Sink or Swim Time

 

Image from Haley Phelps
on UnSplash.

One necessity I learned when I first began to leave the mirror as a novice cross-dresser and join the world was when I was jumping right into the deep end of the pool. None of that just wearing pantyhose under my pants with no socks when I went out with painted nails. I needed to go all the way with my new wig, clothes and makeup.

It turned out, the biggest problem I faced was there were sharks in the pool I was swimming in. In my case the sharks came in the form of teenaged girls who were battling for their own path to femininity also. It made them overprotective gatekeepers on womanhood and at the same time, seemingly attacking mine by laughing and mocking me. When they bit me, my blood was in the water as they kept coming back for more.

The answer of course was very simple. I needed to become a better gender swimmer if I was ever going to survive and move forward towards my dream of ever living fulltime as a transgender woman. As I became better at my overall presentation in the world as a trans woman, I found the teen-sharks began to ignore me and I could move about freely and relax for a change as I had to change all my muscle memory moves from male to female. I think too, that when I went through my turn in the deep end of the pool decades ago, times were different than they are now. I think regardless of the pushback they are receiving from some backwards adults, kids today are moving towards being more tolerant to the LGBTQ community. At least I hope so.

In my case and point in time I was living when I reached the 1980’s and I was in my thirties I was coming to understand exactly where I was in the gender pool. Instead of trying to get out of the pool when something went wrong, I needed to swim harder against the current to make it. Those were the days when I started to do more than just the easy stereotypical duties a ciswoman is somehow assigned to at birth. For example, I started to do more grocery shopping as a woman as well as starting to do more cleaning around the house. It all was the beginning of a very long swim to experience how much of the feminine lifestyle I wanted and was the grass really greener on their side of the border.

Long story short, I found that a feminine life was more complex and difficult than a man. In most cases, ciswomen were tasked with keeping a family together as well as putting up with all the male drama which came with it. Which ironically, I knew all too well as I had put my second wife through the most profound drama of all. When her husband wanted to be a woman. Somehow, we still lasted twenty-five years until her death because when we were good, we were really good and when we were bad, very bad. Maybe the worst part was when we were very good as man and wife, I was always thinking of how it would be if we could do it wife to wife but just kept it internalized the best I could. The whole process just made me bitter, and I took it out on her. Something I will be forever sorry about.

During this time, I was always very self-destructive as I tried to take my gender feminization frustrations out on myself. Some days, I was moving too fast in my pool and other days (and years) it seemed I was just treading water trying to keep my life afloat. I got to the point that even though I was a success in my business as a male, I would have not wished the rest of my life on my worst enemy. 

It did not happen until I was able to make it out of the deep end of my pool and start doing the activities which really gave me a hint about how women really live. I began to think everything was going to turn out for the best after all. Those years of listening to that little voice in my head telling me to stay in the pool and keep swimming were beginning to pay off. I was paving the way towards a future I had only ever dreamed of. As I swam against the current in the deep end of the pool with the sharks, at the same time, I was earning my own unique form of womanhood, I leaned on other women to do it. Specifically, the ones who had led difficult lives themselves. 

For once in my life, being around my female friends taught me how to survive in the world as just me , as they never once asked or wanted to know anything about my old male life. They went a long way helping me to validate myself again as a person. Something I had never been able or willing to do as a man. Mainly because there was always something missing from my life. 

Being able to swim anywhere I wanted in my pool was certainly a liberating experience and worth the wait. All that swimming did me good and made me a stronger and wiser person. Finding the missing gender link was all I needed to complete my life. It was there all along and I had refused to see it. Maybe I needed a new set of swim goggles so I could see better when I was in the pool. At least that is my excuse for being weak.  

Whatever the case, I managed to make it through all the shark attacks to the transfeminine life I always dreamed of. I hope you can make it to yours too!

Thanks for swimming with me! Comments are always welcomed.

Gender Was Always Such a Delicate Dance

Image from Morgan Petrosky
on UnSplash. 

 I can say one thing with relative certainty as I get started with this post, is that dancing has NEVER been something I have been able to do. I simply have never had the ability to sustain any sort of rhythm when I tried to dance, and I was notorious for stepping on my partner’s toes. 

My efforts became so bad when I grew up that I would only try to dance when I was semi-intoxicated. By now, you may be asking, what does dancing have to do with gender? When I started to think about it, I could equate it this way. At the beginning, I was so insecure as a novice cross-dresser, I was trying too hard to be perfect with my hair, makeup, clothes and movements. It was just like dancing for me as I struggled along with my life. The difference finally came when I discovered that being feminine was something I could learn and did not rely on the sense of rhythm that I needed to dance. For the first time in my life, I needed to go all in to perfect my feminine presentation and accept no shortcuts.

Perhaps you have heard of the term muscle memory. Along the way, I was discovering all that I was doing was changing my muscle memory from being a man to being a woman and it was very frustrating to me. My gender dance was starting off to a bad beginning. Of course, I knew ciswomen moved in their own special ways but to duplicate it was going to be the most difficult dance I ever attempted. 

In the beginning, I was trying just to not look like a linebacker in drag when I cross-dressed and went out. I thought anything would be an instant improvement than what I already was trying to unlearn walking like a man. I also needed to combine it with taking the menacing male scowl off my face and show to the world I was enjoying being there. Why put all that time and effort into applying perfect makeup if I was going to ruin it with a frown on my face. My whole problem was I was going to my own gender dance class without a teacher. The only feedback I ever received came from my second wife when she was coaching me on how to walk in high heels. She rarely wore hers, so I always wondered how she knew.

The final image I was trying to put together, just had to be so much more delicate than anything else I had tried in my life. Which was easier to think about than to do. The only previous cross-dressing images I had to work from were singular efforts on my own to work with my presentation before I was brave enough to sneak out of the house and into the world. It did not matter if I was just going to the mall shopping, or attending a transvestite-transgender mixer, I needed to dance my way in as a transfeminine person the best that I could. 

Initially, I failed more than I succeeded and spent hours trying to figure out how I could improve my presentation in all the ways I could. Since I was battling a severe case of testosterone poisoning from my unwanted male puberty. As I said, it was no fun unlearning the male poses and replacing them with female ones. The best part was that when I succeeded as a novice transgender woman, gender euphoria swept in and carried me away. Letting me know I was on the right gender path in my life. No matter how selfish or painful it seemed at times. The best part was when my new feminine self was coming together, the times I could relax and enjoy the dance. Sometimes, in my heels, I could even feel light on my feet which I had never felt that way before.

The more that I was accepted and then involved with a group of ciswomen who regularly socialized with me, the more I learned about how far I still needed to go to be on an equal footing to mentally dance with them. It was a shock, since throughout my life I had considered myself such an avid student of everything female. Only then to find out I still needed to learn so much more. Such as when to be soft and when to be strong as a woman and to project that to the world when I had to dance with all of it at one time. By myself.

My life as a man in the past taught me at least two ways to deal with the world I needed to change. One of which was to never show any emotion and the second was to internalize any negative thoughts I might run into. Like being able to ever dance with women at all. Overcoming those two obstacles on my gender path were very difficult for me and was especially difficult when I started seriously to pursue a male to female feminization. Way past just putting on a wig, makeup, and a dress all the way to dancing with the world as a trans woman. In fact, I never reclaimed my emotions until I started HRT or gender affirming hormones and to this day I have to still work to not internalize all of my thoughts. Now I know it is OK to show emotion and not internalize everything in life.

One thing is certain; I will never be able to actually dance well in any way shape or form but mentally I can now since my senses have improved so much. Along with my sense of smell and temperature, all the old music I liked so much just sounds better to me now. It is a place I never thought I could be, so I have grown to cherish it. Afterall, gender was always such a delicate place for me since I was forced to a male box at birth I did not want to be in, once I escaped, I never wanted to go back. So far, I haven’t and my dance continues.

I hope you are a better dancer than I am! Thanks for reading along and any comments are always appreciated. 

Why Not Me?

 

Image from Brett Jordan
on UnSplash. 

During my life, I have spent an inordinate time admiring the ciswomen around me. Among many other things, when I was a kid, I envied the girls with their long hair and pretty dresses and wondered why not me.

The reason of course was that I was caught being a male in a very male dominated family and I could not get out. The closest I came was sneaking off to cross-dress in front of the hallway mirror in the house I grew up in. As I looked around, I knew it was going to be a long drawn out process for me to ever escape the male curse I had been given without asking. 

Sadly, before I got to the “why not” gender phase of my life, I needed to go through the victim phase first. At the time, I kept thinking I was the poor, poor, pitiful me for wanting to be a girl and certainly I was the only boy in the world who wanted to do it. It became a comfortable place for me to be, and it took some time to work my way out of it with absolutely no help. Left alone to its own thoughts, my head developed new ways to deal with my frustrations by building bridges I could not climb…yet. Before I could climb them, I needed to stop building and begin climbing to places I had never been before. 

In the pre-internet days, transgender role models were very difficult to come by and for the longest time, I had none. It was not until I finally broke out of my dark gender closet and made my way to “Tri-Ess” socials for cross-dressers and transgender women. When I went, I was looking for friends on the same level as I with my cross-dressing or role models to help me get to the next level. If I was fortunate to find a role model, I needed to soak up as much knowledge as I could about what it took for them to get to the place, I possibly wanted to be. There would be no more pitiful me, I needed to put my shyness aside and do it. When I tried, I found that the whole process was not as easy as I thought it would be.

The first thing I discovered was I did not fit in with many of the cross-dressers and I gravitated towards the more accomplished transgender women who attended. The group was equally as difficult to be a part of because some were mean and acted like the old “A” list girls in high school. Which did me no good at all if I was ever going to learn anything at all about climbing the gender ladder to the next level. 

About that time was when destiny and pure courage set in to help me. At one of the socials, the group provided two professional makeup artists to help any interested people on their makeup skills. To do it, I stepped up, removed all my makeup and essentially said, here I am, fix me. I got the male artist, and he was really good at explaining what he was doing as he transformed me into the prettiest me, I had ever seen. Finally, I had reached a stage in my presentation where I could attempt to be admitted into the “A” girl's sorority (without the meanness). I looked so good that when we went out after the mixer to a couple of bars to continue the evening. I was initiated when a man in one of the bars tried to pick me up and not them. Much to their surprise.

After my ego rush calmed down, the next thing that happened was that I began to be invited to smaller, more diverse parties much closer to home. At the parties, I could expect to meet a wide variety of people from impossibly feminine transgender women to lesbians to men looking for cross-dressers. All I wanted was to know the transgender women better so I could learn their story and figure out if I could take the same path. I was determining if my why not me was indeed possible. I found out that although all their paths were different from mine, my gender dream was still a possibility. If I followed the right paths to do it. I did not have the fancy pensions and insurance to fall back on for gender realignment surgeries (or facial feminization surgeries) either, so I would have to transition out of sheer will power. If I was ever going to find the true me, I would have to make do with what I had. 

It then became clear to me that in order to see if the true me was going to survive in the world, I would leave the mixers and gay/lesbian venues behind me and try out the real world. It was only then that I decided to try the best I could to live the life I envied so much when I viewed ciswomen everywhere. It meant taking off all the old male tags of my lifetime worth of baggage and replacing them with female tags. It also meant planning ahead to when I could donate all my male clothes away to the thrift stores and plan to to determine how I would dress everyday as a woman. Not just for special occasions when I went out. It was a good thing I had hoped and planned for this moment for so long as I moaned “Why not me!” 

As the gender euphoria began to fade again for me, the reality of living life everyday as a transgender woman set in. In a surprisingly short amount of time, everything settled down into a new routine I had only ever dreamed of. I even had a growing support system of ciswomen around me to help me along when I needed it, but for the most part I did not since I had planned my whole life for this moment.

Hey you! Thanks for joining in with my experience in life. Comments are always appreciated!

 

How Did I Get Here

 

Image from Colton Sturgeon 
on UnSplash.

Often, I sit back and wonder how I ever arrived here as a fulltime transgender woman. Then, the reality of my life comes around and shows me the power of my dreams so long ago.

Some of my dreams I realized and some I did not, which is probably similar to any person’s life. I am biased, but I think a trans woman’s, or transgender man’s life is sufficiently different from most of the population to be mentioned. I think that very few boys' most prominent dream of what they wanted to be when they grew up was NOT a woman. Mine was. Even though I was into sports completely, I did not have any dreams of advancing into upper-level competition when all I wanted was to be one of the pretty cheerleaders on the sidelines. 

I wanted to be a girl so bad with their pretty dresses and long hair, I even dreamed about being a girl in my dreams and was extremely disappointed when I had to go back to my old boring male life. I just hoped that someday I could find my way out of the closet I had built for myself. On the other hand, I thought just maybe I would outgrow my gender dysphoria when in fact, what happened was I grew into it. As the years began to fly by, my skill at makeup and dressing myself in feminine clothes became better with time. 

What did not become better with time was me being able to sneak out of the house and away from the mirror which lied to me about my appearance and head out into the public’s eye. When I was out in my new high heels trying my best to look natural everywhere I went, I kept asking myself how I got here and why would I want to leave all the male privileges I earned along the way behind me. Mainly the natural defense that most men have simply because they are males in the world. If I was harassed for being my new transfeminine self, what would I do? Luckily the worst harassment I ever received was being laughed at early on and later having the police called on me for using the women’s restroom. I simply retreated quickly to my cross-dressing drawing board to become better as a novice trans woman and the female cop who answered my call just told me to go on my way. No harm to either except to my frail feminine ego. 

I keep writing about my failures in life because as humans we all have them and when we do,we need to pick ourselves back up and learn from them. When I faced my biggest obstacles, I needed to understand in the worst way that I really wanted to be in the new exciting yet scary life I was in, but how much was I going to give up continuing it. Building parallel successful binary gender lives was not the long term way to go. In the end, one had to go. 

The best I could do then was stay out in the world of ciswomen and see if I could make it on my own. It meant attempting to experience the good and the bad of a woman’s life to see if I could earn my way across the gender border into my own version of transgender womanhood. During this time, I did the best I could to establish myself as a totally new person, which meant leaving any vestiges of my male life behind to total strangers. There was no time for me to consider how I got there when I was interacting with the public. Again, I was fortunate in that most of the world was accepting to me and my problems were rare. 

I found myself at a point where I never thought I could be and that was being able to live a quality life across the gender border and being able to be shown the way behind the magical gender curtain I always wanted. Once I got there, my final answer was no surprise. I never wanted to go back to my old male life. Then it was up to me to figure out what to do about all the leftover male baggage I had accumulated over the years. 

As I was figuring all this out, it never occurred to me to consider how I got to such a different point in my life. Afterall, how many other humans have the chance to live such a unique life seeing the world from both sides of the main binary genders. It was not until then did I begin to enjoy where I was in life and the challenge of building a new one. Taking a life down and building a new one is certainly not for a weak person and not becoming a victim when you are down is a key to success to figuring out how you got here. 

Even today, as I prepare for a big dinner out with spiritual friends tonight and I am putting together an outfit, it still feels slightly different for me. For the dinner, we are supposed to bring an object or picture from a departed loved one and I chose the picture I recently found of my dad in 1951 with his dog. Since I have long since made peace with my mom who I tried to come out to when I got out of the Army, I never did try to come out to dad. Looking back, maybe I tried the wrong person, and I blame myself for never giving him the chance to know his daughter. Now this is as close as I can come to letting him know how I got here. Maybe too, since I have had the chance to live my transgender dream as long as I have, I would have been in a better place to explain it to dad. His death took that away from me sadly.

I hope you are on the path to discovering your place in the world. Thanks for experiencing mine. Comments are always appreciated!

Better at Being Human

 

Image from Micheile Henderson
on Unsplash.

Following years of refining my life as a transgender woman, it occurred to me that trans women and transgender men are just better at being human. Or should be.

Why? Because if we are able to do it right, we get to see both sides of the binary gender spectrum in life. Along the way however, I have met more than a few trans individuals who have not managed to make the transition across the gender border gracefully and seem to have some sort of a chip on their shoulder about the transition process. I could understand them being that way with the outside world but could not understand why they would be so bitter with others within our community.

Let me explain or try to. When I was first being active in the online community of cross-dressers versus transgender women, I encountered a group of trans women who seemingly based their femininity on how many gender affirming surgeries they had gone through. Coining the term “I am more trans than you” so what do you know about being transgender since you are just a cross-dresser. In one fell swoop, the “trans-nazis” as we called them were taking all of humanity out of the entire gender crossing process. I know I thought at the time that somehow they had not lost all of their male past when they transitioned. They were still men at heart showing off their materialistic possessions such as new women's parts to make themselves feel better. 

As luck (or boredom) would have it, I grew tired of the conflict and switched away from the internet site altogether to begin to explore my own feminine world I was busy building. The only thing I knew at the time was I wanted to explore building a kinder and gentler me when I entered a new world. And especially, I wanted to support others who were doing it too, the best I could and not try to be in some sort of a contest to be more trans than they were. Essentially, way back then, over a decade ago at the urging of a friend, I decided to begin to blog about my life and gender transitions as a way to help others. 

I also decided to make a concerted effort to try to never put myself up on any sort of pedestal as I certainly had gone through my share of difficult times in my life due to my own gender dysphoria and bi-polar depression issues. I wanted to make myself a better human by doing it. I learned through therapy that even though depression could be a part of my gender issues, often it was not and was caused by a chemical imbalance in my brain. Not my desire to wear a dress. I was fortunate to have found the right therapist out of sheer luck to help me. But I was not lucky enough to listen to her when she told me there was nothing, she could do about me wanting to be a woman. I was still too stubborn to face the obvious about myself and make me a better person because at that time I was not as I was a mean and nasty person when I was coming down from my high when I achieved gender euphoria. I was hating my male self and letting it show to the ones I loved. It became so bad that I lost jobs over my attitude before I got it under control 

From that point forward, I decided to focus on the positives I was learning as a transfeminine person and put it into good use in my everyday life. Mainly I began to notice and react more effectively to the ciswomen around me. In many ways, I was preparing myself for the days when I could cross the gender border and live with them on an equal basis. Since I had always been better at getting along with women than cis men it was easier for me to do when I was treated to an unexpected rush of feminine attention when I started to come out into the world. Looking back, I think there were two reasons why it happened the way it did. 

The first reason I think was the fact that most women were curious about why I would leave all my male privileges behind to enter her world. The second, equally as important, was the fact I was a better human for my time exploring the world of both binary genders. In fact, I was flattered when a few ciswomen asked me questions about understanding their spouses or boyfriends. Finally, I was given a chance to be a better person as a transgender woman and not scorned or belittled. The best part I always mention was that every time I interacted with another woman, I was learning from her on how to exist in her world. Maybe the women I was dealing with sensed that, and it paved the way for a smoother interaction. 

The final reason I did not mention was the fact that when I was carving out a new exciting yet scary time in my life, I may have not been the best at doing some aspects of it but at least I was honest in what I was doing. 

After the wonderful election results, I am hoping that the overall population realizes we trans folk are not the demons we were painted out to be by the political culture wars. Maybe now, more and more people will come to the realization that we are better humans because we have had the chance to live on both sides of the binary gender border. Just maybe, along with that, people will learn we are just part of the population which is trying to better itself. No different than most anyone else. 

Being a better human takes very little extra work in life.The world just looks a lot better when you do it.

Thank you again for reading along with my ideas! Your comments are always appreciated. 

Constant Refinement of Life as a Trans Woman

Image from JJ Jordan
on UnSplash. 

 Proper presenting as a woman has always been a challenge for me. After I went through an unwanted male puberty into an equally resented manhood, I emerged with no real feminine characteristics to work with. So, I had to begin from ground zero on my path to my own unique form of womanhood. 

When I could still find some of mom’s clothes I could fit into, the mystery of applying her makeup kept me working towards mastering it for a very long time. Until I could get to a point where I did not look like a circus clown in drag. Even if I was in despair over my cosmetic progress, I was able to keep working on it until I became more proficient in what I was trying to do. I did not know it at the time, but I was facing decades of constant refinement to get the feminine image I wanted to show the public correct. 

When my cross-dressing habits took me out of my closet, I was really put to the test when I first went out into the world. That is when I discovered how far I needed to go to be successful as a novice cross dresser. At times, the whole feminine process seemed impossible for me to do. But, for some deep reason I did not fully understand, I kept going. I even went the extra mile as a kid to take on a rural newspaper route to make extra money to buy what clothes, panty hose and makeup I gathered the courage to buy on my own. It all worked together to give me an added sense of accomplishment in my refinement process. 

When I had the courage for the first time to go shopping in one of the big indoor malls close to my house, I used to gauge my progress on how much attention I got from the roaming bands of teen girls in the mall. I instantly knew my refinement was working when I went from being noticed and laughed at all the way to blending in with the other ciswomen and not noticed at all. Still, it was no more than a beginning, and I had no way of knowing how long and winding my path would be across the gender border. 

Coming up with the credentials to cross the border into a woman’s world, took quite the refinement process for me. I researched as much as I could the transgender women that I knew who had already made the crossing as I wondered what made them successful other than their appearance. Which was amazing. I knew the old “beauty was more than skin deep” applied to these trans women and I wanted to know more. As I was deeply questioning my future in their world. What would I do about the relationship I had with my second wife and child as well as how would I continue to support myself in a totally new life were the major questions I had. At that point, refinement meant to me I needed to research how the other trans women I admired changed their lives and could I do it also. 

As I researched the trans women I knew and admired, I learned the truth that there could be no shortcuts for me if I ever hoped to overcome the obstacles I faced on my uniquely personal male to female feminization journey. Every wall I faced, I would have to climb it rather than look for the easy way around it which simply did not exist. I started from point zero and had made it to a middle point which I discovered was more interesting than I ever thought it could be as I went from being a dedicated student of ciswomen to being allowed behind the gender curtain to see the real complexities of the life I wanted to live. Still, I faced my own insecurities about doing it and needed to rely on my inner voice to keep me going. It kept saying that somehow, I was doing the right thing, no matter how difficult it felt.

When I arrived at this part of my life, I again out of necessity had to really begin to decide what I was going to do about my future and take the next step towards refinement so I could do it. Unexpectedly, I was able to carve out a new transfeminine life faster than I thought. Which brought in communication skills as well as other things such as settling into wearing the same wig and using the same name because the same people were interacting with me and I had to become a solid person. Not just a memory which kept on changing. Constant refinement was slowing down into areas which I could control. All of a sudden, my dream of womanhood on my own terms seemed like a real possibility. Which scared me in some ways and excited me in others. I could control for a change where I was going because I was a regular there and I even thought I was the venue’s token trans person because I was a tribute to their diversity. 

When I discovered I could make new women friends who accepted me for who I really was, I was able to refine myself simply by learning from them. They led and I followed their example which rounded off the remaining rough edges I had from a male life. Most importantly, the lesbian women around me taught me that I did not need a man to validate my existence. Which worked out well for me because the vast majority of cismen ignored me when I left their club and all my male privileges behind.

I think now, in the long term, the life I led which resulted in my constant refinement presented me with the chance to have a much more interesting life than the normal human. 

Thanks for reading along! And I hope the election turned out as well for you as it did for me. We now have a Democratic Senator and Governor in my native Ohio! Yay!

 

Election Day and Much More

Image from 
the Smithsonian

It is election day and my anxiety is at an all-time high it seems. On one hand I am excited to go out and place my vote and on the other, I am scared to death the final results will give us more of the same we have had to put up with as transgender women and transgender men wherever we are. If you are at all a regular reader of mine, you know where I stand with my politics and I am very much against the “Diaper Don” and Elon Musks of the world who have tried to buy elections. Especially in my native state of Ohio. I am so sick of the anti-transgender political commercials I see lying about us in the world. I cannot wait for it to be over. The only thing I urge you to do is look ahead at your future and the future of young trans kids everywhere. Even if you are a closeted cross dresser right now, you never know what the future may bring for you and you may need the rights you voted for. 

On the other hand, it is time for me to remember the first time I proudly showed my new female driver’s license to vote. It was a true milestone in my life that I will never forget. It was as if I was knocking out two birds with one stone by exercising my right to vote as an American and as a transgender woman. Hopefully, after this election, the people will come around to the truth and vote for no more useless wars and honest politicians who care about us. I would only urge you to get out and vote for the future of this country and to release the bonds we feel every election day as trans women and men.

The “more” portion of this post pertains to the fact I have still not heard anything back from the cardiologist at the Veterans Administration which I hope goes under the category that no news is good news, but I will see. The latest EKG I took showed some sort of problem my doctor wanted to look at. Now, my biggest fear is that I will have to stop taking my estradiol dosage I have been on for years. I have received a comment from another reader approximately my age who needed to stop her hormones quickly when she was diagnosed with heart problems. Being me, I immediately became concerned what would happen if I too was told I needed to stop my hormones. Would I lose the long hair I have taken years to grow, go back to having male emotions and certainly lose my soft skin and breasts were all primary fears. Then, for once I calmed down and told myself not to build any bridges until I came to them and if I did stop, whatever happens would be far better than losing my life.

Plus, anyway I look at it, I need to be grateful I was approved for HRT to start with and deep down I knew I could be on borrowed time if I took them. At the least, even if I need to stop tomorrow, I would be deeply disappointed but appreciative of the chance to take an exciting hormonal ride across the gender border I was traveling. It is just a negative part of my personality to build such huge bridges along my life’s path. 

Speaking of my path, ironically as I enter my late seventies, the biggest obstacles I face seem to be medical ones. On top of my heart concerns, I have an appointment with my hematologist coming up soon also at the VA. Since it is at the downtown hospital, it is very congested and hard to get to, so thanks to my wife Liz, she can pull up to the front door, drop me off and go find a parking spot. It will be another we will see appointment because all my blood lab work has been done for the doctor to look at. 

This will be a short post today as I have to get ready to dress casually and go vote. A close shave, followed by a light foundation covering and lipstick should do it for my face. While leggings, and my “Boomer” sweatshirt would do it for my fashion on an unseasonably warm Ohio night in Cincinnati. Even though I want and expect to see a larger than normal turnout, selfishly I hope I do not have to stand in line long because of my mobility issues. Whatever the case, I will have to make it because I desperately want my vote to count. 

As always, thanks for reading along! I hope your day finds you healthy and happy. Comments are always welcome.

 

Stop The Noise

 

Image from Markus Kammermann
on UnSplash

Transgender women and transgender men often have quite a bit of external noise to deal with in our lives. Mainly the noise coming from family about following our gender paths to transitioning. 

In my case, I did my best to shield myself from any noise coming from my family over my desire to be feminine. I hid my small stash of women’s clothes I collected the best I could in our house growing up and even had a backup collection I put away in plastic trash bags in an old hollowed out tree in the woods next to my house. I guess I did a good job because to my knowledge I was never discovered and forced into impromptu visits to a psychiatrist. 

Another problem I had was that most of my noise was coming from a very loud internal source. It kept telling me that I was living the wrong life as a male and I could do nothing about it at that time. Frustration grew as I looked for various other outlets for my noise. At first participating in sports worked. I was not the best athlete around, but at least my involvement helped keep the bullies away and made my life a little more secure. As I said, the problem was that I never excelled in sports or anything else that mattered. The noise was telling me that the only thing I wanted to be really good at was being a girl. Which presented another problem. How could I ever express my gender needs when telling anyone would certainly result in blowing up the life that I had known. So my life went on, as I headed for my college time and then a stint in the Army. Which certainly went against all my gender desires. 

Just when I started to be brave enough to buy a nice wig for myself and sneak out of the house and into the world, Army basic infantry training came along and put all my desires to be a woman on hold. My three years in the military were far from spectacular as I had followed the same old path in my life I had always followed. I did the best I could to survive until hopefully, something better came along. It all worked for a while because of the structured life I was forced into in the military and the noise was just moved to the back of my head constantly because there was nothing I could do about it until I was honorably discharged. When I was, my life went right back to where I had left it and I could resume my cross-dressing ways in front of the mirror. 

The only difference was that for the first time in my life, just before I was discharged, for some reason I decided to tell three of my closest friends that my Halloween “costume” was not a onetime deal and that I liked to dress in women's clothes as much as I could. Thank goodness, no one I told told anyone else so my secret was still safe until I tried to come out to my mom when I got out of the Army. She brutally rejected me, and I was sent back to all the noise I was experiencing before. The topic was never brought up between us again. The only understanding “friend” that I had was the mirror. 

At this point (for once) my noise out did the relief I was experiencing from cross dressing in front of the mirror and I resumed getting out of the house and into the world to see how I fit into it as a transfeminine person. The going was rough for a while until I got my high heeled shoes firmly planted on the ground and I started to blend in harmlessly with the world of ciswomen around me. I discovered that the vast majority of the world was wrapped up in themselves and did not care about me at all which brought the number of people I needed to pass way down and lessened the panic noises in my head. 

Then I needed to be more selective in the voices I was listening to. I needed to tune out the rare hater (TERF) gatekeeper I ran into who resisted me being in her world and concentrated on the ones who did. The women that did want me there were my teachers in what femininity truly meant to them and were willing to share. From my background, I was always attracted to strong ciswomen, and I was just following on the same path as I gained ground. I cannot stress enough about how positive the feminine gender changes in my head were suddenly being accepted and how much better my life was. For the first time in my life without all of the transgender burden I was carrying around, I could actually see happiness in my future. 

Before happiness could ever be around, I needed to follow my voices again on my male to female feminization path and get it done. That was when I needed to start backfilling my old male life and refill my past with my new feminine life. I am referring to the legal name changes and new ID’s I needed to smooth out my entrance to the world. As well as the HRT gender affirming hormones I needed to make it all so much easier. Until all of this happened, I think I was nearly tone deaf because of a lifetime worth of constant noise around me. 

As I said, once I was able to sort the noise and see the bright future I always should have had if I was not forced into the male box I never asked for. In my case, destiny stepped in and opened gender doors for me I never knew I had. Whatever I decided to call it, the best part was happiness did set in when the noise went away. 

I hope you did not have to put up with your own brand of noise. Thanks for reading along about mine. Comments are always appreciated! 

No Learning Experience is a Waste of Time

 

Image from Christian Lue
on UnSplash.

Now that Halloween has come and gone, I am sure that some of you took advantage of the freedom of the season to express your feminine side. Maybe to the public for the first time. 

For you first timers, congratulations on taking the first tentative steps out of your gender closet. For the rest of you, you ended up like me and gained Halloween experiences as a trans woman you will never forget. I vividly remember the night that three friends and I attended a midnight showing of the “Phantom of the Opera” on Halloween one year in the newly restored “Ohio Theatre” in Columbus, Ohio. I was proud of my “costume” which was a mini dress, blond wig, shaved legs and high heels to set it all off. I was prepared to pay the price for fashion with my heels until I had to walk a distance to the theatre from the closest parking spot we could find. As I tried to daintily find my way down the sidewalk, it was not long until my feet were protesting and I was looking for a place to sit down. That was not happening and I just had to ignore the pain and chalk it up to another experience.

When I began to break away from just going out into the public eye and testing myself as a novice cross dresser or trans woman, I needed to get ready for many more experiences, some good, some bad. From both, I tried to keep in mind how difficult it was going to be to attempt to cross the gender border and live out my dream and I tried to always learn from the experiences I was going through. Since I had very few to none natural feminine characteristics to start from, I knew my journey to possible success as a transfeminine person would be a long one and hopefully soon, all the tears from the rejection I was feeling would soon be forgotten. Sadly, that was not the case and some of my early dealings with the world have left many serious memories with me. Until I got to the point of dealing with them as just another experience I would have to go through to get to my goal. 

I was there, mainly because I was always on the outside, looking in when it came to being around the ciswomen in my world. Because I was excluded from the exclusive girls’ club, I could never see all of the complex dealings in the world a woman has to go through just to be successful. Including dealing with huge male egos which I was guilty of having. I just tried to transfer mine to my feminine side by obsessing the best I could about being an attractive woman. It became an all or nothing obsession which consumed me to a point where it was all I lived for and I am not proud of the experience. I wonder now, why my second wife stayed with me at all, but she did. 

As I always write about, it was not until I broke the self-imposed bonds, I had put myself under, did I begin to really understand the life I was pursuing. And figure out if I really wanted to do it because there was so much at stake. Everything I worked so hard at would need to be thrown in a giant trash can as I started all over again as a trans woman. No experience was a bad experience really came into play when I left the gay venues I was frequenting and started to try to socialize on an equal footing with the ciswomen in my world who would gather after work in a TGIF Fridays I went to as a man. When I was going there as a man, I always fantasized how it would be if I could do it as a woman and when I did, I was in heaven as well as being scared to death that I would be "discovered" and told to leave. Which thankfully never happened and I needed to step up my wardrobe options to keep blending in with the women around me.

It was not until then did the women around me begin to reach out to me when they saw that I was all alone and I began to build up a small circle of friends who turned out to be lesbians who were destined to teach me more than I ever imagined about the world and how to deal with it as an independent woman. The first thing I needed to do I discovered was to take the important step of validating who I was as a person. To take all the experiences I had accumulated and learn from them. By this time, most of the bad experiences had faded away, giving me the confidence to be myself for the first time in my life. When my validation was secure, I could move on and cross the gender border the way I wanted to. 

One thing was certain; I needed to keep being a keen observer of the genders around me if I was to continue to be successful.  Quickly I found, I was kicked out of the men' s club for good as they left me alone for the most part. Which was the direction I wanted to go anyhow because I had never felt comfortable around men and what they demanded from me to be successful in my life. For once, I felt comfortable in my life which added to the fact I had always felt so natural that I was doing the right thing when I was pursuing a feminine life. 

Finally, I bought into the idea that I was a unique human with a lot to offer to the world if they would accept me. To arrive at the point where I was, I needed to take all the good and bad experiences of my gender journey and combine them to succeed. When they did, I knew I had made it to my goal against all obstacles, and I was living my dream.

Thank you all very much for joining me and as always, I hope your experiences turn out to be positive ones. Comments are always appreciated.