In the Wrong Room

 

JJ Hart

The first time I realized I was in the wrong room was when I was out as my transfeminine self in one of my regular venues when somehow, I found myself with a group of four men. Let me preface my thoughts by telling you the men were just having typical men type discussions on sports and work and no one was a rocket scientist.

Very quickly, after I was made to feel below their dignity to even acknowledge me, I went away with my first lesson learned. Stay out of male conversations unless invited, and even then, don’t expect your opinion to count for much. It seemed I had entered a place where my impostor syndrome was replaced by out and out rejection. I wasn’t worried about being in a group of ciswomen being worried about what to say and do, to entering a place where I was not wanted at all. I just can tell you this, I was never treated rudely by the women I faced in my first girl’s nights out as I was during my impromptu meetings with men. Which helped me to understand I was headed in the right direction on my gender path.

It could be too, that I did not give men a fair break. I was not attractive enough to be desirable, and I had not developed any sort of personality, yet which gave me any other positive characteristics. In other words, I was still an unsure new trans woman who had just left the men’s club, and it showed. At least to a transgender man who asked me out to a dinner date and later he said I was scared and nervous on our date. He was right, and I was just going through being in the wrong room as myself.

Fortunately, that feeling of being in the wrong room did not last long as I grew more adjusted to my new life as a transfeminine person. My inner self kept telling me I was in the right room at the right time as I felt natural doing it. As we all know, confidence plays a huge part in being successful as transgender women and transgender men and when I gained the confidence, I needed to say to the world who I was, there was no turning back. The more I accomplished in my new life, the more I realized that my male life was living a lie. The problem was that just deciding I was not going to live that lie any longer was not going to be as simple as just doing it. Because I had accumulated so much male baggage along the way as I fought to succeed in a world I never really wanted.

Even though I was fighting to switch rooms, the battle was never easy because of the major roadblocks which were in my way. Primarily, the roadblocks came from my second wife who was struggling to maintain her marriage to a man who did not want to be one and my male self who was fighting for his total existence. To make matters worse, my life as a man was not that bad all of the time, so the gender decisions I needed to make were so much more brutal in nature.

When I finally found myself in the right room as a trans woman, I found I needed to furnish it into what I needed to live. It was totally barren of anything I would need to live successfully, and I had to start by doing the best I could to present well as a woman and then learn the basics of survival in a world run by ciswomen. It was their room I was trying to be given admission to but not before I earned my way in.

That was when I needed to take a deep dive into myself and produce more of a one-sided effort to do something than I had ever tried before. Always before, when I was trying something new, I would get discouraged and quit, but this time I could just not and kept trying because I knew my dream of living as a transgender woman was certainly achievable. Before I did, I needed to somehow be allowed into other women’s lives and rooms to see how they lived. I was especially interested in the women who were not especially attractive because they showed me the importance looks do not have to play in a woman’s life. There were plenty of other things in a ciswoman’s multi-layered life to concentrate on other than beauty.

Since I lacked beauty, I needed to decorate my room with it, I needed to seek out other ways to do it. Such as was I treating other women the way I wanted to be treated became a main goal. A smile took me so much farther than my old male scowl designed to keep people away that I could not believe it.

Once I learned the difficult lessons of feminine decoration, I no longer had any vestiges of being in the wrong room. In fact, the deep belief that I was in the right room kept me going through out the trying times of legal name changes to the fun times of HRT therapy which sent me into the second puberty of my life. It turned out, it was the one my body was always waiting for.

Rooms are always difficult to plan for as you decorate a new one. Especially if your gender workbook is blank and you are struggling to catch up. The paintings on my walls were of my friends who showed me the way as well as my wife Liz and daughter who finally kicked me out of my old room and into a bright new one. As you can tell, they all mean so much to me.

As all of you do who follow along with my experiences and daily goals on a regular basis. Without you all, everything I do would be worthless, so thank you! And I hope the room that you are in is not a closet you are trying to find your way out of. Hopefully, you can do it soon.