Am I Just “A Man In A Dress?”
By: Laura-Ann Marie Charlot
Tags: LGBTQ, Gender Identity, Culture, Transgender, Self

Am I Just “A Man In A Dress?”

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

In one of the transgender support groups on Facebook that I’m active in, I read a post this morning that began, “…[there are] thoughts in my head that tell me I’m just a man playing dress up, and it’s starting to make me doubt myself.”

I made this response:

Please don’t doubt yourself. I have these same thoughts at least once a week. I transitioned at age 59, and for 28 years of my adult life, I was the husband in a very conventional marriage, to a woman that I deeply loved. How could I NOT be having thoughts like this?

Ask yourself this question:

“Why am I driven to cross-dress in the first place, in light of the fact that our society ruthlessly hammers ‘masculine’ gender expectations into AMAB (assigned male at birth) boy children?”

I will submit to you that if the answer to that question is something like: “I knew I was a girl inside when I was a kid,” or, “Something inside me feels a sense of relief when I dress up”, or, “I hate myself when I look in a mirror in male mode, but not so much when I dress and do my makeup,” and, “I see a different, happier person in the mirror,” then you are almost certainly, and legitimately, transgender, and not “just a man playing dress-up.”

Photo (selfie) by author. © 2020 Laura-Ann M. Charlot

When I look in the mirror now, who do I see there? My hair is longer, the top I’m wearing is from Woman Within, and my eyeglass frames are of a style marketed as “women’s” eyeglasses, and I wear earrings now, but this selfie, shot 9/3/2020 (the day after I wrote most of this blog) doesn’t show a face that looks all that different from the face I wore in 2015, the year before I transitioned. But my perception of the soul under the face in the mirror is that of a trans woman who is infinitely happier than she was 5 years ago.

Just because you probably didn’t ever tell anyone about these feelings until recently, doesn’t mean that they aren’t your truth. I don’t believe that gender identity is absolutely binary, in at least 1/4 of the population. And not all trans people are strongly transgender, meaning that they were aware from infancy of being the “other” gender, or that they were “insistent, consistent, and persistent” in communicating their gender dysphoria to their parents. I certainly wasn’t — in fact, I never dared tell anyone that I had gender issues until I was 59 years old, and my parents were both long deceased.

My gender identity issues were severe in my childhood, then for 28 years while I was married to my wife Lynn, they went into remission, only to resurface after she died in 2013, much worse than they had been before.

“I don’t want to lose sight of that past: I loved my wife, and I don’t want to forget that I was her husband.”

Eventually, by the autumn of 2015, I got so torn apart by gender dysphoria that I thought I was losing my sanity, then in January 2016 I joined a trans support group, was referred to a gender therapist in March 2016, and transitioned in June 2016.

But who I am is the sum total of my life experiences: 59 years lived as “Larry,” and only the last four as “Laura-Ann.”

I don’t want to lose sight of that past: I loved my wife, and I don’t want to forget that I was her husband. I tried to be as good a life-partner as I could be for her, and I have done the best I can to move on and find peace and happiness in the years — now, almost seven of them — since she died. That was no less honorable than the life I am leading now, trying to be a good life-partner and girlfriend to my sweetie Pauline.

Left image: Author (pre-transition) and wife Lynn in 1987. Right image: Author and life-partner Pauline in 2019. Photos by author.

So, be at peace with yourself. There is a process we all go through following transition, that some therapists call integration. It consists of finding a space you can live in as yourself —*Corinne — and not be tormented by your past.

*denotes fictional name, assigned at random to preserve the privacy of a real person.

We were forced by our society to live as boys, as if our assigned-at-birth gender were the only possible truth to our existence. It was not through any fault on your part, or mine, that we were hiding the truth of who we really were for all those years, and it’s not your fault that you were born trans in the first place. This isn’t a “lifestyle choice” (God, I hate that phrase!), it’s just who you are.

Only you can suss out the whole truth of this “just who am I?” question that a lot of trans people ask themselves, and you should be neither distressed by, nor ashamed of, any surprises you might find on a deep exploration into yourself. A therapist can help direct your search, but only you can recognize the truth inside your mind. You are feeling for it with a blindfold over your eyes, searching for something that you have never seen clearly, and of which you only have the vaguest notion of what it “feels like.”

Discovering Corrine is a totally new experience — you are exploring terra incognita when you first try and figure out what “being transgender” actually looks and feels like.

Remember: gender isn’t binary, and especially not for transgender people. If your gender identity as a woman isn’t pegged all the way over to the extreme “FEMALE” side of the gender-identity spectrum, that’s nothing to be ashamed of or fearful about.

Be yourself, and be whole. If you decide something like, “85% of me is Corrine, and the other 15% was, and can continue to be *Charles,” that’s perfectly okay. Let Charles be the part of you that knows how to do all the “stereotypically male” stuff, like, a brake job on the family car, teaching your son what he will need to know, and how to grow up to be an honorable man himself.

If the life behind you was lived honorably, and you tried to be a good human being, despite your gender dysphoria, then you should own that life and not deny it. Own it just as joyfully as the life you are moving into as a trans woman named Corinne.

Two lives, two names, two genders, but just one human being.