Is It too Early for Halloween?

 

Early fall Image
JJ Hart

As I look around the neighborhood I live in, I see people putting up their Halloween decorations already.

Then I began to think of the supposed “good old days” when about this time in September that I was starting to seriously consider what “costume” I would wear and how could I maximize its use by going to as many parties as possible. It just did not seem fair to me that I had to wait for a once-a-year party to express my feminine side without the fear of retribution. The worse that could happen to me were the other women at the party asking me who helped me with my makeup and did I really shave my legs for one night.  I was learning a valuable lesson about how curious ciswomen could be when you cross the gender highway into their lane.

Basically, my biggest decisions came as I thought about which theme I would follow year to year if I was going to the same party. And how creative could I be with my “costume” Ironically, my first big attempt at dressing feminine at a Halloween party came when I was still in the Army in Germany, when I was invited by my future wife to go to a hospital’s party. I had a couple of other wild friends who had their costumes already picked out and were coming as various forms of the male and female anatomy. So, I thought it would be an ideal time to fall from my cross-dressing wagon that I had been forced to be on for two and half years and come as a trashy prostitute.

I do not remember now how I got the clothes I needed to complete my outfit, but I was able to put together a short mini dress, long blond wig, hose and heels for a very effective costume. Since I still had approximately six months to go in the Army at the time, I was happy that no one seemed to care that I was dressed as a woman at the party.

When I was discharged from my military duty, and Halloween rolled around, I had a different challenge to face with all the newfound freedom I had. One thing I did was get away from the prostitute look and try to find a way to find a “costume” like what a ciswoman would wear.  In other words, I wanted to go to the party and try to pass as another woman enjoying herself. During the first multi-party Halloween night I went to, I think I did well. I went as one of the French girls I had seen in Paris when I was in the Army and brought the look home with me. I paired a all-black outfit which featured black tights, mini skirt and leotard with my blond wig, red lipstick and topped it all off with black flats and a black beret.

I was having a very good time entertaining myself in one of the big local clubs I went to which was having a Halloween party when a guy in a full mask approached me and simply said “I know who you are.” At first, I needed to recover from his comment before he went on to say, “I know because you look just like your mom!” Then I knew who he was and did not know whether to be flattered or not before he did not say anything else and went on his way. I did know I looked like mom but not that much.

From then on, I began to build my Halloween “costumes” from scratch and only used my many trips to thrift stores to help me with items for what I was going to wear. All I really knew was that I enjoyed my self immensely in my new world as a transgender woman and wanted to see if I could take it past the party scene and into reality. There would be other significant parties I will write about later, for now I had to learn if the build up to Halloween was totally worth it. I learned it truly was because of all the early lessons I would need to learn if I was ever going to decide to try to cross the gender border and live full-time as a transfeminine person.

I also realized that Halloween would be just the briefest thrill in what would be a long life of gender discovery. Would the overall gender euphoria of making it through the parties successfully be worth it when I had to crash back to reality and my increasingly boring male life. Plus, I found it was unbearable for me to just wait a whole other year to experience my feminine side again without me going out in public. I took my gender life into my own hands and began to explore the world in malls and outside in different venues such as bookstores which helped me build my confidence as a novice trans woman.

I went further, quicker than I ever thought I could and forever put Halloweens behind me as a necessity in life and more of a fun pursuit. In its place, I would be trying to carve out a brand-new feminine life of my own. It was the beginning of the most terrifying yet exciting time of my life. Mainly because I was stripped of all my old male protections and had to start all over again in a world where I did not know who to trust. Including myself because everything I knew was changing when I left the good old boys’ club for good and applied for membership in the girls’ club that I had so long waited to join. I was just at a point where I needed to convince ciswomen around me that I was serious and brought different qualifications to the feminine table. I had to suggest I was a woman too but just had been socialized a different way than they had been.

In many ways, Halloween was the earliest part of my socialization process thanks to the early interactions with ciswomen (and men) that I experienced. Immediately, I found that men I had known for years ignored me as a potential cross-dresser or whatever they thought I was. It did not matter. I was out of the club.  While at the same time, women I had known for years were curious about me. Lessons that had carried with me well in the learning years to come.

That is why I will forever miss the early excitement I felt around my early Halloween parties and why I still feel the fun I felt when I see the neighbors putting up their decorations early. Who knows, there may be a person in the family with gender issues also.

 

 

 

 

 

When Every day is Day One

 

JJ Hart

We all know how difficult being a transgender woman or transgender man can be. For years, it seems as if you are starting on day one when you are trying to catch up with ciswomen who have lived a feminine existence their entire life.

For me, my journey started when on certain mornings when I did not know if I was going to be a boy (physically) or a girl (mentally) that day. My thoughts often came from vivid dreams I had from the night before that I was living a life as a pretty girl. I just couldn't shake the idea that something was wrong in my life, and I couldn't do much about it except occasionally cross dress in front of the mirror in mom’s clothes and makeup. When I did, early on I needed a lot of help with my makeup and everyday when I tried something new on my face, I was starting all over again. Plus, it did not help that most every time I cross-dressed, it was an adventure in not getting caught. Between my parents and my slightly younger brother, earning my private time to be on my own and be a girl was difficult.

It took me years to shake the idea that every day as a transwoman was still day one in my life. Mainly because, I was still learning so much from all the ciswomen I was around in my new world. I had plenty of stop signs on my gender path I needed to negotiate as I made my way towards my dream of living full-time as a transfeminine person. Some of the stop signs were busy four way stops when I really needed to stop, look both ways, and make the difficult decision to proceed. Looking back now, I don’t know how I managed not to have any major collisions with anyone but my second wife who unfortunately had a front row seat in my transition from just cross-dressing on a part-time basis all the way to considering HRT or gender affirming hormones as a transgender woman.

What kept me going was my deep-seated knowledge that what I was doing was right. All the cross-dressing I was doing was just practice towards a bigger, brighter future as a trans woman. Looking at it that way was certainly difficult, but it was all I could cling to if I was to keep my fragile mental health intact. As my wife told me when we were fighting about my gender that I made a terrible woman. So, I needed to find out what she meant because she added that she was not talking about appearance which I thought I was doing better with.

I set out at that time to re-dedicate myself to understanding a woman’s life. I was naïve at the time and thought I could learn more while I was still presenting as a man fulltime. Years later, when I had crossed the gender border publicly as a trans woman, I finally was invited back behind the gender curtain so I could learn a lot and not be a terrible woman. For most of you who do not know, my wife unexpectedly passed away from a massive heart attack after twenty-five years of marriage to me and she never was able to see the better woman I had become. Mainly because my time behind the curtain enabled me to start all over again and mold the new woman, I wanted to be. Including most of all the nuances and the layers a female must live through before she becomes a woman. My inner female was forced to stay back and be dormant for all those decades before she could claim her ultimate gender prize also. She just had to take a vastly different path to get there.

At that point in my life, everyday was day one again when I donated all my male clothes and vowed to never look back again at my male life. Which I ultimately found impossible to do. Male influences built me into the person I had become as a transgender woman and made me stronger in the process. I even brought experiences from the most male dominated part of my life to my gender table as I remembered the days I went through in Army basic training. There was no need to throw away valuable experience I could use in my new life.

It turned out to be the most exciting time of my life when I could finally live my truth in the world. And I was able to forget the dark days of my youth when I began to deeply question what gender I was. Having all the help I did to finally begin to fill out my gender workbook helped me too, even though I was rejected on occasion and needed to start all over again. I urge all of you who are considering a journey in life the way I did, is to be resilient and expect many ups and downs along the way. Most are just learning experiences anyway and can be valuable as you are allowed to play in the girls’ (or boys for you trans guys) sandbox. It takes time and experience for your confidence to grow as you navigate one of the most difficult paths a human being can take.

Slowly but surely, every day will not feel like day one as you get used to living a full-time life you have always dreamed of in a gender world you want to be a part of. For me, it was like taking a great deep breath of fresh air when I was finally checked out and was able to begin the long-awaited HRT which would transform my body outwardly and more intensely, inwardly. My entire being was telling me what took me so long when the male to female feminizing hormones hit my system. But I did not need the hormones to tell me who I was, they were like the icing on my transgender cake and made every day a better day.

 

 

Courage or Something Else?

 

Image from Miquel Bruna
on UnSplash. 

Recently, I have exchanged a few comments with a reader named “Janie” and we somehow got into the subject of being courageous in our male to female gender transitions. Also, on occasion, I get someone calling me courageous on how I decided to follow my path to leading a transfeminine life.

The problem is I never considered myself courageous as I tried and tried to establish myself where I could blend in, in a world of ciswomen everywhere. Here are two examples, the first coming from “Janie.” When she said she wished she had the courage (and I am paraphrasing) to come out as a full-fledged transgender woman as a teenager. On the other hand, I wished I would have had the courage to follow my instincts and come out of my closet when I was honorably discharged from the Army and had very little male baggage to think about. I was still becoming established in the working world, had no children yet and a future wife who did not seem to care what I did. I would never again have that sort of opportunity to live a life as my authentic self without waiting on the world to catch up.

It turned out that I still had a lot of living to do before I could find my way up my path to being a fulfilled transgender woman. Sure, there were plenty of opportunities to overcome when I was petrified to try to overcome my male self and enter the world of women, but I never thought I needed an extraordinary amount of courage to do it. I always reserved that amount of praise for war heroes and first responders who ran towards danger, not away from it. I was not running towards danger; I was just doing what I had to do to survive.

Ironically, the world evolved around me when it came to gender issues over the years. You may remember when the film “Tootsie” came out and gave a realistic idea of what ciswomen go through in the world through the ideas of a man (Dustin Hoffman) living the experience. Sadly, the new look into the genders did not last until today when coming out into the world possibly did take a lot of courage after all. Lives could be wrecked when you would not be fully accepted as a trans woman with your spouse, your family, your friends and your employment. Especially today when the orange Russian asset in Washington DC is leading the charge against us for no real reason.

Getting back to the task at hand, the something else when it came to the courage question, as I said, came down to pure survival. Not some sort of a hobby of putting on a dress and makeup to attempt to look good as a woman. The problem was that I knew at a very early age just looking at my girlish image in the mirror was never going to be enough to satisfy my gender desires. I simply wanted more. To live like the girls around me I so envied in school. An idea which would come back to heavily influence my life in later years. I fought my feminine instincts hard, which ended up doing nothing more than potentially destroying my mental health and my life as I led a very self-destructive life. It seemed everything my male self-had built up, I needed to try to tear down. I would not have wished what I went through on my worst enemy. So, I set out to do what I could to save myself.

During those days of discovery, I learned firsthand the idea of having persistence over any idea of having courage. Survival became my goal in life as I set out to build a feminine lifestyle from scratch. Deep-down, the idea kept coming to me that I was doing the right thing, no matter how painful it might turn out to be. In fact, I went all the way back to my childhood, so I knew it was more than just a temporary rush of gender euphoria as a trans woman when I was accepted in the world. I was surviving as me with little or no courage needed. Just a liberal amount of fear on the occasions when things were not going so well like when I had the police called on me for using the restroom of my choice. It was my own fault for being in a redneck venue I had not taken the time to set up being a regular yet. Then I never had the courage to go back.

I will never try to speak for “Janie” or anyone else who regularly reads my work, but on my end, no matter how much I did not respect the work my male self-did for me over the years there are certain things I would have really missed if I had followed my instincts and come out before I had the chance to build any sort of a life. I would have missed the once in a lifetime opportunity to have a wonderful daughter and a loving wife which I was with for twenty-five years until her untimely death. We had many good times, interwoven with the bad caused by my gender issues. I don’t know if I would have ever had the courage to ever totally leave her and wished she could have been around to experience my growth into a mature transgender woman. Of course, now, I will never find out.

As you can tell, I really don’t believe courage had that much to do with my development as a transfeminine person. On the other hand, a heavy dose of persistence mixed in with the ultimate need to survive allowed me to make it to where I am today. I know I am basically just dealing with semantics anyhow so the only thing that matters is how you survive. With or without HRT or any gender surgeries or with extensive work it does not matter as long as you are happy and thriving.

Thanks to “Janie”, Christine and all of you who have taken the time to comment on my topics. Without all your input, my work would not be worth it.