Do you have an exit strategy?

It started with an email from my friend, Susann. We are not close friends but we are friends and in many ways we are kindred spirits. We live some thousand miles apart. We only met in person once. That was when we were roommates at one of JoAnn Roberts’ Beauty at the Beach weekends many years ago. We have occasionally corresponded and exchanged ideas ever since. I enjoy hearing from Susann. She writes so well. Others in her family seem to accept ‘Susann’ as easily as her male persona is accepted. After several decades of dressing en femme, I still have not achieved anything close to that level of acceptance within my family. I do not try.

Truth be told I don’t expect to achieve anything close to that acceptance. Except to my spouse, I am totally in the closet to the rest of my family and friends.

When I saw her message, I hastened to open it, anxious to find out about Susann’s latest adventure.

Sadly, there had been no adventure, no happy news. Susann was writing to tell me of the passing of a good TG friend of hers. That friend and Susann had also roomed together at Rehoboth (Beauty at the Beach) and Harrisburg (Keystone). Susann wanted to let me know in case I had known her. Attached was nice photo. I wish I’d known her. I had known her name but not met her in person.

I may have let Susann’s news go but I could not. The news got me thinking about other members of our TG community with which we have some level of contact and then they are gone without a trace. I thought of Carolyn. She and I used to get together once per year up in Ottawa or Montreal, Canada when her wife would go holiday in Florida while Carolyn got her suitcases out of storage and wrote to me to come visit her at such and such a hotel. We got along great but then one year I wasn’t summoned. Not that year; not the next nor the next. What had happened to Carolyn? She was no ‘spring chicken’ but she always seemed healthy.

Probably everyone has a ‘Carolyn’ in their past, perhaps several. That got me thinking that someday somehow, we all will be somebody’s Carolyn. We all may become the friend that just mysteriously disappears off the face of the earth.

Your TG friends may miss you and remember you wondering what might have happened. But for those of us who are living partly or largely in the closet it occurred to me that when we go our partners, family and perhaps friends may be in for a great shock. They may lose a dad, a brother, a buddy but at the same time they may be suddenly discovering about the t-girl they never knew they knew.

They may find out by helping a spouse clean out some boxes or a mysterious storage locker no one knew existed. They may uncover an unknown file or cache of photos stored in the recesses of a computer. I got to thinking that I don’t want anyone to come across my secret. With everything else that goes on I don’t want my spouse to have to answer a lot of questions about the mysterious ‘Linda’.

That got me thinking of developing an exit strategy. Are you familiar with the term? Do any of you have your own exit strategy. How do you plan to enact it?

Anyone who has taken courses in business and commerce, anyone who has been involved in owning and operating a small business, even a large one will know about the term exit strategy. The exit strategy is how you plan to leave your enterprise behind. Sell it as is? Wind it down and wrap it up? Sell it in pieces? Sell your name with the company? For some entrepreneurs having a good exit strategy is a major part of a plan for a good income in retirement. Not so with many in the transgender community. I suspect most of us are leaving our exit strategy planning to another day.

I did have one friend from Australia who came out by writing a book about her life and that of her gay brother the theater director. Peta Wilson was her femme name. She made a bucket list trip to the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta and then announced her ‘retirement’ from crossdressing. Retirement? I didn’t know one could retire from any part of the TG life but apparently Peta did. If you can find a copy of her autobiography, I highly recommend picking it up and reading. It is called Desirelines: An Unusual Family Memoir by Peter Wherrett and Richard Wherrett. I think you can guess which brother called himself ‘Peta’.

I have been an active crossdresser — the old definition where we dress to pass and go out among the public folk — for a little over 40 years. That is barely over half my life, but it is a long time in CD years. ‘Linda’ is known to my wife but no one else knows both my male and female identity. It is not that someone finding out would be ‘the death of me’; I just like it that way. I like the stealth.

However, in my male world I’m seen one way. In my trans world I’m seen as being quite different. I would like to keep those two images separate. I imagine many of you feel that way. I’m not on death’s door but I am getting to the age that when I look at obituary notices in the local newspaper more of the latest entries are younger instead of older than me.

All power to those who come out as ‘the person they really are’. That must take strength and willpower. Susann has strength and will power but coming out is not for me.

Two sentences in Susann’s email about her friend hit home. “This saddens me so because so many people will never know of our loss in the community,” she wrote, “and so many others will never know of the (lady) I knew, including her family. I’m not sure that you ever met her but I know you would have liked her.”

How do we traditional crossdressers — the ones that develop full femme personalities and seek even short periods of acceptance outside the closet — plan for the end of our days?

Should we leave a written explanation to the family to explain that suitcase or closet or storage locker full of clothes and wigs and heels? How about the magazines?

Will we be leaving a CD ‘footprint’ on our computer?

Do our spouses have instructions on how to ‘wipe our CD footprints off the sand’?

Will we leave instruction of who to tell and how to tell them that the person behind our femme personality ‘has passed on’? Should TGForum consider creating an Obituary page?

Or, as with my old friend Carolyn, will it be a case of the rest of us living on a few years before we just start thinking ‘whatever happened to. . .’?

I have been wondering if there is a better way.

I may have already started on the first steps to an exit strategy (she writes not very convincingly as she sits at the keyboard with one glance at the computer monitor and a longer glance toward the mirror and her full breasted image looking back at her.) I have a storage locker. I have had it for thirty years. At one time it was crammed full of femme clothing, wigs, make up, magazines and books. There is the souvenir sash from the time I was crowned Princess of the Poconos. Gradually all that femme stuff has been replaced with other mementos and the victims of a ruthless downsizing on the home front. ‘Yes, I know we can’t take my stamp collection to the new condo but I’m not ready to get rid of it just yet.’ The sash I still have.

So, the locker is clean and somewhere a Goodwill shopper is going to come across a treasure trove of size 14 dresses and 11W shoes and figure she has struck the motherlode.

But what next? Can you help me out? What do you gals suggest for a way to clean my life of Linda? Or is it even possible to clean out? Help me, please.

Any ideas to help Linda? Login here and use the comment area below.

Tags: crossdressing, featured, mortality, Transgender

Category: crossdressing