Ditching Good with Better as a Trans Girl

 

Archive Image
from Witches Ball
Tom on Left.

Ditching good with better has always been a difficult obstacle in my life. 

I always blame my parents for my feelings on doing the best I could on anything I tried. Nothing I did was good enough. If I got B's they should have been A's was a prime example. Even though I was an above average student, I don't remember ever being told I was doing a good job. I think now, their influence carried on with me in every facet of my life, including when I was a novice cross dresser and budding transgender woman. 

It all started with my appearance as a girl. When I was younger and before I went through any testosterone poisoning at puberty, it was much easier to look like a girl. But just looking like a girl was never good enough, I wanted to be a girl and enjoy their life. Or at least as I perceived it to be. I guess my parents attitude was rubbing off on me. At the time, all I could really do to further my looks was to over achieve with my meager allowance and take on a rural newspaper route. Between the two, I could sneak out to the store and buy the occasional wardrobe item or makeup I could experiment with. I was doing my best to ditch my good with better as a trans girl during my early age. If I had given the same effort to everything else I tried during that time, at the least I could have received better grades and my parents would have been pleased. 

On the other hand, my parents in no way would have been pleased if they had known I had issues with my gender. I shudder to think what would have happen to me if they had discovered me dressed in my feminine wardrobe and makeup. At the least, I know I would have been sent to a therapist during a time when even being a cross dresser was considered a mental illness. I never wanted to even consider what the worst could be. Perhaps since we were not particularly religious, Christian conversion therapy would not have been in my future. The only thing I know for sure is, I would not have had any understanding at all. All along I did the best I could and was able to hide my cross dressing with the world. How I don't really know.

The older I became, good certainly did not become enough. A prime example would be the Halloween parties I went to when I was first testing the world  I started with just trying to be a sexy sleaze of a woman thinking I would receive some sort of a validation. Several parties later, I grew more bold and wanted to see if I could be mistaken for a real woman, so I wore my business attire and then waited for reactions. Overall I was received well with strangers who did not know me mistaking me for a woman who did not have a chance to dress up for the party. I was discovering better was always best when it came to how I presented as a transgender woman in the world, under the cover of Halloween or not. 

All of my experiences led me to establishing myself in a new feminine world. I needed to try very hard to do away with all my old values to do it. My whole world became a concentration of new friends and life. In my own way, I needed to be better than the world to succeed in chasing my dream of living full time as a transgender woman. Sure I needed to look the part but suddenly I needed to be the part which meant moving and communicating as a woman. 

Ditching good for better in my transgender world was one of the best moves I ever made. By the time I was medically cleared to begin taking gender affirming hormones or HRT, I was more than ready for the results. Almost instantly I knew I made the right decision.  Since my parents have long since passed away, there is no possible way for me to communicate to them they were right. For all the wrong reasons. Their resistance  to giving me any positive feedback early in life made it easier for me to find my own path in the world as a trans woman. A place where good was never enough for me.  

A Spectator in my Own Life

 

Ohio River Image from
the Archives.

Many times during my life, I felt as if I was just a spectator in my own life, not an active participant.

Included were the times I fell in love with myself over the new feminine self in the mirror at home. The whole experience for years  was similar to the impossible dream I could never achieve.  The older I became, changes began to take place in how I viewed myself. Perhaps, some of the biggest ones came about when I began to meet other diverse people in the cross dresser or transgender community. At the time, I barely knew a transgender or transsexual person even existed and here I was actually meeting real life people I could learn from. I especially wanted to see and understand how two women I knew were going to go through the entire surgical gender surgeries to complete their gender journeys. I wondered if I could ever make the ultimate sacrifice to change my body or, did I even need to. It was until much later in life when I fully learned gender was between my ears and not my legs and living like a woman was good enough for me.

As I was initially out in the public's eye trying to survive as a novice trans woman, often I felt as is I was a spectator in my own life. The pretty girl in the mirror just couldn't be me but she was and what would happen next. What happened was, I immediately wanted to do more in my new exciting femininized life. In order to do so, I needed to begin to communicate with the world if I wanted to go any further. At that point I thought my spectator issues would go away but it did not.

The prime example with me being a spectator happened on the night I went to a sports/restaurant venue to see if I could blend in successfully with other single professional women. Despite being scared to death, I managed to survive even though I still felt like a spectator in my own life. Who was this person?  By this time, I was wondering if my spectatorship would ever go away and I could lead a so called "normal" life as a transgender woman. 

The answer came from repetition.  The more I was out in the world, the more I felt as if I belonged and my authentic self took charge. I no longer felt as if I was a spectator looking in on my own life. I suppose much of my change had to do with the balance of living over half a century trying to exist in a male world, with much a smaller percentage of time learning to exist in a world often not accepting to transgender women. Through trial and error, I was able to see what was working and set out to fix it. I am very stubborn and the same effort I put into my transition often slowed my progress down when I hit a rough patch. Such as how I was dressing. I needed to adjust my fashion away from what my old male self liked into what my feminine self thought was proper and then I started to blend and succeed in the world. At the same time, I felt less and less as a spectator and more and more as a participant.

Being a participant was impactful and fun and made me feel as if I had a real say in my everyday life into my future for the first time ever. It seemed living a life as a transgender woman was within my grasp and I started to understand what my acquaintances so long ago felt, except for the major gender surgeries of course. 

Then there was the major waste of time I needed to face in my life. I always say, if I could have just a small amount of time back when I was day dreaming of being a girl or woman, where would have my life taken me. If I had not been a spectator and took control could I made a bigger success of my male life, or would something else have happened to keep me on the same path I was on. Ironically, age brings on many questions and very few answers except for at the least, I ended up trying to change for the better. 

Maybe we all are spectators in our own lives and never realize it until it is too late. It seems transgender women and trans men just have better seats on occasion  Especially all the times we had to tear down our old life and rebuild anew. .

  

My Wheel had a Flat Spot

Date Night with Liz
from the Archives.

I am fortunate to have lived a long life (so far) as I am looking at my seventy fifth birthday coming up this fall. 

When you live a long life, often you are able to see many things come full circle to fruition. On the other hand, especially when you are leading a transgender life, you discover your circle or wheel may have developed flat spots. You could be moving along in life when all of the sudden flat spots show up to derail you. 

After discovering gender euphoria, at the same time I began to day dream my life away until I could cross dress and admire myself in front of the mirror again. So, no matter how hard I tried, getting back on track in a male life I never really wanted was very difficult. At that point, I held nothing but resentment at the flat spots in my life. Why couldn't I be like everyone else in my small circle of friends. Since being similar to the rest of the crowd, I needed to find away around it. At first, I survived my dark gender closet by cross dressing as often as I could, dreaming I appeared as a pretty girl. The older and more sophisticated I became, the more I needed to put effort into smoothing out my flat spots which could provide me with quite the gender jolt. 

I am not proud of the fact of the amount of sneaking around, all the way to out and out lying I needed to do to try to live a life as a transgender woman which I was finding more and more about. For the most part, I thought I was becoming quite agile at dodging the flat spots which came along in my life when all I wanted to do was run and hide behind my skirts and dresses. Each time, I found I wasn't quite as good as I thought I was when my wife caught me cross dressed again. 

As it turned out, regardless of the hell I put our marriage through, I indeed was in the middle of coming full circle in my quest to lead a feminine life. There were so many times when I was stuck in a flat spot of my wheel, I did not know how I was ever going to get out of it. My lowest point came when I tried a suicide attempt years ago with pills and alcohol. From that low point forward, my life began a slow trajectory forward and upward as I was forced to see who I truly was. Fighting to maintain a male life which wasn't worth it increasingly did not matter anymore as I femininized myself everytime I saw a flat spot coming on. 

I realize having flat spots in life is a human experience we all have to go through but (I'm biased) and think we transgender women and trans men have more than our fair share to deal with. Especially when it comes to having accepting families and friends. Or losing successful jobs and other male privileges. You name it and many of us have had the chance to lose it during the flat spots in our life as we struggle to come full circle. 

The older I became, the closer I came to seeing what a full circle could look like to me. Plus I had the feminization effects of HRT working miracles on my male body. I had been through a lot and was excited to see the work I had put into my flat spots behind me. 

Little did I know, I actually hadn't put all my flat spots behind me after all when I started to look ahead to my end of life options. Needless to point out, I am worried about my future but my goal now is to be positive about anything which may happen.

Trans Girl at Pride Day

 

Pride Flag image from
Jason Leung on UnSplash

Welcome to Pride Month. The only month of the year when the LGBTQ community is celebrated by a portion of the world and hated by others. Sadly, the month brings out all the gender bigots in the world. 

Early on, I had many experiences at various Pride Days with my new circle of lesbian friends. Including non lesbian friends when a meetup group my wife Liz and I were in operated a table at Cincinnati Pride for a couple of years. On occasion, I even felt as if I was the token LGBT person in the group. Regardless, I had a good time people watching all the diverse public which was walking by. I saw everything from lesbians wearing nearly nothing to cross dressers teetering painfully around in their heels and hose. Then, of course there were the drag queens who I almost felt were embarrassing to me because I did not want anyone to think I was part of their culture, I was transgender not a drag queen. My disclaimer is I have nothing against drag queens but my days in male gay bars taught me how unfortunate it was to be mistaken for a queen. 

Plus, I wanted everyone to know how important it was to me to be recognized for being a transgender woman in a sea of other diverse people. Along the way, I felt the Prides I went to started to emphasize trans people and not the drag queens who seemed to get all the attention with their flamboyant attitudes and clothing. Cincinnati in particular a couple of years ago featured a trans woman I don't remember now as their parade marshal. Plus, I started to see many more transgender women and trans men in the crowd along with groups of butch lesbians and gay male "bears". It made for an interesting experience as my preference was to be mistaken for a lipstick lesbian. Or a lesbian who wears makeup. 

Early on, back in our drinking days, Cincinnati Pride always featured an after hours "Pub Crawl" which one year even featured a bus which took us to many gay venues we had never been to before. I had always wanted to live in Cincinnati and this was a great way to experience it, without ever driving because at the end of the evening, we took an Uber to get home. A great time was had by all. 

Of course, Cincinnati wasn't the only city in the region which hosted a huge Pride celebration. Before I moved to Cincy, I lived within a half hour of Columbus, Ohio. Columbus, as I said, had a LGBTQ celebration which rivaled all the others in the state. This time I went with my new circle of lesbian friends including Liz and two others. Similar to my Pride experiences in Cincinnati, the drag queens became less of an influence and better yet, I could relax and enjoy myself. That night for some reason, we ended up in several straight bars without any problems. 

These days, Pride has really expanded. In the local metro area alone, there are four separate celebrations going on this year. Sadly, with most, after the celebrating has died down, the same old problems exist for transgender women and men in the community. Big corporations who support Pride go back into their closets and I assume wait for the push back from the gender bigots. 

At any rate, it is refreshing to see the public media support for our community. Even if it is temporary.

Enjoy your Pride month no matter where you are in your gender transition! That includes all of you who identify as cross dressers. You never know when all of that may change. It happened to me.

A Zig-Zag Trans Life

Party night at Club Diversity
Columbus, Ohio.

 Maybe I should have called this post I should have zigged when I should have zagged. Or vice-versa.

In many ways, I see all sorts of transgender women or trans men in the same situation. I started at a very young age when I would zig away from my younger brother when we were home alone and I was able to get away from him when I cross dressed by locking myself in the bathroom. Fortunately, I never needed to zag because somehow, he never caught me and told my unapproving parents.

Somehow I thought when I got older, my life would improve. The first thing I learned was my urge to be or at least cross dress as a girl my age would not magically disappear. In fact, it became stronger when I learned it was not just a phase and I began to understand my gender dysphoria better. At that point, I really had to start zigging and zagging just to maintain my fragile mental health. When I was old enough, I even began taking myself to therapists to seek out help. My only main success which came out of it was when I was diagnosed with a bi-polar depressive disorder. It had nothing to do with my gender issues at all. As far as zigging or zagging, I was able temporarily save my marriage and received my money's worth when my gender therapist told me the truth. She could do nothing about me wanting to be a woman. Overall, my desires should not be a problem and I should face my truth. Of course, I wasn't smart enough to follow her advice and resumed all the zigging and zagging. 

It took me years and years to grow up and away from my male self and settle into a life as my authentic feminine or transgender self. By this time, I was growing so tired of all the zigging and zagging I was going through. Even though the whole process was an exciting time of my gender life, I was still becoming fatigued by my life the way it was. Ironically, when I was, I settled into a long term set of appointments with a very understanding therapist. She talked me off the ledge several times and along the way helped me secure gender affirming hormones and the paper work I needed to change all the legal gender markers I could. All of a sudden, I was able to visualize myself living my dream as a full fledged transgender woman. With my daughter's help, we were even able to come up with a new legal name which would reflect my family history and would be easy for my grandkids to use.

Finally all my exhaustion came to an end and I was able to live how I pleased. All the zigging and zagging had worked. All the times I hurried to hide myself away from friends and family, were put behind me. Through it all I learned one difficult lesson. If you can somehow believe in yourself, you can live your best life. Even though you may (like me) take years and years to evolve into your authentic self, the trip is usually never boring as you lead a zig-zag trans life. Overall, it takes a ton of effort to weave your gender issues into a life of family, spouses, jobs and friends. You learn to be forever vigilant in protecting yourself and end up internalizing way too much of your life. It seems the entire process is just ingrained as part of a transgender life as breath itself. We just have to finally zig to get around it. Then zag to adopt your new life as a trans woman.

Trans Girl Passing Privilege

 

Witches Ball Image. Tom on
left.

Passing privilege has been one of my biggest gender paranoia's over the years. Many because I did not begin my journey with any feminine characteristics I could see. Testosterone poisoning had essentially ruined my life when it came to establishing passing privilege. 

As I began to add angles to my body along with unwanted body hair and muscle mass, I began to think ever presenting well as a cross dresser / transgender woman would be impossible. In order to make my gender dream possible, I needed to look around at the other women my age and try to blend my style with theirs. The whole process was difficult and I made many fashion mistakes along the way. Even though I did, I managed to survive in the world as a novice transvestite on my own and move forward. Mainly thanks to brief moments of gender euphoria which always propelled me forward. To do so, I learned how important for me it was to blend in with other women. All I knew was, I enjoyed it immensely when other women would take the time to talk and communicate with me as an equal.

Through it all, I learned that even if I was not the most beautiful woman in the room, many other cis-women were not either. Since women operate on a more layered existence than men, there were many other possibilities to be successful in the world other than just being attractive. In fact, being transgender gave me an extra quality to my existence which many women were drawn to. As I crossed the gender frontier into a new feminine world, ironically I found I had more interest from women than I ever did when I was a man. 

Probably, one of the more profound statements I was ever told was when my transgender friend Racquel told me I passed out of sheer willpower. Which I took to mean (again) I was not the best looking woman in the room but went out into the public's eye anyhow. Together, we went to many so called straight venues together and had a great time with very little public push back, Even if I was passing out of sheer willpower, I was doing it successfully. Which was all that mattered. 

It mattered even less, when I was able to expand my small circle of lesbian friends who put the icing on the cake so to speak when it came to passing privilege. We were able to attend several lesbian mixers in Dayton, Ohio at several different venues. Even though I was initially very scared to go, I was quickly put at ease when I found I could blend in with the group in the venue. Sometimes the venue would be gay and sometimes straight which added to the excitement. All I know is one night, I was asked to be a lesbian wing person for my friend who was too shy to approach another woman and ask for her name. I even was able to steal a few kisses on the side one night from another woman I met. Willpower passing was great. 

I don't have enough power to do it but I think "passing" should be changed to "blending". With blending, you have the choice to dress with the other women you are going to be around and you have the choice not to if you like. In my case, I always wanted to do the best I could to enter the world as a transgender woman and blend in with the other women who were going to be around me. On the other hand, I understand also it is a trans woman's privilege to go to the grocery store in her heels and hose to do her shopping. It is all part of the fun of entering the women's world. 

The biggest problem with trans girl passing privilege is the amount of stress and attention put into appearance by the media and the outside world. The competition to look better seems to get stronger with each generation with the internet and social media being the major culprits. When the stress goes up for ordinary women to look better, it follows the pressure to be even better is real for transgender women and their quest to blend in with the public. 

At least now, there are plenty of self help makeup videos to help the novice trans girl along plus several of the big makeup stores offer advice and products too. Many more places than transgender women such I had when I was first coming out. Maybe it all equals out. 

The Quiet Trans Girl

Image from Linkedin on UnSplash.

Growing up, I lived under the double edged sword of not wanting to live in a male dominated world which was my family. So I did what I was taught to do, I internalized my thoughts and never mentioned them to anyone.  I became a very quiet trans girl until when I was in my early twenties and came out as a transvestite to a few very close friends. In the Army, of all places. 

In fact, internalizing my feminine desires became my main theme to my life. On many days, when my gender dysphoria was at it's highest, I had no idea how I was going to make it through another day in a male world. Somehow, without the help of anyone else I made it and continued to live a very quiet life with a few male dominated activities included to throw my gender doubters off the beaten track. Somehow I managed to join up with a small group of hell raisers who I stayed friends with through high school and the military.

Staying hidden in my closet had a negative effect when I first took my tentative steps in the world as a novice cross dresser / transgender woman. When I made my entrance into the real world away from gay bars and clothing stores where everyone could be accepted, I was petrified when someone attempted to communicate with me. What would I say and more importantly how would I say it. Nothing in my life had prepared me for what I was about to face. 

I began the process with simply trying to mimic the voice of the woman who was trying to talk to me, which seemed to work out fairly well until I needed to talk to a man. So I tried to do the next best thing and not talk at all. Not talking worked fairly well until I began to see people again. For the most part, I was easy to remember and more people than I care to mention wanted to know more about me. Particularly women, who in their own feminine way wanted to know why I wanted into their world. To further my communication success, I then decided to attend vocal classes at the Veteran's Administration in Dayton, Ohio. By doing so, I was able to learn the basic differences the male and female binary genders use to communicate in the world. The training went much farther than just the basics of vocal range and I learned a lot. 

Perhaps the biggest improvement I learned was I could now have the confidence to hold my own, one on one with another woman. I was no longer coming off as unfriendly or worse by not wanting to talk. I used to say I was going out to my favorite venues night after night to be alone but it was not true any longer as I was out to be social. 

Ironically, the better I became at being social with other women, the more I was kicked out of my old men's club which I had become so adept at surviving in. I learned quickly my male privilege of discussing topics of interest with other guys was a waste of my time when I was rejected for being a woman. Transgender or not. Like it or not, once again I had became the quiet trans girl. 

It wasn't until I began to build a new circle of women friends did I finally discover I didn't need a man's validation to be a person at all. I could stand on my own two feet and flourish in the world but it wasn't easy to get there. I had more failures than successes when I first started the communication process in the world as a transgender woman. The feminine nuances of non verbal communication women use initially was very difficult to learn. It did not take me long though to grasp when a friendly woman behind the bar was trying to tell me when a drunk guy was a huge red flag and I should vacate the premises.

More than anything else, my new communication skills brought the quiet trans girl out of her shell. When I moved in with Liz in Cincinnati, we began to go to "Meetup" social groups which helped immeasurably with my communication skills. Sure, probably, most of the others attending knew I was trans but I was different and even exotic to a few, so I stood out from the group. I needed to accept the fact and finally began to thrive on my reality.

I know my reality isn't for everyone and my journey could be different than all of yours. The main thing is we are all on the same journey at various points in our lives and can learn from each other. When we do, we can come out of our deep/dark gender closets and live a meaningful life. 

Time Waits for No One if you are Trans

Image from David Cohen
on UnSplash.

Sometimes I look back at my nearly three quarters of a century of life and wonder how I made it.

Often I think I could have made it easier on myself if I had been able to muster the courage to come out much earlier and live the authentic feminine life I always wanted to live. It is difficult to imagine exactly how it would have worked out, because the world has changed so much for transgender women and men. It is always worth mentioning the pre-internet/social media days when trans people were so much more isolated in their dark gender closets.

Timing always has quite a bit of influence on how anyone is able to attempt joining the world as an out transgender person. As anyone becomes older, they have a tendency to accumulate life experiences, material or not. Families come along for many, making the gender shock of changing genders so much more of a problem. Baggage continues to increase when we undertake better employment and secure better housing. Both of which can be very difficult to give up.

Time keeps on moving, which often is the only definite and when it does, the pressure builds to do something about it. The older we become, the more the reality of our mortality sets it and we lose the recklessness of youth. I was certainly much more reckless when I was younger and tried more self destructive acts such as consuming too much alcohol and driving way too fast. Also, as the pressure mounted, my mental health which was already shaky was put to the test repeatedly. Anything I tried seemed to take me farther and farther away from any potential answers I could think of.  

The problem was I couldn't see the forest for the gender trees. Similar to any other woman, my biological clock was ticking away and the older I got, the louder it became. I tried everything to run from my clock but of course nothing worked. Finally, when I turned sixty, I could take it no longer. On one momentous night after years of struggle I gave up my male self and gave in to living fulltime as a transgender woman. I put all the years of experimentation as a cross dresser behind me, dis-carded the remainder of my male clothes and set out to live my dream. Sure, it was scary but all the preparation I put into the move made it more natural and successful from the beginning. Primarily my inner woman was overwhelmed by finally having the final say in my life. 

At the time, I was viewing the entire process as jumping off a gender cliff and hoping for a soft landing. As it turned out, all my prep time when I was actually trying to play in the girl's sandbox worked well for me because I had a chance to build up a close circle of women friends who helped with the landing and even welcomed me in. 

I knew too, I wasn't getting any younger and if I put off a gender transition much longer, I would likely never have the chance again. I was close to retirement age, had no spouse to worry about, and had a limited amount of family and friends to come out to, so even I didn't have a good reason to stay in my gender closet any longer. 

In my case, for whatever reason, I was able to wait out time to the bitter end and come out positive in the process. I wish now, I didn't wait so long to live as my authentic transgender self and put so much prep work into it but no one goes back and gets a second chance to rewind the clock.  

Not the Only One

My Transgender Friend Racquel
from Texas

This is really an extension of yesterday's post. During the post I mentioned the times when I discovered there were actually others who shared my cross dressing dreams. In fact, they even had a label back in those days, we were called transvestites. 

In my post I even mentioned the "Transvestia" publication which I came to cherish so much. I was so amazed to see a nationwide network of like minded individuals. In a short period of time, I discovered a side group of sorts called the "Tri-Ess" organization for strictly heterosexual cross dressers who met in nearby Columbus, Ohio for socials or mixers. Columbus was only approximately a half hour from my home and I just had to check it out.

When I did, I was able to meet a smaller, diverse side group who had private parties in an exclusive Columbus location. As I became a part of this group, I really found how I was not the only one. The only issue I had was, deciding what exactly I was. I knew from experience I was much more serious about being a cross dresser than many of the others I met at the mixers. On the other hand, I still wasn't sure if I was as serious as a few of the transsexual women who were headed for gender realignment surgery. Or sex change as it was known back then. I still had too many huge gender decisions to make before I could ever make such a life changing choice. 

In the short term, I decided to align myself as close as I could with the transsexuals as I attempted to learn as much as I could about their lives. I only really knew two, so contact was very rare plus on most occasions my second wife was with me so I needed to be careful about how I acted. 

As the internet and social media came into play, the potential of knowing I was not the only one in the world with gender issues literally exploded. Along with the internet came a new understanding of the different layers of gender life. As I said in yesterday's post, the term transgender became increasingly known here in Ohio, which as always behind the East and West coasts. As I studied it, the more I was convinced transgender fit my status in life and I felt better for a short amount of time. I say a short period, because in no time at all, I was striving to be a better trans person and learn more and more about myself in the world.  

What I did learn was, even though I found others who shared my gender issues or even gender dysphoria, there were not many. In fact, before she moved to Texas, my friend Racquel was one of the few women in the LGBTQ world I stayed in contact with and Racquel often joined in with my lesbian friends when we partied. 

Recently, partially because of my mobility issues, my transgender outreach has been limited to my writing as well as virtual diversity meetings with the local Cincinnati Alzheimer's Association. As well as the occasional speaking engagement thanks to a friend in the trans community. When I am able to participate in an outreach, particularly to young people, I am able to see I am far from being the only one with gender issues and it feels good.  

Flashing a Trans Girl

From the Archives. Club Diversity
Columbus, Ohio.

Before you think I am preparing to write a post about me "flashing" another person. No my skirt was not too short or anything else on that occasion. I was wearing my typical fall fashion, boots, jeans and sweater. 

In truth and as boring as it may seem, the only person  who was flashed was me and I don't think anyone else noticed. At least, I hoped not. As it was, my flash occurred just after I increased my dosage of gender affirming hormones. On the evening in question, I was out doing what I normally did, trying to enjoy myself with a drink at one of the venues I regularly went to. 

Suddenly out of the clear blue sky, I felt my face flush and I felt as if I was internally combusting. As I attempted to slyly look at the patrons around me, I was surprised and please to note, no one was rushing towards me with a coat or blanket wanting to put out the flames. Then, as quickly as it came on, my first hot flash as a transgender woman was over and I went back to my drink. I can not say the whole experience was as unpleasant as much as it was unexpected. Up to that point, my gender affirming hormones had ushered me into the second puberty of my life...a feminine one. 

While I could not go back and totally erase all the unwanted benefits of my first puberty which I called testosterone poisoning, my new HRT could help me into a new world. As my breasts and hair grew, my skin softened, along with my facial contours. Not having to wear wigs anymore as well as using less makeup helped my feminization in the public's eye as well as giving me a new found confidence. What I missed the most was having anyone to talk to about my second puberty. When I did bring up the facets of changes I was going through, my female friends just said welcome to their world. Little did they know how long and how much I wanted to be in their world. 

Up to the point of my flash, I had never cried in my life, even during the passing of both of my parents. The best way to describe the new me who could cry was when my testosterone was driven down, the hard edges were taken off my life. All of a sudden, my first good cry occurred one evening when a thunderstorm rolled through my Ohio town and I quietly mourned the loss of my male self. I took no real pity and for the first time, I was able to understand the difference between a good cry and a bad one.

As you can imagine, I was elated with the results of my second puberty in life which did not occur until I was in my sixties. Even though, if I had it all to do over again and transition earlier, I would not have wanted to miss out on the times of accomplishment and fun I had carved out as my old male self. He had taken me a long way in life on a basically successful journey which gave me highlights of having a daughter who supports me to this day, all the way to living with wives/women who helped me unknowingly be a better transgender woman. 

In a nutshell, very few humans have the opportunity to go back and try again. By going through a second puberty and flashing myself, I had the rare chance to not screw it up and be a better person. While I consider my hot flash learning experience as one of the top moments in my life, I also consider the process part of my passage into my unique womanhood. Not unlike having a mammogram. I am just glad, no one else noticed I was on fire one minute and reaching for my coat the second because my thermostat was broken and I was freezing. All part of my second puberty.

See, I told you this post wasn't going to be part of a sensual flash in anyway. Sorry! 

Mansplaining a Trans Girl

Woman being 
mansplained by Al Eimes
on Unsplash .

First, mansplaining to me is a highly insulting way to communicate with women and one I tried my best not to do before I transitioned into the world of a transgender woman. 

In fact I think I went out of the way to not mansplain anything to the women I worked and lived around. I hope now it wasn't noticeable and I was coming off as dismissal. Regardless, I did my best until I was admitted behind the gender curtain and was able to see how the female half lived. 

The problem was, I took so many years to get to the point of being allowed to look behind the curtain and play in the girl's sandbox. So I never quite understood what the mansplaining fuss was all about, until it slapped me one night in a regular venue I was accepted in. What happened was somehow I became part of a small group of men discussing a topic I knew a lot about, like sports. I was still new to the system and tried to interject my thoughts into the conversation. Just as I would have as my male self. To my surprise, I was rudely ignored by the men and I quickly left and went on my way. The whole process was another of my life changing moments when I was transitioning. 

I didn't know what I was expecting since I had seen mansplaining all my life from other men around me when they interacted with women. Why would I be any different? Well, I wasn't and the better my presentation as a transgender woman became, the more I was talked down to. It was like I had lost most of my intelligence and all my life time experiences in addition to other male privileges. 

Quickly I learned to play the game of being a dumb blond, which I was most of the time back in those days. A prime example came one night when my car broke down and I had to call a tow truck. As luck would have it, a well meaning policeman showed up to help and between the driver and the cop figured out the best route to get my car home without even asking me. I was infuriated until the whole evening declined even farther when the tow driver started to explain to me how his wrecker worked. on the ride back Finally, I relaxed and started to ask him questions about what his wife packed him for dinner and why were wheels round. (Just kidding.) But I tried to make the questions of my status as a woman for him which was obviously very low. 

Maybe I should have been happy I presented so well that I lost a main part of myself forever. I learned how women are really treated and prepared myself for other gender lessons. The main one I write about often is the loss of personal security I witnessed up close and personal when I transitioned. I learned to park in the most well lit and safest places I could with the shortest walk to wherever I was going, to name one important point. For the first time in my life, I was the prey when I was out in the public's eye and it was quite the change.

Slowly but surely on the rare occasions I needed to communicate with a man, I learned to draw from my personal experiences and understand where he was coming from. I waited for him to come to me and interject my ideas when I could as a transgender woman. By doing so, I was able to build my confidence back up in public. 

Today when I am mansplained, I take it with a grain of salt because I know there are plenty of women who reverse the process with their communication with men. I remember several nights when I was fine with talking to the woman in a couple I didn't know and having it all change in a flash when he started to show any interest at all in me. There was no womansplaining going on as I instantly knew where I stood. It also never took me long to understand all the non-verbal cues women use to signal each other. 

 It is one of the reasons both binary genders have such a difficult time of communicating. Upper level understanding of the genders is one of the rare benefits of being transgender and should be embraced. When you can do it, you truly have the chance to advance as a human. 

Being a Transgender Victim

Image from University of Cincinnati
Trans Seminar.  

It is difficult not to play or be the victim if you are transgender. 

It is always easy to think why me and resort to various escape mechanisms such as in my case, running home and cross dressing in my dress when anything went remotely wrong in my frail male world. Making the varsity football team just wasn't as important as trying to look like a cheerleader in my mirror at home. 

Many years went by before I grew out of being a victim. Perhaps I made my biggest strides in Army basic training when I had no where to run and hide behind my feminine feelings. Ironically, my intense introduction to man hood would in turn enable me to be a better transgender woman in the future. Or as my second wife used to tell me, be man enough to be a woman. For the longest time, I had no answer to what she was telling me. To begin with, I had no idea of how I would support myself as a trans woman and at the same time, I was still very inexperienced as a woman. I had a ton of learning to do. 

As I finally was able to escape the confines of my male existence, I fell back heavily on his new found idea of never being a victim. When I initially was going through all the trials and tribulations of attempting to present convincingly as a woman, many times I was a dismal failure. The easy thing to do would have been to be a victim and blame the world but I chose the other path and kept going back to my cross dressing drawing board and try again. By doing so, slowly I was able to learn what I needed to get by.

By not becoming a victim, I was able to look the world in the eye and learn to communicate one on one with mainly women in public. Very quickly, I was able to see in their eyes what their perception of me was. Mostly I found the majority of women knew I was transgender and were curious what I was doing in their world. By the time I reached that point in our interaction, there was no turning back and I was in so deep I could not back out and hide at home or in my car. Most importantly I learned to stand my ground and learn a new feminine life. Of course there were many new rules I needed to observe and accept before I could move on but I did. The whole process was not without setbacks and many times I needed time to rest before I re-entered the fray cis-women call life. I had learned from my work experience, women have the tendency to form cliques unlike the teams men form, so I knew once I was accepted by a women's clique, I had it made. Just getting there was the issue.

As I widened my search in the venues I frequented, destiny enabled me to be successful. By pure luck, one of the bartenders who always waited on me set me up on a date with her lesbian Mom and we became close friends  and remain so to this day. Then, one night another woman sent me a note down the bar and we became friends also and the three of us were inseparable for years.

Probably, my most chance encounter of all came when my current wife Liz answered my "ad" on a dating site and we have been together for nearly fourteen years now. She came along on-line after having to put up with an incredible amount of trash. For some reason, I refused to become a victim again and kept trying.

Being transgender is a difficult situation to find yourself in. As I always point out, trans is NOT a choice but being a victim is and it is a difficult burden to overcome. 

Living in Your Own Prison

 

Image from Engin Akyurt
on UnSplash

When someone says living a life as a transgender woman or trans man is a choice I get a huge chuckle. 

I wish the people who think my life was a choice, needed to live a small time in my shoes and  then they could truly decide my life was never a choice. I was living in my gender prison. In many ways, I could describe my confines to a bigger version of what was called my personal closet. Either way, I was stuck in a very dark and isolated space where I was all alone. Especially in the pre-internet days when I was living.

When the internet came along with social media, I was able to locate a few others who were cross dressers or transgender women , which made life a little easier in my prison. My biggest problem then became hiding my new on-line contacts from my wife who was more tech savvy than I was. Let's just say I needed to learn the hard way when my wife found a discussion I was having with a person in nearby Indiana and I had to become much too comfortable with.

Looking back, I could call the few, brief times when I tried to purge my feminine wardrobe and be a full time man as being out of my prison on parole. The problem was deep down I knew what I was doing was wrong and the pressure would build to build a new feminine wardrobe and try again in front of the mirror. I could almost predict when I would go back to my gender prison. 

Yet another casualty of me serving time in my closet was one I always mention, my mental health. Since it was already fragile and I was going to therapy for help, I didn't need any extra problems to push me closer to the edge.  I was becoming a hot mess as I took more and more chances when I left the house as my novice transgender self and explored the world. The problem became, I was feeling more and more natural when I escaped my prison. Even still, the process was not easy and involved too much scary trial experiences when I first went out. 

The entire process became all I thought about and when I was in my my male mode I caught myself thinking too much of the next time I was going to be able to experience life as a transgender woman. Plus, at the least I was busy studying the mannerisms of all the cis-women around me. I was locked in to one thing only and it was being a woman myself. It was a good thing I had my therapist to talk out my exploding feelings about my gender. 

I guess the only frustrating part of trying to explain to the outside world what it means to be transgender is there was no choice. If I would have continued in my self destructive male ways, I would have killed myself and become yet another statistic. Fortunately, destiny had other ideas for me when I escaped my gender prison and started to live an authentic life as a trans woman. Similar to so many others in the transgender community I was a survivor and thrived when I was free to do so. 

Bad Gender Decisions

 

Image from unknown origin. 

I often wonder if during all the writings I do, as I  describe how I succeeded in living my dream as a transgender woman, do I emphasize the bad decisions I made. 

Needless to say, I made plenty of choices I wished I had back to try again. First of all, I suffered from the same problems nearly all novice cross dressers or transgender women go through. Unlike cis gender girls our age, we didn't have the peer pressure or knowledge to help us be girls or women. We were not invited to the sleepovers where the girls experimented with makeup and clothes and it showed. I equated the whole makeup process to painting model cars when I was growing up. It took lots of practice to get the basics right. In the meantime, as I learned, many times I made bad decisions and came out looking like a clown. This was especially true with the clothes I chose to try to wear. I tried way too long to force my male body into clothes designed for sexy teenaged girls and I paid the price when the mirror lied to me and I tried to go out in the public's eye. 

When I was laughed at in public, I knew my feminine life had to change for the better if I was ever going to be able to survive. I just could not keep coming home in tears after another night out making bad decisions. Certainly. the process was not improving my deepening gender dysphoria. In desperation I sought out help from one of the only known gender therapists in Ohio at the time which was a good decision. The bad decision came when I decided to not listen to what she told me. She told me there was nothing she or I could do concerning my deep seated desire to be a woman. I would have to learn to live with it. If I had not been so hard headed and stubborn, I would have taken her advice and prepared myself for a life as a transgender woman. 

Once I started to really explore the feminine world, I made plenty of bad decisions. The primary example was when I became comfortable in presenting in places such as clothing stores, book stores and malls, I would always challenge myself to do new activities as a trans woman. Activities where I had to face the public and communicate one on one with the world. By doing so, I knew sooner or later I was going to have to challenge myself and use the women's restroom. Nature was calling and I knew I needed to answer the call. 

I started the process innocently enough by using the women's room in one of the bookstores I went to on a regular basis. I would do my best to make sure the room was empty before I went in and took care of my business. I was fortunate in that I read about and knew quite a few basics women follow when they gather in the restroom. I also knew from my experience in the restaurant/bar business women were not always the pristine gender they are known to be but that is another story. As well the other basics I needed to learn such as looking other women in the eye, washing my hands and stopping to adjust my hair and makeup. 

For the most part the only bad decisions I ever made as far as rest room usage was concerned was which rest room venue I decided to use. On a typical night, I would plan to go to my regular venues  plus maybe try out a new place. By this time, I was becoming fairly secure in my presentation to the point I wanted to try to challenge myself. I decided to go to a borderline redneck venue, order a couple of beers and try to use the restroom before I left. Before I knew it, someone had called the police on me and I was told to leave. Which had to be the worst decision I ever made. From there I went back to my usual regular venues and everything was back to normal.

Normal for me was difficult to change. I was so use to pushing my boundaries as a novice transgender woman, I had a difficult time adjusting my life when I no longer had to push so hard. I was enjoying the fact I did not have to face making bad gender decisions to begin with.

Teamwork makes the Dreamwork as a Trans Woman

Girls Night Out, I am on the bottom far left.

Similar to so many other cross dressers or novice transgender women I have heard from, they dream of enlisting a cis-woman to aid in their appearance.

I was included in having a similar fantasy. All the way to the point of begging my fiancé to completely dress me as a woman if I rented an out of the way motel room for privacy. Sadly, for me, she agreed and she did do her best to dress me as the woman of my dreams.  I say sadly for two reasons. The first being I did not see that much of an improvement over what I was able to do for myself since by that time I had practiced in the mirror myself for years. The second reason I say sadly came years later when I was facing being drafted into the military and being sent off to Vietnam. At the time she pressed me to tell the draft board I was gay to be deferred from going. Even though I didn't and don't have anything against the gay community, I knew I wasn't gay and wasn't going to lie to escape military service. The end result was she ended up breaking the engagement when I went off to the Army which I learned later was the best thing which could have happened in my life to that point.

As you can tell, I didn't have anyone to enable my teamwork work from any sort of a dream work. One of the problems I was having was working my way through exactly what my gender dream. I was still years away from facing my reality of being a transgender woman. So I suffered alone with my gender dysphoria before I was able to break out of my gender closet. It wasn't until much later when I discovered the beneficial beauty of having cis-woman friends who accepted the new transgender me for who I was. When I let it happen, my dreamwork began to flourish. 

Quickly I began to learn the world from the aspect of being an invited participant in girls' nights out. I was invited along to several different groups of women. All the way from married women to younger girls still in the dating pool. Neither mattered to me because I was learning so much about living a women's life with no men around. Even though when I went out with the younger group, I found how it was to be the decidedly older and less attractive woman in the group. Again, it didn't matter as I flattered and happy to be invited to begin with. 

This was an exciting time of my life when all of a sudden my dream of living a life of a fulltime transgender woman seemed to be so reachable. Being included and  embraced by the women I met was the difference. We went to birthday dinners together, went to parties with each other and of course used the rest room together, All of which turned into the ultimate bonding experience as a new trans woman.

Was I scared? Sure I was but the embraces I received within the group quickly put me at ease so I could enjoy myself and gain confidence in the new feminine person I was creating. It turned out I did not have much creating to do because once my feminine soul hit the world, she flourished. 

Even still, being in a women's world and experiencing their teamwork, did make the dream work happen for me. I was a better person for it once I left my gender dysphoria behind. My mental health improved as well as everything else in my life once I left my male self behind.

Un-Common Risks as a Trans Girl

Liz on left. Date Night. 

Most people undertake a risk or two as they make their way to the undertaker in the end. 

When you come right down to it, which person you chose to marry is a risk as well as which profession you choose. Transgender women and trans men seem to have an added layer of risk in their lives. Along the way as we pursue a gender transition, we have to make many difficult choices which aren't really choices at all. They are paths we have to follow or face devastating self harm to ourselves. Which results in extremely high suicide rates in the transgender community. 

When we are growing up in a world where our families often don't accept us, the entire process makes the risk factor even more important. I am so blessed to have a daughter who completely accepts and supports her transgender child and I am proud to have been a role model for my grandchild to follow but it wasn't easy. 

When it came to my marriages, seemingly destiny has led the way into several different areas of acceptance. Acceptance of course led to risks being taken. My first wife was very easy going and knew of my cross dressing desires before we were married and had our daughter who turned out to be my only child. My first wife accepted without question my desire to cross dress as a woman and venture out on Halloween adventures. I often thought if I came home from work one day and told her I was checking into a hospital for gender alignment surgery, she would have said that's fine, just be careful. As it turned out, I was not ready for that sort of surgical risk and would never be.

Then destiny threw me a curve ball with my second wife. The moment I saw her for the first time, I knew I wanted to be with her in the worst way. Even though she too knew I was a cross dresser, she still restored feelings I long ago had forgotten when I was ready to compete with another man for a woman. In order to win the competition I needed to divorce my first wife and move on to a totally different strong woman who knew somewhat of my gender issues. I say somewhat because back in those days I was just learning myself how deep my transgender feelings ran which were to cause strong problems in our twenty five year marriage later on after the newness wore off. From the start, I always thought she would be the one who would help me to break through in my cross dressing world and help me to be successful in my dreams. As it turned out, she wasn't that person and always drew the line if I suggested at all I wanted to go further into the transgender world. By the time she had passed away, our relationship had deteriorated into an ugly cat and mouse game of me taking risks and seeing what I could get away with.

Another main risk I took was with my job. Slowly but surely I had been promoted through the managerial ranks to a successful position as an executive general manager of a big popular casual restaurant chain. A position with a company I knew would not accept me transitioning into a transgender woman. In my haste to destroy myself anyhow, I began to go to my competition as a woman thinking no one would recognize me. Well, I was wrong and the roof began to fall in on me. It was tough but I denied all the rumors and kept on going.

By this time, my second wife's life was coming to an end and she suddenly without warning passed away from a massive heart attack. By this time I had purchased my own restaurant and was somewhat in control of my own financial destiny until a recession in the Rust Belt where I lived wiped out the population. I ended up losing my restaurant as well as my inheritance by taking a major risk and losing nearly everything I had. I finally was able to find me a fast food job to hold me over till I could take an early retirement from Social Security and sell vintage items my wife and I had collected over the years. Between the two I survived.

I then found myself in a period of wonderful gender discovery, when with the help of new women friends everyday seemed as if I was reborn. Specifically Kim and Liz helped me the most. Liz lived in nearby Cincinnati and we met on line. After corresponding by email  for months, I finally became brave enough to talk to her in person and our first date was at a drag show. That date was nearly twelve years ago and we are coming up on our second anniversary of marriage. Liz cemented her place with me when she told me she had never seen a man in me and why didn't I finish my transition into a feminine world with her.

Finally, after a half century of wondering and suffering over my gender dysphoria, someone else recognized my truth and wanted to accept it with me. My un-common risks were over. I accepted her advice, gave away my male clothes and never looked back.

You got it...Now Live with It!

 

From the Archives, Club Diversity. Columbus 
Ohio.

For some unknown reason, I have been remembering more and more what my gender therapist told me so long ago, she couldn't do anything concerning me wanting to be a woman. Now I don't remember if she told me I could not do anything about it either. 

If she did and had I listened, I would have saved myself so much inner torment over the years from my gender dysphoria. At the time my male self was not even close to being ready to give up any claims to his life which at the time was becoming relatively successful. After all, he had worked long and hard to arrive at the point where he was. 

If I wanted to blame anyone but myself for not accepting my true authentic self, I would blame my home environment. I grew up in a very male dominated family. My Dad had two competitive brothers and his competitive personality filtered through to my brother and I. It seemed no one had girls in the family and if they did, they were second class citizens. How I existed was by keeping my true feminine desires a deep dark secret. I learned early the very male trait of internalizing any negative thoughts or ideas. The whole concept turned out to be very self destructive over the span of my life which included the years of being a very serious cross dresser or transvestite. The whole process nearly took my life before I finally figured out I had it, now I needed to live with it. 

All I wanted was the impossible. Give me back just a fraction of the time and effort I had wasted by trying against all odds to maintain any sort of a male life. The cruel and unusual punishment came in when the more I achieved as a guy, made it more difficult to give it all up. I had a spouse, family, friends and good job to suddenly consider. What would my daughter think? Not to mention my wife and brother. All of a sudden I needed to draw a line in my gender sand and decide which route in life I was going to take. 

Everything changed for me the night I finally decided I had put enough exploration as my feminine self to make the ultimate leap over the gender border. Needless to say, it was a huge weight off my shoulders. I had a chance to go back in life to a point where I was not so jaded by either gender and experience for myself what the future held for me. It was at this point friends jumped in and showed me the way I never thought possible. I found I had it all along. I was a transgender woman and now I had the rare opportunity to live with it. I discovered there was so much more I needed to learn when I entered the world as a trans woman. 

Plus it took a while for the overall excitement of transitioning into my dream life to wear off. Everything I did was new and different and even when I was not accepted, I learned from my mistakes and for a change, my inner stubborn streak served me well. I had it and now I was living with it. I guess if you are able to live long enough as I have, you have the opportunity to see life go full circle. I paid my dues as a guy and what he learned turned out to be beneficial in my new life as a woman.

Quoting the singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides Now",  only when I was able to see the world from both sides of the binary genders, was I able to relax and enjoy my life. All along I had it and just missed out on the real possibilities of what I was missing. Living with being transgender was all that mattered.

Smiles Equal Confidence

 

Go Ahead and Smile from the
Jessie Hart Archives. 

Where ever I go in public, I try to lead with a smile to ultimately disarm any potential transphobic individuals. 

I have to remember also I look better when I soften my face which still has a tendency to go back to my old male scowl if I am not careful. A male scowl in my world always comes off as a bitchy look which I normally am never feeling. 

The whole process goes all the way back to the days when I was cross dressing my way to the front of the mirror. Since all the ups and downs which followed, I needed to learn to put my feminine image in motion if I was to succeed in following my transgender dreams. Since recently I have been getting out into the public's eye more and more again, I have needed to reinforce wearing a smile to boost my confidence as a senior trans woman. This morning was no different when I went with my wife Liz to her eye doctor visit. 

After I applied a light amount of makeup to go with my casual outfit, I thought for once I looked presentable for the world. I even tripped off my gender euphoria for a brief second. My euphoria lasted until I went through the door into the doctor's waiting room. For the briefest of time the two receptionists just stared at me and finally said how could they help me. Not the friendliest of greetings and I became worried about my presentation. Since I had quite a while to ponder the situation, I came up with the problem and it was all me.

I had forgotten the most important part of my presentation which is my smile. For the greatest majority of the public I face, a smile disarms them and allows me to communicate with them on a one on one basis. Plus when I am smiling, I am showing the confidence I need to enable the people in my world to be more friendly also. Most importantly, a smile is my best accessory when I use it properly. Not using it at all takes me back to the day when I was shopping for clothes and suddenly nearly ran into a girl child who was darting between the clothing racks. When she stopped and saw me, she exclaimed to her Mother "Look at the BIG woman." I had long enough to consider the kid at least called me a woman. Then she ruined the feeling by calling me a "BIG Mean woman." From then on I resolved to try to put a nicer look on my face and not scare the public with my bitchy look. 

After living a long unwanted life trying to exist in a male world, some habits are still hard to erase. Putting a smile on my face shouldn't be such a big deal but it is. So big, the whole process is as big as makeup, fashion and hair. Putting the whole image into motion is what counts for me to be truly successful as a full time transgender woman.  

Close Encounters of the Transgender Kind

 

Image from the 
Jessie Hart Archives.

Very early in my life, similar to so many of you, I suffered many close calls when it came to being caught in my feminine clothes by my younger brother or worse yet my parents. 

As with most inquisitive younger brothers, if I was out of his sight for any length of time, he wondered what exactly was going on. To make matters worse, we were just a couple of grades apart at the same school, so we rode the same bus home and arrived at the same time. Leaving me very little time to cross dress and admire myself. I even had to hide out in the woods when the weather was good to dress up.

My parents were partially a different story. My Dad was a banker and Mom was a high school teacher, so they arrived home usually in time to sit down to dinner. If you remember those days. My point being, seemingly for weeks at a time I couldn't find a way to explore my gender closet at all and the pressure to do it just increased to the point of no return. Which meant I needed to take risks. We had two bathrooms in our house and sometimes I could barricade myself into the one which contained most of my Mom's makeup. When I combined her makeup with mine, I had plenty to experiment with. 

On the exceedingly rare days I was left all alone, I went all out. Even to the point of being able somehow to get away with shaving my legs. I was completely in love with how wonderful the air felt on my freshly shaven legs when I took the chance to walk to the mailbox which was some distance away. No matter how good I thought I looked, the biggest problem I had was with my hair. In those days, I was stuck with either the ultra short burr haircut my Dad had or the equally as bad crew cut. A wig of any kind to me in those days just seemed like the impossible dream and it wasn't until my college years when I could afford to buy a nice wig I cherished for years. I even hid it, as well as other cross dressing necessities away when I went away to the Army. Hoping they would not be discovered. They weren't. 

Even with all my precautions, I still ran into the times when I had to hurriedly wipe the makeup off my face and change my clothes when my parents came home early. I don't know how but I somehow survived without a gender confrontation which would have been a disaster. At the time, I thought when I became older I would have more control over my cross dressing desires and life would be better. In no way did I feel as if all of the sudden I would wake up with no gender dysphoria and life would be much better. On the other hand I still felt I would not have to hide my true self to others. To compensate, I developed a very macho exterior self and avoided making very many friends who I may have to come out to later. A process I would come to regret later in life.

It turned out, mainly because of my wanting to not come fully out as a transgender woman, hiding away my true self from a loved one would reach new heights of desperation. The loved one I am referring to is my second wife who knew from the beginning of our relationship I was a cross dresser and accepted it. Everything in our relationship was good until I finally faced the truth of me being transgender, which my wife soundly rejected. Increasingly, when she was working nights, I was out exploring the world as a trans woman to primarily see if I could make it or not. When I found I could, I began to go out more and more which led me to having more chances of being caught. All of which led to huge fights when I came home as my feminine self and she was waiting for me. It was like I was a kid again and resented the process completely but it was like a train wreck waiting to happen.

Our relationship became so strained, my wife told me things like why didn't I just man up and live as a woman. A great point which I never did while she was alive. Somehow, it was similar to me trying a last gasp attempt at saving what was left of my manhood at her expense.

When she did unexpectedly pass from a massive heart attack, at the age of sixty, I finally was able not to worry about any close gender encounters. I had paid my dues and was so happy to fully come through an often very uncertain life and live in the world as a fulltime transgender woman with no negative people in tow. A dream I thought I could never achieve.   

Steps Forward and Back on Our Transgender Day of Visibility

 

Transgender Flag image from 
Alexander Grey on UnSplash.

During this week, we celebrated the "Transgender Day of Visibility." A time to be see and be seen during a time of great duress depending upon where you happen to live. It is also a time to remember and celebrate how those of us who are fortunate enough to have escaped our gender closets. Then were able to carve out a new life. 

In order to do the carving, you must have a sharp knife and be prepared to expect steps forward and steps backwards. In my early days in the public's eye, it seemed I couldn't get my feminine presentation together. It seemed on nights when I had my makeup and fashion together I then tried to ruin it all by slipping and almost falling in my heels or worse yet, just walking like a linebacker in drag. 

Of course I took a couple steps back when I left the comfort of my mirror and encountered the harsh reality of the real world. In many ways you could describe the process as the second act of my life. Of course the first involved working very hard to make it in a male world I never really wanted. Then I needed to work even harder to take the steps to leave it all behind. Even when I was struggling with the world at large by getting stared at, all the way to being the subject of out and out laughter, somehow I found the will to keep trying.

The problem I had was I sure I was trying to achieve the right goal. Could my dream of living a fulltime life as a transgender woman ever be a reality anyhow? Many dark days told me I was spending too much time, energy and even money on an unapproachable goal. The next step forward as I was in the darkness searching kept happening because everytime I saw the light in my closet, it felt it so natural. Deep down something was telling me to keep pursuing my journey.

The problem was, life kept getting in my way. First of all, my male self and my second wife had the idea any femininization I was thinking of would be totally wrong and cost me all chances at the life as I knew it. Even though I was at a disadvantage, I still knew deep down I had the courage to pursue more steps towards the point where I couldn't return. For me it meant beginning gender affirming hormones if I could be medically cleared to do so. I still could not take the big step until my wife passed away and I was cleared to begin. 

As with everything else in my life, hormones did shorten and lighten up the steps I was taking to living a transgender life. For any number of reasons, destiny opened my closet doors wide open. Tragically, when I lost so many friends and family who were dear to me, people I needed to come out to were few and far between. Other factors came into play also such as my age (sixty) which enabled hormones to take effect faster. At the same time, I wasn't too far away from being able to retire early and not have to worry about my finances when I was forced to come out on a job. Another plus came when the Veterans Administration health care system which I took advantage of started to accept transgender veterans like me and help with hormonal care.

As you can tell, destiny was urging me on to take the final step and live my life as a trans woman. Finally, I could take it no longer and took the final step and never look back. Taking the steps makes me proud to be a part of this year's Transgender Day of Visibility.