I Hit the Kid Lottery

 

Liz on left JJ Hart with Daughter
on right. 

One person I don’t mention enough is my daughter who is my only child. The easiest thing I can say about her is that somehow, I won the kid lottery when she was born. 

To begin with, when my daughter came along, I was very much an out of control, alcoholic wreck of a person. Desperately running from my gender dysphoric problems. Very quickly, I needed to settle down and at the least figure out a way to pay for her birth on the close to minimum wage job I was working at a small local radio station. So, you could say, she worked her magic on me before she was even born. Since back in those days, it was more difficult to determine the sex of your baby ahead of birth, my wife and I decided to be surprised when she arrived in the world and more than anything else we wanted a healthy baby.

Not only were we blessed with a healthy baby, I became what I treasured most…a girl dad. I was secretly overjoyed that I would have the chance to be around another feminine person in my life and if I ever had to come out to her as my authentic self, it would be easier to do with a girl than a boy. 

As she grew up to college age, her mom and I were divorced and my daughter ended up growing up in a village who adored her but more importantly shaped her into a very diverse person. Which would obviously come back to help me later with her. The only drawbacks to her diversity came from my mom who wanted to control where she went to school which I would not allow. 

Jumping ahead to when I finally came out of my closet and announced to the world that I was transgender, my kid was chosen as being the first to know. I was very nervous on the morning that I chose to tell her the news, and I was frightened at her possible response. It turned out she was disappointed but not in the way I thought. It was not in the fact she was essentially losing her father figure but on the other hand, why was she the last to know. Then I had to tell her she was the first to know I was transgender. Not a cross dresser such as her mom and stepmom knew that I was. It was a huge difference, and she started to calm down and to my amazement began to make plans to help me along with my transition across the gender border. I knew right then I had won the kid lottery and all the effort I put into raising her for this moment had paid off. 

The first suggestion that she made was asking if she needed to come shopping with me. Which I politely declined since I was able to fill out my wardrobe nicely by then since I was a serious cross dresser for so long. The second suggestion she made scared me to death. She volunteered to treat me on my upcoming birthday to a hair color and styling at her upscale beauty salon and spa. Like I said, the whole idea frightened me but I did take her up on the offer and in a couple of weeks, there I was in the salon nervously walking down a line of ciswomen getting their hair done. After the nerves wore off, I discovered my day was the gift of a lifetime and I understood then what the drawing card was for all women everywhere. In fact, I joked about not needing to take my Estradiol dose that day because the estrogen in the air was so thick I could cut it. On my way out, I set up my next appointment without the help of my daughter. 

Her influence on me did not end at the salon as she worked with me setting up a new legal name which would work easily for her three young children and made it clear she wanted me in their lives. It turned out, I was in a humorous way when my middle grandson ended up in a fourth-grade class taught by one of the cities’ best known out drag queens. My grandson came home one day and proudly announced to my daughter that his teacher and I were just alike, and my kid had to explain the differences between a drag queen and a transgender woman to her fourth grader. It turned out to be the first of many conversations she would have with her kids about diversity in the genders when her oldest daughter came home suggesting she liked girls more than boys. That was the daughter who graduated as a nuclear engineer from Ohio State and then transitioned.  It turned transgender women and transgender men run in the family. 

Later on, it turned out my daughter and son-in-law stepped up in a big way when I needed them again after the breakup between my only sibling and I when I came out to him as transgender. It was around Thanksgiving and he revoked his invitation to me to come enjoy the family. Back then my future wife Liz and I were just getting serious, and it looked like I was going to have no family to visit on the holiday like I was used to. Liz and my daughter stepped up in a big way and invited me to their family’s holiday get together. It meant the world to me.

It proved to me once again that somehow, someone was looking after me and I had won the kid lottery. I even was asked to speak and participate in my grandchildren’s Bar-Mitzvahs when she converted to Judaism. Again, I was scared to death to get up in front of a bunch of strangers I did not know except for a couple of women I knew from before I transitioned and even went along on a girl’s night out trip to a drag show with my daughter. 

Whatever the outcome of my life now, my daughter was certainly a gift which kept on giving. 

As always, thanks for joining in with my thoughts. Any comments are always appreciated!

More Changes

 

Image from Brad Starkey 
on UnSplash.

More changes are coming to our house beginning today. Thanks to my wife Liz, we are tearing out one of our old bathtubs and putting in a new walk-in shower. Which is perfect for my immobile status and makes it less dangerous for me to take a shower.

You would think, by this time in my life, I would be used to change but it seems I have just become more set in my ways as a senior citizen transgender woman. As with many of you, our gender issues changed us for the first time quite early in life. Mine manifested itself the first time I felt the magic of trying on my mom’s clothes and I worked my way forward from there.

At that time, I labored under the impression my love for feminine clothes would eventually go away but it was something I ended up growing into rather than away from. The older I got, the more skilled I became at acquiring key items in my wardrobe and hiding them away in places even my younger brother would not find. I even increased the number of odd jobs I would do (such as a newspaper route) to augment my meager allowance and allowed me to buy items such as makeup and panty hose which felt so good on my legs I was shaving earlier than probably half the girls my age that were allowed to do. To shave them I had to use my mom’s electric shaver which I needed to carefully clean after every use. Again, somehow, I managed to escape detection as I continued to cross dress.

It wasn’t until my military days that I really began to push for more changes in how I was approaching my femininity. It was a Halloween party I went to when I only had about eight months left to serve that changed everything. For my “costume” I chose a slutty woman’s look to go with my friends looks. Further down the road, during a night of drinking fine German beer, my “costume” came up in a casual conversation with three of my closest friends, including my first wife. As we talked about the amount of time and effort to look the way I did, I finally thought to hell with it, and told the group I was a transvestite (the term of the day) and I liked to wear women’s clothing. Surprisingly, no one cared and life went on normally for me even after for the first time in my life I risked it all and told someone else my deepest darkest secret. I felt like a huge weight had been taken off my shoulders, but my freedom was fleeting because of what I did in the Army. If anyone of my higher ups had found out about my secret, it could have easily caused me to have be put up for a dishonorable discharge with less than the eight months I had left to go. Which would have been heartbreaking with all the changes the Army had put me through.

As I always write about, my newfound freedom to tell anyone else about my ongoing male to female femininization project came to a screeching halt when I tried to tell my mom. She rejected me totally and sent me scurrying back to my closet as far as telling any blood family about my potential transgender dreams. The only close person to me that I knew was my first wife and surprisingly her sister who told no one. I think sometimes by coming out the way I did at Halloween parties was a plea for the public to listen to me and when I did ever transition, no one would be surprised. Surprisingly, I was so macho in my male life, nobody ever did. Including the few people who were still alive years later when I came out. All I got was surprise from the people I knew. The main reaction was that I seemed too macho to ever be a woman. 

All the changes I went through as a novice transgender woman in my thirties and forties were immense as I learned what I was really facing if I followed my gender path to my ultimate goal of living fulltime as a trans woman. I kept being stopped by blind curves and huge Ohio potholes as I learned the hard way what ciswomen must go through to live their daily lives. I had become a social person later In life and desperately needed it to continue when I went behind the gender curtain and emerged a better person. I spent so many evenings planning to be by myself that the loneliness was really getting to me before changes suddenly began to set in. It all started when a bartender at one of the venues I visited often set me up to meet her lesbian mother to have a casual drink where she worked.

We became friends and were able to see each other often until another woman entered our little group and we became a friendly threesome and gathered to watch sports on the big screens. Of all things, the third woman was another lesbian who slid her phone number down the bar to me one night when I was alone and I responded feeling much better about myself.

The most amazing experience I had was yet to come when my future wife Liz responded to an online ad I placed. Predictably, I had to sort through the ton of online responses I received all the way to being stood up on pre-planned meetings with men I met online who I refused to not meet in public. I met Liz on the other hand in one of the sites where I was advertising in a “woman seeking woman” room and she responded to me and kept responding until we set up our first date midway between our homes which were approximately seventy-five miles apart. We went to a drag show then to a Renaissance Festival and fairly soon she invited me to move in with her. That was over twelve years ago, and I surely made the right decision.

With all this social success, I need to point out again how many dues I needed to pay before I was successful. I look at it as a full circle karma payback to all the lonely times I spent after my second wife died along with most of my closest friends. I had nowhere to turn for comfort and was forced to step out of my usual social conditions to look for connections. But that did lead me right back to the old big sports bars I so enjoyed and felt at home in as a man. Again, a full circle social moment. At least, the bartenders would socialize with me if I did not cause any trouble and tipped well. At that time in my life, any interaction was welcome as I went through the biggest changes in my life.

Change is a natural part of life anyway, but it seems we transgender women and transgender men have more than of our fair share of change to deal with. To be sure it is difficult as we pay our dues to live a life as our authentic selves.

 

 

 

 

 

Class Less Reunions?

As graduation time quickly approaches in my part of the world, I began to think about my days in high school one hundred years ago and a post I read somewhere from a U.K. cross dresser.  He went to an all male school "back in the day" and like most of us, stayed deeply in the closet.  He wondered though, how many other cross dressers statistically could there have been in the school too.  Even to the point of coming up with some sort of graph-where he lost me.

I don't believe he is alone in wondering how many of our friends and class mates were in their cross dressing closets too. While it is almost a romantic thought to think any guys who happened to transform into attractive girls for Halloween or school drag shows were actually cross dressers- I know I was the exception to that rule. I didn't want anyone to know of my cross dressing urges.

So many years later, in a couple years, I will be facing my 50 year class reunion.  Of course I have wondered if my decision to ever go to a reunion will change by then and I'm thinking not.  My decision has less to do with buying a "not" so little black dress and rocking the event in my heels but more in the stubborn reality I had very little to do with any of my classmates then - and now.  It's so bad that on my 40th class reunion, the committee in charge of finding the whereabouts of everyone couldn't even locate me in my home town,  where I was a very visible person.  So I sent the form letter asking where I was back in, saying I died in a car wreck in 1969. (Which I almost did.)

I can hear the group behind my back jabbering, "Look Martha, she used to be a he in our class but who was he?"

Lessons in the Sandbox

I'm fond of referring to transition as "playing in the girl's sandbox." The process is the time of your life when appearing as a woman takes a back seat to living as one.  All sorts of sand is being kicked in your direction and it is hard to keep up!

I've written here in Cyrsti's Condo many times of my "sandbox experiences" which by the way are far from over. Ironically, as I do transition, I look back and remember experiences which were more important than I gave them credit for initially.

Here's an example:  Years ago, my second wife accompanied me to a Tri-Ess meeting before we were actually married.  We drove quite a distance but still arrived plenty early before the nightly meeting/mixer. Instead of hanging out in our hotel room, we decided to get out and explore a little bit as two girls. We found that not too far away was a sort of a neighborhood tavern that advertised a mixed crowd and even drag shows on occasion. We sought it out and went in for a drink.

Not long after we sat down, a guy literally rolled up to the door on his Harley motorcycle and sat down a couple seats down from my future wife and began to flirt with her. My first thought was a feeling of being powerless in the situation, I had no control as a man or a woman.. I had the sinking suspicion she was going to prove to me I was a mirror "Princess" and knew nothing about being a real woman.. I was right.

Before long she was returning the flirt ever so slightly and the first time he looked past her to me I could see the change in her eyes. I ceased to be her guy in a dress and became a feminine competitor for the attention of this guy and stay the hell out of it. Believe me, I was in way over my head and she could have rode off with him - I was powerless anyhow but in no uncertain terms I knew what she meant. Then almost as fast, she snapped back and he took off,  leaving me with a rather scary first experience with feminine competition in the sandbox.

The problem became, I was way too early into my transition to understand what had just happened.  I never experienced a similar situation with her again.