Coming to Terms
With Myself

By Julia Ann Gilkey


It is amazing to me how much I want acceptance for who I really am. I have an intense hunger to be honest with people about it and yet I can not, at this time do that.

A great part of this quest is to reach a level at which people will have a better concept of who I am and how to deal with me at the beginning of a friendship. Hopefully that will improve interaction and communication.

It has been very frustrating throughout my life to feel that I always have to make adjustments for others and then they often still miss who I really am and how I really feel about things. I guess being taken for appearances hurts no matter what those are.

I realize the need for changing so many behaviors in order to be able to be whom I always have felt that I am. One thing this soul searching and deep appraisal of my self has brought is an appreciation of how feminine I really am. In the past I always thought I was much more feminine than masculine, but I didnít realize how far along that continuum that I was.

This does not mean that I feel ultra feminine, because I donít, but I do feel confident that I am a very feminine person. I may need to strip the onion some more in order to totally expose myself, but I am me and me is she. That doesnít mean that I do not have masculine behaviors now or that they will all disappear in the future. But, I have seen very few people that donít have some bits of masculinity in them or some bits of femininity that helps creates the unique man or woman that they are.

Lately I have really begun to see that I am most in touch with my inner self when I am in relationships with other people. Contact with people seems to bring out that which is feminine within me the most. I value people more than anything else and I want people to value me and my friendship with them.

I have played the strong male, on occasion, I have been the protector and filled the role as well as I could which is very adequately I would think. Yet, I have also not wanted the hierarchical structure at all. I wanted my partner to be my equal, to have the same room to grow and experience things as I have needed to have. I wanted first and foremost for her to be happy and fulfilled.

I would like to be able to accept the strong sheltering protection of a man. There is a strange dichotomy among the sexes that no matter how strong the woman nor how weak the man. In romance, the man is the protector and the woman the vulnerable one. This does not reflect reality, but it does reflect where our hearts and minds are.

However, no matter how much I want my partner to be happy and no matter how much I want to be able to help him and care for him, I also want to be in charge of those decisions that directly effect me and to be an equal participant in those decisions that effect the both of us. That is something that is unchanged from where I was as a male. I want our humanness, not our gender to be the level on which we operate.

Just thinking about being a woman in a relationship is both wonderful and scary. How good a woman will I be able to be? Will I be able to represent my real gender as I think I should? Will I be accepted for what I really am, a woman who is more than that, but also none less? I do believe now that being transgendered is a gift, not a curse, and that it has helped me much more than it ever hindered me. I believe that being transgendered has given me insight and understanding of a much more broad level of human experience. It allows me to see and understand things much more clearly.

Until I began this process I donít think I recognized it for what it was, a gift from God. As I uncover more of myself, as I strip away the training, attitudes and expectations away from covering who I really am I constantly am amazed. For example, I was on Julie Watersí Web Site one evening visiting personal sites when I encountered sites for women. After a few seconds I realized, ìWow, I am a woman, at least in spirit and soul, so why shouldnít I go to those sites?î It was then that I began to see that I made an essential shift, not from the male as I had already began to think of myself as transgendered, but as a transgendered woman. This is quite a leap for this dumpy broad.

My whole life has been involved in connecting people to one another and to the community as a whole. I am just now beginning to understand why that was important to me and where it came from. I know now that it reflects my feminine nature and it always has.

I would hope as a functioning, accepted woman that I could develop even more of those feminine gifts that I already possess and to bring along those others that I have not completely been in touch with.

I also possess masculine gifts which I hope that remain, not in the fore front, but somewhere that my genie can call from the bottle of my soul and utilize as parts of the whole for the better. I believe that I am more than the sum of my parts and that my parts are diverse and sometimes even at odds with one another. I am an aware individual whose developed philosophies are enhanced and expanded because I am a transgendered woman. I would hope that as a transgendered woman I can contribute to some little bit betterment of my world.

In the beginning I thought that my logic could help me withstand the pressures that come with understanding. I still feel that is true that I can act in the manner best suited for me to achieve what I need to that I do feel the pressure to get on with my life as a woman and to begin living as fulltime as soon I am able. I know I wonít be able to be totally happy until I am able to live as a woman completely.

When I can get up in the morning, put on a dress or even Leviís and be able to relate and be accepted by the world as the woman I am will I begin to live whole life that I need to. To me living and being accepted for whom I am is the manuscript and the SRS is only the punctuation.