A Trans Girl and her Football

 

Ohio State versus Michigan. 

When I seriously began to think of pursuing my male to female gender transition, I wondered what I would do about all my male baggage in my new feminine life.

Since I was nearly sixty years of age, I had plenty of baggage to consider what I was going to keep and what had to go. By far, my sports baggage was the largest piece of baggage I needed to wonder about was my love of sports. Especially football and baseball.

Ultimately, I found I did not have to worry about anything because ciswomen around me were catching up to me in their love of sports. To make it clearer, as I looked around during the big games I was watching in the sports bars I was hanging out in, I was beginning to notice more and more women in their football jerseys around me. All of a sudden, I did not feel so out of place. I knew some women were into sports, such as my second wife, but not to the level I was.

Also, what helped me was the customer/regular relationships I built with the bartenders I saw on a regular basis. It even got to the point when my beer was always waiting for me when I sat down in front of a big screen television to watch a game.  When all of this was happening, I was deciding I could take my love of sports with me as I transitioned into transgender womanhood. It was just part of my inheritance.

Little did I know, the best was yet to come, and I could bring my sports baggage with me. It turned out, my wife Liz and other ciswomen friends I had made along the way were all as passionate as I was about watching sports. I even was living life large when I was invited to go to a women’s roller derby match one day in Cincinnati by my lesbian friends. It was also a dollar beer night which also added to the fun.

The whole focus of this post is “The Game” is today. Or in other words, the Ohio State/Michigan football game. I make no secret of my love for the Ohio State Buckeyes as Liz is also so we will be tuned into the game. Ironically, the game was one of the main days out of Thanksgiving and Christmas we ever got together. The good news is, I have a better person to watch football with (my wife Liz) who helped me build my life as a transfeminine person, rather than tear it down like my brother did.

No matter how the game goes, I will forever be grateful to all the cis women in my life who encouraged me to be me which included bringing along my love of sports. It probably all came from playing sports (primarily football) which kept the bullies away at the same time. So, it worked well, even though I made it through a couple broken bones. One funny story I have about broken bones was when I broke my collar bone. The doctor who examined me said he would not reset the bone, and I would always have a lump where the break was. Then, the doctor said it would not matter since I would not be wearing a strapless gown in my life. I thought, if he had really known, he would not have said such a thing. Of course, I was worried from then on about that lump on my collar bone and always remember what the doctor said.

Any piece of advice I may have for anyone considering a gender transition of their own, is to look at your baggage closely and then what the ciswomen around you are doing. The world of women is always evolving with the world and is never staying in one place. It happened to me with sports and can happen to you too with some of your questionable baggage. It could be a chance for you to be a leader rather than a follower. If you follow your heart, others will find no problems with you. People are like sharks and have the tendency to circle the wounded ones quickly. Don’t give them the chance to see you bleed.

I know it is impossible to bring all your male baggage with you. Afterall, he had a hand in making you who you are today. Possibly, it all could make you a better person as a trans woman. You already are because of the understanding you have of the two main binary genders and you can build on that success.

Maybe you can be a trans girl with her football too, and GO BUCKEYES!

 

Stopping was Never an Option

 

Image from Josiah Niklas
on UnSplash.

Very early on, during my very confusing crossdressing years, I wondered if I could just stop the madness of wanting to change my gender as I grew older. I did not know at the time that stopping would not be an option.

As I grew older, my desire to be a pretty girl (then a woman) grew with me. The more I cross-dressed in front of the mirror, the better I became at the basics of makeup and whatever fashion I could get my hands on. Plus, the better I became, the more I wanted to do more to improve myself. Increasingly I knew stopping and purging all my feminine clothes was never going to be an option even though I tried and tried. At that point, I tried a clumsy attempt to come out to a couple friends I had but was rudely rejected. I needed to return to internalizing all my feelings of wanting to be a girl if I was to survive in my world. Which was cruel and unusual punishment for me and more importantly, my fragile mental health. I was already stuck in long periods of depression before I was diagnosed as being bi-polar by a therapist I went to as I grew up and away from my parents.

When I did move away to college, I actually lost my desire to cross dress and act like a girl for almost a year. I did not know how to act when stopping all of a sudden became an option.

Of course, before I knew it, my gender dysphoria came creeping back into my life. I then needed to build my wardrobe fashion, undergarments and makeup all from scratch. I vividly remember the trigger object which started it all. My future fiancé for some reason, found a short wig to cover her long straight hair, and tried to surprise me with it. I was not pleased and let her know it. I then set out to get her a wig I liked. Funds were tight as I worked at a small radio station where I went to college, but I managed to scrape together the money to buy a beautiful long blond wig I had seen in the window of a beauty shop in my hometown. Under the guise of buying, it for her, I had really wanted it for myself. As luck would have it, she did not like it, and I was able to “inherit” the wig when we separated years later.

I kept the wig until I joined the Army for my Vietnam War tour of duty and beyond, as I was able to hide it away on the rare occasions, I could use it to “top” off my outfit when I cross-dressed. Even with all the traveling I was doing with “Uncle Sam” I still was able to anchor myself with the belief that stopping my idea of being a woman was not a fairy tale and could still be possible someday.

It wasn’t until I seriously began to explore the public’s perspective of me as a newly minted transgender woman, did the world start to change and I knew nothing that I was trying in my new world was going to change…ever. Even still, ever became a big word for me as I hit a series of roadblocks to become a full-fledged transfeminine person. Just when it seemed I was moving in the right direction, something would come along and temporarily stop me. At that time, through all the roadblocks, I finally realized I could see my dream of living like a woman was certainly not an option and it would be a shame to waste all the time and effort I put into my path.

I also needed to make the final decisions I would need to successfully put my male life behind me. What I would do about supporting myself and coming out to my remaining family became very important decisions. My only child (daughter) made it easy on me because she accepted me totally. While on the other hand I was rejected by my only sibling (brother) and we became estranged. My parents, second wife and most of my friends that mattered had passed away which made my coming out process easier. One way or another, I had decided to go my own way no matter what anyone thought.

If I had realized earlier that stopping my male to female gender transition was never an option, life would have been so much easier for me. I would have been allowed to live the best I could, make all my mistakes earlier and achieve my ultimate dream sooner. Rather than stubbornly hanging on to a male life I was born into but never wanted.

 

 

 

Transgender Dreams

 

Image from Felipe Delgado
on UnSplash

Obviously, we transgender women and transgender men do a lot of dreaming when it comes to the ultimate results of our lives. For example, when I was very young, I could never speak truthfully when an adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Saying I wanted to be a woman would have never been acceptable and would have rewarded me with a visit to a psychiatrist. So, I said something more acceptable such as a lawyer or a veterinarian.

I had to save my ultimate desires to be feminine for my dream world and often went to sleep thinking of how it would be if I could wake up as a pretty girl. Of course, I was never able to take advantage of such a thing happening to me and I needed to make the best of what I had to work with. Which was about ready to radically change for the worse when I went through male puberty. As I started my growth spurt, I rapidly outgrew all my mom’s clothes I had tried to squeeze into and had to rely on my meager allowance added to my newspaper route delivery money to try to sneak out to stores and buy my own clothes and makeup.

Through this portion of my life, my mirror was my friend and helped me to bring dreams of being a pretty girl to life, no matter how I really looked. It wasn’t until I began to experience the public’s reaction to me did, I finally get a fair and accurate reaction to how I really looked. I desperately dreamed of being more than a clown in drag. After tons of work and trial and error experiences, I finally made it to where the public at least knew I was being serious about achieving my dream of being a woman. Little did I know, the real work I would need to do to achieve my dream was about to begin.

The more I explored the world as a novice transgender woman, the more I found I had to do to survive in the new exciting feminine world I had dreamed of being a part of. When I was in the public’s eye, I found I attracted the attention of ciswomen as never before and as I did, I needed to get radical and do things such as talk to them. Initially, I was very shy and completely unprepared to take such a big step, but I was way past the point of ever turning back. For the first time in my life, my dream appeared to be within reach, if I kept learning what my new world meant.

I found I was stuck in some sort of a gender never-never land. Ciswomen instinctively knew I was not Cis but on the other hand, wanted to be in their world. Fortunately, I found most of them let me into their worlds and showed me a path to being successful, if they knew it or not. I did not care how I received the help and guidance; I was just trying to achieve my dream of living as a successful transgender woman. As I tried to point out in yesterday’s post, I went past the point of trying to be trans all the way to just being me. Which I think the women around me accepted because of my honesty. By now, you may be thinking what about the men around me? For the most part, they left me alone. Which was fine by me. I wanted out of their club and wanted nothing to do with going back if I had anything to do with it. I was successful and never did. My dream increasingly appeared to be reachable, and destiny opened her doors for more success for me. Primarily when it came for time to consider going down the path of gender affirming hormones or HRT.

I knew first, I needed to find a doctor to approve taking the hormones and I found one in one of the Dayton, Ohio LGBTQ publications. He had openings and I was able to get in for a checkup and then receive my precious prescriptions for initial minimum dosages for estradiol and spiro to get started on a new path towards achieving my dream as never before. After I began the minimum dosages, I had no adverse reactions and in fact the opposite was true. I felt as if I should have been on the meds for my entire life. They made me feel so good.

By this time, I felt as if I was living proof that transgender dreams come true if you pay your dues such as I did. The dues I paid were certainly the best investment I ever made.   

 

Is There a way to Be Transgender

 

JJ Hart in Mystic, Connecticut.

To be fair, I saw this question posed on a couple different sites on the internet and thought I would comment on it. The question is, is there a way to be transgender.

As I thought about it, I initially thought for years that there was a way to be a transgender woman and that would be to copy all the other cisgender women around me. Even though I thought this was the best way to go, in the long run doing it hurt me. Why? Because doing it stopped me from becoming my true authentic feminine self.

Surely, cis women are guilty of forming cliques while men form teams and to be included in a feminine clique, you have to look and act the part…at first. I discovered that once I was accepted by an alpha female, my entrance requirements became easier to come by. But what I did not realize was how perceptive the other ciswomen in the group would be to me and how women can spot a fake a mile away. I would have to proceed with caution if I was going to succeed at the invisible goal of being transgender. To succeed, I did all the usual things such as obsess on my appearance so I could blend in with the other women when I received a cherished invitation to a girl’s night out.

Then, when I arrived at the function and my fear began to subside, I needed to look around and judge all my reactions to the conversations going on around me. Which marked my first real idea that there was not a real way to be transgender. Afterall, when the conversation turned to kids, I still could participate because I had one that of course I did not birth but still participated in the trials and tribulations of raising her. Similar to the other women in the group. It was just a small example of how I survived the evening as I added in my input when I could. It seemed to work because all the other women except for one accepted me and I ended up enjoying myself.

As the years went by, and I began to experience many nights as my transfeminine self, I found there was no way to be transgender but there was a way to be myself. When I did was when I became more and more successful in the world as a trans woman and my ultimate dream of living a full life as such could be realized. Also, during that time, I spent quite a few evenings socializing with a transgender woman friend of mine before she moved away to Dallas. The two of us were prime examples of differing ideas on how we wanted to pursue our lives as trans women. My friend Racquel wanted surgery to look the best she could and attract men, while I found myself comfortably in the company of lesbians who I found for the most part accepted me for who I was.  I did not and have not to this day desired any major gender surgeries. Mainly because I did not need them to help me to realize my way to be transgender.

Of course, as human beings, we are all different and one of the problems we have now is being forced into one small box by a society which does not understand us and for the most part has never met a transgender woman or man, that they know of. Some, like me, are forced into forms of living stealth just to survive. When just using the bathroom becomes a threat to your existence in some parts of the country, something needs to be done, yet we continue to be forced backwards in most parts of my native state of Ohio. It all makes just being transgender so difficult to do.

Enough of the negative, and now on to the positive. Even here in Ohio, the LGBTQ winds of change are blowing with several more communities proclaiming they are safe zones for us. And, with the strong showing so far for the Democrats in the country, real change could be on the horizon for change as we need it.

If and when change does happen, it will make it easier to live your gender dreams and realize one thing. In the end you are much more than just another transgender woman or trans man. You are you, and that is the most important fact to realize if you are to be successful in your world.

There is no way to be transgender but there is a way to be you. 

Gender Professionals

 

Image from Alysha Rosly
on UnSplash.

On occasion, I can just sit back and observe other women. Through my observations, it has occurred to me that some ciswomen are better at being women than others. For example, they walk straighter with their shoulders back and are proud of their femininity.

It has also been my theory that all females do not have the right to claim their femininity or the right to be called women just because they were born that way. Transgender women in particular know that becoming a woman can take many paths and we have can claim our own womanhood when our gender workbook is filled out.

Does it make us gender professionals? No, not in its own right but it does give us a leg to stand on when we are out in the public eye just trying to live our lives. It could be argued that transgender women and trans men must be better than our gender counterparts to get by and stand a chance of becoming gender professionals.

The question could be also, what does being gender professional really mean. I am only one gender conflicted person of course but for me to understand what a gender pro really meant, I needed to go into the world and live it. First, I tried to go to gay venues to see if possibly I was attracted to other men, or would they be attracted to me as a transgender woman. They were not attracted to me in any way and considered me no more than another drag queen on their turf. Which I wanted nothing to do with. Next, I tried the few lesbian venues I could find in the Dayton, Ohio area. There were three, and I found I was hated in one, had a neutral reception in another and was warmly accepted in a third. From the experience I mainly learned the different levels within the lesbian community and was it possible to work my way in at all.

The third and final venues I ended up at were the big sports bars I frequented as a man. In them, I was surprised to learn how quickly I could establish myself as a regular if I did not cause any trouble, learned to smile and then tip well. I learned too, to try to carry myself as a gender professional. Leaving no question of who I really was. I had to learn also carrying myself as a gender professional was completely different from being a gender professional. It meant I could carry myself well if I was wearing a fancy sweater and slacks, or my favorite team’s football jersey with a pair of jeans and boots. I discovered, more than anything else, I needed the confidence to do it and the rest of the world be damned if they did not like me. I was just having fun in the world as my self and taking advantage of all the fashion perks of being a woman.

Even with all the learning I was doing at the time, I still made learning from the ciswomen around me a priority. I figured they held the secrets that I needed to complete myself as a professional woman. The times to talk and communicate and the times to keep quiet and shut up and learn come to mind. You might say, I was exploring all the nuances of being a woman and trying to improve myself at the same time. I was fortunate in that almost all of my friends came from the lesbian community, so I came up with a unique view of the world. Especially around men which I learned did not validate my womanhood.

As you can tell, pursuing my quest to be a gender professional overtook much of my thinking. There was so much happening when I met my wife Liz, and I started to accompany her to her meetings she went to for various reasons. What happened was I had no choice but to expand my horizons again and meet a whole new set of people. When I did, I fell back to all the lessons I had learned about communicating with strangers. Not as a transgender woman but as just me.

Most Importantly, I had built back a portion of the self esteem I had lost as a gender professional growing up. I lost the inferiority complex I had put myself through during the rocky days of coming out earlier in life. Believing in myself for the first time as a transgender woman was all it took to get me by and enable me to become a true gender professional.

 

 

Five Million

 

Original image. 
JJ Hart writing.

Recently, I reached a milestone as far as my blogging “career” goes.

This week, I reached and went over my five millionth hit to the blog which was amazing to me when I considered the humble way this all got started. I actually started blogging a long time ago when I barely even knew what the term meant. And I did it mainly because of the discussions I had with “Connie” an online transgender woman friend I had met from Seattle. Along the way, on another site we were on, we discovered a mutual dislike for what we called “trans-nazi’s” or transsexuals who based their worth on the number of gender operations they had undergone. Somehow, they felt better than the rest of us and were not shy about letting us know it.

From there, I had started to relay the experiences I was having as I initially began the trip out of my closet and into the world. “Connie” thought my experiences would be worth sharing and here we are so many years later. In many ways, both of us share the same sarcastic sense of humor, so we matched up well.

On a much deeper level than just harassing the “trans-nazi’s”, I hoped sharing what I went through in my lifelong gender journey would be a great way to pay forward my experiences and help others. Every time I receive a comment or two from a person in need of guidance as a beginning cross dresser or transgender person, I feel honored that they reached out to me. While all our trips are different, at the same time we are similar and have all have the same opportunities to learn from each other.

Five million hits later, I now realize the strain of finding subjects to write about on a daily basis really takes it out on me until I run across a comment or two which keeps me going. It fulfils the original idea I had when I started writing something I did not know I could keep on doing for any length of time. When the comments kept rolling in, I knew I was on the right track because I thought the audience I was writing to represent is a very narrow part of a potential audience. Then I thought, if I was reaching just one person out of the vast majority of readers on the internet, I would be doing my job. I learned to be more satisfied with being more of a niche blog, designed for the transgender audience or those that were questioning being trans and would their life look similar to mine. Because switching your main binary gender is so difficult and intimidating to do.

The bottom line is, I would not have all those hits if it was not for you and I cannot comprehend how many of you come from around the world to visit the blog. My deepest thanks go out to all of you no matter where you are.

Even though now I write on two separate platforms, I still write for free because I feel it is the right thing to do. It just makes me feel better.

Once again, I cannot thank you enough for joining me in my gender journey and I should do it more. Just be assured, it means a lot to me when you read along and even take the time to comment!

May we continue on to many subjects together in the future. 

 

Completing Myself

JJ Hart doing Transgender Outreach Speech

I knew very early on in life that just cross-dressing as a girl in front of the mirror was not going to complete me in many ways. There just had to be more if I was risking my life as I knew it as a boy to dress as close as I could as a pretty girl.

Sadly, I had to ignore my gender truths, went on living life as a boy successfully and learned how to internalize my gender dysphoria. It all came back to haunt me later in life when the effects set in to my already frail mental health. Especially when I had started to go out more and more in public as a self-proclaimed transgender woman and I really put off hiding who I was to the most important person to me who was myself. I refused to make the changes needed to make myself whole for the first time in my life.

In the kindest words available, gender dysphoria was hell for me in my life. What made it so bad was when I applied my makeup correctly, I could actually see what could have been possible in life if I had not had to struggle with my gender identity. What made matters worse was when those brief moments of gender clarity were ripped away when I needed to go back to my male world. In other words, I never allowed myself to be made whole in my life until much later.

What had to happen first was the all-out decision made to do it. I was very cautious in the moves I made because I had so much at risk in my life. Losing my wife, family and job all weighed heavily into my decision. All the time and effort my male self-put into building a successful life would be wasted.  In so many ways  I was in a bad space which I think is humorous for anyone to think I ever had a choice in my battle with gender dysphoria. It was stopping me from being whole and living my life to the fullest.

While all of this was going on, I was attempting to learn as much as I could about living as a transfeminine person. I was going out every spare moment I could in the world to see if I could make it at all. And when I did, I knew I felt increasingly natural, and something was going to have to change in my life if I was to go on living. What happened was I loved the feminine world I was in and even though I experienced several rough spots, I knew I wanted (and needed) to learn more about my own form of womanhood. As I like to say, I was essentially starting from point zero and had everything to learn about feminine existence. Especially an existence where not everyone accepted me. Amazingly most everyone did and I was able to ignore the rest.

As the challenge of turning my life over to my feminine side and living a fulltime transgender existence, again the stress on me increased. Should I go through the process of being approved for gender affirming hormones of HRT was a major hurdle to cross. It would represent to me a final step in making me whole. If the hormones did what I thought they would, and everything I read about also. Even though I knew I could still go off the HRT is something went wrong, nothing ever did, and my body took to them like I should have been born this way.

It did turn out to be the final big step I took to combine my inner Yin and Yang gender selves and make myself a whole productive person. When I found out what I was missing, I had wished I had tried to make myself whole years before I faced the reality of my life and moved forward. Now I know what I did but it is way too late to make up for lost time for me at my advanced age of seventy-six.

Now seems to be the time to (no pun intended) transition into some busy work I have to bring up. The first is, there will be no blog post tomorrow because I am going to my trifecta of medical appointments. Tomorrow is my hematology appointment at the big Cincinnati Veterans Medical Center. It is my yearly visit when they check all sorts of blood related issues such as my all-important estradiol. I just hope it comes out as good as the last major trip to the vampires and my recent eye appointment last week. My eyes were the same as they were several years ago and I did not even need new eyeglasses. The third part of the trifecta won’t be until February when I go for my annual mammogram. So there is a lot going on. When I made my life whole. 

What Makes You...You

 

JJ Hart

Recently, I have taken an informal poll with my wife Liz. We walk a lot and stop to talk to our neighbors quite a bit. Just once I would like to ask the neighbors, we see what makes them, them. Just kidding of course, I can’t imagine doing such a thing in our neighborhood. If I did, I would guess that they would all take for granted their gender and they would look at me as if I was crazy.

Predictably, the women who live on both sides of us are very friendly and the men are rather standoffish to me which brings me to my point of what is up with the men in the world today. First of all, as difficult as it is to being a woman today, in many ways, being a man carries its own set of potential problems. Primarily, having a very fragile idea of their own sexuality. Plus, men are still expected to be primary providers in many families which is added pressure not to lose your job.

For me, growing up, my gender became an early issue, but my sexuality never did as I was attracted to all things woman. At least, in my mind, I had one constant to hang on to about what made me, me.

As I started to grow into myself, I began to understand the differences in what I was facing which were different than the mass majority of the other men around me. When I inwardly did not embrace the male culture, I was born into of competition and posturing, all it caused was extreme mental conflict. Which I am or was sure the other men around me did not have to deal with. Most of my stress was caused by the pressure I put on myself in the highly competitive restaurant business I was in. Even though I was outwardly very successful, inside I wanted to run and hide as my increasingly transfeminine self. At the same time, I wished I could just be like the other men around me and not have to carry around the gender issues I carried. I was resentful either way I turned by not being the ciswoman I wanted to be or the man I always was.

At the same time as all of this was happening, I went exploring in the world as my exciting yet terrified new feminine self. The first move I made was to transition for the second time in my life from being what I perceived as an innocent guy who just liked to look like a woman, all the way to a guy who wanted to be a woman and see if she could interact one on one with other cis women when I was out. Which took me to the fateful evening at TGIF Fridays when I finally decided I had enough of what used to make me, me and wanted a change. As frightened as I was of losing my male privileges, I went ahead with the move, was successful and knew my life would never be the same again.

As I continued my explorations into the new me, I had glimpses of how my life as a transgender woman could be and could not get enough of the learning process, I was a part of. I made it a point to try new situations as a trans woman that I always wanted to be a part of when I was on the outside looking in as a man. I tried gay bars, lesbian bars and even the big sports bars I was familiar with as a guy before I settled into a venue where I was accepted and felt comfortable. In other words, I was involved with learning what made me, me. Something I had been missing my entire life.

I do believe if you are starting your gender journey from scratch these days, you may feel the same sort of resentment I felt when I started, which was something like why me? It was not until I embraced who I really was and learned the benefits of being able to see and live out both sides of the binary gender spectrum. In my case, I needed to put the feminine image I saw in the mirror to the test in the public’s eye to see if I could really pass the public’s scrutiny. Until you get out of your mirror and prepare for the bumps and bruises of your gender path, you will know the truth about yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with going back to being a cross dresser in your closet or a transfeminine person in the world.

As gender challenged transgender women or trans men, we face many uphill battles that other women and men don’t have to face. Such as the basis of our gender at all. It is one of the basics of human nature that we take our gender for granted, but what if we don’t? Then the search starts for who you really are and what makes you, you.

 

 

 

 

Stranger Things have Happened

 

Image from Alexander
Krivisly on
UnSplash.

My gender journey has proven to me that stranger things have happened, just not to me.

What I mean is, on a scale of one to ten at succeeding in ever living a life as a transgender woman, I would have ranked myself some where around an eight. Meaning I was giving myself very little chance of ever making it to my dream life. Along the way now, I wish I had kept more track of every time I succeeded at and then passed a goal I had set for my feminine self.

In many ways, the early days of shopping in mall women’s clothing stores was easy and gave me a false sense of hope. I was naïve and did not realize for the longest time, I just represented as a dollar sign in front of the store clerks, I was facing. Most certainly, I was not the first man in a dress and makeup they had ever seen in their store and would not be the last. Regardless, the false sense of confidence I was giving myself raised my faint hope of ever succeeding at my dream.

As I went not so blissfully on my high-heeled way, I did pick up bits and pieces of information I would need to survive. For once, I thought far enough ahead to set up time away from my wife so I could slip away and shop with the rest of the women in the malls on Black Friday after Thanksgiving. Which had been on my trans bucket list for years. By this time, I had experienced enough time in public as a woman, I knew things such as wearing comfortable footwear was a must for the long trips from the parking lot to the stores, all the way to being stylish but not overdone in my fashion choices for the day so I could blend in well with the other ciswomen I met. Stranger things happened and I had a great time which I will write about in a later blog post.

All of my continued success combined to make me think maybe, just maybe I could achieve my dream life, and I could increase my scale to a four out of ten. What helped me were the short trips I made to Columbus, Ohio to the small diverse parties I went to where I could meet and interact with anyone such as transsexuals on their way to surgery to cross dresser admirers who were there just to watch. I even met a stray lesbian there one night who I left with briefly to go to a big gay club together. Through it all, I was just trying to see where I fit in at all. I figured if I had any success at all at understanding where I was, I hoped I could see the light at the end of my gender tunnel was not the train and just maybe I could live my dream.

As much as I liked the interaction in Columbus, I knew I had to leave the relative safety of the group and try to carve out my own life as a transgender woman in the world. Sure, I was terrified to do it but I knew I had to overcome my fears if I was ever going to be able to move up my scale from a five to a seven. When I made it to a lucky seven, the pressure to live the way I wanted to really be increased. The reason for the increase came because of the new interactive experiences I was now having with other ciswomen around me. What I did was watch the women around me and try to learn how they were living their life and learn my own way.

From then on, when I could see the dream life I had hoped for was in sight, I could really concentrate on my future as a transfeminine person. At that point, I needed to begin my preparations for what do about telling the family close to me about my male to female gender transition, all the way to what I was going to do about surviving financially. I was to the point where I did not have to make it as a transgender woman, I just needed to let it happen. I had to stay in the new moment I was in and live it for all it was worth. It turned out my scale was worth it, all the way.

Stranger things happened to me. I may not have looked like a ten, but I felt like one.

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.