September - 1999

"A Single Red Rose I Give To You"
A single red rose I give to you,
To hold for me but for a time.
Then return it to me, is all I ask of you.
This one red rose, when I die,
Addressed simply to, "Who I Knew"
- (Jamie Lauren) -

I need to be able to get on with my life. When I get this way, I gently need to be reminded that I do have a life worth living. And an occasional hug sure doesn't hurt either. I just get so very tired struggling so all the time with how others think I should be. I just want to live at peace with myself and be able to finally be who I really am. If I were to die right now, there would not be anyone, neither family or friends that would recognize my passing. Instead they would mourn the loss of the male husk lying there, without any mention of the true me. Everyone would remember "James," but it's very unlikely that "Jamie" would receive brief mention, if any at all. For without one person, one friend to remember me, it would be as though I had never existed. Hidden and denied by others in life, and forgotten. I wish I could find that one person, that one close friend, to remember me. Just one red rose laid on a grave that is marked with someone else's name for one forgotten soul is all I ask for, just one small red rose with my name on it. To be one time remembered. I know when I die, I will die alone. There will not be another soul around. I will be totally alone. Of that I'm certain. I've always been alone. In everything I do. So I don't doubt I'll be alone in this too.

Some therapists recommend that their patients or clients keep their daily life in a diary or journal of some kind. I've started something many times, but it always hurt to be reminded so much of the past. Even those things that happen on a day to day basis are just so many painful reminders. And after a period I will lapse and find all sorts of excuses not to continue.

It is strange how interactions with other people try to force us into their molds, or their ideas of what we should be. "I have felt the emotions of a male - even though they always seemed strange, and peculiar, and foreign, and alien to me, and now after some 45 years I am finally, freely experiencing those of a female, and it feels like home, love, affection, warmth, tenderness, life, caring, kindness ... I so wanted to share this joy, this time of happiness in my life with those I loved or thought I could care about. I am both male and female, and yet neither. But no one that matters in my life, wants to accept this.


I find myself starting to ask the question of, where do I fit? I can no longer spend my life contiuning to masquerade (unhappily) as a male. But where am I accepted as a girl? Only by strangers perhaps, I think, my therapists, my doctors, and those whose life is totally made up of strangers. My feelings are beginning to crystallize around the thought, "Where do I fit in?" I think at some point I will finally detach from these unhealthy emotions, and no longer care, but be simply happy with myself; but how, or when?

I find myself watching for those things which I deem "gifts." Those simple little gifts, that mean so very much to me. A kind word or look of expression of manifestation that I am accepted. Especially when it comes from a total stranger. Sometimes I feel like a cur feeding on table scraps from others table, grateful for any little crumb tossed my way. Yet, never satisfied, never enough. Always hungry for more. Of acceptance and approval when someone doesn't realize that I am different. I love these simple gifts of love.


The single biggest sadness for me involves my childhood lost to me forever. I am keenly aware that I have been denied a childhood as a girl. I have not had the experiences, the traumas, the joys and the socialization skills that "normal" girls take for granted. I will never know what it was like to go to school as a girl, get my first period, have childhood friends relate to me as a girl. Receiving my first teenage kiss. To experience that one-time special life-long friend known since early childhood. I will never have memories of pretty party dresses, or playing with dolls ...

I sometimes find myself collecting mental photographs of a past I never had. And I curse myself for not having expressed my gender far more obviously at a younger age ... even though I know that would have resulted in more than just the misery I endured and the hatred and would likely have been killed many times. The yearnings for a past stolen from me do occasionally trouble me. And fill me with a sadness hard to voice.


Though I haven't physically cried for almost 40 years. I sometimes cry down deep inside my soul where no one can see it because I know I will never be able to have a child. Though my physical form is male, my inner wiring hungers for knowing a child growing inside a womb that should be there, but isn't.  I will never be a mother in the truest sense. I will never have a daughter, something I have always wanted. I will never suckle a child. The doctors say I will have fully functional breasts, but I will never be permitted to have them serve their biological purpose, I will never know that experience. And adoption, except by indirect and somewhat covert means, is not allowed to the average transsexual.

How many times have I hurt more deeply than any "real" genetic mother hearing horror stories of a mother killing her own infant by starvation, drowning, strangling, or casting, it into a garbage container to die alone, cold and unloved - to never know a gentle whispery soft kiss on its cheek, or soft gentle touch of lying against a warm breast and being held and knowing that it was indeed wanted and loved. For what one transsexual would have denied taking the child and loved it as our very own, raising and nurturing it. But we are denied adoption by the courts because "we're sick and perverted."

Indeed, it is best for me and others like me, to stay away from the children of any person as possible, because our past makes us an instant target for bigotry. What greater horror to any mother than to have one of those perverted, sick, transsexual freaks around, corrupting or hurting or otherwise molesting their children? Even if we never lay a hand on her child, the perverted, sick, transsexual freak is only awaiting the opportunity like the imagined predator they really are. To save ourselves from unfounded accusation and persecution, from prejudice an intolerence, we can never dare to work in a Day Care, become a grade school teacher, or do any of the other jobs that childress non-transsexual women may choose to overcome their sorrow.


Beginning transition has been the most intelligent, self beneficial thing I have ever done. I would certainly have been dead by my own hand before too many more years without it. The benifits are almost innumerable. Indeed, I wish I could have done it sooner than I did.

My body is finally starting to feel correct. I love the changing contours of my figure, the softness and delicacy of my skin, the biochemical "feel" of my body and mind from the ingestion of hormones. The necessary building blocks that it literally hungered for all these years. How, did it know what the hormones would do? It obviously never had them. There was no frame of reference for it. So there was no way it could know. Yet, it sensed "everything", it knew! It welcomed them, and embraced them Lapping them up as a thirsty traveler in a hot desert would greedily seek water. It knew how it would feel, how it would grow, - and it was right.

I love how my emotions are now being affected and released by the influence of estrogen. It is wonderful to actually be able to freely laugh. I can laugh freely, I can giggle, I can sing. Though these things were once few and far between. Now I find myself humming some mindless tune, sometimes for no real apparent reason. Quitely to myself. Even awakening myself one night doing so.


Without question, the ability to feel correct is beyond words. For me, fully transitioning will worth every tear, ever horror that I may have to endure.

I am grateful that I can finally begin wearing what I want, move as I wish, behave in a natural and unaffected way, and not be fearful of someone saying something hurtful to me. Indeed, the more relaxed and natural I am, the more accepted I am. If I am found curious, or novel, or perculiar, it is when I am nervous and unconsciously start affecting the behavior that I once used to mask my lack of masculinity. Indeed, I am now rewarded and accepted by these strangers, that would have at another time, mocked, or ridiculed me. I am no longer shamed by others for being myself. This cherished gift of acceptance is far more precious to me than any treasure of gold.


For me nothing could possibly be better than to be a woman, relating to others. Whether in a crowded mall, on a busy street, or a quite room, doesn't matter. To be able to relate to another person as myself, no longer as a role, no longer as a pretense or fake characterization of something I cannot be. The emotional interpersonal dynamics of being a woman with another woman, as when I am with my therapist, is the happiest thing I have ever known. Experiencing the sheer emotional honesty of two women together.

All this would have been forever unknown to me, had I not began my journey.


Before I started hormones, my doctors were troubled that I wouldn't be able to handle my newfound limitations of life as a woman and ran the usual plethora of endless questions and gaunlet of tests. What a shock, what a consternation, they supposed, for anyone to find themselves suddenly paid less, rarely listened to, minimized, barely respected, and rendered less socially and economically powerful just because of their sex. My doctors worried that this would destroy a man.

All this would have destroyed a man. It has destroyed any man that has chosen this path.

Fortunately, I am a woman. I have seen my share, perhaps more than my share, of such cultural downgrade. Even before taking my first dose of hormones, before starting transition, long before my sessions with my first therapist, I was already considered second class ... indeed perhaps not even third class, because at least a woman is not considered a "biological freak" ... Even a work horse enjoys some protective rights against misuse or mistreatment. I never passed well as a male. In a way it is almost amusing that I pass better as a woman than I ever did as a male, despite having been born into a male body.

Click here to return to my home page.

Click here to return to the previous page.

Click here to return to the Jump Gate.