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| JJ Hart |
When I transitioned from male to the feminine person I was all along, I hit many walls.
As it turned out, some were short walls and easy to climb,
and some were almost insurmountable. The problem quickly became which were which.
Very early on, when life was simpler, the act of applying eye makeup initially
presented itself as a major hurdle, or wall. Once I conquered that challenge, I
was able to move on to bigger and better things. Little did I know, I would be
facing bigger walls to climb. A few were so tall I could barely see my dream of
living fulltime as a transgender woman at all.
Leaving my safe yet dark gender closet and trying my hand at
living as a novice cross dresser or transgender woman in public suddenly
presented me with many new walls to climb. Iniitally, there was the omnipresent
pressure of presenting properly in public as a woman. To do it, I needed to
overcome how my old male self-thought I should look and change it to how my femininized
self knew how I had to look to blend in with her cisgender counter parts. Plus,
I needed to do it on a regular basis as people were starting to remember me.
There were no more changing names to fit a new wig I was wearing. At least I
needed to understand that even though strangers knew I was not a cisgender
woman, I needed to prove I was a person who was nice to know and got along in
the world. Most of all, I was not some sort of a freak, and I needed to remember
in the overwhelming number of cases, I was the first and only transgender woman
the public had ever met.
The frustrating part of this time of my life came when I was
taking a step forward towards climbing another wall, then slid back down when I
hit it. I was rapidly losing all the press on nails I bought as I was trying to
climb. I seemingly always had problems with moving like a woman. No matter how
much I tried, I still ended up moving like a stiff football player in public
when I walked into a venue. I worked long and hard to correct the problem and
finally succeeded to an extent. Putting femininized self into motion was a
problem so large, it was only topped by the communication problems I was having
dealing with the public. Basically, I was scared to death of talking to anyone.
It was particularly frustrating when I began to talk to other women, who I very
much wanted to be friendly with.
On the other hand, men were not a problem at all, since for
the most part, they left me alone. The problem was partially solved when I took
feminine vocal lessons and the rest with pure practice. Finally, before I came
off being unfriendly with other women, I just gave up, relaxed and did the best
I could to enjoy and learn from the conversations I was having.
Before I knew it, the walls were coming down and I was
gaining the all-important confidence I needed to reach my lifetime dreams of
being a woman on my own terms. My terms became rather obvious over time. No
major gender surgeries which I thought were too expensive and risky for a
person my age of sixty. I would just have to take all my learned experiences
out of the closet, put them together and do the best I could.
Another of one of my remaining tallest walls was doing more
for my inner self. I solved it by becoming eligible for gender affirming
hormones. My initial thought was the changes I would experience would be
external, not internal. It turned out, the internal changes were more immediate
and far reaching than the external changes. In fact, I can and should write an
entire blog post about my changes on HRT. Briefly, I entered an entirely, the new, softer world. Suddenly, I could cry, and my senses improved. Perhaps
the biggest one was I was more susceptible to changes in temperature. I learned
all those years of thinking women were faking it when they were cold was true.
When I was reaching for my coat on a chilly evening.
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