I Wish I Knew Why

 

Image from Anderson Rian
on UnSplash.

It is not like I am new to being out in the world as my authentic feminine self, so I don’t know why I feel certain ways.

One of them happened this morning when I needed to take our car to the shop to get the oil changed before we take a rather lengthy trip to my old hometown later this week. As I have written before, I am still fearful of going by myself to any male dominated businesses.

I think it goes all the way back to when I was a kid when I used to go with my dad to an auto parts business a friend of his owned. There were never any women, and I felt totally out of place. At the time, I felt it was because I was young at the time and I would grow out of feeling self-conscious there. But now I think, it could have been my inner female rebelling at the ideas of being around all that intense masculinity.

Back to this morning, even though I did get an early start, I wanted to be there when they opened at 7:30 AM to get my paranoia over with. I was worried since we are headed into a holiday weekend, they would be busier than they were. Which was a moot point, since I had to figure out what I was going to wear, shave, put on my light makeup and head out the door. After doing all of that, I was still out the door by eight and still was able to get right into the oil change location.

Since I would not be getting out of the car for either of the places I could go ultra casual and wear my jeans along with my “Libra” themed burgundy tank top which I wear with my long hair pulled back so it softly falls over my shoulders which is my revenge for having to cut my hair extremely short when I was young and even later when I was in the Army. I am very fortunate in that I have never had any male pattern baldness, so I have always had a great head of hair.

It turns out all my paranoia was unfounded as none of the male workers did anything out of their way to make fun of me and were professional in every way. Before I knew it, I was on my way and breathing normally again. On my way to my nest stop at my wife’s Liz and I’s favorite coffee shop to pick up coffee and a light breakfast. Other than having coffee and food we like, the coffee shop also has a LGBTQA+ flag proudly on one of their walls. Again, the person who served me was very nice and put me at ease.

On the way home, during my short trip trying out the world again as an independent transgender woman, I was wondering if changing my estrogen HRT patches out today had anything to do with my moodiness about going out in the world alone. Friday, when I make a much longer trip back to my old hometown, Liz will be going with me as I must pick up more copies of my name change documents from all the way back to 2015.

Sadly, I have more negative memories of my hometown than good ones, but I need the legal copy with the judge’s signature on it for a life insurance policy I forgot so long ago. I can procrastinate with the best of them!

To make a small joke about my visit to have the oil changed this morning is that all my fluid levels turned out to be OK. Maybe the true win was to realize what the basic reason I still fear going into male dominated spaces so badly. It is a deep-seated problem which goes back to my youth which makes it very difficult to get rid of.

 

 

 

Memories or a Dream?

Image from Ian Dooley
on UnSplash

Too many times, when I went out into the world for the first time as a new transgender woman, I wondered if I was making a memory or living a dream.

Sadly, most of the time I was working so hard to succeed for the first time in a new exciting world, I did not have the time to know if I was making memories or working my way towards a lifetime dream. There was simply not enough time to do all I wanted to do, such as present well enough to blend in with the ciswomen around me. It was like I was driving a new car, and I did not know all the new features I was trying to master. How was I ever going to stop being a man with all the male looks such as a scowl and how I walked and turn myself into a pleasant looking feminine person as I camouflaged all the testosterone damages male puberty had caused me.

There turned out to be a way after I worked my way through not dressing like a teen girl which just drew negative attention to me. Certainly, creating more negative memories than positive ones and my dream of living as a full-time transfeminine person, remained just that. A far-off dream. At first, I had many memories to make and learn from as I followed my dark and lonely gender path. Perhaps my biggest problems came when I realized I was trying too hard when it came to expressing my own brand of feminization because I was working so hard to catch up with my own gender workbook and decide where I wanted to be.

The only dreams I was having during this time of my life were the rare occasions when I went to sleep and dreamed that I was the attractive woman I always wanted to be and the pressure was off to look a certain way as a woman which I had always lived with. I was obsessed with trying to try any beauty secret I could to improve my appearance in the world. This obsession very much was with me until I began to settle into my own beauty routine

 The dream took a giant step towards materializing when my daughter took me to her up-scale beauty/salon and spa to color and style my hair for the first time when it had grown long enough to do it. Even though I was scared beyond belief to do it, I knew this was a golden opportunity to go behind the gender curtain into a female dominated space I had never dreamed of going before. It was amazing as I wrote about several posts ago, and I knew right then why ciswomen were so adamant about having their hair done a certain way. I could not wait until I could scrape up the extra money so I could afford to go back. Plus, with my new hair, there was no way I could keep on presenting male in the world as I knew it.

I was so obsessed with putting myself out into the world, I needed to think of different ways to do it and build more memories such as when I started to meet the ciswomen and lesbians who would form my circle of friends and help me slip across the gender border and behind the gender curtain where I desperately dreamed of being.

At this point, I always mention the good and the bad that happened to me along the way to validating myself as a transgender woman. It took a lot of confidence I didn’t have to make it happen. Too many nights of rejection when I attempted to push the gender envelope too far and was sent home in tears with my new dreams shattered. When it did happen, I needed to rely on my deepest inner feminine self to assure me everything would be OK and these were just memories which happened to be unpleasant to add to my dream. She told me that the roughest dreams you ever had are the ones you had to work extra hard to achieve.

Sooner more than later, I began to have more pleasant memories than bad ones and my ultimate dream again began to come into focus. If I tried hard enough to accomplish all my feminine goals, I could join the others ahead of me in the transgender community I was familiar with and leave my male past behind me forever.

Surely, there is a big difference between memories and dreams. I consider memories a less than physical form of dreams. Meaning memories are easier to come by and dreams are something a human should always have to keep their lives headed in a more positive direction.

Depending upon where you are on your gender path, maybe you are just in the dream phase of where you want to be and that is fine. It is when you begin to build memories of your journey do you start to build the blocks you will need to make it through. During Pride month, no matter what you may read from haters, TERF’s and bigots, you should be proud of the gender dreams you have.

You are worth it and often there are more silent allies and developing transgender women and transgender men that you know who are ready to join society. Just look at your memories and dreams as what you had to go through to arrive where you are today. Someday you may be able to become that confident trans woman you only were when you were asleep.

When it comes right down to it, it does not matter if you are clinging to memories (past and present you are making) or the life you are dreaming of living, The most important thing is the self-love you are able to give yourself. Without it, you have a difficult time loving anyone else.

Thanks for reading along with me and thinking of your own memories and dreams. Any of your comments are always appreciated!

 

Feminine Power Moves

 

Image from Gayatri Mohotra
on UnSplash.

When I first began to seriously explore the world as a transgender woman, I was stripped of all my male privileges and wondered what I could do to survive if I found myself in questionable situations.

The big answer I learned was to try my best not to get myself into questionable situations to begin with. Lessons learned at an early age by ciswomen everywhere such as trying their best not to jeopardize their own personal security from toxic men. When I first came out, I was used to going where I wanted to go, when I wanted to do it which led me into several tense situations. One from a much bigger cross-dresser admirer who had me in his sights in a narrow hallway where I could not escape and another time when I was approached alone on a dark city sidewalk by two men in front of a gay venue. Neither place I should have been to by myself, and I was lucky to escape without any real problems.

By this time, I was used to the only feminine power I had was having doors opened for me by men and I knew I was missing much more in life if I wanted to pay my dues and transition into a transfeminine world basically the hard way. Since I couldn’t afford to go through any of the expensive gender surgeries of the time and did not have any insurance coverage that would cover any facial surgeries, I needed to find ways to accomplish what I wanted to face on my own. I learned the hard way that I could do anything I wanted to if I set my mind to it. Or I passed out of sheer willpower according to my transgender girlfriend Racquel. All it really meant was I was able to work my way into living the life I wanted to live through more effort on my physical appearance through better makeup skills and wardrobe basics. The same things I noticed other ciswomen doing in the world who themselves did not really have “passing privileges.” I just came into my privileges as a woman from a different way.

Another difficult phase of my male to female feminization project was the impact of woman-to-woman communication which continually goes on in the world that men are not subject to. Or the world of non-verbal communication women often use between themselves. I even went to the extent of taking feminine vocal lessons which focused more on what I said rather than how I said it. The keys I was taught were mainly built around the passive aggressive tone’s ciswomen take such as “are you sure you want to do that” rather than the traditional male “don’t do that.” I got quite a bit of valuable gender information from the course to use on my path which was always full of male stop signs. To repeat what I just said in essence instead of giving me a stop sign, my inner feminine soul was saying do you really want to do this.

Of course, the answer always came back to me one way or another that I was on the right path, and I felt so natural doing it that I just had to keep exploring what was ahead around the next blind curve. It was at this point that I began to discover what I had suspected all along those ciswomen had more going for them than having doors opened by men. With the help of HRT or gender affirming hormones, I opened my world to a whole new universe of emotions and senses I never knew (or allowed) myself to have. I was the one who could reach for her coat without shame when she was cold when my thermostat went crazy with hot flashes at the same time. And I became the one who could cry a happy tear at the drop of a dime. If I needed to or not. It was all part of who I was as I began to explore my feminine power base I was developing.

As I always do, I cannot give myself much of the credit for doing more than just surviving in the new women’s world I was as I began to thrive and enjoy my new power base. As my new friends kept telling me, welcome to their world. I needed to be careful how I responded because I did not want to give up much about myself and shield my male past.

Thankfully, by this time I had given up all my male privileges and was excited to be settling into my new life as a transgender woman preparing to go fulltime into the world. By doing so, I needed to prove to myself that I was no longer afraid of being rejected as a trans woman. Primarily by men who resented that I had left the boys club behind to slip behind the gender curtain to play in the girls’ sandbox. Thanks, in no small way to my lesbian friends who showed me how to validate myself.

Somehow, I managed to give myself extra time to drain the remnants of my old male life drain away before I went all the way and gave up all my male clothes. Which was the symbolic way of me finally severing my male past altogether. As difficult as it was to give up all those decades of struggling in a life I did not like, the relief of doing it was amazing.

Before I knew it, I was enjoying everything I could in the new transfeminine life I had only ever dreamed of. I was fortunate that I was able to live through several severe gender-based self-destructive incidents that I paid my dues on and was able to move on to find a whole new set of powers.

It turned out that I was simply giving too much trust to male powers I was born into and never had a chance to do anything about it. When I did, I seized control of my true powers and never looked back.

 

 

 

 

 

So Many Choices...So Little Time

 

Image from Drew Colins
on UnSplash.

One thing that I learned from experiencing decades of cross-dressing is that there were so many choices and so little time.

It all started when I had to scramble for any time, I could find by myself dressing as an imagined pretty girl in front of the mirror without discovery from my brother or worse yet my parents.  I was born as the eldest son into a very male dominated family, and I was expected to fit right in with that male mold. I had little idea at the time that I was destined to break that male mold during my life and it was not going to be easy.

Back in those days, I had very little income that I scraped together from doing household chores and a newspaper delivery route I had for several years. The first feminine items I could afford to buy on my own were makeup accessories but first I needed to figure out a way to get to a store undetected and then decide what to buy. After putting a lot of thought into my situation, I remembered that my grandma lived in town, fairly close to one of the old five and dime department stores that sold makeup. I used the excuse to visit grandma, then go and shop. Or try to.

The only problem with my plan was that my dad worked downtown close to the store I wanted to try to buy my first makeup in. I was tired of using my mom’s samples, That was all well and good until I gathered my courage and walked into the makeup selection of the store I was in. As I viewed the extensive selection of cosmetics, I almost panicked and walked quickly from the store. There were so many choices and so little time to choose anything that might help me during my novice beauty program. Somehow, I stood my ground and picked out some foundation and lipstick which fit in with my limited budget, gathered my courage and headed for the checkout counter. Just knowing I would get made fun of along the way. Amazingly, the person at the cash register did not give me a second look as she took my money and I was no longer a virgin in buying my own feminine supplies. I just wished I had more access and money to do more.

I would have more financial resources later in life along with the knowledge to go with it as I learned the fun of doing thrift shopping for just the right choice of clothes to add to my wardrobe.  Plus, the thrift experiences gave me a chance to be patient in many of the bigger stores with seemingly an endless supply of discarded fashion. When I took the time to try on a new item I had never tried to wear before, I had two benefits. I didn’t have to pay much for the item and two, I could see how well it either flattered my difficult to please male testosterone poisoned body or didn’t. It helped too, when I was able to streamline the shopping experience and give myself time to vary my day as a novice transfeminine person. Instead of just facing an endless amount of clothes. I actually had time to do other things like take myself out to lunch. Then, again I was faced with an almost never-ending choice of where I could eat. Since I had already tried too many fast food drive throughs with various amounts of success, I decided to step up my game and try to eat at one of the casual dining restaurants I had went to and even managed as a man. Since I was still on a gender time clock and had to be home by a certain time dictated by when my second wife would be off of work, I was still facing so many choices with so little time to enjoy myself as a transgender woman.

My plan was to just get by and improve myself a little at a time in a world of ciswomen I was just discovering. By doing so, I discovered that most ciswomen ignored me if I was dressing to blend in with them or were just curious of why I was in their world. Of course, I did run into the occasional TERF woman who hated me and wanted me out of her world, which I did. One way or another, I was encountering far more women in my quest to be part of their world than I ever did any men because I just wanted to be out of my long-standing membership in the men’s club and they knew it. The only thing I did know was that I was increasingly not so lonely when I went out in the world to my regular straight venues. All my lesbian places had closed up and the gay venues I used to go to just brought back bad memories of me being looked at as just a drag queen so I was stuck…just where I wanted to be and I was satisfied, until I went too far and tried too hard to be accepted.

In my search for acceptance, I began to become too overconfident in my ability to succeed a began to look for more choices of where to go in such a short ill-conceived amount of time. What I did was start going to redneck themed places thinking I could be accepted when I was not and even had the cops called me one night in a venue, I was just trying to drink a couple beers then pee before I went to another place I had been to a lot. It turned out that they would sell me the beer, just not let me get rid of it.

As it turned out, I was/am able to live a long life and see many of my choices gang up on me in a very short period of time. Destiny worked its magic and gave me a full circle of life to live with. Throwing in that I was a transgender woman just added a little spice.

 

A Humbling Gender Experience

 

Image from Katherine Hanlon
on UnSplash. 

For literally decades, any thoughts I had of living a successful life as a transgender woman, were only thoughts. I was never sure if I had any chance of making it. In fact, most of the time it seemed as if I was swimming against the current in a fast-moving stream of ciswomen, I wanted to interact with so badly, on their terms.

Doing it on their terms was my problem as I had always tried my best to be a strong student as a man of how all the women around me were living their lives. The main issue always was that I was only allowed to see so much of what was going on across the gender border. Again, because I was a man and had not yet paid many dues yet as a novice cross-dresser and not even a transgender woman yet. I still thought my real issue in paying my dues to be let behind the gender curtain came from my appearance in the world. Just being able to blend in with the ciswomen around me was good enough.

It was quite a humble experience when I found my appearance (and no matter how much it was improving) was not going to be enough. Even though the mirror was being kind to me as it told me I presented well, I was still stuck behind it as I still needed to put the image into motion. I was caught in the place where I looked good as a woman…for a man trying hard to accomplish it. I desperately needed to find a place where I looked as if I wasn’t trying to dress to impress. I was just being me. The problem then became who was the me I was becoming? How deep did my feminine desires run and where would they ultimately take me became the main things I thought about in my life. Every spare moment I had was spent either actively cross-dressing in front of the mirror or making plans of going public with how I looked and making the world my mirror.

As I learned the hard way my lessons on how to blend in with the world around me, often I was brutally laughed at and rejected by the world because I was dressing to thrill and not to blend. I guess I could say, I was humbled in the worst way by groups of teen girls in the malls I was just trying to shop in. My initial goal back then was to face my teen critics one-on-one until I failed completely or succeeded after many times of going back to my cross-dressing drawing board. It was like ripping a band aid off a mental wound and saying too hell with it and trying again to be successful. Until I was.

Rather than become overconfident at that point, I decided to try to build upon my newfound success and work on things such as how I moved and walked in heels. I discovered that every little discovery helped in my male to female femininization project such as keeping the old male scowl off of my face when I was out as a transfeminine person. No more scaring little kids away who called me a woman which was good but a mean woman which was bad of course. It was the last thing I wanted to do after working so hard on the basics of presenting as a passable woman.

The more I progressed on my path to living as me, the more humbled I became. Too many nights I came home in disbelief at the lessons I had learned from men and ciswomen in public as I struggled to fill out my gender workbook which was way behind the rest of the world I was dealing with. I learned men did not value anything I had to say unless I was spoken to first and women had their own way of communicating around men even if the men thought they were in their conversation. Just as a starting point. I also learned of a whole new lesbian culture I knew nothing about and where I could possibly fit in as a femme lipstick lesbian. As you can understand, the terminology and how I fit in came at me quickly and again I was extremely humbled to be asked to go to lesbian mixers where I learned a lot.

I learned also that women lead much more layered existences than men do, often built around dealing with men themselves. I did not have to worry much about that because I was not attractive enough for men to pursue me and after my lesbian friends taught me I did not need a man for validation, my life brightened considerably.

As I progressed deeper and deeper along my gender path, it became increasingly obvious that I could indeed achieve my goal of someday succeeding in a feminine world. Even though in many ways it did not resemble my initial dreams. In no way did I think I could maintain my sense of sexuality as I never made it with a man. In my own way, I maintained my own “Gold Star” status that many lesbians I knew maintained. The closest I ever came to getting any real attention from a “GS” lesbian were a few kisses.

When my new world began to open up, I was very humbled to be there at all. Along the way, I have survived issues such as severe depression and negative attitudes towards me from loved ones to stick to my dreams and goals. Remembering where I came from helped me form the strong building blocks to complete such a diverse and difficult change in my life. Using the negatives in my male life to build a transfeminine one was one of the best moves I ever made in my life as I made a complete circle back through all my male years to be the person I always dreamed I could be.

I was back to being me. The only transition which really mattered.

 

 

 

 

 

Trans Girl's Dreams...Nothing lasts Forever

 

Image from Bruce Mars
on UnSplash. 

Nothing last forever in a transgender woman’s world, or does it?

Many of my life’s earliest recollections begin with the vivid dreams I had of being the pretty girl of my thoughts, only to be shattered back to reality when I woke up into my same old male world. Sadly, I remember thinking at the time how bad it was that dreams could not last forever. Why was I stuck with the impossible dream.

At the time, I thought too, it was a possibility that I was going through some sort of a phase that I would grow out of. As many of us know, we did not grow out of any sort of cross-dressing phase, I grew into a more transfeminine one. It turns out that thinking me wanting to be a girl was just a phase was as wrong as thinking I was truly crazy because of my gender issues. I did not really think I was crazy for just wanting to be who I was, but it remained a thought in the back of my head which back in those days was reinforced by the mental health community.

As life moved quickly forward as it always does, in my thirties and early forties, I began to really entrench myself in the physical world of newly found cross-dressers and transgender women around me. For the first time in my life, I discovered I did have role models in the community I could learn from. In their lives, they were approaching the world as if they were never going back to their male selves, so why couldn’t I. My impossible dream may not be so impossible after all as I improved my feminine presentation to the point to where I could blend in with the majority of ciswomen I encountered when I started leaving the mirror at home and heading into the world.

From there, I began to set up small bucket lists for myself. Once I completed one task as a novice transgender woman, I immediately set up another. Basically, I set my tasks up on what my observations of women were anyhow and how much I wanted to try them in my new world I was experimenting in. An example was when I began to go to the big bookstores as me to see if I caused any negative attention. When I didn’t, I began to visit their in-house coffee shop and even began to use the restroom of my choice. The women’s of course. I would have looked very silly using the men’s room the way I was dressed.

Another problem I had was focusing on my dream. Just exploring the world without a plan was not getting me anywhere. In order to progress towards my goal, I purposely chose a few of the most trying experiences a ciswoman could have. Like going to an auto parts store to see how I was treated. The scariest experience I ever had was going to a pick it yourself junk yard with my wife Liz to pick up a side mirror for an old car we had. It was a very hot and humid Ohio day, and I was worried about melting in front of the guys at the junk yard, but no one gave me a second look, and we were off with our mirror before I knew it. But to this day, I am still shy of going into male dominated spaces because I know of how women can be taken advantage of from my old days as a male.

By the time all of this was happening, I was having a sneaking suspicion that my desire to live full-time as a transfeminine person was never just going to go away. In fact, it was just going to become more intense.

As my third wife Liz became more serious, she wanted to travel to a few places she had never been to and some that she had. The easiest way to do it was to sign up for tours with a local Cincinnati based tour bus company. Over the years, we traveled from Boston and Maine and New Orleans to Mardi Gras and Florida in the south. The challenge for me was always using the restroom with a bus who majority of passengers were women. I had some adventures along the way such as one elderly woman commenting that I was using “their” restroom, all the way to being afraid of confronting two agitated women in an Alabama restroom and being afraid of being arrested by a “good ol boy” southern sheriff for just wanting to pee. To add insult to potential restroom drama, matters just got worse when I became non-mobile to where I needed to use a handicapped stall where there was one available. But through it all, I learned to be resilient, and the world was not such a bad place after all.

It was about this time that my gender life flipped, and I knew my male life was not going to last forever but my female one would last as long as I did. It was during this period I survived two trips to the hospital. One for Covid and one for pneumonia which were the most gender numbing experiences of my life. When the nurses asked questions about my gender status since I was still biologically a male and I had to put up with all the nudity which went along with my visits. From it all I learned that being nice to the staff was the best way to go and they would be nice to me.

I am sure that kid in the mirror would have never thought his life would have taken so many twists and turns if he chose the gender path that he did. Would he have done it? Sure, but would he ultimately have a choice, no. Being transgender was simply something that was built into him from the beginning and he never would have a choice in the matter. As soon as he could come to that conclusion, the better off he would be when he discovered nothing lasts forever.

 

Hey You!!!! Meeting Myself in the Middle

 

Image from Adam Winger
on UnSplash. 

For me, meeting myself in the mirror was never easy to do. While the group of boys I grew up around were blissfully doing boy things without a problem, I was struggling with the idea that I wanted to be a girl.

Sadly, for the longest time, I thought that someday I would have the chance to outgrow what would become for all to call gender dysphoria. For me, I was just a kid with problems I had no idea of how to conquer. Through all this time of my life my favorite quote to pass along was when some adult asked me what I wanted to become when I grew up, I could never tell the truth and say a woman as I lied and said a doctor or a lawyer. The only thing with certain that I knew was I would get an immediate trip to the psychiatrist if I had ever told the truth compliments of my parents. 

As I always say, age entitled me to a chance not to outgrow being a cross-dresser but did give me the opportunity to meet myself in the middle and start to mature into the transgender woman I am today. Before I did though, I needed to come up with an understanding of what the middle of being me really meant. What made it all so difficult was that my male life when it was going well it was very good, but when it was bad, I wanted out immediately. As I ran to my makeup, dresses and heels for comfort in the mirror.

The middle began to be harder and harder for me to find when I left the home mirror, gathered my courage and headed into the world as a transfeminine person. Many times, I could almost see and sense my middle person in the public mirrors I was still using to build myself up in places such as clothing stores in the malls and changing rooms I had started to use in all the thrift stores I was shopping to discover the latest fashion item I could wear. I was never any good shopping for women’s clothes as a man, as my feminine self-wanted to do it all and make all the final choices for herself.

In addition to fighting for the middle with my male self, I needed to fight my second wife for the rights to her husband. Like my male-self, my wife was a formidable opponent to any idea of me transitioning any further into the feminine world I increasingly wanted to live in. In many ways, she held all the gender cards because she knew I was a cross dresser when we met but never/ever agreed to me going past that point as she said she did not sign up to live with another woman. For whatever reason she never liked the transgender woman I was becoming and passed away before she could meet the finished product I had become. I don’t blame her because she just got caught in the middle of me not wanting to admit to what I always knew deep down…there was actually no middle point to me, I was destined to eventually live my life among ciswomen as an equal transgender woman.

The problem was, getting to the point of realizing all of this was easy to write about and harder to do. The biggest mistake I made was thinking my gender balance between male and female was so good that I could live as both in the world. While I maintained a long-term marriage and a good job. Trying to go all in on both genders cost me my already fragile mental health as I was still trying to do my research in the public eye about which gender direction I wanted to go. Long story short, I found without too much trouble I could carve out a new feminine life without the world questioning anything about my old male life. As I surveyed the world suddenly, I could see gender possibilities opening for me that I never thought possible before.

During this time in my life, I think I met myself in the middle too fast and tried unsuccessfully to slow my progress down until I could figure out what to do about the rest of my life. Primarily my second wife and my very lucrative job. Plus, on the other hand, I had put this gender teeter totter in motion, and it increasingly looked as if I could not get off. I kept up the old male charade I was forced to live as long as I needed to, and with the help of a few ciswomen friends, I was able to find a new middle point in my life as a trans woman. Which seemed to work well, until HRT or gender affirming hormones came my way, and the balance of my life was changed forever.

I had always viewed the possibility of me taking the gender altering hormones as a line of demarcation of me never going back to my old male life and it was. From the obvious growth of my breasts and hair to the overall softening of my skin and facial lines the changes came fast and furious and again I was forced to move up my timeline to discard (or give away) all my old male clothes and set my sights on a new bright future. Away from all the uncertainties of going back and forth between the two main binary genders of womanhood and manhood. My lifetime of juggling identities went away, my mental health improved as I entered the world I had always dreamed of my entire life that I had finally earned my way into.

The “earn” word is important here because of all the trial and error (mostly error) I put into finally facing the reality of my true gender and forever stopped meeting myself in the middle. Was it worth it? Sure, because I ended up not having any choice after all.

 

 

 

 

Who Had it Easier

 

JJ Hart

The most ridiculous understatement I ever made to myself was thinking how much easier women have it in their lives than men do.

Those were the simpler days of just envying all the girls around me for their ability to wear pretty clothes when I was stuck in my usual boring male attire. As you can tell, my adolescent thought patterns about gender were much shallower back in those days. All I knew was I was having issues with going through male puberty and all its hair and added angles to my body while the girls were adding all the curves I so desperately wanted. It was about that time when I started to further torture myself by having dreams of being a pretty girl when I just had to wake up again to the same old world, I was so tired of at such an early age.

Another benefit I saw from the outside from being a girl was on the dating front. From my ultra shy vantage point, boys had to do all the work to chase a girl but gave it no thought to be a girl with no boys having any interest in you at all. It seemed all my ideas came from the problem I had for years of not being allowed to see behind the gender curtain to go through the insecurities of a girl’s puberty. As their bodies ramp up the necessities for possible childbirth later in life.  Which leads me to this, the incredibly short period of time a ciswoman has to level out their hormones and have the chance to live a so-called normal life. First, they have to go through puberty which shapes their bodies then go through child birthing years which strain their bodies and then go through menopause to reduce all the hormones again. Not to mention all the monthly menstrual periods most women must live with too.

In the days when I was busy with just being the “pretty, pretty princess” as my wife called me, she was taking me to task about never experiencing the so called downs of being a woman because I just wanted to appear as one, perfect my makeup and wear my pantyhose and heels as much as I could. For years, I went on clicking my merry way in my heels not giving much thought to what she was telling me. It was not until many years later that my heels finally led me to a path where I could finally learn what she was talking about.

Essentially, what I was able to learn from being a transgender woman and being able to live on both sides of the gender border was that both genders have their challenges. That humans are born as male and female, then get socialized (if they are lucky) into men and women. We transfeminine persons just were born into an unwanted male gender and were socialized into our chosen lives as trans women. The whole process gives us a deeper understanding of the world as we look into who has it easier in life, ciswomen or men.

Since the socialization process of being a male was what I was born into proved to be partially successful one for me, I have always thought men have had it easier. And women have it harder because they must put up with men. Even though, my gender dysphoria issues made me difficult to live with as a husband, I somehow have always found a woman to make the journey with me. Someday, I will have to write a post on the differences of my three wives during my life.

As I continued in vain to find the easy way out in my life, being a guy was the way to go as I found success in being able to bluster my way through in many situations and in others wondering how I would approach them as a transgender woman.

Finally, my gender travel took me behind the gender curtain where I could hear firsthand the experiences of all my ciswomen friends. It was not until then did I realize the grass was not always so green on the other side of the binary gender border. The only problem I did have was reversing all my experiences in the conversations we were having from male to female, so I did not out myself to my friends. I knew I was beginning to be successful when strangers outside of my circle of friends began to ask me questions on what to do about getting along with their boyfriend. I was flattered that other women had trusted me with their problems and were looking for input.

My own socialization journey had taught me that neither gender had it easier. Stereotyping here, men largely bluster and run when they can’t get their way and women are left to raise the kids and pick up the pieces. It is difficult to take such a complex subject such as gender and not stereotype something about it at some point, so I apologize.

I am sure that no matter where you are on your gender journey, you will encounter your own set of standards when it comes to the male and female genders and where you fit. It will certainly be an interesting journey with many individuals trying to tell you to stop. At that point, you must decide if maybe you have had it more difficult than either of the two main binary genders you have encountered. Many of them simply will not have the understanding it takes to approve of your journey, and you will have to move on. But, on the other hand, there could others who approve of you and even want to help. Just be careful that you know which is which.

When it comes right down to it, that girl you envied from afar in study hall, all the way to the woman whose fashion and passing privilege you admired so much both had their own problems to deal with. You just must get behind the feminine gender curtain to figure out just what they were.

 

 

 

 

When Nothing Else Mattered

 

Image from Klara Khokhlova
on UnSplash. 

Perhaps, similar to many of you, you have been described as selfish when you pursued your gender desires. I know, I was by my second wife as she told me many times my desire to be a pretty cross-dresser in my life was not all about me.

During this time of my life, sadly or not, all my spare thoughts and time dedicated to my cross-dressing activities, so yes, it was all about me. I did my best not to be that way, but I was failing miserably. Especially when I figured it out, I could leave the house as me and do a portion of the household chores such as grocery shopping. I figured by doing so, I was helping my wife and at the same time helping myself.

The more proficient I became at doing my new portion of some of the weekday household chores, the more I felt that nothing else mattered to me than my quest to explore my inner femininity. Increasingly, I broke the rules and made excuses to leave the house and explore the new, natural and exciting world I was experiencing.

As years always do, mine flew by in a blur as I became more proficient in perfecting my feminine appearance and it began to be more apparent to me that the life as I was living as a man would have to be sacrificed at some point if I wanted to pursue my dream goal of living as a transfeminine person. That is when I began to fall back on my ill-fated male habits of internalizing all my feminine feelings. Hoping that eventually, they would just go away. Compliments of my latest purge of my cross-dressing belongings.

Very soon, it became evident that all the purging in the world would not rid me of my deep-seated gender issues and nothing else began to matter, not even the massive fights my second wife and I were having when she caught me out of the house as myself. I would go to any extent possible to try to mend the wounds from my breaking the promises not to ever go out again unattended, all the way to promising I would go to a therapist in Columbus, Ohio who specialized in gender care to attempt to solve my “problem.” Even then, I would not listen to the therapist who told me that my gender issues were not a “problem”, and there was nothing she could do about them. I made the mistake again of thinking there was something radical I could do about how I was attempting to live my life. I could keep trying to sneak out of the house and try to learn more about my possibilities of living life as a transgender woman, while at the same time continue to live with my wife. She always know I was a cross-dresser but was completely dead set against me going any further towards being approved for gender affirming hormones (HRT) and living as my authentic self.

Perhaps the biggest problem was I was not sure what my authentic self really was. I knew I loved my second wife as much as the day I married her years before, but I really was not sure of how deep my transgender issues were going to run. Plus, all the research I was doing into a new life, jeopardized my old life which at times was not so bad because I was accumulating all the male privileges such as wife, family and job that I did not necessarily want to get rid of. The whole situation just mentally tore me up as I did not know what gender I was going to be from day to day. Was I going to try to be my true self or go out into the world again and “act” like the strong man I was not.

It all led me to feeling completely detached from the world and wanting to end it all because I felt so worthless to everybody. Fortunately, after I hit rock bottom, I got help from a good therapist and was prescribed medications which helped my on-going Bi-polar disorder and anxiety. It turned out my anxiety was triggered in many ways by my gender issues so that was easier to solve, but my depression was not so my new meds really helped. Giving credit to where credit is due, my help came through the Veterans Administration health care system and as luck would have it, I was teamed up with a therapist who knew what she was doing when it came to depression and LGBTQ care.

By this time, my second wife had tragically passed away from a major heart attack leaving me totally alone with my thoughts. Quickly, since nothing else mattered, I took the path of least resistance into my own form of womanhood. All those dues I was paying as a cross dresser working with my appearance came back to help me when I could hit the ground running in my heels (not really) and concentrate on rounding out my persona of the trans woman I wanted to me in the world of alpha cis women around me. I was able to see and learn from what they did to make their lives more fulfilling as women, and I wanted to do that too. I was having fun while at the same time was secretly learning everything I could from the ciswomen around me.

Most certainly, nothing else mattered when I sought out approval for my gender affirming hormones from a doctor I found in an LGBTQ newspaper. Along with the hormones, I was putting my new life together by legally changing all the gender documents I could with the VA and in the civilian world. Very soon, my old male life was in my past and my “dead” name faded away.

The only thing that did matter was building a new life with my third wife Liz, a lesbian ciswoman who accepted me for what I was. I could not let a second chance such as that pass me by.

 

 

You Never Know until You Try

 

Image from Leo Visions
on UnSplash.

You never know until you try was drilled into me as a kid by my WWII generation parents whenever I was facing a potential difficult situation. Little did they know, their insistence on me trying to do the improbable would come back to haunt them in a very different way. Back in those days (in the 1950’s) gender issues were referred to as mental illness and any reference to their eldest son being mentally ill would have been frowned on, so I was stuck wondering if I was really a boy who wanted to be a girl.

The only thing I knew to do was to keep cross-dressing in front of the family’s full length hallway mirror. Imagining I was one of the pretty girls I desperately wanted to be. At the time, I had no idea my gender issues would last the better part of fifty years and take up huge portions of my life. Not that I could have done anything about it if I had tried which I did a number of times when I purged nearly all my feminine belongings swearing never to pick them up again. I was stuck being a male and somehow, I needed to make the best of it. Like so many people I knew with gender issues, purging never worked. The pressure built until I could take it no longer and again, I was accumulating women’s clothes again and wearing them.

At the least I tried to go back to mentally being male full-time and failed miserably at it. All I knew was when I was not thinking about getting out of my dark, lonely gender closet, I was not happy at all and when I at least tried to be me in the mirror it took the pressure off. Even if it was only for a while. At the same time, I was acutely aware that I was doing the best I could to see if I could improve my appearance as a pretty girl. How I never got caught doing all of this, I will never know, and I even resorted to taking plastic bags of clothes and makeup into the neighboring woods so I could escape the prying eyes of my slightly younger brother and family.

My mentality of never knowing you could do something until you try really came to the forefront when I was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War. Instead of taking the two-year plan with a ticket to Southeast Asia, I took a chance and signed up to try to get a job I wanted in the American Forces Radio and Television Service. With a lot of luck and the help of a congressman whose radio station I worked for, against all odds, I got one of the sixty job slots in the Army for AFRTS. It turned out the whole process turned my life around and taught me that anything could be possible. If you went out of your way to try. Probably the most valuable lesson that I could have ever learned as I looked ahead at my path to becoming a successful transfeminine person. If it had worked for me once, why couldn’t it do it again.

As I set out to leave my gender closet behind and improve my life, I know I took on a journey I would not readily recommend to others. When I started to leave the mirror and join the world as a trans woman, I used a tool that I had already used effectively as a man in my previous life. It was alcohol, and I knew I could use it to build up much needed courage to be in the world as a transgender woman and not get myself into more trouble as I was presenting as a single woman in an establishment which served alcohol. Gay, straight or lesbian, it did not matter. I found I could get by if I stayed out of the redneck leaning venues. I was also well schooled in the artform of driving while buzzed from all my days in the Army when I did all the driving. More than anything else, this was back in the days before the major crackdowns on drunken drivers, so I was safer, and in NO WAY do I recommend what I did.

Also, what I think is tougher these days than when I was intensely lonely and looking for companionship is the world of on-line dating. When I was seeking a date, I played both sides of the gender coin, because I was in the unique position of being a transgender woman who favored lesbians. Looking back, I think I got the most attention from men seeking men dating sites. But just knowing that the amount of trash I would receive was at its best humorous and at its worst, a disaster because I refused to meet anyone in a public place which was not of my choosing. I was stood up more times than I would care to count or remember because my life was destined to change forever when I met my future wife Liz on a woman seeking woman dating site.

Liz responded to my picture saying I had sad eyes which was entirely possible at that time of my life. Amazingly, she lived relatively close to me in a town (Cincinnati) that I had always admired. From there, I began to become involved in her friend’s girl’s nights out and I was able to do more to learn what was behind the gender curtain than I had ever thought possible. The entire on-line dating world for me proved again you never know what you are going to get until you try.

These days again it is more problematic to find someone online with all the scammers out there, but destiny can never find you if you never venture out of your dark lonely closet and light up your path to a brighter future.

I wonder what my deceased parents would think now of what they taught me so long ago.

 

 

 

Letting the Light Into my Trans Closet

 

Image from Sahin Kalijii
on UnSplash. 

Growing up, I had what I considered to be a very dark and escape proof gender closet.

I was part of the pre-internet/social media generation so I could not find the latest online tutorial on improving my makeup skills. And of course, I could not run to my mom or girls’ peer group for any information either. I was stuck with no light in my closet all by myself it seemed.

I stayed that way for years until gender pioneers such as “Virginia Prince” began to shine her faint light into my closet. I had little to no knowledge that individuals such as me even existed in the world. Once I did, I was very relieved I was not the only transvestite as Virginia called us then in the world and I set out to meet others. Before I could open my closet door even a little, I had to convince my second wife that it would be OK to do it. She had known from the beginning of our relationship that I was a cross-dresser but did not like it when I began to let others know of my so called “hobby.” It actually marked the beginning of me opening my closet door to the world and proclaiming I was a transgender woman, not a part time man putting on a dress and makeup.

Along the way, another problem I had was deciding when to take the chance to open my closet door and to which person. I did myself no favors when for the most part, I tried to internalize all my feminine feelings which made me an impossible person to get along with when I was looking in the mirror at my male self and hating what I saw. All the times I ventured out of my closet only to have to hurry back in was wrecking most of my life as I knew it. Not to mention the life with my wife who I envied because she was a ciswoman, and resented because she would not let me explore a feminine side which was trying to see the light of day.

I found my male self-had installed a powerful spring closer on my closet door which was designed to keep me in. Deep down he knew his part of my life was in danger every time I was able to escape the closet and get out into the world. I felt so enlightened and natural when I did, I never wanted to return to my male life and all its drudgery. I was so sick of wearing the same old collection of ties to work every day when better/brighter fashion choices awaited me in my closet at home.

I discovered that the more I outfitted my closet with brighter lights and bigger mirrors, the more I wanted to test my new fashions, wigs, and makeup in the world. Away from my mirror which had the tendency to lie to me. I can’t tell you how many times the mirror told me I looked great only to be rejected quickly in the public’s eye. It took me years to realize that I was expecting too much on just looking like a ciswoman, I had not yet paid my dues on becoming myself and then having the ability to relax and enjoy myself even more.

It helped me too when I began to venture further away from my closet as my confidence as a transfeminine person began to grow. To get there, I needed to be able to look another woman in the eye and communicate one on one with her about the world around us. Men entered the picture too but briefly since most of them did not want to have anything to do with me anyhow. More and more, I did not have to scramble back to my closet following a bad day or night out into the world because I was doing better in my feminine life. All my male could do was sit back and helplessly watch as his hold on me slipped away and all he ended up being was a provider because of his good job.

I arrived at a point when I needed to expand the small dark transgender closet, I had always lived in. It all began with me having to accept who I really was and had much more to do than just expanding my closet for all the feminine clothes I was buying. I was making a huge lifestyle choice that I had spent way too long deciding to make. All of this moving things around in my life led me all the way to leaving my closet totally behind and looking for a transgender house to live in. I had taken my time (decades) to make my decision, and it occurred to me that I had taken too much time but by then there was nothing I could do about re-winding the clock. I took the good and lived on until I was able to carve out a new transfeminine life.

As I look back, it does not seem possible to me that I have come from the lost, lonely boy staring longingly at himself dressed as a girl in his closet’s mirror to the person I am today. But none of would have been possible had I not been able to embrace the help of several key ciswomen around me to make it happen. I wonder what would have become of me if I was not able to meet them. On the bright side, stepping out of my closet (as scary as it was) enabled me to meet all of them to start with. So, destiny was on my side as my life went full circle from a dark closet to the bright existence I live with my wife Liz now. I was just fortunate as my hunches that everything would work out if I stayed on my gender path. I just had the super strong hunches that they would.

Thanks very much to all of you who read and interact with my writings. All comments are always welcomed!

 

A Special Kind of Crazy

 

JJ Hart

In my youth and even later when I was struggling with my deep-seated gender issues, the thought entered my mind that I may just be a little crazy to think that way. I even went as far as telling others I was not the well-adjusted person they thought I was.

Looking back now, I think I was just preparing in my own way to tell others I met that I wanted to be a woman. Which I never did for decades when it became obvious to strangers I met at cross-dressing, transgender socials I went to that I wanted to be feminine, or I would not have been there.

The first time that I told anyone that I liked to wear women’s clothes was after a Halloween party I went to in the Army of all places. Weeks later, over way too much good German beer, the topic came up with friends about how realistic my “costume” was, all the way to my shaved legs. Since I was among a few very close friends, I took a big chance with risking the remainder of the time I had in the Army and told them I was a transvestite (the term used back then) and I liked to dress as a woman. I said nothing about being crazy, and I just liked to do it.

Of course, at that time in my life, I was busy running from the fact of how deep my gender issues went. I was hiding the fact from myself that no I was not crazy, I just wanted to be a transgender woman in the days when the term was first being used. “Running” for me back in those days meant changing jobs and locations frequently to keep my mind off what I was truly running from, my gender issues. Even with all the moves I was making, I could not outrun my life and occasionally the term “crazy” snuck into my thought pattern.

To compensate, I began to do “chores” which I considered feminine in nature such as doing part of the grocery shopping for my wife dressed as a ciswoman. When I succeeded with no problems, I started to feel so natural that I continually wanted to do more. So, I began to combine my grocery shopping adventures with new visits to big shopping stores to pick up small items I could afford such as a pair of panty hose, or new makeup. Amazingly, no one bothered me or shouted, “There is that crazy man in a dress.”

As the years went by, I learned that the ciswomen around me did not think I was crazy. They thought I was more curious than anything else as they wondered why I would leave the men’s club to play in their world. Ironically, as they were taking care of their curiosity, at the same time, I was learning from them. I had always envied girls (then women) so much as I followed them from afar, and now I had the chance to go back behind the gender curtain and learn first hand about the pluses and negatives of a ciswoman’s life and did I want to be a part of it or was I just following a crazy path off a cliff.

I learned quickly that I was following the right path, no matter how crazy it seemed at the time. The more I explored the world as a trans woman, I found the more exploration I needed to do but that was OK with me because again, my life for a change did not feel forced and so natural because I was not fighting to be something I was not…a man. All of a sudden, my life made sense and a was a special kind of crazy, a transfeminine person. At that point, I knew I would have to lose for good all the formidable white male privileges I had earned over the years. Even I was surprised to say “buh-bye” to all privilege I had built up.

Not all benefits I had living as a man were so easy to give up such as part of my intelligence and my personal security. I did not have many interactions with men one on one, but I learned the process of letting the man take the lead in most all situations. Especially when it came to sports, where I knew a lot about what was going on. The other privilege or benefit I needed to give up quickly was when it came to my personal security. I was not prepared for the world I was facing now in which I was fair game for any toxic man. I was fortunate to have escaped injury a couple of times when I broke the rules that ciswomen grow up with such as not finding your self in a compromising position on a dark city street all alone. I thought at the time, I was crazy to do it and never did it again.

Most recently, the craziest thing I have done is to let my precious Estradiol prescription run nearly all the way out. In fact, I am down to my last applications of patches this week as I am waiting for another refill which I have been notified is coming today. I have written in the past a couple of times about the paranoia I felt when I had a recent appointment with my endocrinologist who prescribes my HRT medications. It turned out that that all my crazy paranoia about the far reach of the orange felon in the White House rejecting any ideas of me receiving gender affirming care through the Veterans Administration would ever happen again. Instead, I received a prescription which will last me through another year until our next appointment.

Once again, it was proven that I am a special kind of crazy which I wish I had learned to embrace earlier in life. It would have made life so much richer just knowing I had the chance to experience life on both sides of the binary gender border.