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| JJ Hart. |
In the very beginning of my transgender journey, I often wondered if it was all just part of my very active imagination. Perhaps it was all part of me secretly hoping all of my gender issues would magically go away.
Of course, my gender dysphoria never went away until much
later in life when I faced up to it and all I was doing as I viewed myself in
the mirror cross-dressed as a girl, was slowly instill the knowledge my trans
desires were not going anywhere. In fact, back in those days, the transgender term
had not even been invented to use at all. I was living in the pre-internet “dark
ages” of information. All I had was the well-worn issue of “Transvestia” from Virginia
Prince to connect me at all to the world of people who had the same gender
issues as I did. Closets were impossibly dark and lonely back then.
It took the knowledge of my situation to finally break into
the light and see the world as a small part of who I really was. I finally used
my issue of “Transvestia” to locate nearby mixers which were headlined for
heterosexual transvestites only. If that was true or not, I found a diverse
mixture of people attending which ranged from beginning cross-dressers all the
way to impossibly feminine transsexual women heading for gender surgeries. The
frustrating part for me was that even with the choice of individuals I felt
close to, I could not find a group to hang out with. I was frustrated that I
had come this far to still feel this completely different. The light was there,
but it was very dim due to my complete misunderstanding of who I really was.
The one fact I was waking up to was that none of what I was
feeling was my imagination. My gender issues ran very deep and would be very
difficult to solve. As I always point out, since I was so busy being an active
man at the time, the conflict was real. Once I realized what I was really
battling. On the plus side, about this time, the internet became part of my life,
and I was able to see and even reach out to others like me. It was all well and
good until my second wife, who was more computer savvy than me, caught on to
what I was doing and tried to stop me. After I used my imagination to find ways
around her, I was still able to build knowledge of what it would look like if I
was actually able to enter the world as a transgender woman.
Once I began to really explore the world as a novice
transfeminine person, I really had to use my imagination to succeed in getting
out every spare moment I had from work. I would purposely schedule myself off
from my work on the days I knew my wife was going to be working late just so I
had free time for exploration, is a prime example. In that case, imagination
became knowledge as I actually began to explore what I needed to explore behind
the gender curtain. Even to the point of making new friends who had no knowledge
at all of my previous male life which I was trying hard to do away with.
More importantly, as I sat myself up for success in venues I
really wanted to be in as a woman, imagination further faded as knowledge sat
in as I was able to fill out my gender notebook. No more gay venues for me
where I was treated as a drag queen and even ignored when I tried to order a
drink, all the way to be treated as a regular where I wanted to be was the
knowledge that I needed to succeed further.
During this time also, I spent a lot of time soul searching
about if I was doing the right thing about attempting to femininize myself even
more with my new lifestyle and going even further my seeing it I could be
approved for HRT. Mainly because I felt so natural as my feminine self among ciswomen,
I thought I would take the path of least resistance and continue building
knowledge of taking the gender leap I was considering. In essence, I was taking
all the imagination that the young girl in front of the mirror away and
replacing it with the knowledge of what I could expect living as a fulltime
transgender woman. I needed all the knowledge I could get because the risks in
jumping the gender border were so great. It all meant saying goodbye to all the
male privileges I had worked so hard to build up. Not to mention the extra
pressure of the possibility of giving up spouse, family, friends and employment
as I knew it. I needed to be prepared to burn it all and start over.
What I ended up doing was, hedging my bets a little by making
new friends in a new feminine life which I hoped would soften the fall if I
decided to jump off the cliff and never go back to my male self. At this point,
I always mention all the women who helped me along but somehow, I miss the most
important one, my inner female who came through in a big way when she was
allowed to run my life for a change. Once I gave her the platform to flourish,
there was no imagination of the path she was going to take. She took the highroad without all the evilness
you see in some fulltime transgender women. She just wanted to enjoy her life
and be an active part of the world and the LGBTQ community. And she wanted to
help others by writing about her experiences.
Which brings me full circle to where I am today. No
imagination, just the knowledge of experience to get me by in the world.
