A Marathon not a Sprint

 

Image from Peter Boccia
on UnSplash.

In my life, I have rarely ever had to run any distance at all. The only times when I did was when I played football and was in the Army. So, I was never a sprinter until I discovered my love of cross dressing as close as I could to a pretty girl. I could not wait until I came home from football practice, and no one was home so I could put on a short skirt like the cheerleaders I admired so much, were wearing.

I wonder now, if I knew how long it would take me and all the trials and tribulations I went through to arrive where I am today, would I have given up on my journey. I doubt it because along the way, my gender feelings ran so deep and I felt so natural as my feminine self, I could have ever turned back. I needed to settle in for the gender marathon I was facing because sprints (which I compare with brief moments of gender euphoria) were hard to come by. It is a good thing, because I was always better at marathons anyway.

I can blame my marital situation on the fact that I was still trying to run gender sprints. Rather than face up to the truth of who I was, for years I tried to maintain the delicate balance of a stable marriage and a rapidly growing love of public living as a transgender woman. All my sprints did were cause problems at home when I was caught and put a tremendous strain on my twenty-year -plus marriage. On occasion, life between us became so bad my wife on several occasions simply told me to be man enough to be a woman. I hadn’t been yet, but I was working on it. She did not know it, but her challenges kept me going during my gender marathon. I just needed time to get it through my old unwanted male head that being a woman (transgender or not) meant more than looking like one.

I receive many comments from those individuals who are just wondering where their gender path will take them. When I do, I try my best to point out I did not magically appear where I am now. It took me a lot of work and disappointment to realize I needed to be better than the average ciswoman to survive in their world. They had a head start on me in the race to womanhood and I needed to work hard to catch up. Along the way too, I found some ciswomen were eager to help me into their world, and some were not. Maybe they had their own marathons they were running in life.

Another thing I learned from running a gender marathon was I had the time to relax and enjoy the journey on occasion. I felt much different than the fast pace of fleeting gender euphoria when I was involved in a gender sprint. Then, it was back again to living in the present as a transfeminine person, rather than living in the future and missing most of the enjoyment. Slowing down also gave me time to research who I really was and who I was, was on the right path in my life. Because I had huge decisions to make. Family, marriage, jobs and friends could have been all on the line. At times I was crushed under the pressure of it all and had to put it down for a different day. Something I could have never done as a gender sprinter.

The moral to the story was that slowing down helped me to determine my own pace. The problem was that I wasted valuable time coming out of my male closet longer than I should of. I finally came to the conclusion that I could not have it both ways. I ended up doing what was right for me keeping in mind that your story you are writing in life could be totally different.

Either way, what you consider is a gender sprint or a marathon is a personal matter and has a lot to do with how old you are. Even though I have read about male to female transitions well after the age of sixty (when I did it) I think it is rarer because those who think they can put it off longer because they have put it off as long as they could. But then, on the other hand, there are people like me who realized their gender truth and could not put off making a move any longer. Before I had to sprint for the finish line of life itself.

 

 

 

 

 

Staying in the Present

 

ss

Image from Ekka Wessman
on UnSplash. 

As I progressed in my cross-dressing life to a novice transgender woman, it proved to be difficult for me in several different areas.

Just one of those areas was the amount of time I needed to stay in the present for the first time in my life. My problem was compounded by the fact I had trained myself to daydream my life away as I wanted nothing more than to be a girl. Then, when I took my feminine image out of the mirror and put it into motion, I needed to constantly stay in the present to remind myself where I was and what I was doing. If I did not, I would be in danger of slipping back to my old ingrained male self. The problem was particularly intense when I was trying my best to mimic the magical way ciswomen moved.

Sadly, I found if I relaxed at all, no matter how attractive I thought I looked as a trans woman, all would be lost if I looked like a linebacker in drag as I walked. And to make matters worse, I needed to quickly learn to change the old stay away masculine scowl I had perfected and replace it with a more welcoming feminine look. As I shopped and interacted with ciswomen in public, they wanted to smile at me, so I needed to be pleasant and smile back. Especially if they suspected all was not as it seemed gender wise with me. I did not want to appear as any sort of a threat.

Staying in the present brought about other pleasant rewards also, such as when I communicated with other women, I needed to look them in the eye and listen to what they were saying, not jumping ahead and anticipating what I thought they were going to say. My communication game with women had really changed.

After a lifetime of hiding in the future, the present started to be a very pleasant place for me to be. I could take the time to feel the different clothes and talk to different people from a whole new viewpoint. I could take and give compliments from others regardless of their hidden motives. I found just the most innocent mention of my earrings from another woman was not about my choice of jewelry at all, she was gently starting a conversation to find out more about me. It all carried into the learning curve I experienced when I began to take lessons in passive aggressive aggression, from other women. I never had needed much knowledge of passive anything with the alpha macho men I hung out with. They were upfront with me for the most part. Ciswomen, on the other hand, could smile at you while they clawed your back for whatever reason they had. For a while, I thought I was going to have to carry band aids in my purse for any surprise attacks such as one night when a woman was coming back from the restroom and caught me talking to her man and took a dim view of the situation.

The more time I spent in the present, the better my life had become, and I got to the point where I missed out on all the time, I spent daydreaming of my life away. As I wondered how it would be if I could shed all my male existence and redo it as a transfeminine person which made me unapproachable to family and friends as well as making me totally miserable. Also, all the jealousy I felt towards ciswomen would have been swept away if I had had the chance to live and compete with them in their own world. To be sure, it was a different world but a life I discovered I enjoyed immensely as I found my new life to be all I thought it would be and more.

To arrive at the point I wanted to be, I first had to be confident in how I arrived at my own womanhood and if someone did not like me, it was their problem not mine. Then and only then could I fully live in the present and most importantly, try to forget most of my past. The future is still a problem for me as I wonder what will become of me if I have to encounter an assisted living situation where my gender issues are not addressed. The difference now is that I don’t spend the time dwelling on it as I used to. The present is just more important for me, which was a hard lesson to learn.

 

 

Tired of Looking Over my Shoulder

 

Christopher Morley
1974 movie
Freebie and the Bean.

In a continuation of yesterday’s post in many ways, today’s post is about how I grew weary of looking over my shoulder as a transgender woman.

Looking back, all I can remember from the earliest days I had cross-dressing in front of the mirror were the all too brief moments of gender euphoria I experienced and the all too numerous times I spent looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was going to catch me. Then life as I knew it would be ruined. To stop this from happening, I became very good at hiding my clothes and makeup away from the prying eyes of my slightly younger brother and the rest of my family. I even resorted to hiding a small amount of clothes, makeup and a mirror in a trash bag in a hollowed-out tree in the woods next to our house in the country. Even with all of this hiding, I still found myself spending a lot of time looking over my shoulder.

Somehow, I thought when I grew older, I would conquer all my gender issues, and they would magically disappear, but they just grew with me. The better I became applying makeup and selecting feminine clothes, the more I wanted to do. Like a dog chasing its tail, the more success I had led me to want to do more in the public’s eye. Sadly, as I grew into my high school and precollege years, I was still stuck in the same old routine of dressing at home, hiding from my family and looking over my shoulder. The only relief I remember was the night friends and I went to a high school carnival and one of the male students was parading around dressed as a pretty girl. I was fascinated but again was looking over my shoulder to make sure none of my friends noticed how interested I was.

Which was exactly how I felt when I saw the movie “Freebie and the Bean” in 1974. I did not know it or had never heard of actor “Christopher Morley” who was an accomplished female impersonator. He had a part in the movie which I found amazing because he was so believable as a woman. As with the student cross dressed as a pretty girl, when I saw Morley, I needed to look over my shoulder at my friends to see if they noticed my newfound interest in the film we were watching. I guess I was pretty good at hiding my interest because nobody ever said anything about it.

Moving forward, there were the early cross-dressing days when I was still trying to perfect my everyday presentation as a transgender woman. I constantly worried about someone sneaking up behind me and pulling off my ill-fitting wig. What would I do then? Put it back on or just pick the wig up and run out the door. Fortunately, I never had to find out when I figured it was my inner female paranoia talking to me that I was not looking good enough to pass her standards yet.

By this time, looking over my shoulder became a habit. There was a time when my second wife and I moved to a small town in southern Ohio to run a new restaurant there. In order to suppress all my cross-dressing desires, I started to do the grocery shopping as a woman then go ahead and do a little lite shopping for myself. One day when I was blissfully doing my thing as a transfeminine person, I unexpectedly ran straight into my wife’s boss doing his errands. As bad luck would have it, my wife and I were invited that weekend to a small party at her boss’s house and I needed to really look over my shoulder when I heard him mention to my wife about the “big woman” he had seen in a store. Rightfully so, I was always guilty until proven innocent with my wife and she turned directly to stare the look of death at me. It took me weeks of denial to finally live it down.

Denial, lying and other mistruths became a way of life for me with my wife before she passed away after twenty-five years of marriage. The only thing I am proud of is that I did manage a full out purge six months before she died. To prevent any backsliding, I even grew a beard. Needless to say, I was miserable during this time but nothing like I was going to live through later.

After all the tragedy I went through during this time, I finally had enough of looking over my shoulder for decades and decided to follow my instincts and come out to the world as a transgender woman. Not spending all that time and effort was completely refreshing and allowed me to totally concentrate on my new life as a trans woman.

 

It is Right When you Know it Is

 

Image from Caroline Herman
on UnSplash.

Some have asked me over the years, when did I know it was the right time for me to leave my closet and emerge into the world as a transgender woman. It is a complex question with a very easy answer. I always knew I was having problems with my gender but did not have a clue for years what to do about it.

The only relief I had was the brief time I had to rapidly cross dress in front of the mirror, away from my family and friends. Even when I was able to accomplish my goal of looking like a pretty girl, I still was aware deep down that something was not right with my life. In my own way, I set out to find any gender solutions I could, on my own, with no available sources to aid me. Plus, at the time, my male self was rapidly settling into a relatively successful life, and he wanted nothing to do giving up any of it to my inner feminine self. It turned out, this would be a battle I would have had to face for decades of my life to come. I would spend any available free time I had as a cross dresser, only to have what I learned rejected when I went back to my male life.

The only thing which kept me going was the deep idea I had that what I was doing was actually the natural part of my existence. And the parttime male life was an act. The act which became so good over the years that I shocked a number of people I knew when I finally came out as a transgender woman. I always had assumed they had thought something was up with me when they saw me at Halloween parties dressed as a woman but never did. It was like my male self-tried to dig a deep hole to bury my female self was never quite successful as she kept digging herself out.

The years at that point seem to fly by with the continuing fights with my second wife over considering if I was transgender at all and at the same time, me improving my transfeminine presentation during the times I was out in the public’s eye. I started to do more than just walk around in malls to see if I could present well and started to accomplish small tasks such as doing part of the family grocery shopping as a woman. I found I could do the tasks, and my life began to feel so natural again. The opposite of when I needed to go back to living as a man. It seemed unfair to me when my wife and my male self-ganged up on me to protect their interests in the relationship and I did not know what to do because I was just doing what was becoming more natural to me.

All the infighting only did one thing and that was prolonging the truth from coming out. I had always been destined to be feminine and when the time was right, I would be able to claim my birthright. The longer I lived as a transgender woman among ciswomen I knew I was in the right spot and had to face the facts about myself. My wife unexpectedly passed away from a massive heart attack leaving only my male self to protest any idea of me being trans and starting the HRT medical treatment. Under a doctor’s care of course.

Finally, when faced with the reality of my future life, my male self-gave in to my inner feminine self who had waited so long to live and prosper. More importantly, I was tired of all the internal fighting and knew I had readied myself to make a choice. All the frustrating years of playing with makeup and clothes came back to help me. I did not have to worry so much about my presentation when I made the decision to permanently be in the public’s eye as a transgender woman. I found a great majority of the world either didn’t pay any attention or were just curious of me which was a great surprise. I could relax and enjoy the wonderful new world I had always dreamed of.

When I finally stopped the gender in-fighting I suffered through all those years, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders at the age of sixty. Why I waited so long to face my true self in the mirror and decide to do the right thing will forever be a mystery to me. My only excuse is, I just knew the time was right.

 

The Transgender Fear Factor

 

Image from Darius Bashar
on UnSplash

Even though my transgender fear factor is a relatively dramatic term, it was very real to me.

So much so, I used to walk clear across malls to avoid groups of teen aged girls who in the past treated me with scorn. Finally, I had enough and decided to zero in on what my presentation problems were. When I did, I was able to blend in with other ciswomen I was around and only then did I begin to really address my fears.

Before I did though, I needed to define exactly what transgender fear meant to me. The problem was I could not go to an internet site and read about someone else’s definition of fear could be. I was on my own to decide. To figure it out, the only way I could was to test my new life out in person. At that time, I was used to going to gay venues because of their relatively safe spaces and was afraid to leave the venues and see if I could be successful in so called straight venues where I knew I would like the atmosphere.

Then, my biggest issue was being pulled aside in one of these new venues and being physically assaulted. Ironically, the only place I ever was in any kind of danger was outside of a gay bar I went to a lot. I paid my way out of the danger with my last five-dollar bill. The two men who stopped me took the five and let me on my way. I learned my lesson and never went back there again.

Fear as a transgender woman and fear as a man was obviously different. I was stripped of all my former male privileges. Most importantly, out of all of them the privilege of personal security proved to be the most dramatic change I needed to face. All my life as a man, I was fairly good size and was able to bluster and bluff my way out of any difficult situation I ran into, plus I was always the protector for the ciswomen around me. All of a sudden, I was put into a world of who was going to protect me.

What I learned from my fear factor was what all ciswomen learned from situations early in life. Plan ahead for potentially negative situations is the best way to have very little happen to you. Such as staying out of dark or dimly lit parking lots and go out with other women friends whenever possible. When I did learn my new limitations, I felt better about my new life in the world as a transfeminine person.

Dealing with fear factor with me also was involved in the amount of male baggage I needed to lose to survive. Since I took until the age of sixty to finally completely transition into a cisgender world, I had plenty of baggage to get rid of. What I managed to keep was my life-long love of sports. I discovered I could go to the big sports bars I was fond to going to as a man and watch my favorite teams play, something I could not do in the gay venues I was going to. When I did begin to be accepted as a regular in the big venues, I began to notice the other women around me who were also into sports. Which made my life easier. I began to be more confident, friendly, and overall, more fun to be around.

Predictably, when my sports baggage stayed, many other parts of my life had to go. I was fortunate that I had retained a relationship with my only child, my daughter. On the other hand, I lost all contact with my only brother’s side of the family. We had not talked in over a decade ago when I came out to him right before Thanksgiving and my invitation to the family dinner was revoked. In the long term, I never missed any interactions with my brother and ended up cherishing my time with my daughter. So, putting my fear of rejection proved to be unfounded and I won the battle.

It was never easy for me to put my transgender fears behind me as I transitioned from a male to female dominated world. Mainly because I did not realize all the rules which would change in the world when I aggressively pursued my transgender dreams. Some of my changes came seamlessly, when others came with big obstacles. An example is I was always a basically shy person as a man, which was easy to lose, when I started to live as a woman in a cisgender world. It was worth it to battle and win my wars with transgender fears.

 

A Thing of Beauty?

 

My Trans Friend Racquel.

During my male to female gender transition years, I always stressed to the max about my appearance as a transgender woman or cross dresser.

Every now and then, I go back into my very early blog posts to see what I was fixated on and quickly noticed I was all about how I looked. In those days, I thought being a woman was all about looks and beauty and I wanted to overcome my testosterone poisoned body to achieve what I could.

The big test of my so-called beauty pageant was when I began to free myself from the mirror and break out of my closet into the world. By doing so, I found I had a lot of work to do if I was able to make it in the world as a transfeminine person at all. My first big test was too present well enough that the teen girls would not notice me and send me home in tears. During that time, my makeup had to be just perfect, and I did not want to ruin my mascara and carefully applied eyeliner by crying. Even when my makeup and hair was done just right, I struggled to think I was anything close to being beautiful. I just wanted to be presentable and live my new experience as a transgender woman.

It wasn’t until my second wife began to call me the “Pretty, pretty princess” when we fought about my cross-dressing desires, did I begin to think about what she was really saying. Since she was an attractive but a no-nonsense makeup woman, and she was my idol in so many ways, I tried to tone down my makeup the best I could to please her. On occasion, she would even go out with me as my feminine self, so I wanted to do the best I could to not embarrass her or myself with how I looked. Of course, the problem continued to be I could not get away with wearing no makeup like she did which led to more fighting.

Many years later, after she passed away, I began to build my own feminine self from what I had learned about beauty and how it related to other ciswomen around me. The first thing I did was becoming a better student of women than I had ever been before. I needed to remove the male blinders I still had to get a realistic view of the world I so desperately wanted to enter and be a part of. I discovered I paid an inordinate amount of time admiring the beautiful ciswomen I saw and not notice the vast majority of women who were doing the best they could with the physical attributes they had to work with. An example was, I was always worried about my height as a trans woman until I began to notice plenty of other tall successful women in the world I was in.

I became less of the “princess” and more of the trans feminine person who was just trying to blend in an survive. It was about this time when Racquel, a trans woman friend of mine told me I passed out of sheer will-power. My willpower took me into a world of lesbian women when hers took a different path into facial operations and men. I guess, in our own ways we were successful transitioning into the world at large with her as a tall, slim beauty and me on a completely different level socializing at lesbian mixers with my friends. By doing so, I learned valuable lifetime lessons on how to live my life without the validation of men at all. If they liked me fine, and if they didn’t (which most did not) that was fine too. Afterall, I was not the ideal girl to being brought home to see the family for the holidays.

Years later, after I met my wife Liz and we became serious, it was difficult enough for me to meet her family for the holidays. Her dad was an extremely right-wing gun rights supporter, and her brother never talked so I did not know what they thought about me. I will never know, since dad passed away years ago and her brother lives south of Cincinnati in Louisville, Kentucky. All I know is, I was extremely ill at ease during holidays with the family.

Now, all I know is that I present well as being old with non-age-appropriate long hair. I can’t do anything about my age and love my hair, so it is not going anywhere. Perhaps I am making up for all the years I had to have my hair cut short in my youth and military days.

As with all other ciswomen, over the years, I have learned to work with what I have been given physically. I was extremely fortunate to have found people who accepted me for who I am as I presented as myself out of sheer willpower.

 

Fifty Seven Percent

 

Image from Element 5 
Digital 
on UnSplash

During the election results last night, I watched a combination of my local television station and MSNBC for news of the election.

Of course, I was overjoyed with the Democratic party’s sweep of the elections around the country. As I casually listened to the commentators mentioning what they thought of the election results, I heard the transgender word mentioned not once but twice. As a group, we were mentioned about how much resources the Republican party put into their campaign lying about trans women and men. They said, the Republicans put fifty seven percent of their resources spreading lies about the trans community and dodging the issues which really mattered.

From experience with the elections here in Ohio, I knew the percentage was high, but not that much. The incumbent Democratic senator Sherrod Brown was slaughtered with mistruths about the LGBTQ community by the Republican convicted crook Bernie Moreno. Now, Brown is running again against a tRumpt rubber stamped spineless candidate Husted, who is already spreading lies in his campaign.

Regardless of the talk about all the resources the Republicans spent to smear a very small part of the population, the best news was that the tide has began to change, As far as last night’s elections were concerned. Things in the country have gotten so bad under the orange felon that people are seemingly being forced to look at the real issues. Instead of the worn-out idea that transgender ideals are being forced upon your kids.

Locally, in my school district all the Republicans were not elected again and were replaced by an all-Democratic slate of candidates. So maybe now, the school board will not come out against LGBTQ friendly activities in the schools.

Before you think I am being overly optimistic that the tide is beginning to change, perhaps I am because we are fighting an uphill battle here in Ohio for next year’s governor race. tRumpt and Musk backed Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy is running against Democrat Amy Acton for governor who I fear is not the strongest candidate.  Her biggest drawback is she forced these idiots in Ohio to wear masks during Covid, and of course she is a woman. Imagine that a ciswoman battling a Hindu for Ohio’s top government seat. The evangelicals won’t know who to preach for.

Maybe, just maybe, it is time to have a little hope for our countries’ future once the orange Russian asset goes away. Another comment the panel of journalists made last night was the populace may be getting tired of the daily turmoil we feel and is ready for a change.

I know I am and am very tired of worrying about what is going to happen next when I go to bed every night. Last night I thought the light at the end of the tunnel was not the train. One thing is for sure, no matter if you are a lesbian or gay person, or a cross dresser wondering about your future as a transgender person, you better pay attention to the next major election because tRumpt and his minions are coming after you, 

 

Falling Asleep in my Heels

Image from Toa Heftiba
on UnSplash.

Falling asleep in my new high heels turned out to be a very dangerous thing for me to do.

There was a time when I was in my early formative cross-dressing years that I thought wearing high heels was a fashion necessity I could not do without. Instinctively I knew the heels made my legs shapelier and longer. But what I did not realize was how much power the shoes gave the ciswoman wearing them. Have you ever noticed how men follow the sound of heels when a woman enters a room? Plus, the power extends from men to other women, who at the least responded to the expertise it took to wear a pair of high heeled shoes.

So, where did the danger come in for me? Actually, in. several different ways. First came the pure challenge of wearing heels. I had never experienced anything like it in my entire life but only knew the shoes made me feel so deliciously feminine. Through sheer effort, I conquered my fear of wearing heels so much that I forgot I was wearing them and ended up with another big problem, looking like a linebacker in drag, in heels. So much so that one night as I was trying to negotiate the stairs at home, my wife barked at me with a feet forward command. I never forgot that night and resolved to walk better in the future.

There were times in my past when heels went out as a fashion accessory and flat shoes were in with over-sized sweaters and short mini skirts for ciswomen everywhere. I was overjoyed with the idea of showing my legs off in tights and opaque pantyhose but again found myself in a situation where I needed to really concentrate on how I walked femininely without the heels I had come to rely upon. It seemed one of my favorite female privileges was taken away just when I was getting used to them. As with anything else in the fashion world of women, if you don’t like something, just wait because change is just around the corner.

That corner for me turned out to be a long way away. My fashion sense turned into a strong urge to blend in with other women in the world. Which meant where I was going, the women around me never wore heels. Especially all of my lesbian friends. Like them, I went for comfort in my footwear and blended right in, especially at all the lesbian mixers I went to.

My caveat to all of this comes from the transgender women such as “Stana” at the “Femulate” blog who have fabulous legs. Years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting her in Dayton, Ohio. Stana is tall to begin with and makes a striking beautiful woman when you meet her in person. Where we met, there were a group of men waiting for a ride when the elevator opened and out stepped Stana in all her long-legged glory. From where I was waiting, I could see everyman in the lobby turning to admire her. As you can tell, I have never forgotten the moment years ago when Stana took every advantage of her legs and heels as a transgender woman.

As I grew older, unfortunately, I had an old football injury destroying my ability to wear any heels at all. I broke my left ankle twice in the same place and wearing heels just became unbearable. To compensate in my own way, I try to buy stylish shoes and boots with no heels that I can walk in.

Regardless, I still remember the days when I felt the power of wearing my high heels gave me. Even after I went through the paranoia of feeling I was so much taller in the shoes. I decided to stand tall and be proud of myself, even though I was barely six feet tall. I had the opposite effect of going to sleep in my heels. I was wearing them proudly when I could. As I said, time has passed for me and I need to go for total comfort in my footwear, and it makes me sad. I feel I have lost a portion of my transfeminine self which will never be reclaimed. In the meantime, I can sit back and admire any woman I see negotiating the world in her high heeled shoes. As I know what she is going through, so I appreciate it.

As for you, if you haven’t checked out the “Femulate” blog yet, try it and you will see several transwomen and cross dressers in their heels and hose. Then you can go home and practice. Till you have your walk down and attempt in the public’s eye and watch out for sidewalk cracks which can cause you problems. Which I know from personal experiences.

 

  

What Was I Walking Into

 

Image from the 
Paris Photographer
on UnSplash. 

Many times, in my life, I have wondered what I was walking into. Sometimes, it did not have anything to do with being transgender but many times it did. And sometimes I was wearing high heels which I was not used to which increased the risk of what I was doing.

The main time it did not was when I went into the Army during the Vietnam War. I had no idea what basic training would have in store for me except I would need to get in better physical condition. I did make a half-hearted effort at trying but failed miserably and gave up. On another negative side, I knew I would have to give up all my cherished cross-dressing activities for the next three years of my life.

It turned out, in the scheme of life, three years did not turn out to be that long as traveling the world to three continents kept me plenty busy and I grew used to the idea of not knowing what I was walking into. So much so that I adopted “Call me the Breeze” by “Lynard Skynyrd “as my official song when I was on the radio. Because I was always rolling down the road. Through it all, I learned that my affinity for women never changed. I wanted deeply to live in their world and all the running I was doing would never change that. It was a lesson in life I wished I would have listened to later.

When I served my three years in the military, my restless spirit continued to dominate me and caused me to try to outrun my gender issues. I constantly was trying different jobs in different places unsuccessfully trying to run away from being transgender. Sometimes I had secret agendas, sometimes I did not. Like the time we moved from Ohio to New York City. Somehow, I thought being closer to a more liberal populace would help me to be able to come out of my gender shell. It did not work out that way because of several different reasons which would take another blog post to explain.

Another idea I had which actually worked out better for me was the time we moved from a very rural area of Southern Ohio along the Ohio River to Columbus, Ohio which was a couple of hours away. This time, I knew for sure that I could get back in contact with the friends I had made in years previous at the gender diverse parties and mixers I was going to. I was successful and reestablished myself with the group and tried to make up for lost time and at the same time, settle down.

When I did settle down, I was able to start exploring the feminine world as a transgender woman which meant almost nightly, I was walking into new situations I had never seen before. From gay and lesbian venues to big sports bars, the world was new and sometimes scary. Again, “Call me the Breeze” should have been my theme song due to all the new situations I was facing. Anything I enjoyed doing as a man, I tried to do as a woman to see if I still enjoyed it. Spoiler alert…I did and kept on trying more and more new situations to see if I could handle what I was walking into.

On the flip side, I am hesitant to recommend this type of transgender lifestyle to anyone. Too many times, I boosted my confidence through alcohol abuse and was fortunate to have never caused any major problems all the time I drove when I shouldn’t have. These days I barely drink at all and never drive when I do. The other problem comes from the increasingly nasty anti-transgender reaction which will undoubtedly be stirred up again in the upcoming elections by the orange Russian asset’s minions across the country. We have a close senate race coming up here in Ohio and I am sure I will see the transgender lies about the Democratic candidate before too long. He has run before, and the television ads were nasty.

Regardless, I am fortunate that these days, I present mainly as old and don’t have many problems walking into new situations. I will have several coming up in the next six months or so to keep me on my transfeminine game. I have an eye appointment at the VA as well as a hematology visit coming up soon as well as another bus tour vacation south in January. Not to mention my mammogram which will be in February this coming year.

It has become part of life for me to wonder what I am walking to at my stage of life. Especially hematology where they are going to do a total blood work check up on how my body is working but I will jump off of that bridge when I come to it. Which is what I have done through most of my life. This time I had to do it without all the male privilege I had built up which as scary.

 

 

Asleep at the Switch...a Gender Problem Unsolved

 

JJ Hart, Mystic Connecticut. 

I am seventy-six years old and totally admit throughout most of my life, I have been asleep while tending to my own gender switch.

I can easily make all the excuses about not having access to any gender information at all growing up, but the fact remains that it was all my own fault. Most certainly, I should have tried something to act upon solving my severe gender dysphoria. Starting most days, not knowing if I was going to be a boy or a girl should have been a huge red flag that sooner or later, I would have to throw my gender switch.

Maybe calling it a switch was my first mistake as my switch turned out to be a one-hundred-amp breaker which threatened to shut down all of my existence if turned off. There was nowhere to turn, and I ended up guarding the breaker as it controlled my existence. It wasn’t until the internet came along did I realize I had choices with my gender dysphoria and more importantly, there were others close to me dealing with the same problems. The only difference was that they did not seem to let on that they had a problem at all. Some were beautiful and effeminate, some were not, but all were making their way through a world I had only dreamed of.

All of you of a certain age may remember who I am talking about. “Virginia Prince” and her “Transvestia” opened up a whole new world for me as did the “Tapestry” publication. Through all of that exciting cross-dressing input came visits to nearby mixers and meeting other transvestites like me in person. Or so I thought so. What I really found was a group of people in various stages of throwing their gender switches. Some had already resorted to throwing a breaker on being a man at all and were preparing for gender realignment surgery and never turn back. Then there were the others who were still desperately hanging on to their fragile manhood by smoking cigars and trying to walk in heels in a dress and cowboy hat. All in the days before “Urban Cowboy” came along and made women in cowboy hats cool.

Through it all, once again I was lost. I did not know if I wanted to throw my switch and hang out with either group, so I stayed to my self as I more or less drifted to the effeminate group in the room. Especially those who continued the party after the mixer by going to a large lesbian dominated dance club. I did not dance but still wanted an opportunity to see if I could still fit in with any group, at all. Finally, I did when I was invited to much smaller diverse parties at an acquaintance’s home in nearby Columbus, Ohio. I was intrigued because I never knew who I was going to meet up with. From cross dresser admirers to the occasional lesbian, they were all there at one time or another. Including the impossibly feminine transsexuals who made an appearance too. Never knowing who I would meet helped me to determine which switch I would throw if I ever had the chance.

As time went on, my hand began to tremble as I reached for the big power breaker which I knew had the power to end life as I knew it. The potential was there to wipe out everything I had worked so hard as a man to accomplish. Throwing my life into a huge blackout.

Once I made it past the biggest mistake I was making, the darkness around my choice began to brighten somewhat. The mistake was I thought just appearing as a ciswoman would clear the path to my dream. When instead, it was just the beginning. To throw the big breaker and end my male life successfully, there would be so much more learning to do which went past just being accepted by the diverse groups I was meeting at the parties I was going to. I would have to sever my ties, hitch up my big girl panties and get out of the gay clubs and into the world.

One thing became increasingly certain as I did it, I could and would be able to leave my past behind and survive in an exciting but so scary new feminine world where I was able to compete successfully one on one with other ciswomen. Once my path head became clear, did I have the courage to follow my dream and live a transfeminine life I always had wanted to live. More importantly, I had fooled with my main breaker with the power on and had never got electrocuted.

 

The Yin and Yang of Gender

 

Yin and Yang from Gabriel Vasiliu 
on UnSplash. 

You might ask why I would write a post explaining why I was in such a hurry to transition into my womanhood when it took me nearly fifty years to come out of my gender shell. I finally discovered I was in a classic war between my yin and yang personalities.

Today, I am writing to explain the two forces I faced as I decided when and how to transition. My own personal yin and yang of gender. I guess it doesn’t matter which of the two forces I had to deal with, or if my yin side was feminine and my yang side was masculine because both were prominent parts of my life. Yang flourished because he had to early in my life and yin did the same when she finally had a chance to live and exist. I found this description from “Wikipedia” which backs up my theory:

“In Chinese creation theory, the universe develops out of a primary chaos of primordial qi or material energy, organized into the cycles of yin and yang, force and motion leading to form and matter. "Yin" is retractive, passive, contractive and receptive in nature in a contrasting relationship to "yang" that is repelling, active, expansive and repulsive.” It described me completely.

Yin and yang caught me chasing my tail as I would run back to the mirror as quickly as I could to put on a dress, make-up, and convince myself how pretty I was. It was yang’s primary form of escaping any potentially troublesome situations. As I always explain, coming to terms with all of this caused great torment, and now I wished I had someone to at least discuss it with except the one good therapist I was fortunate to be placed with at the Veterans’ Administration in Dayton, Ohio. She was understanding and even had a basic understanding of the LGBTQ community, so I did not have to educate her at all. However, we did not ever get into the clash of my yin and yang genders. On the plus side of our therapy, she never tried to equate any of my bi-polar depression issues with my need to express my yin side of myself.

Ironically, I think my yang side was very active and expansive in pushing my yin into the world. He provided the life lessons I needed to get out and push my gender envelope by learning new things. Without him, the initial exploratory trips to the regular venues I established myself in as a novice transgender woman would have never happened. So many nights I sat in my car for what seemed like forever before I summoned my courage to go inside.

On the other hand, it was yang who did his best to ensure his male world would never be taken away and he made a strong, experienced adversary. The problem became was how I was ever going to join my yin and yang together and form hopefully a good transfeminine person. The answer was I never had to really give up all the life which yang brought to the table. It turned out, I still was able to follow my love of sports, all the way to keeping my sexuality when lesbians took over my life. Altogether the entire process of joining my yin and yang proved to be easier than I thought. I just needed the courage to do it.

It would be too easy to say all transgender women and transgender men suffer from yin and yang gender problems, but the idea may go along way towards explaining what we feel to an outsider. It is far out of my pay grade to predict what anyone may do when confronted with such complex gender problems a trans person has. In fact, when I go back to “Wikipedia”, it even mentions gender in this form:

“When pertaining to human gender, yin is associated to more rounded feminine characteristics and Yang as sharp and masculine traits”.

I don’t know about you, but the whole definition works for me, and I wonder why it has taken me so long to stumble upon it in my research. In some ways, yin and yang reinforces my idea that transgender people deserve a special place in the world. Not one of scorn and discrimination. Maybe the average person just needs to know more about us on a regular basis and not what they hear from politicians. But they can’t even govern well enough to keep our government open, so I can’t see much chance of that anytime soon.

Do "It" or Die

 

Image from Claudia Love
on UnSplash.  

I find it humorous when a gender bigot or some sort of other hater thinks transgender women or trans men had a choice when they decided to transition into the gender they should have always been.

The haters conveniently overlook the fact we trans people spend a lifetime of discontent over our gender dysphoria. In my case, the dysphoria invaded my already frail mental health and nearly destroyed it and me. I suffered from being born into the pre-internet “dark ages” where information on gender issues in particular was very hard to come by. It took years of my life before I was formally diagnosed with dysphoria and even worse, a bi-polar disorder.

It all started when I spent my days off work in bed, not wanting to move at all and forcing myself to work to keep my job. Of all people, the first real gender therapist I had diagnosed my problem when I brought it up in a conversation we were having. She ended up telling me she could prescribe medications for my depression but not for me wanting to be a woman. I should have listened to her and took more action than just cross dressing when she told me that. I was still stubborn though, and my male side thought he could conquer all. Setting up an internal war I would fight for years. I was fortunate when the prescribed medications worked with my depression but not so fortunate when they did absolutely nothing when it came to me wanting to be a woman. In other words, my gender therapist was right.

In the meantime, as my gender war raged on, I was out of my closet exploring the world to see if I could survive at all. As with any other novice, I had my good days and my bad days but something deep inside kept telling me to keep going because my survival was at risk. How much so, I still had not fully grasped.

As with anyone else, the years seemed to fly by and regardless of the unlikely idea I could ever achieve my dream of competing in and surviving in a transfeminine world successfully, I slowly was making it. Ironically, many times when I did make it, the trip up was not worth the trip down mentally. A prime example was the night I went to a cross dresser-transgender mixer on Long Island, New York and was forced to show proof I was actually a man before I was admitted to the mixer. Of course, I was on cloud nine for days after that before I crashed back down into my unwanted male world. I so badly wanted to take the next step in my transition but was afraid to do it which created extra pressure on me. Sadly, I took the pressure out on my second wife who I perceived as a problem when she did not understand what I wanted to do.

It turned out, I needed a ciswoman in my life to challenge me to do more than just look like a woman. She forced me into searching for the elusive lives’ ciswomen lead, and why they were so different than men. Still, I was stubborn and thought I had already put that research in until my path took me to a whole different gender world which I was never allowed to visit before. Until I tried and finally let in to see what my wife was talking about.

By this time, I was reaching the point in my life when all my explorations into womanhood were taking me as far as I could go. I was staring ahead at reaching my sixties and knew I was not getting any younger. It was time to try to be approved for gender affirming hormones or HRT and take the next big step towards my dream life. If I did not, I may never have the chance to do it again. Plus, I was coming off the darkest moments in my life when everyone dear to me died (including my wife) and the only comfort I had was my inner feminine self. At that point, she showed me the reality of where I was in life.

As the pressure mounted to choose which direction my life would take at the age of sixty, I chose female and closed the book forever on my male self. At that point, I never looked back and took the pressure off myself. Finally, a wise move and somewhere I could hear my second wife saying I told you so. She did but I just did not listen. And, by the way, I still suffer from depression and from dysphoria but now I have learned to live with both of them by living the way I was born to be.

I did it before I died.

 

 

 

 

 

Following the Gender Breadcrumbs

 

Image from Elena Moshvilo
on UnSplash.

Following the gender breadcrumbs in my life meant finding the brief moments of gender euphoria I experienced and running with them.

Even when the mirror provided me with euphoria with the rush I felt when I saw myself as a girl, the feelings seemed to be exceedingly short and frustrating. I had yet to figure out my longing for the feminine clothes I was wearing meant very little to me. What was more important was, could the cross-dressing process ever take me closer to my dream of living a transfeminine womanhood.

Along the way, there were times when the breadcrumbs almost disappeared totally, leaving me completely lost and back into my closet. In despair, as I looked around, I did find enough crumbs to keep me moving because I was slowly learning, failure was not an option. I could take many of the hard-earned lessons I learned in the male world, adapt them and use them in my new exciting feminine world. For example, I learned that even though men compete differently than women, there was an equally intense competition going on between the ciswomen in the world that men knew very little about. Way past just being concerned of another woman looked better than them.  Since I did not have to worry about that, it took one more problem away from me. I never thought I looked better than any cisgender woman and I was not that shallow anyway.

I had more important problems to worry about as I searched for breadcrumbs to guide me along the path, I was on to transgender womanhood. Afterall, I was seeking to accomplish one of the most difficult tasks a human attempt to do which is change one of the most basic needs a person has, and that is their gender. Starting all over and carving out a new life was daunting for me, and I needed all the help I could get. For some reason, I found myself with ciswomen who spread the gender breadcrumbs for me. I could sit back and observe how they conducted their lives, good and bad. From them, I could see not all was peaches and cream as a woman then decide if I still wanted to do it. Then structure my life the best I could. My biggest problem was throwing out and ignoring all the hard-earned male breadcrumbs I had accumulated. In fact, I had almost put together the entire loaf which I kept trying to break up and throw away.

The most positive aspect of my life became the nights I went out with my lesbian and transgender woman friends, and we actually enjoyed ourselves so much we began to do it more and more. My breadcrumbs became easier to follow because I was different to my friends. I was not quite a full-fledged ciswoman as they were, but on the other hand, I was far from being a man they stayed away from. I was certainly baking my new loaf as a transgender woman with the help of my inner self who had been with me all the way and was just waiting to be set free.  It seemed most all of my dark lonely nights were finally behind me again in life. This time, on the side of the gender border I so long had waited for to open.

Wherever you are on your gender path, I hope it is lit well enough for you to see your breadcrumbs and have enough gender euphoria to get you by until you face another learning experience. I know, at times, the entire experience will seem overwhelming and hopeless. But the light at the end of the tunnel does not have to be the train and again I point out what a difficult path you are trying to follow. Risking, spouses, families, friends and jobs are never easy and is intimidating to say the least.  That is why if took me till the age of sixty to take the leap of faith I always wanted to do…live as a woman on my own terms.

It is important to note, you are doing the search on your own terms and the nay-sayers who like to point out you will never be a ciswoman are right. You can’t, but you can reach a womanhood of your own making.

Best wishes to finding all of your breadcrumbs along your path, and reaching your dream.

 

 

 

All that And More

 

JJ Hart

When I jumped from the cross-dressing world and I went into the public, I found myself in a situation where all that was more in my life.

Why? Because I was very naïve about how the two binary genders react to each other. In my relatively sheltered male life, naturally I had only experienced life from the male side only, and I was trying my best to make all I could out of it. To make matters even worse, I was so shy I could barely talk to girls at all. So, I never had any experience with them. No experience led to no confidence which sent me further into my shell.

I used my shell to protect myself the best I could and give the best impression I could that I was a so-called normal boy. For years, I fought the good male fight and internalized all of my feminine feelings. In the meantime, I was studying the girls and women around me, daydreaming of the day I could be just like them. My gender workbook was blank at the time, and I should have hung a sign on me saying “no experience necessary to survive.” In the meantime, I immersed myself in sports and cars and appeared to the outside world as a normal young male. There I go, using the “normal” word again, when I know now, there just isn’t such a thing.

It took me years of trying to break out of my shell or closet and tentatively go out into the world as a girl. I started at night by going to places I knew would be deserted but then again had big windows where I could still see my dim reflection. I was actually headed to a book/magazine store where I could hopefully navigate the books but never had the courage to do it and ended up going back home deeply disappointed in myself. Slowly, I resolved to do better but I never did make it into that particular store. Instead, I began to explore the world of women’s clothing stores where I found any number of helpful clerks who were more than willing to look past my gender, and into my available money.

After I realized that the women’s clothing stores were too easy on me and did not present a challenge, I began to branch out and try to look for more challenging venues. I came up with the plan to stop for lunch when I went out cross-dressed, just to see what would happen. I discovered that when I was dressed to blend in with the rest of the cisgender women around be, I was able to interact with the servers waiting on me. More importantly, I was beginning to realize, it was easier for me to talk one on one with another woman than it ever was when I was a man. It was a huge point in my life which ranked right up with realizing I was much more than a male wanting to wear feminine clothes on occasion. It would lead the way to me discovering I could live the transfeminine life I had always dreamed of.

In many ways, I was able to channel the pure fear I felt when I went out for the first time as my true authentic self and turn it into energy I used to further my communication skills with the public at large, and women in particular who seemed to be more receptive to me because I was in their world. Before I knew it, I was able to settle down and begin to enjoy my new life as a transgender woman. To be sure, I was different than most everyone else I encountered but I wanted desperately to make it a positive difference. Mainly because nearly everyone I met had never known another transgender woman or trans man in their life. I just had to make our meeting a special occasion which was all of that, and more.

In return, I was learning valuable lessons from the ciswomen I met. In ways they never realized, the women helped me discover the wonderful world of my own womanhood. In doing so, I was able to navigate the pitfalls of my male to female transition and always move on to higher ground.

When I did, I went on to discover the layers of life women live in during their lives which they hide from men. My life went from chasing a dream to living it as I discovered a transgender woman’s life was all that and more.