Learning I’m Non-Binary 60-Plus Years Later

“I never realized how much you look like your mother,” my first cousin told me at my father’s funeral three years ago. You don’t know the half of it, I thought to myself. Twenty years earlier, I went to London for a transformation that resulted me looking a slightly less attractive version of this cis woman cousin. That image, more than the experience itself, so horrified me that I refused the polaroid that captured the moment for posterity. But the photo was forever burned in my brain.

At the funeral I vowed to myself I would get to the bottom of why since adolescence I always felt different. I cleaned out my dad’s house, which I was luckily able to sell the last weekend before the pandemic lockdown. While going through drawers, I discovered a 1960s letter from my mother to my grandmother about her taking DES, the fertility drug, when she was pregnant with me. I did some research about DES and thought, perhaps I found an underlying biological reason for what I clearly suppressed for decades, throughout a long marriage, a divorce, and two kids, now in their twenties.

I kept telling myself that my fondness for occasionally wearing women’s clothing was a stress reliever. Admittedly early on there was a fetish aspect to this proclivity, which I shared with my future ex-wife before we went to bed for the first time. She wasn’t fazed and early on occasionally even encouraged it. I perhaps wasn’t as forthcoming with several women who were sexual partners before and after the marriage.

In April 2020, I finally began trying to figure out the real me, and found an online trans support group, whose members turned out to be welcoming. I admitted to them I hadn’t spoken about any of this to anyone. I wore my gender confusion on my sleeve. I felt like a sponge.

I also scheduled a tele-health appointment with a local gender therapist who happened to be a trans woman. I read her 200-page dissertation on transgender folks late in life into the wee hours of the morning before our first appointment. I wasn’t sure where it was headed, but I knew deep down knew it was long overdue. Thankfully, we hit it off. I learned from the therapist that gender was a spectrum, something I did not realize. My therapist meanwhile gave me a homework assignment to write out a chronological timeline, marking…