Keeping My Mouth Shut

 

Image from P.A.U.L.A.
on UnSplash.

As I wrote before, yesterday was one of those busy days when everything seemed to come together to get things done.

The day began innocently enough when I went with my wife Liz to two of her doctor’s appointments. I have long since stopped being anxious about going to a medical waiting room because everyone is so wrapped up in their own problems or their cell phones to notice a stray transgender woman just going about her business.

For the day, I decided to get brave and poke the bear so to speak by wearing a T -shirt I received when I was a board member of the Dayton, Ohio Rainbow Elder Care Alliance a few years ago. The shirt proudly displays a pride symbol on the front and has a “Support LGBTQ Elders” on the back, so I was prepared if I triggered any negative feedback from a stray gender bigot or TERF. Ironically, it did not matter because the waiting room was empty the entire time I was waiting for Liz to get done. In some senses, I was disappointed that I did not get a chance to show off my shirt to anyone, so I took it off when I returned home and saved it for today’s birthday lunch for my daughter and son-in-law who are coming down from Dayton for her party.

We are celebrating a little early because she is leaving for Maine to climb a mountain there on her actual birthday. She is the mother of a transgender child so I thought my LGBTQ shirt would be appropriate.

The real fun started yesterday when I went to my Veterans Administration weekly virtual LGBTQ support group meeting. That is where I could not keep my mouth shut and brought politics into the group as a new member made a snide comment when I mentioned I was getting access to a brand-new VA satellite clinic made possible under the Biden Administration. Everyone else cringed as I simply said Biden was a real improvement over the Russian asset, we have now. I was ready when the new person who identifies as a trans woman then said she never votes anyhow and I was going to say then you are part of the transgender community’s political problems. But I saw the look of panic on the moderator’s face, so I stopped. Because I care about not breaking the group’s rules and getting asked to leave.

My mouth is one thing I inherited from my mother and passed on to my daughter who is a strong ally of the transgender community. Her reaction when I came out to her was anger because why she was the last to know and kept in the dark by her mom and stepmom. She calmed down when I told her that mom and stepmom only knew me as a cross dresser and fought all the way any idea, I was a transfeminine person. One way or another, it was a great relief to get the coming out process to her out of the way and even a bigger relief to know she completely accepted me. In fact, for my birthday that year she treated me to a visit to her beauty parlor/spa for a color and cut on my hair which suddenly was getting long enough to style professionally. I don’t know if I was more scared or excited the first time I went, but I made it and loved my hair. I knew them why so many ciswomen consider a regular visit to the salon a must in life. After I was done, I thought I could probably miss a day of my Estradiol pills because of all the Estrogen in the air in the salon. I loved it.

My main problem when I first began to communicate with women on a regular was keeping my mouth shut too much. So much so that I thought I might be coming off as unfriendly or worse yet as some sort of a bitch when in fact, I was just too shy to speak. I had not practiced my feminine voice enough to have any confidence on how I sounded when I needed to switch from my old unwanted male voice into a new vocal pattern which fit the new feminine me. I even went as far as having feminine vocal lessons which taught me how to speak in a more pleasant manner and get my point across, often in a passive aggressive manner. I certainly did not achieve miraculous results from my vocal work but did enough to express the true me.

In many ways, keeping my mouth shut became impossible when ciswomen in particular began to ask for my opinion about men as they recognized the unique position, I held living on both sides of the gender border. As inherently shy as I was, it was a good way to practice my new vocal pattern to fit how I appeared to the public.

These days it is particularly difficult for me to keep my mouth shut when it comes to politicians taking away our rights as transgender women and transgender men. In my native Ohio, the state Bureau of Motor Vehicles announced they would no longer give trans people new driver’s licenses under their preferred gender and only issue one with a corrected birth certificate which is extremely difficult to do here in Ohio. I did not find any information on what they might do about renewals as my license is good for another year and a half. Here in Ohio also, having a current picture identification allows us to vote unless it is changed too by the Crook in Washington.

On a sad note, I just learned yesterday that I had lost two transgender woman acquaintances to death. One was an icon here in Cincinnati who I believed passed from Parkinsons and the other was down in Tennessee and died from unknown circumstances. Hopefully, they are both resting in peace now.

Back to a brighter side, it is time to get ready to meet daughter and son-in-law for a Mexican lunch at our favorite restaurant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Busy Day

 

JJ Hart

Today will be a busy one for myself and my wife Liz as I am going with her to two doctors’ appointments. So, I will have no time to write.

Going with her on her visits is normally not a big deal because everyone else is normally wrapped up in their own worlds or on their phones. Not enough to notice a stray transgender woman in the waiting room. Also, going dressed casual is no problem because I blend in with all the other ciswomen.

Today, I am getting radical and wearing one of my pro-LGBTQ elder care lavender T-shirts, which if anyone decides to read close enough, they will surely identify me as a trans woman. I don’t care because if I encounter a gender hater, it is their problem not mine. I relish it because of all the years it took me to have the confidence I do these days when I encounter the public.   

In addition to the new T-shirt I am wearing, I am just going to wear a pair of blue leggings along with my new tennis shoes for a comfortable walk. I am putting off a close shave until I am done with this post because I also have my Veteran’s Administration virtual LGBTQ support group meeting later this afternoon and I want to look my best for it too. These days, it almost takes me as long to brush out my long hair as it does for me to shave and apply a light coat of makeup and lip gloss.

I doubt if anything very exciting will happen, but if it does, I will write about it.

 

Burning my Gender Bridges

 

Image from Issiac Viglione
on UnSplash. 

The first time I tried a dress on and put on mom’s makeup, I burned a couple of my gender bridges. Because deep down inside I knew I could never go back.

After a few missteps, I became quite used to it. Even though what I was doing by cross-dressing and building new bridges was quite risky to the only life as a boy I had known, I kept on burning the old bridges and building new ones. Fortunately, the new bridges I was building were the product of better construction than I had ever known before, I still had such a long way to go.

Early on, the problems I faced were simply formed by the lack of experiences I had being a feminine person at all. My gender workbook had never been filled out because I had never been allowed to hang out with the girls and have the chance to understand their lives. There were no girl’s sleepovers for me to go to get peer input into how I was dressing or ideas on how I should apply my makeup. It seemed as if I was stuck forever in my male world and I could not get out.

Another problem I had was I built too many invisible bridges that I did not need to. I was and am a worrier and I routinely build structures just to jump off of them it seemed. That has continued to be a lifetime problem of mine as we can take yesterday’s routine trip to the drugstore as an example. The store is very close to my house but yet I needed to worry about getting there and back in one piece, as well as what I was going to wear and not forget all the items I needed. Of course, I just dressed casually for the trip and it came off without a problem as I got everything, I needed including birthday cards for my daughter’s upcoming dinner my wife Liz and I are hosting her for before she heads off to Maine to climb a mountain to celebrate her 50th birthday. Already, I am stressed about what I am going to wear to the restaurant.

As I matured into a more complete transgender woman, of course I discovered more things to build bridges on or around my life. For the longest time, I refused to face the truth in my life that I was always meant to live in my femininity and leave my male life behind. It was then I started to run, move often and change jobs so I could better support my two women. My second wife and myself. All my building was doing was destroying my already fragile mental self as I desperately looked for answers which were there all along. Anyway I tried to cut it, I should never have been forced into a male box when I was born and had no power to do anything about it.  

It wasn’t until I got out of my gender closet and became familiar with the world as a trans woman, did I really have to begin to burn my old male bridges to the ground. Specifically, when I got out of the gay venues, I sought out some sort of safety and solace in and started testing myself in the real world did I discover how many bridges I had destroyed and how many more would have to go. If I was ever going to have the opportunity to live my dream. I was running as fast as I could in my high heels away from my old male privileges I took for granted until I torched them. Such as sacrificing part of my intelligence and all of my personal safety when I was allowed behind the gender curtain and out of the boy’s club.

The bridge which surprised me the most was when I needed to communicate with the world of ciswomen who let me in and wanted to know more about me. It was a shock to my system to have to actually carry on a conversation or better yet begin one because I did not want to come off as being unfriendly with another person, mainly women. The overwhelmingly group of men as a whole left me alone since they had the sense, I was a traitor to their club. It turned out that if I did not want to burn the bridges between men and myself, they did it for me and they were replaced by the ciswomen I felt more comfortable around anyhow.

When I worked on my male to female transition, the bridges I was building had to be so much stronger than they had ever been before. Mainly because I was risking life as I knew it to do it. Over the years, I had accumulated so much male baggage I needed to figure out what to keep and what had to go so my bridge would carry the load. My baggage included the usual suspects such as spouses, family and friends as well as employment. Again, I was fortunate when I discovered other women with the same interests as me such as watching sporting events.

Lately, I have been receiving comments from readers who are just beginning their gender journeys and the only advice I can give from the other side is to build your bridges well to withstand the changes you will go through. And don’t forget there are many ways to achieve your goal. You can go the surgical route to transform yourself into the person you always knew you should be and go the hormonal route like I did when I was able to thrive with the help of a few ciswomen who showed me my way to build my own bridge into a feminine world. The end result should be whatever feels good and natural to you, you should go with. The one life you have to live should be yours, even if your path to doing it may be a little more different and difficult than everyone else’s. Don’t be like me and take years running from your truth before you face it and win and are able to proudly walk across your bridge.

 

 

Try then Try Again

 

Early Days in my Gender Closet
JJ Hart.

When I first broke out of my gender closet and into the world, there were many cases of failure I needed to deal with.

For example, all the evenings in malls when I was singled out for abuse by groups of teenaged girls. So much so that I tried my best to head to the other side of the mall as quickly as I could in my new high heels before the girls noticed me and started laughing.  When that happened, many times I was sent home in tears wondering what I had done wrong with my presentation. One thing was for sure, I needed to go back to my cross-dressing drawing board and try, try again.

It took me a while to realize I was backwards in my public presentation thinking. I was dressing myself how a man would rather than how a ciswoman would if I stood any chance of blending in and making it in a world I only had just dreamed of. Plus, I benefitted from a crash diet I put myself on which helped me to fit into more stylish feminine clothes. It was the first time in my life that I had been so serious about anything that I could remember.

One big thing I did not realize was the total scope of the male to female femininization project I was taking on. The deeper I delved into the feminine culture I was in, the more I found I had to try to do to become successful and there were many times when I simply not a success. One time that sticks out in my mind was when I visited my gender therapist unannounced as my authentic self and sent her into obvious shock looking around to find out where her son was. I would have thought, since she advertised herself as a gender therapist, she would have been more comfortable around a person cross-dressed as themselves. But she was not. I took it as I had to keep on working on my feminine presentation to hide all the testosterone poisoning male puberty had wrecked my body with.

The more I was able to find myself behind the gender curtain as a transgender woman, the more I needed to try, try again to never stop learning more about how ciswomen spend their lives operating in the world. The circles they run in and their overall dealings with each other as well as men come to mind as I think back on my initial experiences. It was a scary yet exciting time in my life as much of the time I was still risking destroying life as I knew it, if the world discovered my deep dark secret. I had not yet concluded my secret really was that I was a woman hiding behind a man. Not the way I was living thinking I was a man trying to be a woman.

Most of the time, the world did ignore me as my presentation improved well enough to get me by but on the occasions I met the rare TERF (radical feminist) gatekeeper who did not want me behind the gender curtain, I was sent away to try, try again until I earned my way into the places I wanted to go mainly such as women’s restrooms because on my long days out I simply needed to go to the bathroom and not make it such a big deal. It took me a lot of resilience and knowledge of the feminine world to do it but I finally earned my way into the “room” also.

I have always thought that building my fragile confidence into a strong one was one of the best moves I ever made so I could relax in the world and stop trying so hard to be myself. I say fragile because there were so many times over the years when I thought I had achieved confidence only to have it shattered by an unfeeling gender bigot. By trying again and again to overcome the haters, I made it to a point where I could say to heck with them and I was going to live my own life the way I saw fit.  

When I had reached a point where I thought I had enough confidence to get me by was when something unexpected happened to challenge my path. All along, I had some sort of an idea of how complex a ciswomen’s life was than a man’s life, but until I got there as a trans woman, I did not have a real idea of how complex. It was as if every time I thought I could see a clear road ahead on my gender path, someone would throw a stop sign in my way. Making me stop what I was doing and look around. Did I really want to take all these difficult steps I was taking to be a transfeminine person after all.

Of course, once I stopped, looked around and thought about it, I discovered I was in the world which I had always belonged to and I wanted to stay in the worst way. The more I was allowed to play in the girls’ sandbox, the more natural I felt as I felt my life make a seismic shift towards becoming the person I had always meant to be. To keep trying, I needed to decide to risk losing all my remaining close friends, family and employment and embark on the road without any more stop signs.

I was not getting any younger and at the age of sixty my transgender biological clock was running out. It was time to try to see if I was still healthy enough to be approved by a doctor for gender affirming hormones or HRT and I was. Which was actually the last big gender hurdle I had to try because I had already done the social part and I did not desire any extensive facial or genital realignment surgeries. So, I could then try to discover if I could find anyone to share my unique life with.

By trying to put myself out there on dating sites and in the regular straight venues I was going to, that paid off for me too when a ciswoman lesbian from nearby Cincinnati responded to one of my on-line dating requests and we are still together fourteen years later.

All those early years of trying and failing came back to help me years later when I needed it most and my life went full circle.

Thanks for reading along and passing along all your comments and reactions! I really appreciate hearing from you.

 

 

Figuring it All Out

 

Image from Erik McLean 
on UnSplash.  

I correspond quite a bit with one of my regular readers “Bobbie” whose life and mine amazingly align up in many ways including our military service. And if my memory is correct, she also benefited from a heavily influenced lesbian set of interactions. My apologies if I am wrong with my old memory which is like a steel trap…a rusted one. Because I heavily benefited (and still do to this day) with my feminine “upbringing” with my lesbian friends.

At any rate the reason for this post I to explain how Bobbie and I diverged on our gender paths. One very important way was when Bobbie went into how precisely she planned her male to female transition. All the way down to having a supportive wife. Which I did not and I needed to work my transition around her because she flat out refused to live with another woman. But on the other hand, did not mind that I was a cross dresser. She even went as far as scraping money from our limited family finances for me to rent a motel room to cross-dress in so I did not have to go out from our house which was on a heavily traveled street.

 Another way I diverged from Bobbie was her employment as a man required her to have several backup plans for every move, which mine didn’t. I was in the fast-paced casual dining industry which required me to work in an environment which constantly changed and was very difficult to plan ahead for. All of which really appealed to me at the time. Also, for various other reasons, I have decided to stay away from all gender related surgeries. Much different from Bobbie as I will translate for you:

“When the transformation began, the checklist was social first, add HRT, get the orchi and then the bottom surgery. A BA may be in the offing as my P has finally exhausted any more growth and a "Barely B" doesn't quite cut it.” Translating, “Orchi” means removal of the testicles, “BA” means breast augmentation surgery and “P” means taking progesterone hormones in addition to any Estradiol you may be also taking. Finally, “Barely B” means her breast size under the hormones she is taking, and “bottom surgery” is genital realignment surgery and is a major move.

I also decided against taking any progesterone after my endocrinologist did not like the idea at the Veterans Administration. But on the other hand, I started like Bobbie did with social and then went to the HRT or hormone replacement therapy and then went off to live my life as a transfeminine person. By this time, I was in my sixties, excited about my new life and set out to find someone unique enough to want to share it with me.

As you can tell, the whole male to female femininization path is not for the weak of heart and very much trashes the idea that transgender women embark down this extreme path out of a desire to just dress and look like a ciswoman. I get amused when I read that and think if the person saying it only knew the truth, they would certainly think differently.

Also, you can tell from Bobbie’s and I’s paths, there are many different ways to get to where we want to go as transgender women and transgender men. Even though my first dinner date as a trans woman was with a trans man, I still thought I knew the layers of the lesbian community, but I did not. Not only was I learning something totally new, but at the same time, finding out where I fit in. As the result of pure effort and observation, I learned I fit in quite well with the femmes or “lipstick” lesbians I encountered. To this day, I still benefit from my initial friendships I made with lesbians. As I have been in a relationship with a ciswoman lesbian for over fourteen years now and is going strong.

You may not have the circumstance or the ability yet to go “social” like Bobbie and I did, but the world is always changing, and you can change with it. Change is also different. You can plan ahead for six different scenarios (like Bobbie did) or pretty much just step out into the world and do the best you can like I did. I think now, I just wanted someone to realize my truth who knew me, but then it grew into carving out a whole new feminine life away from my old male one. I guess you could say I won the battle by taking an approach I never thought of taking. It was only then that I did set up an orderly “bucket list” of what I wanted to try to do behind the gender curtain in the world at large. As I was getting closer and closer to a dream life I never thought I could succeed in, for the first time in my life I needed to plan ahead and then let destiny take control of my life.

Examples of how destiny led me to successful outcomes were when I was matched up at the VA with a therapist who was knowledgeable about LGBTQ persons and specifically trans ones and was willing and able to help me with important tasks such changing as many of my legal markers that I could. She was really good and even helped me separate my depression and anxiety issues from my gender dysphoria. Maybe most importantly, she opened the door for my approval for HRT which I still cherish today. Sadly, my therapist moved on but I was lucky to have her when I did.

No matter where you are in your gender journey, I always enjoy hearing from you. As I said, remember there is no right or wrong way to discover your true self. I am always interested to hear of different paths. Humans are a very complex tribe and being transgender might be the most complex as all. Just remember you are in excellent company.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being Better as a Trans Woman

 

Image from Donald Gianetti
on UnSplash.

Often you must be better than the world to prove yourself as a transgender woman or transgender man.

An easy example would be we have to be better with our appearance. Because of the current lack of concern over appearance with many ciswomen and cismen, it’s an anything goes fashion world when women are wearing their pajamas and slippers to shop at a big box store, I won’t mention. Because we trans persons have so far to come in the appearance department, we cannot set our appearance bar that low or even want to.

Another problem with appearance is that we have had so few natural advantages to help us along when we first take the tentative steps out of our gender closets. In the case of transgender women, very few have the advantage of escaping the ravages of puberty which gives us angles, broad shoulders and deep voices. So, unlike the curves and softness we see in the women around us and envy so much. To get by in the world as a cross-dresser, we must strive to cover our natural flaws and act like we are not doing it.

The good thing is that ciswomen provide us with a big range of fashion to work from. Some wear dresses, some wear pants, some go without makeup and others don’t as life goes by. All you have to do is grab a spot you feel comfortable in and try to maintain it in a world of curious ciswomen who want to know more about you. You notice I said try to maintain it because early on, finding the best fashion and learning hair and makeup are major challenges we face. As our old bodies do not want to cooperate with the new path you have set them on.

Since I have always felt more comfortable in pants, leggings or well fitted jeans as a trans woman, I often took in criticism from other novice cross-dressers when I went to mixers in pants. Per norm, I did not care what they said about wearing pants as a man all the time so why I would do it as a woman because I was noticing how stylish some women look in their pants. I even had a glamorous silky black low-cut pants suit I wore to prove them wrong. Plus. most importantly what I wore was none of their business if I was aiming to be as good as the world of ciswomen in public at large who were increasingly wearing pants in their wardrobes. Not a bunch of cross-dressers at a social/mixer.

The more I was out in the world and interacting with the public, I discovered that appearance was just a small part of being better than the next person. Following some rough early experiments with my presentation as a transfeminine person, I settled into noticing who was noticing me. I learned men rejected me almost completely (which was fine by me) and women on the other hand wholeheartedly accepted the new me who wanted so badly to be in their world. The percentage of gender acceptance I received totally surprised me and I had to up my game to get better when I faced the public with so much more at stake.

Suddenly, women wanted to talk to me, and I was initially surprised and had to talk back. Then as now, I am very self-conscious about my voice, and it took me what seemed like an eternity to understand my communication skills centered more around what I was saying more than how I was saying it. In fact, I needed feminine vocal lessons to learn more about how women speak to each other. Primarily when men were not around. I also leaned the power of passive aggressive speech behavior in cis women and how it could apply to me when a potentially smiling face did not equal a supportive woman who could just as easy stab you in the back. After I tended to more than a few claw marks down my back, I adjusted to the new world I was in and survived by being better than them.

All these steps led me to pursuing an expanded transgender bucket list of potential things I wanted to do as a trans woman. To learn if I would want to do them on a permanent basis. As my checklist grew, my confidence did too and I discovered how natural I felt in the new exciting yet scary world I was in stripped of all my old male privilege such as dealing with my own personal security. With the menacing male scowl being gone, I had to rely of my new feminine senses to get me by and to stay out of potentially dangerous situations. It was all a major lesson of being better in the world out of a sense of pure survival as a new transgender woman.

At that point, destiny set in for me and set my life upside down as nearly all the loved ones I new and respected passed away. Leaving me all alone. To survive, I had to quickly quit being a victim and decide which direction my life would take. I took the feminine path, was approved for HRT or gender affirming hormones and prepared myself for a bumpy path ahead. At the age of sixty, I needed all the wisdom I had learned from a predominately male life and apply it all to a new female existence and exceed my own expectations.

By taking chances in the world, I had lucked into finding supportive ciswomen friends into my new life and I give them all the credit for the ease that it happened. And it made all the prep work I had done in my life worthwhile. Even still, I found I had to be better than the average woman to find my way and stick to it so I would not slide back to my old male ways.

Before I go, I would like to thank “Grace” for inviting me to write for her group “Empowered Trans Woman” on Medium. I really appreciate it

 

 

 

I Was Risking it All

 

Image from Leo Visions
on UnSplash.

In many ways this post is an extension of yesterday's explanation of me never really having a plan b as I traveled up and along my gender path to transgender womanhood. The essence of what I wrote was I did not have a real plan if suddenly it was evident I was not going to make it to my dream.

I was taught to be a dreamer by the unrealistic expectations my parents put on me. Whatever I did was never good enough and often sent me back to hide in my dresses, hose, and makeup. The only place that my impossible dream of being allowed to be feminine could become a reality. If only for a short time. I don’t know exactly why, but the gender dream I was pursuing so well was the only dream I wanted to become a reality as I did just enough to have good grades in school and played just enough sports to keep the bullies away.

Cross-dressing was always a risk because back in those days (the 1950’s and early 1960’s) gender issues were considered to be mental health problems, and I knew that did not describe me. On the other hand, I did not want an impromptu visit to a psychiatrist to tell me about myself and how I should be treated. Fortunately, that mental health visit never happened as I continued to risk my existence on some sort of a high-wire act which if I ever fell, life as I knew it would fall with me.

Of course, as it always does, life became much more complex as the years flew by. As my cross-dressing became more presentable, at the same time, I had college demands and a military service I never asked for to deal with during the Vietnam War years. All this time, I was learning what it meant to risk it all in my life and somehow still succeed. As even though my gender issues were put on hold for a long three years, I learned valuable lessons from the Army on how to attempt to deal with my dream which was on hold. At the least, I learned from the military how to deal with a structure I had never had before as well as other issues that would take another blog post to deal with.

When I was discharged from the Army, I gained my first and only child and my life became even more complex. What could I do with a child to deal with if I wanted to risk it all to run away and live a transfeminine life. Dealing with everything else for me became easy when I had a family to provide for. Any alternate plans I had for my future were delayed again along with any hope of ever making it to my dreams.

What suddenly came along to help me was when the internet took hold of the world and I was introduced to people just like me I could reach out to and even meet. All because of the first in home computer my second wife and I purchased. By participating in the first chat rooms of the time, I had my first taste of what it meant to be a transgender woman and not a parttime cross-dresser as well as sampling my many layers of the gender spectrum I never knew existed. The one big thing the computer did for me was that it taught me how badly I wanted to test out the new world I had discovered for myself and see where it took me.

I also learned quickly that it was easier said than done. Mainly because when I left my safe closet mirror and jumped into the harsh reality of being a trans woman in the world was not going to be as easy as I thought. I needed to quit dreaming of what I thought I should look like and begin to expend all my time and money working on how to survive in a world where ciswomen run the show. Sometimes up front and most of the time behind the scenes which I came to call the gender curtain. I found out the hard way, that to not be rejected in my quest to make it behind the curtain I would have to eventually risk it all in search of the new, exciting world I wanted to live in.

I am not a poker player at all, but I knew I would have to push all my chips to the center of the table to see if I could ever win my goal. The problem remained that my male side was still acquiring more chips with his new more demanding job. Here I was stuck between two genders trying to rule each other and the male side was materialistic, and the female side was more natural and felt like I was doing the right thing for the first time in my life. All the turmoil resulted in was destroying my already frail mental gender spectrum health. It tore me up as I had to constantly be aware of which gender I was on any given day.

As I said, eventually my feminine side won out as I chose feeling more natural in the world than I ever had as a man. He had been reduced to a shell of his former self by being able to shed his male privileges he earned but never wanted. In its place I gained the greatest female privilege of all…the freedom to experience the world as a trans woman myself. It took a while but all the dark downtimes I experienced on my bumpy gender path made me a more resilient trans woman with a unique understanding of both sides on the main gender binary.

I cannot imagine what would have happened if I had lost that gender poker game so long ago because I was living such a miserable life. Plan a was to always live as close as I could to a woman. It took me decades of life (5) to get there, but I made it.

 

There Was Never a Plan B

 

JJ Hart, Back row far left
Girls Night Out.

Very early in my cross-dressing days, I always tried to have a plan b in the back of my head if danger approached in the form of my brother discovering me or my parents coming home early from work.

Seeing as how I had no effective plan to get out of what I was doing in mom’s dresses and makeup, I thought that somehow, I would have to just try to lie my way out of it and say I would never attempt it again. Knowing that was a deal with the devil I could never make and expect to keep. As I continued to cross-dress in the family mirrors, I finally had to throw caution to the wind and just go ahead and do it.

Years went by as well as the complexity of what I was doing as I tried my best to express my feminine self. At the least, I thought of better ways to hide away my resources from prying eyes and was successful all but once when I got careless on a weekend, I was away when I was waiting to go into the Army and start basic training. What happened was, I had just mixed my feminine clothes and wig in with a bunch of my male clothes thinking that one would disturb them until I returned. I was wrong and when I got back, everyone else in my apartment had not returned home for a college break leaving me all alone except for one other guy who had come over to visit.

As we sat around drinking a few beers, I decided to gather my courage and somehow asked would he like to see me dressed as a woman. Effectively, throwing all ideas of a plan b if he got up and bolted out of the apartment. To my surprise, he did not and was receptive to the idea, so I left to start the prep work needed to finally come out to another person. After I had taken the time to shower and shave my legs and face, I went into my bedroom looking for my feminine clothes, wig and makeup. Only to be shocked to learn they were all gone. Someone had stolen them when I was gone. All the plans for the evening I had were shattered as we sat around and then finished all the beer and nothing was ever said about him coming so close to meeting the true me. As far as confronting anyone about where my clothes, wig and makeup had gone, I decided to keep my mouth shut because I was so close to having to report to Ft. Knox in Kentucky for Army basic training anyhow. A final solution for a plan b during the next three years of my life. I knew I could not entertain any ideas of cross-dressing at all.

When I was discharged and Halloween parties with my friends became the only external form of feminine expression that I had, I needed to ignore any of the warning signs that I was giving away any idea I was not as masculine as I acted. I was so into going to Halloween dressed as a woman that I decided to take matters into my own hands and ignore all the plan b’s that I had thought up. Even to the point if some other person commented on my “costume” and the effort which went into it, I would just try to laugh it off. Mostly what happened was compliments from other ciswomen on my shaved legs and I even gained the nickname of “legs” with several of them which I had to act like I did not care. When deep down inside I was overjoyed and wanted more input. It took me years to understand what they were really saying was I looked good for a man dressing as a woman.

As more years went by and I became very serious about being a transgender woman and was attempting to hide it from my second wife, plan b’s became very important to me. In many ways, I had regressed to my childhood in the ways as I had to hide my femininity away from her. In addition to being very tuned in to when she got off of work, I needed to get better and better at makeup and eye makeup removal, so hopefully she couldn’t tell what I was doing when she was at work. The problem was that practice was making my femininized presentation more effective.  Success just made me want more and having a plan b at all was disappearing totally.

For the longest time, the only recourse I had was to attempt to lie my way out of whatever transgender activities I even had to resort to trying therapy to save our relationship. The gender therapist was wiser than I was and told me there was nothing she could do about my deep-seated gender issues. I was trying to buy time with my wife and save our relationship as long as I could, but the therapist was not a miracle worker and I quit going. Leaving me to wonder what I would do about finding the next plan b I desperately needed to hold my marriage together. Because I knew it would be just inevitable my wife would discover what I was doing as a transgender woman exploring the world and we would have a gigantic fight because I had promised I was going to stay home.

The problem was that I knew I was wrong and was just buying time until the next adventure I had in the world with the ciswomen that ran it.

Finally, what happened was I ran out of all needs to have a plan b when it came to me being a transfeminine person. I had learned to live freely behind the gender curtain which I had waited so long and worked so hard to do. In fact, it was the only big dream I had in my life. I then resorted to a new plan to live out my life the way I wanted.

 

 

 

 

I Had No Idea

 

Image from Hayley Lawrence
on UnSplash. 

As we dodged yet another terrible weather bullet where we live in this part of Cincinnati, and I sit here writing, I feel a deep sense of belonging in the life I discovered years ago.

Certainly, through most of my life, I never thought I could make it this far and live out my own dream of living as a fulltime transgender woman. Possibly, it is because I got off to such a rough start when I left my gender closet and took on the world. Back in those days also I had such a simplistic view of what it would take me to live as a woman. I mistakenly thought I would just have to look as close as I could to a ciswoman. I had no idea of how wrong that would turn out to be.

What I had never really considered was how difficult it would be to truly cross the gender border and face all the everyday challenges ciswomen face in the world. Including the ones from toxic men. In that sense, I was fortunate in that I was not attractive enough to garner much attention from cismen at all and only had to deal with the new surge of attention I received from the women around me who mainly wanted to know more about what I was doing in their world. What the women never knew was when they were studying me, I was closely studying them because I was on a crash course to learn everything, I needed to be accepted into their club and be allowed behind their gender curtain.

Referring back to a recent post of mine and a comment from “Mark”, I was excited to be finding the true me and I enjoyed the excitement of being in a new world I always wanted to be in. Probably because I thought it would never be me who could do it. Thanks for commenting, Mark!

Change was slow, but eventually the confidence came that just maybe I could exist in a world where ciswomen ruled and make it. It was only then when I had any idea that it could be me that made it into the world I knew from my transgender mentors I had met at the parties I was going to in Columbus, Ohio. At that time, even though I had very few certainties of where I would end up in life, if I had my choice I rather be like the trans women I knew that the part-time cross-dresser than I was. It was my dream and I was sticking to it. Even though I knew I did not have the natural resources or the financial means to be as beautiful as my friends were. I realized that all ciswomen were not classic beauties but lived fulfilled and impactful lives anyhow. So, there was a path for me anyhow.

My new idea opened a whole new vista of being femininized for me. It meant so much more than the makeup, hair and pretty clothes I was having a chance to wear for the first time. Suddenly, I could see a path forward to where I could see the real me for a change. A person that I had no idea about was there but liked it when I discovered her.

Now is the time I always take to explain how difficult this part of my life was. It seemed nothing was coming easy to me as I struggled to find a middle point with my second wife over my gender desires and my work was making new demands on my male self. The worst part was that the idea of who I was internally was becoming clouded and I lost sight of where I needed to go to find me. As I grasped for answers, I could not wait to get back to my safe place in Columbus and interact with the diverse LGBTQ group of people who always gathered there.

It took a while, but I finally gathered the courage to set out on my own to see if my idea of making it in the world as a transfeminine person was dead. The problem was that I only had known the world of gay venues to attempt to express myself. Since I had never identified as a gay male, I never felt at home in their venues, only lesbian bars and large straight places. I needed an extraordinary amount of courage to begin to see if I could exist in both at all. When I found out I could, almost nightly if I was not working, I was trying out the new world I was carving out for myself. No matter how hard I tried to blend in with everyone else, I did not to the staff of bartenders and servers who routinely took care of me, and I was unmistakable to them and had no problems becoming a regular. A smiling face and good tips took care of the rest.

Long story short, I was finding myself as the person I had no idea I could be. Before I knew it, I needed to settle on one wig and decide on a new feminine name for me to use in every venue I was in regularly. The pressure was on to not lose everything that I had gained over the years, and this time I could just start all over again building a new woman from the building blocks of my male life. The prize I never thought I would ever get was suddenly within reach, and I needed to figure out what to do next.

That decision was made for me when my second wife as well as the only good male friends I had ever had all passed away in a short span of time. I was left by myself to decide my future which without much thought turned out to be female. Yes, the idea I never thought would come true was, just when I thought again that it never would. I am a living example of how someone’s life can change if you stay on your gender path. Especially when you don’t expect it. Sadly, I remember the dark days when all I had was two dogs to comfort me in my times of duress and I had no idea I could ever climb out of my depression to where I could find the support, I needed to live my dream life.

It turned out for me that my grand idea was a good one after all.