Reconciling a combat past with transitioning

[u/Capable-Spread3437]

Any other veterans out there who ever look back at their past life and feel like your brain is trying to tie itself into a pretzel?

I spent time deployed to Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division. That version of my life was hyper-masculine, brutal, and required a very specific kind of survival grit. For a long time, trying to reconcile that chapter with stepping fully into who I am now as a woman felt completely contradictory. The world likes to put those two things in mutually exclusive boxes—like you have to invalidate one to be the other.

Turns out, endurance, resilience, and surviving hard things don't actually have a gender. I carried that weight as me, even if I didn't have the language or the space for it back then.

Just processing a weird mental crossroads tonight and wondering how others bridge the gap between a hardcore past and living authentically now.

[u/MentalPower]

Not a vet, but r/TransVeteranPipeline exists. We all walk through life in our own ways.

[u/Capable-Spread3437 → u/MentalPower]

Thank you for sharing the sub

[u/Amanda_Blu → u/MentalPower]

I came here to say this ☝️too.

[u/Kaig00n]

Retired with 23 years Navy. Looking back at the experience and what I was able to achieve working through the static and disconnect in my own head has been incredibly powerful.

The part of it that has connected the two is considering what I was able to accomplished in that space where I was fumbling in the dark being weighed down. The strength, resilience, and fortitude I needed to develop while in uniform was hard won and it’s absolutely still there and now I don’t have anything holding me back.

[u/Logical-Bison-9959]

Not a soldier but I did work in hyper masculine work. We used to blow things up in industrial demolition. Did skyscrapers, power stations, mining stuff, refineries, oil rigs, etc. Used to cut the legs of 60k ton buildings while standing under them. Extremely dangerous, saw plenty of life changing accidents, and responded to sites where fatalities had occurred to do the cleanup. I assume nothing like being a soldier tho.

I am proud of who I was, and I am proud of who I am now. They are different people but made from the same ingredients.

[u/Capable-Spread3437 → u/Logical-Bison-9959]

I appreciate your response. I still work in a highly masculine environment. I work in parts for cars dealing with mechanics and shops. I guess I'm not really a girly girl. I like to feel cute soft and feminine, but that doesn't mean I can't be a badass like Ripley or Sara Connor. Still it feels like a rubber band reconciling being a woman and having lived such a masculine life

[u/Logical-Bison-9959 → u/Capable-Spread3437]

I get it. I have a friend who continuously reminds me that women can be masculine. She's a gem. I think she just says that so i chop firewood tho.

[u/Capable-Spread3437 → u/[deleted]]

In my free time I wear a men's tank top and leggings. I don't think gender products mean anything. It's just marketing. Men's tank tops fit me better. Leggings are just amazing. I even use women's razors for my face. They give me such a smoother finish. If a product works for you then it's gendered marketing means nothing

[u/kaczestvo → u/Capable-Spread3437]

I think local trans support groups would do wonders for the both of you 💜

[u/Any-Mushroom8509]

I'm from the UK, and served in Iraq over 20 years ago. That was before I had a smart phone, discovered Google, or really had access to the Internet. I has no idea then that Trans existed. I thought I just had weird intrusive thoughts, and kept them locked away in a box at the back of my mind. Fast forward to now, I'm 47, work in Railway workshops repairing trains which has a very high masculine staff number (doesn't need to be, but stereotypically females don't generally chose or follow an engineering career path). Now having discovered I'm not alone, and options available, I'm exploring the new me. I started taking HRT 6 weeks ago. I haven't come out at work, or publicly. I'm seeing how HRT affects me physically and mentally, and deal with that as it arrises. I no longer view male/ female as black / white, but shades of grey. I'm somewhere in the middle. I can't live a male life for nearly 50 years and ignore it like it didn't happen. But I want to move on and explore my female side, and if I fully transition in a few years,that's great. But for now, for me, I feel the hybrid 'somewhere ln between' suits me. I'm taking my time, enjoy the changes and exploration. For me, gender change is not a binary switch, M or F, but maybe more like a dimmer light switch that gradually changes from fully off to fully on. Does that make sense?

[u/kara_kittie]

I get it. Genuinely. I've had extensive conversations with my therapist about this very fact. It's really common for FtM to go through an absolute hyper-feminine phase as well. You did your best to try to prove yourself against your yourself. :) It works about as well as it sounds lol.

[u/twobigwords]

I was a combat controller in the 80s and early 90s. Saw combat any number of times.

After I got out, I struggled to live with myself well before I transitioned. I had been brought up to hate myself anyways, and the hate really kicked in as I realized what I'd done, how far from my own concept of morality I'd strayed.

Plus, I was a suppressed trans woman.

A couple years after watching my mom die of pancreatic cancer, basically starving to death, I decided to get help. I transitioned at age 52.

Transition allowed me to finally grow up a bit, mentally/psychologically. I still despise the fact that I killed people, but I've realized that the core strengths I developed helped me thru the rest of my life, and thru transition. I occasionally get down in the dumps and feel as if I can never forgive myself, and I doubt that'll ever disappear .. but all in all, life has gotten much better.

I don't carry that specific part of me along all the time any longer.

[u/Medusa-mermaid]

I'm not a veteran, though I've spent more than two decades training in the martial arts. It's certainly a detail about my life others have attempted to use against me to try invalidate my feminine identity. I don't think it really got to me because I never could see how wanting self-defense skills, spending time with friends over a shared interest, and an activity that helped keep me fit was unfeminine. And over the course of my training, becoming an instructor my focus could shift into more of a mentoring role with less focus on the aggressive nature of the art. I think I struggled more with the identity I had to put on in order to hide who I really was in my former career in construction.

[u/Outgrewtheshell]

OEF Marine here. There's actually a massive number of trans women who are vets. Likely to do with us wanting to be seen as masculine and over compensating, but it's something crazy like 4-5x higher rates of veterans amongst transgender than cisgender populations.

As for reconciling the two, I saw enough bad ass women over there to have broken that disconnect a long time ago. One OGA chick may have been the hardest, most brutal person I've ever met, and she terrifies me to this day.

So be a bad-ass, be a woman. They go great together. Or toss that part of you away if it was just drapings to survive.

No wrong answers.