Finding your Happy Place

 

Image from Priscilla du Preeze
on UnSplash

These days you may think finding any sort of happiness as a transgender woman or trans man may be impossible but it is not.

Take this morning for me as an example. As I was getting dressed and viewed my bare thighs before I put on my pants, I had forgotten how nice it is to view their increasingly femininized form thanks to the use of gender affirming hormones. In other words, I have developed my own hips, finally following years of hormonal usage. In many ways I took the slow cautious route when I started down the medical transition path on the advice of my doctor. He advised me to take minimum dosages until we could judge the effects on my body.

At the age of sixty, my body took to the new feminine hormones wonderfully and naturally. Soon I was put on higher doses of HRT and bigger changes began to take place rather quickly. I had set up a semblance of a timetable of when I wanted to shed all my male clothes and live fulltime as a woman but it turned out the timetable was a waste of time. What happened was I became very androgynous looking in a very short period of time. While I was developing an increasingly noticeable set of breasts, my skin began to soften which in turn softened the lines of my face. So much so that anyone who knew me from before would notice the difference.

Even though I was shocked at the rapid exterior transformation of my body, the whole process felt so exciting and natural I could not wait to do more and more as I accessed my new transgender womanhood. It all meant setting up new plans and timetables on who I was going to tell and when. By this time in my life I had outlived most of my family and close friends, so telling many people was not going to become a problem. I had even retired so I did not have to worry about transitioning at a job. All of this left me with two main people to come out to. My only daughter and only slightly younger brother. 

I knew at the time, I had a better chance of succeeding at telling my daughter the truth about me than my brother. My daughter was much more liberal while my brother's in-laws were right wing Baptists and I figured he would sell me out to appease them. It turned out I was right on both accounts. I found my happy place when my daughter totally accepted me and was down when my brother did not. I took my fifty fifty win/loss record and moved on.

To this day my happy place continues with my daughter and her extended family. In fact, my wife Liz and I just accepted an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at my daughter's Mother-in-Law's house which makes up for the decade long snub from my brother. 

As the holidays approach, I hope all of you can find a happy place to celebrate with family, blood relation or not. In the transgender community, often we find the best family in non traditional situations. It is a wonderful time of the year to discover or re-discover a new happy place for yourself.

The Ultimate Challenge

Vacation image from Kansas
by JJ Hart

I am biased but I think changing how you live to reflect your authentic gender self is one of the toughest things a human can do. 

Perhaps you noticed I said reflect your gender tastes not change them. I believe our transgender selves are already determined and we are attempting to sync them up to our extremal selves the world can see. The path varies for most of us but the final goal is always the same. Sadly we have many obstacles in our way. 

One of the main ones is trying to overcome the effects of testosterone poisoning which gives us the hated male characteristics we did not ask for. I remember hating all the changes which were happening to my body and how the changes would effect me when I attempted to cross dress in front of the mirror. All I knew was my life was changing for the worst and I did not want it. Much later on when I became much more serious about my femininized presentation in public, my goal was to hide my broad shoulders and the angles of my body with new fashion. 

It turned out, testosterone poisoning and new fashion were the least of my problems as I continued along my path to the ultimate challenge of living as a full time transgender woman. There were so many times I never thought I was going to make it. I had so much baggage to sort through as a man as I had acquired over the years. Since I had spent so long doing my best to build my life, then I needed to decide what to do about my family, job and friends. Leaving me between the gender rock and a hard place. Often I did not know how I was going to find my way out of my predicament. Was I still a man, or a woman and what about my long standing sexuality.

Obviously, the ultimate challenge was to sort through all my issues while I was still attempting to live my so called normal life as a man. I ended up trying to live a little at a time as a trans woman until it began to feel so natural I never wanted to go back. Slowly but surely I was proving to myself I had been born feminine and just forced into the wrong gender by some sort of a cruel twist of fate.

It was around that time, I found I was not alone and began to discover other challenges on my path to transgender success. I learned from others around me about their own successes and failures or triumphs and purges. Often my own feminine wardrobe would be gifted by an acquaintance's giant purge. In fact, my first set of expensive silicon breast forms were gifted to me. The breast forms were a real step forward from what I had ever had before and would help me to present better so I would not be discovered as a man.

As Paula wrote in and commented: "I don't know if we ever get over that fear of being found out, of being exposed and ridiculed. I think this is much more about how we see ourselves than how others see us, I look in the mirror and see all my history, the Dan Dare chin and the prop forward shoulders, others just see a late middle aged woman who happens to be on the tall side."

Thanks for the comment and as I am fond of saying, these days I present as old. Since the genders have a tendency to merge together later in life. I am also happy to have made it to the place I have in my life but as I near my seventy fifth birthday, I know the ultimate challenge is yet to come.  

Staying in the Present as a Trans Woman

Outreach Image. JJ Hart, Cincinnati 
Trans Wellness Conference 

Throughout my life, I  have experienced difficulties with staying in the present. 

Perhaps it all started when I started to raid my Mom's wardrobe and makeup and then briefly feeling really good about it. Then when the warm feelings began to fade, the day dreams began to set in. I could not wait to get in front of the mirror again.

As my life as a cross dresser grew more complex, so did my efforts to day dream my time away until I could attempt to enter the feminine world again. As I always say, I wish I could get back just a small portion of the time back I wasted on day dreaming of my gender issues.

Plus, all the day dreaming in the world could not keep me in the present as far as my ongoing life as a male was going. The more I needed to learn about successfully navigating a world I did not want to be in, the more I wanted out. Especially when I hit puberty and was facing all the changes testosterone was doing to my body. I did not want all the new angles to my body as well as the extra hated body hair which I had no choice over. I wanted all the curves the girls around me had. Changes I fight to this day through my gender affirming hormones or HRT. 

Ironically, I still struggle with my overall concentration as evidenced in my answers given to the nurse practitioner at the VA who monitors my depression meds and blood work. She always asks how my concentration is and I always answer fair and we move on. We have never really explored my answer and how I equate it with my life as a transgender woman. I guess it is our own version of don't ask, don't tell. She in fact has always known I am trans and has never held it against me.

For the longest time, the only person holding transphobic thoughts about me, was me. As I played the victim in my own life, I had an even harder time staying in the present. The main problem was I was attempting to lead a life with feet firmly planted in both binary genders. Being a man one day and a woman the next just was not a good way to live. In fact, my life was ripping me apart and causing me to mentally run. So I was increasingly not staying in the present as I played gender favorites in my head. My life as a transgender woman was so exciting and wonderful, my man self finally could not compete anymore. 

Then there was the anxiety of how my sexuality would play out if I transitioned into trans womanhood. Since I had never been sexually or emotionally attracted to a man, how would I survive if a man approached me after I had transitioned. Could I take myself out of the present and satisfy a man when I had no experience. I quickly found I did not have to worry when all of the sudden I was surrounded by women when I jumped the gender border. I gladly stayed where I was when it came to my sexuality and began to identify with the lesbians who were friends of mine.

I can't really say I can stay in the present any better at this time in my life than ever before. Hormones or not, I feel I am more in tune with the world around me. Which counts for everything.        

Luck or Destiny?

 

Image from Jan Tinneberg 
on UnSplash 
 

Is transitioning successfully across the gender frontier a matter of luck or destiny? 

I would argue a blend of both when it came to me. When I first started to explore the world as a novice transgender woman, I knew very little of what I was doing. Primarily in how I was attempting to present myself in the world as a woman. I was wearing what no other women would think of wearing as my male ego was sending me false messages. During this learning time in my life, I was lucky I only was laughed at or stared at. Sometimes I am surprised someone did not sneak up on me and attempt to pull my wig off.

No one did and I moved on finally learning how to better blend into the feminine world I was seeking to be a part of. Maybe, destiny was on my side for a change and even in my darkest hours of being a rejected transgender woman, I always thought there would be a future. So I pursued the sliver of hope I felt when I cross dressed and went out into the world. Just the smallest amount of gender euphoria kept me going towards my gender dreams. 

It took awhile of finally being lucky and being at the right place at the right time, when I started to actually began to build confidence in what I was attempting to do with my gender. Maybe I could put all those self doubts behind me and carve out a new life as a transgender woman. In some sort of a deep dark way in my mind, destiny was still pushing me forward. Especially in the times when I was out doing Christmas shopping for my wife as a woman and taking the time to enjoy all the holiday decorations in a way I had never had before. In fact, as my male self, I always wondered if I would feel any different with the decorations if I could ever view them as a transgender woman. My answer was a resounding yes, I could.

Luck and destiny did not end with holiday celebrations as I was just learning how to adjust to my new feminine life. Destiny showed me what it would be like when I began to lose my white, male privileges. The first time I obviously felt I was losing my intelligence stands out when I was mansplained over the simplest of topics as well I was shocked when I lost the personal security men enjoy. It was probably more luck than destiny which led me through unscathed and wiser. 

It wasn't until much later in life did I realize I was always destined to lead a feminine life. All my lucky escapes and experiences had combined to guide me ahead to my goal which sometimes I fought completely from happening. I did not know how much destiny was guiding my life. So much so, it was like a huge cloud lifted after tragedy of my second wife's passing. Suddenly I was free to pursue any gender life I wanted. At the same time, the US Veterans Administration health care system I was part of began to administer gender affirming hormones to veterans such as me.   And finally I was close enough to retirement age, I would not have to worry about working as a trans woman to support myself when I transitioned. 

There was no luck involved. Suddenly destiny had opened its door wide and showed me the path forward to a new feminine life I gad only dreamed of. All I needed to do was take the opportunity and run with it.