Connecting the Gender Dots

 

JJ Hart, from
the archives.

Many outside of the LGBTQ community, or more precisely the transgender community, think connecting the dots between male and female is as simple as putting on a dress and makeup.

One of the problems is, in order to  walk a mile in our transgender shoes, you have to learn to tie the laces first. Very few people have the patience or understanding to do it. The complexity of gender scares most people off. They think gender is cut and dried but is the opposite. 

Even those in the community have a difficult time connecting the dots and don't realize that even if we have similarities as trans women or trans men, we have just as many differences. Obstacles such as male lives, spouses and sexuality face us as the next dot to connect becomes bigger and bigger or worse yet out of reach.

During my male to female transition, many times, connecting the dots seemed downright impossible and I would never be able to move ahead in my life. My primary problem was my spouse and my male  self were standing directly in my path to gender realization and they would not move or give up their spot in my life. What I did in the meantime, was fall back into a more realistic journey to the next gender dot. An example would be when I began to get out of the non challenging mall shopping experiences and into actual interaction with the public as a transgender woman. 

Many times, the dots would totally fool me when I totally had a mis-conception of what a woman's life would be like. For some reason, I did not think I would be the one whose personal security would be challenged or my intelligence would be diminished when I jumped the gender border into trans womanhood. I was wrong in my judgement and needed to rapidly rethink my path to another dot. Of course I always knew women's lives were much more complex than men's but I did not really know until I succeeded in connecting my dots. 

The frustrating part of my whole experience was two-fold. The first part was I needed to accomplish it on my own with no help and the second part was everytime I thought I had accomplished something, immediately it seemed I needed to accomplish another milestone or dot on my gender journey. It was not until I was accepted in a small tight knit group of women friends did I really begin to make progress in the world. I learned through them, I could validate myself in the world as a trans woman without the help of much of the public, including men. Connecting these dots made my life fun again and so liberating. 

I can not begin to completely describe my experience connecting my own dots because they could be so much different than yours. The one thing we may have in common is, in order to have success in the world, you have to summon the courage to put yourself out there. Of course the problem these days is the concern for your personal safety. You have to be very careful, be aware of your surroundings as any other woman would and connect your dots the right way.       

 

Gender Prison

Image from Denis Oliveria
om UbSplsh

Many transgender women and trans men have spent numerous years in their own gender prisons. Sometimes referred to as closets. 

Unless you have had to spend time in your own prison with the walls closing in all the time, you have no idea of how bad it is. Just another proof being transgender is some sort if a choice. Why would we ever choose to possibly destroy ourselves with our gender issues. It all got to the point with me, I was doing all I could to manifest myself being as feminine as I could. When all along my male self was telling me I couldn't. 

I finally arrived at the point where I was given free time from my gender prison to explore the world as my new self. When I did, most certainly I discovered I wanted more and more free time. I discovered also, I needed a ton of work to prepare myself for freedom. I was not prepared for all the challenges I would have to face as a novice transgender woman. Since I had spent so much time cross dressing in my life, I thought how much harder could it be. I never factored in what my second wife was always trying to tell me, I did not really know much about being a woman and she was not going to do much to help me out of my gender prison. 

When she told me that, I reverted back to working ever harder to understand what she meant. Since I had studied women closely my entire life, I resolved myself to trying to get behind the feminine curtain to learn more. It would take me years to get there since it seemed I was living a life time sentence in my gender prison. Outside of a few varied chances to thrive, my prison seemed to be escape proof. How was I ever able to leave my prison without jeopardizing all the white male privileges I had worked so hard for such as family, friends and employment. It seemed the more I tried to escape, the more the walls closed in on me.

Once I staged my big gender prison break, there was no turning back. I discovered that even though my wife would not help me pull back the feminine gender curtain, other women would and I took advantage of their kindness. Even when I was able to, I found I was still looking over my shoulder for any male prison guards who were chasing me. It turned out, even in heels, I was faster than they were and I managed to outrun my naysayers which mainly was myself. 

With practice in the world, I finally put my prison time behind me and I set out to live my dream life as a fulltime transgender woman. One way or another, I had paid my gender dues for nearly half a century before I had the courage to fully transition. It felt so good to be let out of my gender prison and not have to go back. 

My parole officers turned out to be the women friends I found and cherished as I learned so much from them about living in a feminine world. When I used their input and included it with what my own inner woman was telling me, I was able to make a smooth transition even smoother. Plus, I was able to use my prison time as a powerful motivator of what not to do in the world. Even as a man, I tried to treat women differently than the other men around me. Mainly because I wanted so badly to be one of them. 

In the end, spending all the time in my gender prison did not do much for my life. I spent so much mental energy rebelling against my male world, I often wonder how much farther I could have gone if I had used all my resources. It wasn't to be because I was in my own gender prison and could not find the key.

On the Teeter Totter

 

A Photo of me on the gender
Teeter Totter

Along the way, following the path to change one's gender presents many challenges. In fact, many times the process can be compared to life on a playground. Especially when we are in the midst of deciding which binary gender we will be a part of.

Here in the blog, I have compared the process to sliding down a very slippery slope. When I consider it, perhaps attempting to do a gender balancing act may be more appropriate.

The photo in this post represents my life trying to balance a life between the male and female genders. In the picture my hair was a wig, my breasts were not mine and even my hips were fake.

 So naturally my life was not the most pleasant. The ride up when I was living as my feminine self was quite the high. But the trip down to my cross dressing male self was a real downer. I was depressed for days until the next time I could dress up in my feminine apparel. During this period of my life I was so confused I wouldn't have wished my existence on anyone.

Finally I found the view from the upper feminine spot of the teeter totter to be so natural I wanted to take the high road and take on the fulltime life of a transgender woman. Of course  just writing about it diminishes the level of difficulty of just arriving at a spot where I could even attempt to live a feminine life. It was extremely difficult to the point of even becoming dangerous when I ended up on the wrong end of a couple ill advised adventures as a novice transgender woman. More on that in another blog post.

As with any other piece of playground equipment, warnings just don't resonate with the users. Primarily I didn't see any warnings about losing my male privilege's I had worked so hard to acquire. As my teeter totter rose to it's heights, ironically my intelligence declined. It quickly became so bad I was even being "mansplained"  by a tow driver towing my car how his wrecker worked and how he had a better idea of getting my car back to my house than I did. 

Through it all, the most important part of being on the higher plane of my gender teeter totter was the new view I had was so much more natural. I loved the new view!

Let's be Careful Out There

 This is actually a continuation of a post I wrote a couple days ago concerning losing one of our main male privileges' when we transition to a feminine life. The privilege is personal security. It's more or less a natural transition since so many cis women know of and have lived around male harassment their entire lives. 

Following the post, I received a couple of comments. The first is from Connie:

"You're absolutely correct. We should never (short) skirt the issue of security. I've had my share of dicey moments, too. Fortunately, for both of us, we may have learned the hard way....but not the costly way. The closest to getting hurt I had was being sucker punched by a creep while I was stepping in to help some younger girls he was stalking late one night. I've reached the age where I'm not out late at night much; bedtime is 10:00 pm, usually. I also have slowed down, physically, so my confidence in being able to outrun an assailant has dropped considerably. I used to be a fast woman, but not a "fast" woman. Not that creepy men care what kind of woman I am, because they are just...uh...CREEPS. Watch out for them!"

Thanks for your unique perspective on a difficult problem.

The second comes from "Girlyboy":

"Part of my own desire to transition is the desire to have the weakness you describe. Part of me wonders if that weakness that comes with a feminine body is not part of why society seems to hate trans MTF so much–that you would willingly give up power and physical strength must seem ludicrous to some…for me, feeling vulnerable is part of the goal." 

Interesting comment. I think very early in my Mtf gender transition, I think I felt the same way because feeling vulnerable validated my femininity.  As I grew into my stronger transgender self, the potential violence all women are subjected to became more important to me and I began to be much more careful.