My discovery - an addendum

Last year on my web site Coming Out Trans I wrote an article about how my wife first discovered that I was transgendered back in the early 1990's. To make a long story short, I left a bag in a car that had my clothes, and my wife found it. Hilarity ensued.

Recently I came out to my children. I have a teenage son and a daughter in her early twenties, both in college. I came out to my daughter in the car when I was picking her up for the winter break. It was the best discussion I ever had with her - her first questions were "What pronouns should I use?" and "Do I still call you daddy?". I was very happy about this - I was concerned that she would have issues accepting me.

One thing that came out was that when my wife had discovered the bag in the car my daughter was with her. She was very young, maybe kindergarten age at the time. She said that she saw my mother was upset about the bag of women's clothes and asked her how it got into the car. My wife said that she thought someone had put it there by accident. This had unnerved my daughter because we were always good at keeping the car door locked. How could someone break into our car and leave a bag of women's clothes, she thought. She said that she asked several people how that could happen. Nobody had given her an adequate answer. To this day she had been bothered by this.

My coming out answered the question for her - it didn't happen that way. Her sense was one of relief, not of fear or anger. We both couldn't help it - we laughed about this. In essence my wife and I had unwittingly caused some small anxiety in her that could only be resolved by my coming out to her.

Happy New Year 2008!!!

I wish all my friends a very happy and prosperous New Year! I hope that you all see your dreams come true in 2008!

I hope that all of us - cross-dresser, transgenderist, transsexual, gender queer, or whatever label you use for your self - that we can all find happiness as we express our true selves in our true gender, whatever that might be. You all are a help and an inspiration to me! Bless you all and thank you!

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For me, well, I have been going through a lot of stuff at home, dealing with coming out to my kids and trying to figure out what's next for me. I feel like Tina has been on-hold the past few weeks. While I'm out to the kids they have not seen me dressed yet. It's a me issue and a wife issue - I want to do it, but I want the timing to be right.

In many ways I feel like I was making progress earlier this year and that I've regressed somewhat, due to the do-over that I feel I had to go through with my wife. But I have no regrets about that - she is an amazing and wonderful woman. I do love her so much.

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As to my web site, Coming Out Trans, I am going to redo the site again over the next few months. I'm learning both Wordpress and Drupal to do content management and presentation. I will redo it first with Wordpress and then bring in Drupal if/when I need to present content in a form that Wordpress cannot handle.

As to content, it's become a victim of time and energy. I want the site to be a good site, but it's a lot of work, and I want it to look wonderful and be easy to use. That takes a lot of work. I plan on reaching out to a few people and organizations to see how I can work with them to help people come out as transgendered. It's not important that the come to my site or someone else's; what's important is helping those who are trans to be able to be honest to those they care about and to themselves. It's a scary step for many of us to take, and there are a lot of people who rationalize why they can keep it hidden (like I did for so many years). That is why I wanted to do the site in the first place.