Night Moves

 

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the Jessie Hart
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With all respect and credit given to singer Bob Seger, one of the line in his "Night Moves" song particularly resonated with me. Seger sings about having a 1960 Chevy which I had one also. Plus, I even copied Seger's lead and made out with a girl in the back seat. 

Basically, the basis of the song has to do with his early learning relationships with girls. Other than the connection with the car, I immediately made another connection with me being a transgender woman. Since I had many years to live as a heterosexual man, I had big sexual questions to answer when it came to my future feminine life. 

At the time I was coming out, I had certain cis-women friends who automatically assumed I would move my sexuality with me into all of a sudden being attracted to men. I worried how my new sexuality would effect me because I knew gender was between the ears, or in the brain, and sex was between the legs. It turned the sexuality did not matter that much to me after all. 

In order to understand where my sexuality would ultimately end up I needed to work on my own night moves. Very quickly, I found out women would still be in my future. As it turned out, not only was I going out by myself as a woman in sports bar venues (which was hard enough), I was going out as a transgender woman. Which meant greater expectations of what my night moves could mean. Along the way, I attracted very few men but on the other hand, I was approached by more women than I had ever experienced in my life. Going out to be by myself was quickly proving to be more of a failed theory than a fact. The public, mostly women, wanted to interact with me.

Of course at that time, I wasn't looking for a sexual relationship of any sort, so I didn't have any night moves at all to work on. Other than attempting to appear as presentable as I could. If I was approached by the rare man, I considered myself validated as a full fledged transgender woman. All the way to the times to I actually had dates with men. Plus there was a guy, if I had the time and would have put in the effort I could have seen myself going farther with him. The fact still remained I had no experience with flirting with a guy and all the experience flirting with another woman. 

By pure chance, all the cis-women who I became close to turned out to identify as lesbian. I think it happened for a couple of key reasons. The first of which was curiosity. The women were all curious why I wanted in their world at all. The second is I was still a mixture of some sort of a hybrid gendered man. I was certainly more mellow than any man they ever met and never made any sexual advances to speak of. I worked hard to not be the guy I didn't ever like. 

Embarking on hormones very much did away with any sexual advances I could ever consider as a so-called normal man. My doctor who initially prescribed my HRT told me was I OK with losing any sexual contact I had previously enjoyed. It didn't bother me because when I had sex with a woman, I always imagined I was a woman too.

I guess you could say since I was too shy to start dating until later in high school, I didn't have much experience with many night moves at all. What I did have was with women and it turned out it was all I needed.