I Never Missed a Beat

 

JJ Hart

Once I started down or up my long gender path, I never missed a beat, even though on occasion, the beats were far apart.

The beat started when the first time I experienced the thrill of experimenting with my mom’s clothes, I knew I was hooked as much as the garters I learned to use way back then to hold up mom’s hosiery. From then on, I went in as many spurts as I could to try to achieve my ultimate dream of being a girl, rather than just looking like one. The problem was I was restricted to hiding my gender ambitions from a totally unforgiving world. Primarily, an ultra-curious slightly younger brother who seemingly was always around. Locking myself away in the bathroom away from him only had the chance of working so many times as the instances I had of being totally alone were rare.

Even so, I managed to perfect my makeup routines in the rare moments I had. Perhaps the days of watching mom put “her face on” did me good. At least I had a working knowledge of how makeup should work, even though I struggled to improve my efforts and not look like a clown in drag. I wanted desperately to look like the other girls around me I saw at school. So much so, I daydreamed my life away wanting to be them. Luckily, at the time, I did not know how many beats I would have to make to reach my feminine dreams.

It turned out the biggest obstacle to my transgender dreams turned out to be the looming possibility of military service in the Vietnam War. It lasted so long in my youth, I literally started to worry about it when I was fourteen. At the least, my worst-case scenario of being drafted and sent off to war would wreck any ideas of fast forwarding my gender goals for years. Three, to be exact when the worst case happened, and I did get drafted. Then I took the option of serving an extra year to try to work in an Army vocation of my choice. As destiny would have it, everything turned out the best it could. Even to the point of seeing the world and coming out to very close friends that I was a transvestite. Which, in the long term, set up another problem.

The problem turned out to be that I was not being honest with myself or anyone else. I missed a beat in the worst possible way. I was not so much a transvestite or cross dresser, I was something much deeper than just having an innocent desire to wear women’s clothes. Deep down inside of me, a little voice was beginning to be heard that I wanted to again be a woman in my own right. The clothes I resorted to calming my desires meant little to nothing to me in the long term of my life. Worse yet, I missed many crucial beats of my life, as I ignored the little voice which was threatening to grow into a loud roar.

All of it set me up to escape my gender closet and begin to seriously explore the world as a transfeminine person. I needed to see if I could make it at all. When I did, the beat of my life began to totally pick up and I discovered I could make it as a transgender woman…if I wanted it bad enough. Plus, I needed to figure out what was I prepared to lose if I made the major step and transitioned into my version of womanhood. A long-term marriage, family, friends, and job potentially could all be gone if I followed the beats of my heart.

In what now seems like a blur, I was able to put less than desirable transition decisions behind me and then struck gold. Which was my experience with on-line relationships. After being stood up on countless (dates) my wife Liz of over a decade reached out to me saying I had sad eyes, and we have been together since. Never missing a beat.

Needless to say, that inner voice I mentioned deserves praise also. When given a chance, she led the way into a new exciting world of ciswomen I had only dreamed about. Even though I had gone down such a long gender path to arrive where I am today, it still does my soul good when a neighbor calls Liz and I “ladies” on our walks when we meet up. After all, I am just making up for lost time and missing many beats.