Life Two Years After SRS

But the future is far from certain. These are dark times in America for anyone who has to work for a living and that goes double for transsexuals. The IT industry has been hard hit by global outsourcing and my company isn't doing that well financially. So this may be just a short term gig. I've been hoping to get into nursing school but so are lots of people and right now I'm parked on a two year wait list. Meanwhile, tuition fees are skyrocketing and grants and scholarships are a thing of the past. I may not be able to afford nursing school by the time I get in. So I don't know what the future has in store...

Life One Year After Transition

As I write this it's just over one year since I transitioned. A lot has happened in that year. Life before transition seems like a distant memory now.

At the time I transitioned (June 2001) I was employed as a Software Engineer for an internet-related company. I transitioned on the job and they were very supportive, but they were hemorraging cash and I got laid off along with most of the work force three weeks after I starting working as Debby! I was pretty bitter about that but I would have been laid off even if I hadn't transitioned. One good thing that came of it was an employment history and references in my new gender.

I spent the summer collecting unemployment, travelling around Colorado, and doing a lot of mountain biking. I was getting burned out by the tech work so a break was good for me. I had fun and the travelling increased my confidence considerably interacting with people.

In the meantime, the tech job market in Denver just kept getting worse. The local tech economy was all telecom and internet, and both industries crashed hard. So I moved to a ski town in Colorado and spent the winter working for the ski resort, doing ticket sales. The job involved a lot of people contact and I really liked that after my years of nerd work. The free skiing was fun too! The other cool thing was that people just knew me as Debby, another skier chick. As far as I know, I was never read and I never saw a need to out myself to anyone. It was so much nicer just being one of the women instead of the company transsexual like in my old job. They were cool about it but it's just not the same.

By the end of the season I found myself homesick for Boulder so I moved back. I was also hoping to get another "real" job, but that hasn't happened yet. The economy just keeps getting worse in the Denver area and I haven't even been able to get an interview, much less a job offer. That's pretty much the situation for everyone else too. It's really bad, the worst job market I've ever seen. At the Unitarian church that I go to in Boulder, 30 percent of the members are unemployed! I'd move somewhere else where there are jobs, but it appears to be the same everywhere. So I might be going back to school soon (at age 45 - ugh). A career in healthcare is sounding attractive. I think in my new life I want to work more with people. And I like the idea that what I do could help improve peoples' lives instead of just making some fatcat CEO even richer.

I had SRS on June 4, 2002, one year to the day of going full time. The surgery went well but it's been a long, painful, difficult recovery, much harder than I expected. I don't seem to be a very good surgery candidate. I'm six weeks postop now, and I'm still a long way from being healed. But I am slowly getting better and I have hopes of being pain-free and able to resume a normal life someday.

One thing that quickly became apparent to me was how natural living as a woman felt to me. It was obvious almost immediately I'd made the right decision. It's hard to believe I used to live as that other gender! That life seems so strange and alien to me now. So for me the decision to undergo SRS was a no-brainer. My surgical experience hasn't gone very well so far (slow healing and a lot of minor complications), but I know it needed to be done. And now my body looks the it's supposed to. I don't get grossed out when I look in the mirror anymore. Of course, SRS has little effect on my day-to-day life or how I interact with others. For me it has more to do with personal satisfaction.

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