I thought I was doing a good job, my wife felt as though she was living with a ghost. By denying my nature and suppressing my real self, I was denying who I was. What was left was simply a shell, an automaton.

Then one night while I was in my typical silent-internal-struggle mode, my wife asked what was wrong. I told her I didn’t want to get into it with our kids in the house, but she kept pushing, eventually asking what would prove to be a fateful question: “Is it that you want to dress as a woman full-time?”

My first instinct was to deny it, as we both knew that if the answer was yes, it would mean the end of our marriage. But for the first time in my life, I was fully honest with her and with myself. I told her it wasn’t so much what I wanted but where I was feeling driven to go.

It was the first time I faced that fact that maybe I was a transsexual.

The hardest and most difficult part of my coming out was with my daughter. I could deal with losing friends, having family turn on me, the uneasiness of some co-workers, even the impending demise of my marriage. But my daughter and step-son were another matter entirely.

The discussion didn’t last long. As I did my best to explain what I felt and what would be happening, my step-son asked if there would be permanent physical changes. When I said "that a possibility, he said she couldn’t hear any more and asked his sister to drive him home. My daughter simply approached me with tears in her eyes and said she was sorry you had to hurt for so long.

Aside from actually admitting the fact that I was transgender, telling them was the single hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Over the next few months, I slowly introduced the increasingly feminine me to family and friends, knowing there was a strong possibility people would struggle to make sense of it all. While there were some awkward moments — misgendering, not getting my name right — I did my best not to take it personally and was blessed that most people I knew were supportive and accepting.

One doesn’t make this kind of change in a vacuum; the changes I was making affected everyone I knew in some way, none more so than my children.

My relationship with them changed, and for many years, our level of closeness wasn’t the same. A sort of gulf had opened between us. But even that has closed over time as they dealt with their feelings and watched me grow into my truest self.

I’d been living openly as a woman for three years when I decided I was ready (and had the means) to purchase hormones. I didn’t see this as some kind of end goal for “becoming” a woman — I already was a woman. This was simply one more step in life.

Today, I’m 70 years old. I have no savings. But I have come to learn just how little I need to live on to be happy. 

"WHAT I AM BEGINNING TO REALIZE IS THAT MANY OF THE PEOPLE FROM MY PAST DON’T ACCEPT ME; THEY TOLERATE ME."

Over the years, I’ve been asked many times if I’m happy having the freedom of my being able to express openly the woman I've kept hidden most of my life. And while I can’t say it has made me happy in the traditional sense of the word, it did put an end to the internal war I’d fought with myself for so long. It brought me a greater measure of peace. It made me more aware of what others face after experiencing bias, ignorance, and discrimination myself.

I’ve come to accept myself as I am, to no longer worry about how the world sees me. I no longer care as much about whether I’m pretty or attractive, whether I’ve dressed well, or any of the other trappings society expects. I’m much less vain but far more self-assured. I’m more comfortable in my own skin.

Acceptance and tolerance are two completely different things. To accept me you have to see me for who I truly am in our past, present, and future. You have to refer to me as Mila when thinking about the moments we shared. You have to use she/her pronouns. In that acceptance, you have to realize that I was always female. If you don’t, then you are only tolerating me. You are just willing to put up with me and play along. To be honest, I am not interested in the charity of tolerance.

Though I had often thought that things had actually worked out with my family and friends and my transition, I realize that I may have been wrong. In the end, people are either going to be able to see me as always having been the person I am today or they will see me as someone they lost. If they see me as the person they lost, I will most likely end up seeing them as the people who I lost as well. For some of us, people turn their back on us immediately like ripping a Band-Aid off. In other cases it is more subtle and happens over time. Eventually I realize that most were only being tolerated and not accepted.

It may just be time to write everyone off and move on. As I get older, my skin gets thicker. My patience for ignorance runs thin and I don’t want to waste any more of the little time I have left. Right now I am thinking that it is time to let the past die. It is a casualty of my existence. I will have to see what happens. Though my coming out has been derailed in so many ways by this new revelation that all is not as I had previously thought, it won’t stop me from getting right back on the tracks.
Trisha Roberts

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