Answering the Call

 

Image from Alexey Elfimov on UnSplash.

On occasion I am sorry to say it took me over a half a century to answer my gender call. But thankfully, I finally did take the call and listen to the urgent message. 

Please keep in mind I don't count all the years I attempted to cross dress my gender issues away. As I often write about, all cross dressing did was provide me with a quick fix. After I dressed as a girl, I felt better for a while before the same old tensions of life with gender dysphoria set in. The problem was, deep down I knew I wanted to do so much more than look feminine, I wanted to be feminine. 

One of the few good things which came from my gender struggles was practice made perfect. Even though I knew I was the only one who could see my progress with makeup and clothes, I stuck with trying to improve every time I cross dressed. It was so difficult for me since I only had the mirror to answer to when checking out my progress. The problem was the mirror was so good in telling me everything, but the truth and I tried to keep in mind I might look good, for a boy in drag. Not as an actual girl. In other words, I learned I needed to hold myself to a higher level than other cis women I observed if I was to survive among them. 

The entire process was so difficult for me since I had never been detailed orientated in my life. Just getting by was not going to be the way to go. I was fortunate when I encountered professionals in the makeup world who helped me along. One in particular came following a transvestite-transgender party mixer I attended near Cleveland, Ohio years ago. After the mixer slowed down, the organizers provided several makeup professionals to provide free tips to whoever had the nerve to ask. On that evening, I am happy I put my ego behind me and answered the call for much needed makeup assistance. The catch was I needed to remove all my makeup and wig and let the professional start over. His work and results were amazing, and I even understood all the tips he was trying to tell me. The end result was I was flooded with compliments and my gender euphoria soared to an all-time high. Furthermore, later on that evening, I was even hit on by a guy in a straight venue I went to with other transwomen from the mixer. 

That night, I did not answer the call to stay with the guy who showed interest in me. My reason was, I was in a strange town with a person I did not know, and I did not know if he realized I was transgender. Not a good place to be at two in the morning. On the other hand, I loved it when the other "A-listers" from the mixer were jealous of me for once.

Along the way, I ended up answering enough calls to barely keep myself going. There were plenty of times when I did not know if my mental health could take it, and I could keep going. It was then when I took the all-important call to begin gender affirming hormones and change my life forever. I was sixty by then and knew there would be no turning back. After I did, I learned taking the most important call of my life turned out to be a life survivor for me. I remember the evening when I decided to answer my phone for the last time. All of the sudden the voice told me I was free to live as my authentic self and the relief I felt was tremendous. All my previous misgivings were swept away. 

Trans Girl Preparedness

Image from Ben White
on UnSplash. 

Since it took me approximately fifty years to fully emerge as a transgender woman, I had plenty of time to prepare.

The challenge comes when we trans women or men need to begin from scratch. We did not benefit from a gender peer group such as other girls to have sleep over parties and experiment with makeup and clothes. No one to tell me I looked like a clown in drag. I learned I needed to resort to the mirror for help but sadly ran into problems when the mirror had the habit of lying to me. I could still look like a clown and the mirror would not tell me the truth.

What I did was go out to into the public's eye and receive an honest feedback on my appearance. In the beginning, the experience was brutal as I was met with stares and even laughter. Many times, I could not wait to go home to the safety of my own room to start over again. I kept thinking, regardless of all the negative feedback I was getting I could do better. For the first time in my life, I needed to decide what I wanted worse, to hide in my closet and not advance toward my dream of ever living a feminine life, or advance and begin the learn the basics of makeup art and fashion which at the least fit me. I found the entire process to be exceedingly difficult for me. 

Spoiler alert. I did learn the hard way what I needed to do to blend in with the rest of the women around me. It was a powerful lesson to learn when I found out how women ruled in their own worlds and how I could join in.  In the meantime, I was learning how to erase my male past and start over. To make matters worse, my male self naturally fought against the gender change to transgender womanhood he was facing. 

Through it all, I was naïve to think I was progressing towards my gender dreams. I thought that just doing my best to look like a woman was all I had to do. When I entered the wild and wonderful world of women, I was excited yet terrified of my future. After all, I was risking all of my male life as I had known it. What would become of my family, friends and income? To arrive at the point of knowing all my gender questions, I just had to be better prepared.

At that point, I started to go out into the world with a purpose to learn if I could make it as a transgender woman at all. Primary issues remained such as communication problems. Plus, I went the distance to try to stair step my way into an increasingly active public community. I purposely tried out more and more challenging situations. Away from the no challenge opportunities I was facing in clothing stores and malls. I even tried to avoid the book stores and antique malls I had become fond of but never presented any sort of a gender challenge to me. I needed to feel OK with who I was, where I was before I was able to move on. 

At the same time, my male life was successful and was pushing me to stay the same and not transition into a women's world even farther. All the struggle did was wreck my mental health. What I did not recognize yet was my feminine self was my dominate personality and needed to be freed. The harder she fought, the harder he fought. Finally, he gave up and I found a deep seated relief I had never known before.

Primarily, after all the time and effort I put into changing my exterior gender to what my inner self was always telling me, was the reason I felt better about my life. Sure, the gender affirming hormones I began to take made the transition easier also but bottom line, I was just prepared to do what came naturally and live it.  

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.