My First Visit, and What Came After

The first time I stepped into Persad Center I felt a little uncomfortable but not overly so. The office I went to was in a very questionable area of town (in Pittsburgh) but the inside didn't reflect that at all. The first thing they had asked me to do was what they called an "intake." I had to pay a one time fee of like $134 dollars to get evaluated and assigned to a therapist. They had me fill out a bunch of forms asking me all kinds of questions including both personal, medical, and questions about my family. After filling out the intake forms I was taken upstairs by an assistant to my therapist to be and she went over my intake forms with me in order to make sure everything I put on there was correct. She also filled out another form herself asking me questions as to why I was here and what I wanted to accomplish through therapy. Needless to say, I received a call after a couple days saying that I was accepted into the Transgendered Clinic there at Persad. I was also given the okay to schedule an appointment with my new therapist Judith Diperna.

It was well over a month's wait before I could get an appointment but it was well worth my "wasted time" in order to get into Judith's office. What can I say really...she was very kind to me from the start and we both clicked almost immediately. I remember my first appointment with her felt so short. It was ninety minutes long but it only seemed like ten minutes. My first visit with her lay down the frame work for every visit that I would have with her to follow which basically entailed me talking about myself and her nodding and occasionally asking me a few questions. I had to fulfill certain requirements to be diagnosed as a transexual and she made that well known to me from the get-go.

I drove every week to see Judith who's office was over an hour and a half away from where I lived. I remember having to pay two tolls, cross a state line, and drive through downtown Pittsburgh just to get there. It got tiring, believe me. And at one point I drove down on Tuesday nights for a group therapy session with other transexuals. At the time I did not like that at all, I was so scared to be in front of people for whatever reason.

After about two months of therapy I stopped going in September of '05 because I got involved with a guy that said I was fine the way I was and that it was perfectly okay for a man to be feminine. We had a short relationship needless to say and because I had stopped therapy I felt both betrayed and stupid for listening to him. Yeah, I'll agree that it it acceptable for men to act/be feminine, but the simple fact of the matter was I wasn't a feminine guy, I was a female and there was nothing nobody could tell me to think otherwise. I didn't recover from this until over a year and a half later in March of '07 when I finally decided to put my foot down and finish my therapy with Judith so I could become the beautiful person I knew I was.

My Very First Steps

If I remember correctly I was nineteen years old when I finally decided to let my family know what was going on in my head since I was a child. I was struggling with this for YEARS, and extremely fearful of the possible consequences of the wrong people finding out that I was a transexual. I can remember going over in my head time and time again the exact steps I needed to take in order to get my dream of becoming a woman a reality. I always thought for the longest time that my only chance to do this was to move away from my family and start my new identity away from home. I'm going to say in retrospect, that this would've only complicated my situation and quite possibly made it practically impossible to get where I am today. Especially in respects to money.

I had no choice but to tell my family if I wanted any chance to make my dream a reality. I had no where else to go and no where I could safely transistion in good time. So after psyching myself totally out and going over what I was going to tell them in the mirror about sixty bazillion times I walked into the living room and sat down for a heart to heart with both my brother and mom. I guess they took it okay, they didn't seemed to bothered by it at the time, and I had told the to "Expect the worst."

Over the course of the next few months I had begun to explore myself openly like I never did previously. I really had no shame and I laugh about that now, nothing quite like walking into Sears in a short short skirt and a strapless corset. I'd never do that now but I guess it was something I needed to get out of my system, and afterall I was only nineteen or twenty at the time so my view of what it meant to be a woman was very unrealistic.

After telling my family, I had realized that I needed to find some sort of professional help to point me into the right direction of people that could change me physically. I had no clue as to where I should look. From what I read I needed to find a therapist/counselor to evaulate me based upon the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care. My mom had suggested to me to speak with a guy at my work place who was gay and find out if he knew of any groups I could get involved with. Once again after psyching myself out I approached him outside and told him about my situation. He had advised me to seek out a group that frequently gathered at a local bar a little ways from where I lived.

Consequently, I had made a contact at this point with the "Lady-President" of the organization and we began to meet up at the group's gatherings. It was here where I met most of the transvestites I've ever known, but few were true blue transexuals. Luckily for me the the Lady President was, and she had pointed me in the direction of a place she had went called Persad Center in Pittsburgh. She even drove me down to Pittsburgh to make sure I could safely get there in one piece.

It was here where my first real serious steps towards becoming a woman would begin, but also the beginning of quite possibly the darkest period of my life. This mainly had to do with a struggle to keep myself from destroying myself and the people that were supposed to love me no matter what. It was here where I learned to not care about what others thought and to do what was right for me instead of what was right for others.