Thanksgiving and the holidays

I'm currently at my parent's home for Thanksgiving. We will be having Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparent's house tomorrow with most of my family. I love my family and enjoy spending time with them. We get along well and I am thankful to have such a strong relationship with my family but as I've often written about on this blog, times like this always make me very aware of the differences in our feelings about who I am as a transgender person.

The holidays in the past have always made me acutely aware of my feelings but I feel it's going to be especially hard this year because I feel I've made very important strides in understanding and expressing who I am as a transgender woman in the past year. I am now living almost entirely full-time as a woman and I am beginning to explore the possibility of becoming a woman through hormone treatment and surgery. The only time I'm not a woman is when I am with my family.

They are still unable to accept that I am transgender. They firmly believe that crossdressing is wrong and they have a very definite image of who I am, an image that doesn't include being a woman. So whenever I am with them, I feel like I once again have to hide an important part of who I am.

Some of the decisions I will be making in the future will make it more difficult to hide that I am a woman; I don't know how they will react to these decisions so next Thanksgiving they may not want to see me at all.

For now, I'm going to be thankful for what I have, time to spend with my family and the freedom to be who I am when I'm not with them, and worry about the future later.