Sounds to me like you’re already doing well thinking positively about yourself OOHC. Of course you are enough as you are...we all are...just sometimes playing to your strengths and maybe stepping out of the comfort zone can tip us into a better place.

I’ve never been one for fake tan, nail varnish and have never dyed my hair but just recently I had a tan before I went on holidays and also got a tan there, my hair lightened up in the sun and I used nail varnish more than I would...I’d lost a little weight and felt great for a change. I don’t like to look artificial but I think a bit of attention here and there is good for my self-esteem and let’s face it, men are visual and they do respond to us when we look and feel good.

That said, I don’t want to date right now, I’m just getting back to being happy alone, it’s simpler and suits me right now.

It’s good to talk about these things, we all have different perspectives that might make us think hey I’ll try that :-)

About the groove and getting it back... As I was thinking about it, I wasn't even thinking about connecting with another person, just feeling comfortable and confident again in my own skin as a woman.  I don't want so much to appeal to men as to find myself again, and to know that the "self" I am is still capable of being thought attractive.
   I think the situation for those of us with trans partners is different from that of gay/lesbian partners.  Gay and lesbian partners may want to stay married, but it's a lot more rare that they desire you, because they're programmed to find their same sex desirable, rather than the one you are.  But my stbx, a male/man, decided that he was now a lesbian, and wanted to have sex and stay married to me.  He professed to still love me; he claimed he still desired me.  I discovered this was only true so long as I indulged his desires, which were, it must be said, contradictory.  He might call himself a lesbian, and one day want to have sex in the way he believed two female women would, but the next he'd act and dress like a hetero porn doll woman, and wanted me to treat him like one (and as if I were male). 
     My stbx and his "women are passive..women like to be dominated...women are [fill in the blank with whatever gendered stereotype you want]" and his sexual fetishizing of "feminizing" really did a number on my own sense of myself as a woman.  I've always thought gender was just a stick they beat you with--if you're hairy, you're not a good woman; if your breasts are too small, you're not a good woman; if you're smart and independent and like to use your body physically and revel in your own strength, and look them in the eye and talk back to them you're not a good woman. (And there's a corollary for men, of course.)  But throughout it all I just went full tilt through life as the person I felt comfortable being; not femme-y or trying to telegraph "sexy," but there was something people liked in seeing a woman being at home in her body.
     That's what I want to get back, my own sense of myself as capable and at home in myself. I could never "do sexy," and felt and looked ridiculous if I tried to "act sexy" in the ways we recognize as come-ons.  I've never been a woman who goes out of her way to appeal to men, and have always eschewed what in femininity seems to me to make woman seem like she needs a man or appeals to his power or dominance: no big doe eyes, no long (useless) fingernails, let alone pouty red lips.  All of which was exactly the way my stbx wanted to act to "feel like a woman"!  He said to me that he'd never felt at home in the standard masculine "come-on" pose; well, I never had in the feminine one, either, but I didn't go around fetishizing the male one and thinking that if I acted like Captain Kirk and puffed up my muscles I was proving I was a man and getting all sexually excited over it!  In fact, I felt the pressure of people telling me beause I didn't do the kinds of things he now wanted to do that I was such a bad woman I was more like a man (or a dyke).  But I felt as false striking conventionally feminine sexy poses as he did in conventionally male ones.  So to see and hear him ape these poses and defend them as defining woman both horrified me and attacked my own sense of what it is to be a woman at the same time explicitly belittling my own womanhood, while he was also claiming womanhood for himself and excluding me from it.  
      I took a huge hit at his hands to ideas of what a woman is and what it means to be one, to sexual attraction and attractiveness, to the relationship between femininity and woman, to sexual self confidence.  At my lowest I would think that I was such a crappy woman that my husband didn't want to be a man anymore.  (And you can substitute "wife" and "husband" for "woman" and "man," too.)  Since I've left I've fought back against that by thinking, tongue in cheek, hey, I'm such a good woman that my husband wanted to be one, too.  The surface signaling of femininity--clothes, hair, makeup, smiling prettily--has never defined woman for me, and it was a huge blow to see my husband, whom I'd thought felt the same way as I did, embracing that idea and trying to live it out, as if acting feminine was bringing him closer to being the woman he wanted to be.  I think that's been the worst, realizing that the man I thought was a feminist ally, a feminist, even, was embracing with both hands the gender dichotomy/binary, the most misogynist vision of woman, and claiming it was "natural" to woman and therefore true (while insulting my intelligence by telling me he was breaking down the gender binary!).  It almost put me off being a woman!  It certainly has threatened to put me off wanting ever again to partner with a man again, as I fear I'll be thinking that somewhere inside every man harbors this misogynist crap, even if he says different.  It's going to be a huge trust issue.   What I think I'm going to have to do is somehow uncouple "femininity" from "sexually attractive" again, and find myself.  I can be myself, and I can be found attractive and even desirable as myself.  I'm not capitulating to "feminizing" activities that I've never embraced that he tried to make me believe and he believed made a woman and made a woman sexually attractive.
    I think cultivating the strength and capability of my body, moving with ease and the confidence you get from strength and flexibility, will help.  It's wonderful to walk fast and feel the muscles of my body.  It's great to clamber over the rocks on the seaside cliffs, to trust my balance (which has always been good) and my ability to find a path through and around the broken and tumbled rock.  It's energizing to feel the wind blowing against me as I stand on the cliff over the water, so deeply exciting. Whether or not anyone finds this attractive, is attracted by it, I mean, is up to them.  
     But I'm not adopting conventionally feminine looks or ways; they aren't me, and I don't believe varnishing my nails is going to make me feel more attractive--or be more attractive!--or give me confidence in myself as a woman.  (And I'd run like hell the other way from a man who thought that was attractive or needed me to mime that kind of femininity to be attractive to him.)  I would feel as if I were acting a part, the same way my stbx did, and as if I was letting him define what makes a woman attractive.  What helps is reconnecting with the way I was before all this, and remembering that I was confident and comfortable in my body, and that others were attracted to that, both sexually and not.  When last month I ran into a man I knew socially through work in the grocery store, and told him what was up--that I was divorcing my stbx, who'd decided he wanted to be a woman--and he said, "Don't take this the wrong way; I'm not coming on to you, but I've always thought you were a very attractive woman" it was just what the doctor ordered.  
    What a morass of crap to work through, and all at 64, an age most people think women are beyond the sexual and, at least, aged out of sexual attractiveness!  But I still believe this isn't so much about my ability to attract another person, as much as it is about my ability to live with myself and in my body and be happy and content there and have confidence that what I am--the kind of woman I am--is sufficient and even attractive (to the right men).  I'm not interested in joining the dating game, or doing one thing in order to partner up.  If it happens, through activities I myself enjoy and do because I enjoy them, then it happens.  But if it doesn't, I still need to feel myself a vital and attractive and worthwhile woman.  I got pushed out of womanhood and out of myself by these last three years with my disordered stbx, and it's time to find my way back into myself again.  As painful as this is, I will say this: it's far better to spend some time on my own issues than it is to obsess over him and his.  
     Sorry this is so long, but this has been building a long time, and I need to think my values through and get this out as part of my healing.  And I don't mean this as an attack on anyone else's ideas about femininity or the way you want to present yourself; I am just concerned to honor my own personality and sense of self again.

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (July 30, 2018 11:36 am)

Yeah,  nothing like being told by your male spouse that you are less a woman.  When all this started up, and he was still hiding it all from me (but trying on my clothes when I wasn't around), mine wrote me a soulful letter telling me how he loved my "butchness."  What a hit to my self esteem that was.  No one ever called me that before!  (Not that there's anything wrong with being a butch woman...it's just now what I want or how I think of myself.)  Only two and half years later, when he finally stopped hiding and told me what was up, could I begin to understand it: he was already re-fashioning himself into a feminine "lesbian" (pretendbian is more like it) and in order to do that he needed to turn me into his opposite.  Only now do I fully understand that it wasn't/isn't me--it's him.  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (July 30, 2018 2:33 pm)

   So he just expects you to play along, does he.  The unbelievable entitlement of these men-wanna-be-their-effed-up-version of woman.  He can change all the parameters of your marriage, and you're supposed to just accept it?   They seem to think that whatever they want to do should be hunky-dory with us.  
   Coming out of the fog is hard and painful, but when you do, you'll see just how unreasonable and self-centered he is.  You owe him nothing.  He thinks he can remake everything and yet still have what he had--it's all about what he wants.  
   Ask yourself what you want.  I bet it isn't this freak of a non-husband.  And then go about getting free.  
   See a lawyer asap, so you aren't on the hook for whatever he's spending your joint money on with his new credit cards.
  You have rights; assert them.
  

I am 62 as well and wondering all the same things.  My divorce was final this July after being separated for a year. He has already gone on to hook up with another woman and move in with her prior to divorce. . Can't be without a beard ya know.   He had worn down my sense of who I am for so long that it's hard to see my self as desirable.  I thought dating would help.  I recently dated a very nice man for 4 weeks that seemed crazy about me, opened doors, flowers, nice dinners, told me constantly how beautiful he thinks I am and how excited he was to have met me etc etc. I  Well I couldn't handle it and just emotionally detached, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It felt like a lot of pressure to live up to this idea he had of me because I didn't believe it, if that makes sense.. I Just knew he was going to be disappointed at who I am just like Was-band
I asked him if this is some type of game because it just felt so ridiculous to me that it had to be fake. No one would really think I'm that great and want to just shower me with attention.  He was very hurt by that and long story short I blew it up. We broke up a week later.
So, what I now realize for me Is dating is not going to change my outlook on myself, it's only going to bring it all to the surface and spill it out on someone else.