Gender Binges

 

Image from Andy Arjun
on UnSplash.  

Binge cross-dressing happened a lot to me when I was quite young.

Once I was able to scrape together my meager finances to put together a small wardrobe of feminine clothes that barely fit me, I could not stay away from wearing them more and more. In fact, I was able to come up with two main hiding places away from the prying eyes of my family and most importantly, my slightly younger brother. It was about that time that I really became involved with binging in my new clothes which I felt made me look like a pretty girl.

Very soon, regardless of the risk involved with me cross-dressing as a girl, I was doing it as much as I could get away with. I think now that my mom had to know something about my cross-dressing but was either afraid to say anything about such a complex subject or thought it was a phase that would go away. Obviously, the joke was on her. My wanting to be a woman never did go away; I just matured into it. Plus, back in the late 1950’s and early 1960's, there was very little good information about gender issues to deal with, so we were on our own as gender issues were called mental illnesses. Which even I knew at such a young age was not true. For all I knew at the time, I really liked experimenting with mom’s clothes and makeup and binge dressing was becoming routine.

As I said, once I began to mature into being a more accomplished cross-dresser (even before I considered myself transgender) I managed to dress more and more. I was even able to buy a beautiful long blond human hair wig that she hated and I loved. Finally, after I changed girlfriends, she went away and I kept the most important part of the relationship to me which of course was the wig. It brought me to a whole other level of cross-dressing away from Halloween wigs into the real deal. Back in the 1960’s when miniskirts were in, I could not wait until I could find a chance to slide on pantyhose and miniskirt and top it all off with my blond wig. Yes, I did binge any chance that I got!

Sadly, my binge dressing needed to come to a complete halt during my military years in the Army. Instead of worrying about how short I could wear my miniskirts, I had a more immediate and important problem of how to deal with weapons and drill sergeants in Army basic training. How I survived was that I put all my fond memories of cross-dressing in the back of my head and daydreamed about the future I knew I could have shaving my legs again and binge dressing as a woman.

After I served my time in the military, the only immediate release I had from all the tension I felt to be feminine at all was with all the many and varied Halloween parties I went to. During that time, I went from being a French woman with my blond hair, black outfit, tights and beret, all the way to professional woman one year when I was mistaken for a ciswoman just getting off work. The good news was I was learning a lot, and the bad news was Halloween only came about once a year. I needed desperately to find another way to binge with a purpose and express myself as a transgender woman. A term I was beginning to accept as my own.

Once I began to accept who I was, I needed to set out to prove it to myself and the world that I could live my truth. It was then that my binging took a whole different direction from where I was before. Thanks to the basic acceptance I gained from successful Halloween parties, I had the confidence to know I could look the part and blend in with society as another ciswoman. Little did I know then, the hardest part of my male to female femininization project was yet to come.

It took me finally getting out of the gay bars I regularly went to for some sort of validation I never received and into being accepted as a regular in many of the straight venues I went to and enjoyed as a man. My validation as a regular gave me the confidence to keep trying to improve myself as a transgender woman rounding out her life in the world. As I achieved goal after goal I set up on my trans bucket list, I really binged out every chance that I got which put me into a direct collision with my second wife who did not want to live with another woman and my male self who was dead against giving up his life all together.

By all out gender binging, I had set myself up for an internal war I was fortunate to survive. It took me all I could do to keep all my lives together as the years progressed. All I knew was I was able to carve out a dream existence as a transfeminine person. No one knew of my male past, and I loved experiencing every moment of my new life. Deep down, for once I felt I was fighting my self when I was binging as a trans woman and expressing my true self.

By turning back, the clock the best I could, I tried to take the best that I learned from my male life and apply it to building a solid base for my female life. I think it worked because I was able to decide which of my male baggage was important enough to bring along and I benefitted from being blessed with a long life, so I can see a number of important things come full circle (which is another blog post.)

The bottom line is I have always been an impulsive person which helped me all the times I just had to binge to satisfy my needs. Dealing with my gender issues was just an integral part of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Want...or a Need

JJ Hart Discovering her Needs
I am in the first row on the left.

When a want turns into a need, sometimes you can feel it. Other times, not so much as if it sneaks up on you from behind.

As I began to wear dresses and makeup as a young boy, for the most part, it was because I wanted to do it. Cross-dressing just relieved the pressure of my unwanted everyday male world. It did not take me long to figure out my want was much more than just a casual appreciation of women’s fashion and makeup.  I did not know it then (and the term had not yet been widely used) that I was transgender more than a cross-dresser. I could not feel the change because I did not have the gender knowledge to do it.

Life began to change for me when I started to cross-dress for the thrill of it and attend Halloween parties. The parties ended up teaching me the basics of being a woman in public around people I knew, and I wanted to take it a step further by not having to wait another year to try again to get out of my dark closet and into the world. That is when my story turned out to be dark as I was not met with many positives by the public as a novice trans woman, cross-dresser or whatever you would like to label me as. To too many people, I was simply a man in a dress and clown makeup. I learned the hard way to get back to my drawing board and work harder on my feminine craft to find out if I was ever going to be able to succeed at all at my dream.

I also learned that if I was ever going to find success on my gender path, I was never just going to make it by just thinking it was just a want. It had to become a deep-seated need. I went back and dieted, worked on my skin and did everything I could to improve my testosterone poisoned body. All it really taught me was how much deeper I needed to travel along my gender path to make it at all and I needed to do it very badly. As the pounds melted off, I was able to find more stylish feminine wardrobe items to fill out my fashion needs and dress for success to blend in with the rest of the ciswoman crowd. Who I learned the hard way, were the people who ran the world I was attempting to be a part of. Or I could go casual if I needed to and a more polished business look when I needed to upscale my appearance. Fashion-wise I was learning that looking the best I could and blending in with the public at the same time was a definite need not some sort of a frivolous want just to justify something I wanted.

The more I tested the world as a transfeminine person, the more I needed to do to help myself along in the learning process of just belonging in the world I always should have been a part of to begin with. It was a real chore just to put the mirror image I thought I had perfected into the public and into motion to see how it worked. For the most part, I was improving to the point where I needed to start trying to communicate with the world as a more complete trans woman. As I always point out, the communication challenge to me was immense because I had always been a lazy communicator in my life. By that I mean, I had never really had to listen closely to what another man was telling me. I knew instinctively how to respond to another man but was clueless when it came to woman to woman talk. Which I always had known was different but how different I did not know until I was made aware of it. For example, for the first time ever in my life I needed to really stop and listen to whomever was talking to me. Were they trying to point out danger to me or just being friendly as a ciswoman who was curious of me or a toxic man who just viewed me as some sort of a fetish object.

Quite possibly, the communication aspect of my male to female femininization need passed my desire to be as attractive as I could as a transgender woman in the world. Instead of just wishing and wanting to be accepted as an equal by the other ciswomen I met, I needed to make it a priority. I even swallowed my pride and took female vocal lessons to make the process easier. It was difficult, but I think I gained enough confidence to help with my overall presentation and life.

I was helped too when the pressure to succeed was relieved here and there by the new success I was having in the world carving out a new life which on one hand to be terrifying and on the other feeling so natural like I was coming home to the self I always should have been.

I found I did not discover all my true self until I could step away from me for a minute to look at how far my gender path had taken me. After years of experimenting and trying different things, I finally achieved my need to be allowed to play in the girls’ sandbox and I was not disappointed with what I found there. Even though I had to put up with the occasional hater or TERF who wanted me out, but the majority of women made me feel welcome in their world and that was all that mattered to me.

The sandbox provided me with firm lessons and reassurance in what I was trying to accomplish in life. The want I always felt was always a hidden need which took me years to realize was my true problem in life to solve.

I hope you can realize your true wants and needs on your gender path also and life becomes easier for you if you are searching like I always was.

 

 

 

  

It's a Lonely World

 

Image from Jarle Johnasen
on UnSplash.

It is a lonely world for many transgender women and transgender men as we journey along our dark gender paths.

As I always point out, like so many of you, I got a late start on filling out my gender workbook on how I was even going to begin a transfeminine life. Before the word was even invented. I was not invited to any overnight stays with the girls I admired so much to take advantage of early make-up tips and even feminine peer pressure on the clothes I was wearing to do a better job of looking the best I could in front of the mirror. Ironically, I was probably ahead of most girls age-wise when I started wearing makeup and shaving my legs, but I did not know that because I was not allowed behind the gender curtain to play in the girls’ sandbox.  

Looking back, I thought for a while there was always a chance I was going through some sort of a phase and I just could not be the only boy in the world with a strong desire to be a woman someday.

To make matters worse, I was always exceedingly shy back in those days which made me an introvert, and I had a tendency to not trust others. That would manifest itself much later in life when I had a very difficult time making close friends. Especially with other men. Who I thought would never understand my deepest darkest secret which by then I knew was no innocent phase in life I was going through. Not surprisingly after a while, I lost most of my shyness around ciswomen and enjoyed my time with them even more. Even though my true motives were never revealed that I just wanted to be like them in the worst way possible and I was just trying to see what it took to live their lives.

Even though I was still married to a couple of very different women through this portion of my life who knew of my cross-dressing desires and did the best I could to surround myself with other women, deep down inside I was still lonely. It never occurred to me why and what I could do about it for years. I just never realized for the longest time that I was living much of my life completely backwards. I was never meant to be a man and was forced into it by a cruel twist of fate I could do nothing about. Being a woman trying to live as a man put a terrific strain on me and caused me to constantly dwell on what I was doing wrong to feel so lonely.

When I finally made it out of my gender closet and into the world, my loneliness amazingly began to go away when I started to interact with other women. While men shunned me, ciswomen were curious why I was in their world. When they found out I was not some sort of fraud and a honest human being, it was OK to talk on a shallow level. Which was fine with me because I was so lonely after my second wife unexpectedly passed away. Her death taught me to never take anything for granted again and I set out to live more deeply as the transgender woman I was becoming. Just breaking down the gender barriers I was doing was never enough to get behind the gender curtain. I needed to do more.

Primarily, I needed to learn all over again how to talk to people. Mainly women but also men. Women I found came at me from all different directions and practiced a lot of nonverbal communication. I needed to practice the art of passive aggressiveness also when I found a smiling woman was not necessarily a friendly one. Until I proved to be up to the gender communication challenge, life became very interesting. Perhaps you have noticed that for the most part I left men out because for the most part, they left me alone. Which was fine by me, because with most of the men I did encounter, all I did was soothe their ego. Payback I guess from all the time I spent in the male world.

By this time in my life, I was looking at being sixty directly in the eye and could see very few avenues available to me to combat the extreme loneliness I felt at the time and had just figured I would have to spend the rest of my life by myself. As someone once said, the darkest hour is always right before the dawn and that is what happened to me. I already had my casual lesbian friends who met with me several times a week to watch sports and drink beer until my current wife came along online of all places and we cemented a wonderful relationship. Firat of all, Liz made me a believer in myself again. A confidence I had always had as a man but never as a trans woman.

Unbelievably, destiny had worked its magic, and I found someone to love in the world again and we lived close enough to make a romance work. As long as we are together (over twelve years now), we will not have to experience any lonely days in a cold world ever again.

For those of you who want to know more about how I did it was the only way I made it out was putting myself out there in that same cold world. I had to battle my fears by going out in big straight sports bars and becoming a regular. And, beat all the long odds to find a romantic partner on an online dating site. My big break came in the sports bars when a bartender I knew as a regular set me up with her single lesbian mother who I am friends with to this day. My moral to the story was I needed to put myself out there before I could reap the benefits, but I know the world has changed and you have to be careful.

One way or another, we transgender women and trans men live in a potentially very lonely world which is a shame because we have so much more to offer than the average human because we have seen so much in our lives.

Thanks for reading along and contributing with claps and comments! Hopefully I can come up with something meaningful to you.

 

It's Your World to Live In

 

Image from Gabriel Silverio
on UnSplash. 

When it comes down to it, it is your life to live and no one else’s. But life comes in the way.

The problem is often for transgender women and transgender men, it is easier said than done to live our own lives. Especially for those of us who had to wait until later in life to go after our dreams of transitioning into a feminine world. Perhaps, you were like I was and called selfish for my one-sided obsession about even seeing if my male to female dreams could ever become a reality. My second wife was fond of telling me my cross dressing should not be all about me.

The longer I pursued life on my new transfeminine gender path, I realized she was right. In order for me to move ahead in a world which felt so natural to me, I had to be selfish. It was the only way I could make the difficult decision to take a leap of faith and try to jump the gender border.

Back in those days, the only thing I could hang my pantyhose on were the annual Halloween parties I was going to dressed in my feminine finest. During these early parties, I learned a few of the basics I would need to survive as a trans woman later in life. Such as how visibly trained the human animal is to the genders, and if I was to go to the feminine side, everyone (male and female) would be noticing me. My new visible role in the world took some time and effort to get used to, but I did finally do it when I learned to dress to blend with the other ciswomen around me. It was my life to live, and I was coming closer and closer to deciding how I wanted to live it.

Before I did, I discovered I still had a whole lot of living to do before I made my decision. The problem was my male life on occasion was not that bad. Which gave me false hope that I could save it. All it did, as I juggled two genders at once, was to make my life a mental health hell as I struggled to maintain any sort of life I wanted. On one side, I had the increasingly financially successful male self-making it harder to give up all that he had earned and the male privileges which came with it. Struggling with my feminine side which felt she was in a more natural position to thrive. The end result was whatever decision I made just had to be the right one. With so much at stake in my life, I needed to go back to being very selfish with myself to make it.

In the meantime, I went into a heavy experimentation period of my life as a novice transgender woman. My goal was to try to live every moment that I could discover what a ciswoman has to go through in her life. So, I could tell if I wanted to do the same thing. I wanted to be more than the “pretty, pretty princess” that my second wife always called me when she was trying to make fun of my femininity to learn what she was really talking about. It was a struggle, but eventually I did by setting up my own version of a transgender bucket list of things to do. What did a ciswoman know that I did not became my main goal in life when I shed my male clothes and went out in the world as a trans woman. Overall, my plan worked well for me except the times I tried too hard and ended up in redneck bars where a single woman should have not been to begin with.

I did so much, I wore out my bucket list of obvious things to do and began to examine the difference between male and female privilege in society. Losing my male privilege brought about no real surprises such as having my intelligence challenged and learning to be more careful with my personal safety. While the main feminine privilege I felt was the freedom to be myself in the world and went way past just having doors opened for me by men. Needless to say, I was in love with the whole path I was on as a transfeminine person and could not wait to get back to it anytime I had to leave and go back to my increasingly unwanted male life.  I was stubborn but then again, I slowly realized I could never go back to the life I had lived before. No matter how successful it was.

As I reached the age of sixty, I could put it off no longer no matter how stubborn my male self-had become. When my second wife passed away from a massive heart attack, he was left with no allies in my life to fight with and was done. I had paid my cross-dressing dues by doing the best I could with what I had to work with appearance wise and had gone out of my way to experiment with how ciswomen live by putting myself in actual situations in life which I could expect to happen. After all of that, I just needed the final push off my gender cliff, and land in a world of my own choosing. Without a perpetual balancing act.

In other words, I guess you could say I went too far in paying my own dues during the approximately fifty years it took me to lead a life to discover who I always was. I decided long ago tt was too late to cry over what I did or did not do and to look forward to the time I have left in the world. At the least, I found living a life on both sides of the binary gender border was as scary as it was interesting. How many other humans get to experience what a transgender women or transgender man gets to see in one lifetime.

Sure, we experience our ups and downs but so does everyone else and we can have such an interesting path to claim a life which was always meant to be ours.

HEY YOU! Thanks for joining me in my journey and commenting or clapping for my posts. You make it all so worthwhile.

 

On a Gender Vacation without a Passport

 

JJ Hart

I saw on the news this morning that shortly after the Fourth of July holiday is the busiest time to travel during the year. It got me to thinking about my own major vacations when I shed my male self and began my life as a transfeminine person.

Mainly, I remember the times when I just needed a passport to go past my natural fears, put my cross-dressing past behind me and step into the world of a transgender woman. That invisible passport was difficult for me to come by since I needed to overcome my fragile confidence to step out of my gender shadows to get it. It was difficult because my earliest days of going public as a trans woman were often brutal when the public got ahold of me and I was laughed at routinely. It literally took me years of work in my cross-dressing workbook to get to the point where I could go out into the world and make a good effort to blend in. When I did, I began to earn my vacation away from my male self.

The more vacations away from him that I had, the more I began to appreciate the new world of ciswomen I was allowed into. As rock and roll idol “Billy Idol” was singing, the more I did, I wanted “More, More, More.” (Rebel Yell, 1984) Early on, I was naive and did not realize what I was getting myself into and partially thought my need for a gender passport would eventually burn itself out and go away. But of course, the need to have a passport just burned brighter in my soul. It seemed because of the need for femininity increasingly felt so natural to me.

It turned out at that time, when I was out in the world as a trans woman, either I was getting it very right or very wrong. Mainly because I did not know what I was doing such as how to move the best I could as a woman or how I communicated with other women at the time. Because they were overwhelmingly the only people who were interested in talking to me at all as nearly all men shunned me. I was amazed at how many women in their own unique way wanted to see my gender passport and let me in behind the gender curtain.

It all led me to finally legally change my name with the help of my daughter. We came up with a family name which honored one of my grandparents and my mom too. Who never supported her new daughter, but I forgave her and took her first name as my new middle name anyhow. As a plus, my new initials were easy for my three young grandkids to remember me by, so the name was well accepted by all.

Since I had my new permanent name in place, I could start building a new permanent feminine persona every time I went out to try to carve out a new life as a trans woman. As I was carving, sometimes I hit very hard granite and had to stop and start over until I could find the sandstone softer rock and keep moving towards my gender goal of living fulltime as a transfeminine person. As I carved, I needed to make certain I was always on the outlook for cave-ins which could cause havoc with my male life. Which was still very much in the picture. Because he still controlled most of my life the public saw as well as life with my second wife (who wanted no part of losing a transgender spouse) and a very good job I had at that time too.

As life moved on for me, I discovered brief moments of gender euphoria which kept me going through the dark days of my male to female femininization. Such as when I was able to leave the gay bar venues which I felt uncomfortable in and set out to be accepted in straight sports bars which I knew so well as a man. I was in my gender heaven when I worked my way into regular status in several of the venues I coveted. Once I was accepted by the staff, I could be accepted by their customers also and I thought I had it made. Sadly, by that time the one lesbian bar I used to go to and was accepted in closed its doors and that outlet for me was over.

These days, the closet thing that I have (so far) to an actual passport is my drivers license which has a “F” for female on it and my relocated copies of my name change documents I recently went with my wife Liz on the three-hour round-trip journey to my hometown to pick up. With all the turmoil caused by the idiots in Washington DC it seems in the future I may need a real passport to vote. So, I am getting ready for that if I need one.

Other than that, I am satisfied with the lifetime of progress I have made by having a suitable passport which allows me to live a public life mainly with the acceptance and help of the ciswomen around me. I was able to ignore the occasional hater like the pharmacist long ago when I started HRT who insisted in a crowded pharmacy in screaming loudly did, I know what the Estradiol medications would do to me. Not that she cared, but I promptly took my business elsewhere. It was no business of hers to judge me anyhow and try to out me to the world.

The passport I earned allowed me to open fantastic gender doors that I never thought I could do and the one I need to get will allow me to vote I am afraid here in backwards Ohio. I am not planning to ever travel outside of the country again in my life, so I won’t need a passport for that. Just the one I have already earned the hard way along my gender path.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who take the time to read along with my writing! It always means so much when you take the time to read and comment.

 

 

 

 

 

Dreaming in "3-G"

 

Image from Amin RK
on UnSplash.

Dreaming in “3-G” seems to be coming natural for me these days.

Somehow, I have skipped the old two gender dreams I was having and replaced them with a more complex series of dreams I can remember in the morning when I wake up. I call them three gender dreams.  It’s kind of like going from black and white movies back in the day to full color masterpieces.

Here is an example. Recently I was having a dream that I was a guy but later became a woman complete with a new bag of lipstick. I wondered at the time how the lipstick got there but I had no answer as the dream moved on. Also, I have noticed recently that my dreams have been shifting out of my old male world and into my relatively new feminine world. I suppose I was expecting miracles when I thought fifteen years of fulltime transgender life could replace sixty years in the male world. In my subconscious.  

All my gender dreams can be traced back to my earliest days of life when I had vivid dreams of being a pretty girl and being very disappointed when I woke up in the same body every morning. But as I remember, my dreams were all in “2-G” and involved me in one of the two main binary genders, male or female.

I find it interesting that some transgender women or transgender men who I happen to talk about concerning their dreams say they are always their authentic gender self when they dream. When I have always been a mixture. I suppose that it is another complexity of what trans folk go through. The only constant in all my “2-G” or “3-G” dreams I have had over the years is that from most of them I was having a positive experience that I wanted to continue. Such as in my early years when all I really wanted to do was present well enough to make it in public as a transfeminine person. Who could blend in with ciswomen everywhere and not cause any extra attention.

What confused me was when I was starting to successfully lead a trans woman’s life, why it didn’t it follow me more into my dream world. I took what I could get and kept moving on with my own male to female femininization program. Dreams were just an integral part of keeping my gender sanity along the way. They helped with dispersing all the pressure in life I was feeling from juggling two genders. Plus, I have considered too that the anti-depressant and anxiety medications I am on may contribute to the vivid dreams I have been having.

I also find it strange when I have a “3-G” rare negative dream. I would have thought that with all the success I finally had on my gender path, I would not have an ugly dream about someone pulling off my wig in public. Especially since I have not had to wear a wig in almost a decade and never had anyone try to pull mine off when I did. It is my own version of a nightmare-cross dresser style.

At the least, when the “3-G” dreams don’t turn ugly, they are cheap entertainment and I wonder how I got here. When I do, the answer always comes back loud and clear that I made it to the place in life where I always should have been. And my dreams just are a reflection of that.

Maybe too, my dreams are finally transitioning to my current feminine self. Which is currently making the transition to just being the me I needed to be. “2-G” or “3-G” dreams should not matter anymore as they are just a needed respite from the real world we transgender individuals must put up with.

No matter where your dreams lead to, I hope they find you in a good place in this sometimes-negative world we live in today. We need all we can get to lead a quality life away from all the gender haters and bigots and a little daydream of how your future could be can never hurt anyone.

This is just a little shorter post than you are used to seeing from me today as I have to get mentally prepared for my Veterans Administration assigned psychiatrist virtual visit. I thought it would be a fun time to write about the effect dreams of all kinds have on our lives as trans people.

Good night!

 

 

 

 

Just Feeling Good Being Me

 

Image from Mathilda Khoo
on UnSplash.

Just feeling good being me took me years to learn. In fact, I needed to go through three male to female transitions to get there. 

First, I needed to go through all my cross-dressing years and feel the angst of how I looked above everything else. In fact, when I go back and read some of my very early blog posts, all I basically mentioned was my presentation as a woman and not how I felt as one. It probably was because I did not feel transfeminine at all at that point in my life. Or, in other words, I had not matured yet in my journey to transgender womanhood.

I wonder if I had known what a long and winding route, I ended up taking, if I would have still attempted it years later. But it turned out, life had a different path for me than nearly all the other people I knew. Since I was deprived of having any input on where I wanted to go with my gender struggles, I was left on my own to find my way. Many times, the only clues that I got came from the dreams I was having that I was actually a pretty girl and was very disappointed when I still woke up in my male life. I was not feeling good at that point until I could make it back to my makeup and dresses to cross-dress in front of the mirror. That was all well and good, except the time feeling good, or gender euphoria I learned it was called, did not last very long.

Somehow, the good feelings took over regardless and I pursued a feminine life even harder. It did not matter that the more I tried to do to transform myself into a pretty girl could result in disaster if I was ever discovered. I don’t know how I never was, except mom maybe knew and just did not want to bring it up thinking I would outgrow it. It turns out the only thing I outgrew was her clothes and I had to be resourceful to find fashion items that I could add to my wardrobe and wear. Like one day in junior high school, I found a discarded stretchy elastic skirt that fit me, and I brought it home with me and cherished it for years to come. I was fortunate in finding me a pair of girls’ shoes in my size at the store where I had first gone shopping with my own money for makeup. I could even afford them along with being able to buy a new pair of panty hose. To come up with the money, I worked a rural newspaper route and put the money I earned together with money I earned from doing chores around the house. I was on a mission to succeed feeling good as me, as a girl.

The mission was due to be paused as military duty came my way during the Vietnam War as I ended up serving three years in the Army. My new task was to put my cross-dressing life on a back burner as I went away to serve. Even though I was bitter at the time since I was drafted by the government to do something I was totally against, I got a lot of good from it as I traveled the world (covering three continents in three years) and learning powerful lessons about life. Army basic training in particular taught me what I could do to survive on a temporary basis without a skirt and makeup to fall back on.

Even on those long-forced marches I was on, during a not so mild Ft. Knox winter, I learned to always look ahead and not behind me. I used the lesson on the days when I encountered a gender hater or TERF (cis woman gender gatekeeper) who wanted to berate me because I knew I could outlast them. The TERF just couldn’t grasp that I was not there to threaten their femininity, I was there to be me and live mine.

After all that learning experience, I still had a long way to go to feel good about being me. As I always say, I was similar to most other men in not understanding what really goes into a ciswomen’s life. It did not matter that I had spent my life admiring women from afar, I was still a novice at trying to go behind the gender curtain to truly understand a woman’s life. And I would not come close to feeling better about the gender disconnect in my life until I did.

I left the world of gay venues and started to enjoy my new life in either one of the very few lesbian bars which were still open at the time, or one of the big straight sports bars I was used to going to as a man. All I knew was I was being accepted as the transgender woman I always wanted to be as a regular in those venues and I loved putting my old male self completely in my past. The new strangers did not know anything about him and the positives and negatives about his life, and I wanted to keep it that way. Until I found a few friends I could trust. At that point only could I begin to fill out my life’s story to them. While at the same time never alluding to the fact that I ever lived a male life at all.

I was a little slow, but my life came full circle from being a part-time cross-dresser to a transgender woman, back to just being who I was always meant to be (me) and I could feel good about who I was for the first time in my life.

Earlier in this post when I was mentioning my military experience, I wanted to take the time to thank Dana and Bobbie for their input on my Fourth of July post. They were both in the Navy and Bobbie in particular is very active in the state of Michigan pushing equal rights for the LGBTQIA+ community. I know too there are other trans vets who follow along and I appreciate you too! All of you who just read and or comment are always deeply appreciated. Trans vet or not.

 

 

 

I Could Never Take my Trans Life for Granted

 

Image from Jeffrey Clayton
on UnSplash.

I learned early on in my life to take nothing for granted.

Especially when I was experimenting with my mom’s clothes and makeup. I needed to use every instinct I had to not get caught cross dressing as a girl. Which I tried to do as much as I could, so I had to never take it for granted I would never get discovered and sent off to see a psychiatrist. My paranoia ran deep back then of my parents sending me to a stranger who would tell me I was mentally ill. Which deep down, I knew I wasn’t. I just wanted to be like the girls around me.

My parents, from the “greatest generation” of the WWII and Great Depression years of our country’s history always made sure I took nothing for granted also. If I got B’s on my report card, where were the A’s I should have been getting. Was how I was raised. The only other real aspect of my life they thought they had to worry about was my interest in sports of all kinds. I was never the athlete my brother was so I was left on my own to do what I could athletically in the small rural school I went to. Even when I did manage to make the football team, I couldn't keep my mind on practice when all I wanted to do was be a cheerleader in their fancy short skirts and be admired by all the boys in school. I admired them too, just because of how badly I wanted to be just like them, and I never took it for granted that I couldn’t. It just frustrated me when I never did.

The years went by; in a hurry it seemed and even I was able to improve my feminine femininization to the point where I wanted to get out of the mirror in my closet and try out the world.

It was a good thing that again I should take nothing for granted that I would have no problems when I went out for the first time. Even though the mirror at home told me I made my male testosterone poisoned self into an attractive woman, why was I getting laughed at by mainly teen aged girls in public. I was stubborn though and kept going back to my cross-dressing drawing board to make any attempt possible to improve my appearance. What I finally learned was I needed to quit dressing the way my old male self was telling me to do and start dressing to blend in with the world of ciswomen around me. To do so, I reversed my fashion course from wearing clothes for teen girls when I was in my thirties and start concentrating on doing my thrift shopping to develop a more realistic fashion approach. That helped me overcome my thick male body with big shoulders that I had been cursed with by male puberty.

I had a dreaded inverted T body shape with broad shoulders, no hips and narrow legs to deal with. I took nothing for granted and set out to attack my fashion problems with better fashion choices. Since I was told I had good legs at the Halloween parties I went to, I built up from there while at the same time, keeping my legs not being a total focus to my look. As I built up from my legs and I wore Demin skirts often, I used foam pads under my panty hose which gave me the illusion of having hips. With my size, breasts were always a problem because I always wanted to be proportioned correctly and have the right wiggle to them. But not too big and look like a clown in drag. I struggled to find what I wanted until a cross-dressing friend of mine gifted me a set of silicone breast forms when he purged his extensive collection of cross-dressing materials. Then I could finish hiding my broad shoulders with longer straight hair wigs which fell loosely over my body.

Speaking of my body, you may have noticed I did not mention anything about restrictive shapewear. I always disliked the feel of being restricted in any way other than panty hose and padding, so I took the diet approach to losing my male stomach and did not have to worry so much about all the potential problems which might happen when I used the women’s room, do my business, wash my hands, smile sweetly and move on.

The one major accessory I was still lacking was confidence that I could present effectively as a transfeminine person in a world where ciswomen ran the show. In my mind, I was still the frightened cross-dresser leaving my closet and mirror for the first time and getting laughed at by the public. Out of sheer willpower I kept on taking nothing for granted until my life as a transgender woman became realized and I began to feel better and enjoy myself in the new, exciting feminine world I was in.

My ultimate goal was to someday have my own “padding” or curves thanks to HRT or gender affirming hormones. I was fortunate that in my later years in life when my testosterone was on the decline anyway (at the age of sixty) I received a doctor’s approval to start the hormonal program and all the changes which happened. Over the years, I was able to develop my own breasts, hips and soft skin as I have never taken the hormones for granted because I know not everyone has the health to do it.

I even went through the efforts of getting approved by the Veterans Administration health care system (which I was a member of) to get approved again for my hormones and take nothing for granted. I guess in many ways, the paranoia of the kid looking at himself in a dress in a mirror all those decades ago never left me. Deep down I still fear for those younger than me in the system having to put up with all the extreme transphobia in the world today.

We can never take anything for granted when our basic lives we value so much are at stake. Be safe out there.

 

 

 

It Is the Fourth of July and are We Better Off?

 

Image from Ben Maher
on UnSplash.

It’s the Fourth of July and a time to celebrate the first two hundred fifty years of the United States.

I don’t want to be negative, but I am wondering what there is to celebrate if you are a transgender woman or transgender man. Making my point was the recent crooked Supreme Court decision which rejected helping trans athletes around the country by denying the request and sending it back to the states where they know the heavily gerrymandered Republican legislatures will keep rejecting our rights. Here in my native Ohio, the ruling was the kiss of death for the very few transgender athletes who could have benefitted from it.

Then there is the ongoing dilemma of what to do about our rapidly decaying dementia ridden convict/traitor in the White House he is trying to destroy. What will he try to do next is the problem when it comes to the LGBTQIA+ community as a whole.

As I always say, his effects cause harm to current out and visible transgender people as well as potential future harm to those of you in the closet who are seeking a way out. The most immediate way out is to NOT stay home and get out and vote for your freedom in November. You may desperately need those rights when you decide it is time to come out of the closet.

It is a difficult road we have chosen to live and holidays such as the Fourth of July spotlight the good and the bad that our country has chosen to do over the years such as take away the native American lands and build some of the new country on the backs of slavery. Certainly nothing to be proud of.

It all brings back remembrances of the T-shirt I wore to several Pride celebrations so long ago which said: I am a transgender veteran who fought for your rights to take away mine.

I just hope that none of the bleak scene I have painted is not too far gone to repair and my Social Security benefits continue to be there when I need them, and my transgender grandchild will be able to still work towards a bright future that they have.

I have every hope in the world that the old dinosaurs will fade away and a new generation can come along and right the ship before it is too late.

Finally, I am sorry I cannot come up with a more positive post on such an important day in our country’s history. But it would be dishonest of me to break my tradition of writing from the heart as the basis of doing this at all.

In the meantime, I still proudly display the flag I served in the past and hope for a better future.