Transgender Journey...Down but Not Out

 

Image from Alexander Grey
on UnSplash.

As transgender women and transgender men, it is easy to feel down and out as we try to navigate our new gender paths.

As I sometimes look back on my journey, it is easy to remember the good times and forget the bad. The most important thing about reliving the bad is having the appreciation for the world I am able to live in today as a fulltime trans woman. Every time I make simple trips in the world to the doctor’s, the Veterans Administration or the pharmacy, I always have to look back at remembering the not so good old days when I was struggling for acceptance. Either one of a couple things has happened. Either I have become better at my overall feminine presentation (wrong) or my confidence has taken me to a point where I don’t particularly care what the world thinks about me.

Either way, I look back to when I considered myself a very serious cross-dresser as I still was researching which fork in my gender path would I take. Back in those days, I took hours to prepare for an outing in the world, and I often wondered what I would do if I had to go out in the world everyday and compete with ciswomen everywhere. It was easy at that time to put those thoughts behind me as I was so obsessed with my feminine looks that my second wife kept calling me the “Pretty, pretty, princess.”  Naturally I loved the “pretty” part but rejected the “princess” part of her very pointed critique of me. One day, she even went as far as separating appearance from being a true woman for me when we were fighting about me wanting to go out. It was one of my all-time down moments when she told me I made a terrible woman. It hurt because I was not trying to make anything, I was just trying to express my true self, but I could not properly put my thoughts in a form she would understand.

I guess you could say, back then, I was definitely in my mental transgender formative years when my mind was trying to catch up with all the cross-dressing I was doing. Sadly, before I could formulate what a better version of my transgender self would be, all I experienced was an extreme amount of frustration. I could not understand what I was doing wrong when I was being successful in situations such as transgender-cross dresser mixers I was going to. The problem was the extreme gender euphoria I experienced at the mixers when I was mistaken for a ciswoman was not worth the resultant crash and depression, I felt when my life went back to its same old boring male self.

It all resulted in me being boxed into rarely getting out of my gender closet to explore the world and I was moody, resentful and not the easiest person to live with as I tried to internalize my gender feelings from my wife. A prime example was one year when we took a vacation from our native Ohio to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. On the trip up there, I progressively grew more depressed and mean until my wife asked me what was going on since I was supposed to be having a good time on vacation. Predictably, I lied my way out of it and did not tell her the truth that I rather be spending my vacation time as a woman rather than a man.

Somehow, I pulled myself back together and the vacation continued without incident, but I remember it as another low point. Little did I know at that time, destiny would finally come back to me on my gender path, and I would get my wish to go on extensive vacations as a transfeminine person.

Along the way, I have had many other low points which I write about often. Such as when a woman called me a pervert for simply using the women’s room in a venue, I had been a regular patron of for a long time and had no one say anything negative to me at all. Then much earlier than that when I was struggling to blend in with the world at all, there were all the stares and even laughter I needed to put up with on my journey to present. I was reduced to tears more times than I care to remember mainly by groups of teen girls struggling to find their own femininity. I was certainly at a low point when all of this was happening to me, and I did not have the tools yet to know which way to turn. All I had was this little voice in the back of my head telling me to keep going and my low points would disappear.

All of it did go away for a while until I hit my dark age when nearly everyone I cared about decided to die within a two-year period. The group included my second wife and three of my closest male friends. Who were the only ones I had. To add to my low point, I was desperately lonely and ended up relying on that little voice who at this time was growing louder and more insistent that she had all the answers for me. This time, I had very few other alternatives to fall back on. As one person told me after I had lost my restaurant along to everything else, you will land on your feet. Not knowing my feet would be in high heels when I did it.

I am sure that everyone’s lives have its share of highs and lows and I can not say a transgender woman or trans man lows would be even more dramatic, but it seems possible because we have so much to lose as we pick up our lives and move them across the gender border. Until we find ourselves living behind the gender curtain where we always wanted to me.

Hopefully if you are in the midst of a low time, you have a little voice telling you everything will be OK. If not, remember life is but a circle and what is down will eventually come up.

As always thanks for reading along and comments are always welcome.

 

 

 

On A Gender Vacation

 

Image from PR Media 
on Ubsplash.

As I matured as a person and a crossdresser, taking a vacation from my male gender became a reality for me.

It all started when I first felt the inclination to try on articles of my mom’s clothing and moved on from there. Very soon, I spent as much time as I could in front of the family’s full-length hallway mirror imagining myself as one of the pretty girls I envied so much. Before my unwanted male puberty set in, I did not have so far to go to be on vacation from my boyhood self. Then the changes set in and I began to develop the body angles and shape of a man as the girls around me were showing off their new curves in pretty clothes.

At that point, vacations became harder to earn, as it was becoming more difficult for me to look like a girl at all and try to work my way around having no knowledge of makeup at all. That chapter of my transgender notebook (like all the others) was empty, and I struggled not to look like a clown in drag at the circus. In a very short time, I became aware that if I was to ever reach my dream of living my life as a transgender woman, I had a long, hard struggle ahead.

It did not make matters any easier when I went on family vacations and saw other girls my age in cars on the highway. One young dark-haired beauty still stands out as one I remember. As I saw her time and time again when we passed on the highway, I so wanted to be like her and put my pillow over my head and pretended to sleep. No imagined vacation for me on the real one. My gender reality was with me all the time.

One way or another as life went on, I needed to do something to survive. Somehow, I needed to break through the bonds of the increasingly complex male life I was living and start to carve out a new transfeminine existence on my own. If my reality was indeed female, I would have to do something about it. What I did was begin to mix business with pleasure on my vacation. Business was when I was learning that ciswomen ran the world I wanted into and pleasure was when I was able to finally blend in until I was allowed behind the invisible but so real gender curtain.  To maintain the lifestyle, I was trying to lead, I needed to do a lot of research and repetition to see if I wanted to be there at all. Those were the nights when I broke away from all the gay venues I was going to and started to see if I could be accepted in lesbian and straight places.

The vacations I took into the world as a new transgender woman turned out to be life changing for me. For once, I did not have to wonder what if would be like to live in the world as a woman and just do it. My time away from my old boring male world, took me into a wonderful new life as the woman I always wanted to be. I was the trans woman at the big sports bar enjoying my large beer as I watched my sports teams play on the big screen televisions. Occasionally, I received some pushback from a toxic man, but it was not enough to deter me from having a good time. Mainly, because of my confidence in who I was building every time I was successful trying out the me, I always should have been. I was not building anything new, just allowing my true self to flourish in the world.

At that point, it occurred to me that my vacations were changing drastically. Instead of believing I was taking vacations from my male self as a trans woman, I was now taking time from my feminine world to allow my male self to finish up important things such as working and keeping up a false image of a man for the world to see until I could fully complete my male to female transition. Since I had accumulated so much male baggage over the years, clean up was not going to be easy. Finally, it occurred to me that transitioning to my new life was going to be an all or nothing proposition…or was it?

A big decision I needed to make was involving my sexuality which had never been a question for me in my male life as I had never been physically attracted to another man ever. It did not help me when I got a suggestion from ciswomen to buy bananas to get ready for a new sex life that never came. Even though I had dates with several cismen, nothing ever sparked within me and we never went anywhere except kissing, Women, on the other hand were different as I still cherished their company which I found they enjoyed mine too as they went on vacation with me. Since HRT hormones took away any possibly of traditional sexual intercourse between me and another woman, by choice I took it off the table.

It all led me to wonder what I would do about sports, the one big passion left in my life. Could I still interact with the world as a passionate sports loving woman or would I have to give it all up. It turned out that no, I did not have to give up my passion, it just changed direction like so many other things in my life. For example, when my lesbian friends and I were talking sports, we did it on an equal footing. But when I talked sports with a man, often I needed to take a back seat to his sports knowledge even though I had plenty of my own. I learned my lessons and moved on.

Even though many of my vacations from life were just quick, cheap escapes, many were extensive, expensive paths to my future life. Plus, they handed out much needed respites for my often-battered mental health as I battled depression and anxiety. It all helped me to survive and make it to my dream goal I never thought I could make it to. A life as a transgender woman.

As always, thanks for not taking a vacation to read and comment on my posts. Your input always means a lot to me!

 

 

If You Don't Try...You Will Never Get There

 

Image from Luis Villasmil
on UnSplash

During our lives as transgender women and transgender men, we come to many obstacles that we have no idea of how we are ever going to get around.

After many early failures in my unwanted life as a boy, it was increasingly evident to me that if I did not attempt to try harder being a girl, I would never have a chance of making it to my dream. In many ways I was stuck between a gender rock and a hard place. On one hand, I was running to hide behind any failures I might have with my dresses and makeup, and on the other, I was making myself afraid to try anything new at all.

It took me years to learn that if you don’t venture into the world outside of your little closet, nothing will be gained. I discovered after I went through male puberty, I had very little to start with as far as having any natural feminine characteristics to work with. Even still, until I got out of the mirror and into the public’s eye, I had no idea of how bumpy my gender path would be.

In the early days, my male ego took it badly and my female ego was hurt deeply when I was laughed at in public. Until I began to take matters into my own hands. In order to improve my feminine presentation, I went on a crash diet which enabled me to fit into and purchase more stylish fashion. I learned to be in the right place at the right time if I really wanted to try to blend in with the ciswomen who ran the world, I wanted to be in. It took time to try more extreme transgender bucket list items I had put together to learn how it would be to live in a woman’s world if I had to try hard enough.

It was about that time that I landed a job with a very successful casual dining restaurant chain who taught me a lot about not being a victim and if I did not try to succeed I wouldn’t. In essence the chain took what I had learned about myself in the military and improved it. Which was just what I needed to take the gender box I was stuck in and find my way out. What I discovered was that most of the world did not care anything about me once I began to learn the basics of not drawing undue attention to myself. Setting me up to try more and more gender trials on my own. Because I had no one else to help me. The mistakes I was making and learning from came from the fact that my gender workbook was blank and the women I could share my secret with left me on my own to learn my own lessons and be a better transgender woman. Once I figured out what that was and how I fit in with the terminology.

It turned out the only ciswoman with any access to me was my second wife who, for the most part, left me alone with my struggles. Only stepping in when I made mistakes causing huge fights. The problem became I had very little public output for my desire to work the world as a trans woman. I became very frustrated and depressed when I had no way to get out and live because deep down, I knew I was on the right path, and I just had to keep on trying. My only regret now is that I would have taken the steps sooner to be myself and not dragged my wife and I through all the torment I was putting us through.

It was not until she passed away, did I find my path again and began to try to actively carve out a life as a trans woman. In order to do it, I needed to have the confidence of my gender convictions that I had never had in the past. For once, I had few other distractions to slow me down and it seemed everyday I was learning and making progress towards a gender dream which had seemed so unlikely in my past. And, for once, I was not doing it on my own as I slowly build a small circle of ciswomen friends to do it. They were able to teach me more about womanhood than they ever knew as they allowed me behind the gender curtain into their world as lesbian women. Somehow, my male baggage which helped me was kept such as my basic mistrust of men since I had been forced into their circles in my life and the fact I could fit in with them image-wise because I was largely a tomboy in my tight jeans and boots.

Through it all, there were a couple of other things I needed to try to improve my world as a transfeminine person. The first was attempting to see if I was healthy enough to be approved for gender affirming hormones or HRT. I was and my life improved dramatically as I took on more and more feminine characteristics. The process was so easy, it was as if my body was saying what took me so long for such an important move. The other was the move initiated by my therapist’s permission at the Veterans Administration to have most of my legal gender markers changed. It was the best Christmas gift I ever received when I saw a judge and received my formal name change approval on Christmas Eve which got the ball rolling towards securing a new driver’s license, Social Security Card and getting my VA paperwork changed over. To the gender I always should have been.

I would never have made it through all the dark gender moments in my life. Especially with the added problems of depression and anxiety I had if I had not made it through and kept on trying to reach my dream of being allowed to live fulltime as a transgender woman. It was certainly touch and go until destiny stepped in and helped me along by pushing me back out into the world until I found other women to socialize with. I even played the online dating game and won after sorting through an enormous amount of trash, my wife Liz found me fourteen years ago and have been together ever since. If I had played my old victim cards, there would have been no way I could have ever made it out into the world.

I learned firsthand, if you never try, you will never make it to your dream.

 

 

I Was Risking it All

 

Image from Leo Visions
on UnSplash.

In many ways this post is an extension of yesterday's explanation of me never really having a plan b as I traveled up and along my gender path to transgender womanhood. The essence of what I wrote was I did not have a real plan if suddenly it was evident I was not going to make it to my dream.

I was taught to be a dreamer by the unrealistic expectations my parents put on me. Whatever I did was never good enough and often sent me back to hide in my dresses, hose, and makeup. The only place that my impossible dream of being allowed to be feminine could become a reality. If only for a short time. I don’t know exactly why, but the gender dream I was pursuing so well was the only dream I wanted to become a reality as I did just enough to have good grades in school and played just enough sports to keep the bullies away.

Cross-dressing was always a risk because back in those days (the 1950’s and early 1960’s) gender issues were considered to be mental health problems, and I knew that did not describe me. On the other hand, I did not want an impromptu visit to a psychiatrist to tell me about myself and how I should be treated. Fortunately, that mental health visit never happened as I continued to risk my existence on some sort of a high-wire act which if I ever fell, life as I knew it would fall with me.

Of course, as it always does, life became much more complex as the years flew by. As my cross-dressing became more presentable, at the same time, I had college demands and a military service I never asked for to deal with during the Vietnam War years. All this time, I was learning what it meant to risk it all in my life and somehow still succeed. As even though my gender issues were put on hold for a long three years, I learned valuable lessons from the Army on how to attempt to deal with my dream which was on hold. At the least, I learned from the military how to deal with a structure I had never had before as well as other issues that would take another blog post to deal with.

When I was discharged from the Army, I gained my first and only child and my life became even more complex. What could I do with a child to deal with if I wanted to risk it all to run away and live a transfeminine life. Dealing with everything else for me became easy when I had a family to provide for. Any alternate plans I had for my future were delayed again along with any hope of ever making it to my dreams.

What suddenly came along to help me was when the internet took hold of the world and I was introduced to people just like me I could reach out to and even meet. All because of the first in home computer my second wife and I purchased. By participating in the first chat rooms of the time, I had my first taste of what it meant to be a transgender woman and not a parttime cross-dresser as well as sampling my many layers of the gender spectrum I never knew existed. The one big thing the computer did for me was that it taught me how badly I wanted to test out the new world I had discovered for myself and see where it took me.

I also learned quickly that it was easier said than done. Mainly because when I left my safe closet mirror and jumped into the harsh reality of being a trans woman in the world was not going to be as easy as I thought. I needed to quit dreaming of what I thought I should look like and begin to expend all my time and money working on how to survive in a world where ciswomen run the show. Sometimes up front and most of the time behind the scenes which I came to call the gender curtain. I found out the hard way, that to not be rejected in my quest to make it behind the curtain I would have to eventually risk it all in search of the new, exciting world I wanted to live in.

I am not a poker player at all, but I knew I would have to push all my chips to the center of the table to see if I could ever win my goal. The problem remained that my male side was still acquiring more chips with his new more demanding job. Here I was stuck between two genders trying to rule each other and the male side was materialistic, and the female side was more natural and felt like I was doing the right thing for the first time in my life. All the turmoil resulted in was destroying my already frail mental gender spectrum health. It tore me up as I had to constantly be aware of which gender I was on any given day.

As I said, eventually my feminine side won out as I chose feeling more natural in the world than I ever had as a man. He had been reduced to a shell of his former self by being able to shed his male privileges he earned but never wanted. In its place I gained the greatest female privilege of all…the freedom to experience the world as a trans woman myself. It took a while but all the dark downtimes I experienced on my bumpy gender path made me a more resilient trans woman with a unique understanding of both sides on the main gender binary.

I cannot imagine what would have happened if I had lost that gender poker game so long ago because I was living such a miserable life. Plan a was to always live as close as I could to a woman. It took me decades of life (5) to get there, but I made it.

 

Trusting the Process

 

JJ Hart Very Early On, 
Trusting the process in a 
rest room. 

One of the hardest things to do as a transgender woman or transgender man, is to trust the process as you continue along your gender path.

Especially when your path is lasting longer and taking you places you never thought of going to. Then you have the probability of picking up more of the gender baggage than you never thought you would. Trusting what you will take with you and what you will leave behind becomes a huge problem.

As you build your new personality, you can use your old gender baggage as positive building blocks if you can take the leap of faith to learn from your past. Perhaps, more than anything else, you must trust in yourself to believe in what others may think of you. This was very important to me as I began to build from my small core of ciswomen friends and have the courage to spread out into society.  I started following my new wife’s Liz lead and joining her spiritual group to start and then spreading out further into other “Meet-Up” groups in Cincinnati which matched our potential interests such joining writers’ groups for me, along with craft groups for Liz. It worked well for me as I was able to work my way out from being so shy around strangers and build more trust in myself.

Trust comes with a couple of drawbacks such as what if your trust is betrayed and how you will ever build trust again. Going way back to my second marriage, I destroyed most of the trust my wife and I developed over the years by breaking the deal I made to never go out of the house alone cross-dressed. I certainly was not proud of what I did but just could not stop myself from doing it. Essentially, I felt as if I was cheating on her with another woman who just turned out to be me and whatever she did was just not good enough for me. As I was busy destroying her trust, she was correct in telling me I made a terrible woman, and it had nothing to do with my appearance. Which at that time meant the world to me.

During this time and beyond, it was difficult for me to try to trust the process I was on during my gender journey. It seemed nothing was going fast enough for me to ever see if I could make it to my ultimate goal of living full-time as a transfeminine person. I guess if you take into account all the years, I spent cross-dressing my life away from the male world I disliked so much, it is no wonder I felt that way.  From start to finish, it took nearly a half a century for my male to female femininization project, which should have been more than enough time to trust the process and have faith where I was going.

My excuse that I always hang onto is that my male life was not that bad and my male self was a powerful ally with my second wife on me ever transitioning into transgender womanhood. And did I trust what all of that meant to me anyhow. I did realize any sort of a gender transition would mean I stood a very real chance of losing all the materialistic male privileges I had built up over the years. In an instance, my spouse, family, friends and job could be wiped out and I would have to start all over again. At that time, I did not think I trusted myself to do it, so my made the worst choice I have made in my life and tried to juggle a life somewhere on the gender border between male and female.

As I am always hesitant to write about, my choice to walk the narrow gender line wrecked my mental health and led me to a self-harm event. I was already diagnosed with being a Bi-Polar depressive person, so it did not take much to send me over the edge. Fortunately, I had a good therapist to help me realize my truth and help me through it. I was slowly coming to a point where I could trust the process and understand where I truly fit into the grand plan of my life the way it always was meant to be. I should have never embarked on any path to being male at all. A place which was foreign to me and I just did not belong. I was no wonder I felt the way I did around other men I was with. Full of mistrust in them for the most part.

Once I was over that hurdle in my life, I needed to begin to trust the world through the eyes of a trans woman which was hard to do. Mainly since I knew the way toxic men treated women from my past. Once again, cis women with their open minds to me joining their club were my secret to building trust again. Even though I still carried the scars from attacks by passive aggressive ciswomen, I was able to build my own new life with a feminine confidence I had never had before. I felt so good, I went ahead with my long-awaited legal name change and even longer awaited plan to be approved for HRT or gender affirming hormones. By doing so, I effectively painted myself into a gender corner I could not escape from. I had to trust the process and not try to turn around no matter how attractive the idea sounded at times when I learned what I was losing with my male privilege being taken away.

Primarily, I lost much of the knowledge of life I had learned as a man as well as needing to keep a closer eye on my personal security. Which was quickly at risk as a transgender woman joining the world for the first time and learning first hand what ciswomen already knew about being around toxic men.

As I said, trusting the gender process path I was on was never easy, but it turned out it was the only path I had.

 

Dreaming in "3-G"

 

Image from Amin RK
on UnSplash.

Dreaming in “3-G” seems to be coming natural for me these days.

Somehow, I have skipped the old two gender dreams I was having and replaced them with a more complex series of dreams I can remember in the morning when I wake up. I call them three gender dreams.  It’s kind of like going from black and white movies back in the day to full color masterpieces.

Here is an example. Recently I was having a dream that I was a guy but later became a woman complete with a new bag of lipstick. I wondered at the time how the lipstick got there but I had no answer as the dream moved on. Also, I have noticed recently that my dreams have been shifting out of my old male world and into my relatively new feminine world. I suppose I was expecting miracles when I thought fifteen years of fulltime transgender life could replace sixty years in the male world. In my subconscious.  

All my gender dreams can be traced back to my earliest days of life when I had vivid dreams of being a pretty girl and being very disappointed when I woke up in the same body every morning. But as I remember, my dreams were all in “2-G” and involved me in one of the two main binary genders, male or female.

I find it interesting that some transgender women or transgender men who I happen to talk about concerning their dreams say they are always their authentic gender self when they dream. When I have always been a mixture. I suppose that it is another complexity of what trans folk go through. The only constant in all my “2-G” or “3-G” dreams I have had over the years is that from most of them I was having a positive experience that I wanted to continue. Such as in my early years when all I really wanted to do was present well enough to make it in public as a transfeminine person. Who could blend in with ciswomen everywhere and not cause any extra attention.

What confused me was when I was starting to successfully lead a trans woman’s life, why it didn’t it follow me more into my dream world. I took what I could get and kept moving on with my own male to female femininization program. Dreams were just an integral part of keeping my gender sanity along the way. They helped with dispersing all the pressure in life I was feeling from juggling two genders. Plus, I have considered too that the anti-depressant and anxiety medications I am on may contribute to the vivid dreams I have been having.

I also find it strange when I have a “3-G” rare negative dream. I would have thought that with all the success I finally had on my gender path, I would not have an ugly dream about someone pulling off my wig in public. Especially since I have not had to wear a wig in almost a decade and never had anyone try to pull mine off when I did. It is my own version of a nightmare-cross dresser style.

At the least, when the “3-G” dreams don’t turn ugly, they are cheap entertainment and I wonder how I got here. When I do, the answer always comes back loud and clear that I made it to the place in life where I always should have been. And my dreams just are a reflection of that.

Maybe too, my dreams are finally transitioning to my current feminine self. Which is currently making the transition to just being the me I needed to be. “2-G” or “3-G” dreams should not matter anymore as they are just a needed respite from the real world we transgender individuals must put up with.

No matter where your dreams lead to, I hope they find you in a good place in this sometimes-negative world we live in today. We need all we can get to lead a quality life away from all the gender haters and bigots and a little daydream of how your future could be can never hurt anyone.

This is just a little shorter post than you are used to seeing from me today as I have to get mentally prepared for my Veterans Administration assigned psychiatrist virtual visit. I thought it would be a fun time to write about the effect dreams of all kinds have on our lives as trans people.

Good night!

 

 

 

 

Dealing with Stress as a Transgender Woman

 

Image from Ksenia Berjoz 
on UnSplash.

In the male world I did not want to be in, I had a difficult time responding to pressure except where I worked where oddly enough, I thrived.

I suppose the gender pressure I was under started very early in life when I needed to struggle mightily to even find the private time to even try to be the pretty girl I wanted to be in front of the mirror. From my early cross-dressing years, instead of growing away from feeling the pressure I was feeling, I grew into it. On one side, I had the fond thoughts of gender euphoria dominating every spare moment that I had and on the other side I had the reality of having to compete in a world I never wanted to be in. Football was a prime example of me trying to overachieve and ended up breaking two bones doing it before I just quit.

Moving forward to the time when I left my closet and started to discover the world as a novice cross-dresser or transgender woman, the pressure was on more than ever before to succeed as neither of my egos were taking getting laughed at by the public well. My feelings hurt, and the pressure as I said was building to do something about it.

The first thing I knew I could do was go on a diet which quickly slimmed my body so I could find and wear more fashionable clothing and started to take care of my skin better everyday after I shaved. All of this helped me to feel better about myself, and I kept on trying to perfect my makeup techniques to improve my public presentation. With all of this, it still took me quite a while to build my fragile confidence to a point where I could go out in public again.

Then I found myself in a spot where pressure was coming at me from different angles. On the days I thought my makeup and clothes were at their peak of success, the pressure would set in about how I was moving as a transfeminine person in the world. I needed to concentrate on two things, not moving like a linebacker in drag and making sure I put a pleasant look on my face. Replacing the male scowl I had perfected for so long. If I was enjoying my new life, I would have to make sure I showed it to the world.

As I did all of that, my inner pressure began to change once again as I began to free myself from the drag atmosphere of the gay venues I was going to (where I was considered as just another queen) and into the straight world I was used to where I could at least have a fighting chance of being treated as another woman in the world where the ciswomen ruled the scene I wanted to be accepted into. For the most part, I discovered that most ciswomen did not notice me, or if they were, they were just curious why I was trying to play with the girls’ club and leaving the universe of men.

At that point, I nearly panicked from all the pressure I was under as I desperately tried to maintain what was left of my male life which included my wife and job and at the same time try to allow my feminine transgender side to flourish also. My main reason to panic came when I needed to learn immediately how to communicate one on one with other women. To relieve the pressure, I went all out and even took feminine vocal lessons and I had to focus for the first time in my life on really listening to what someone else was telling me because I found that ciswomen were the masters at non-verbal or passive aggressive communication and used both methods to by pass the men around them. Which was the main reason men said they could not understand women. The women had set it up that way.

I did maintain that life as long as I could before the pressure increased again until the forms of relieving it, I was using, just did not work any longer. On top of that, I was becoming more and more self-destructive, and I kept putting my life in danger. Fortunately, before anything severely happened to me because of the pressure I was feeling nothing severe happened to me and I began to build a new exciting life out of the ashes of the male life I used to live. I took what I could from him and added it to my new transfeminine life I was beginning to carve out for myself.

Magically then, much of the pressure I was feeling about my male to female femininization started to drain off me. I can’t take all of the credit because I fell into the open arms of so many ciswomen who had problems of their own and took the time and effort to help me with mine. All their efforts reinforced why I wanted to be allowed behind the gender curtain to start with.

After the pressure was released, it was like the sun came out to me on a cloudy day, I can’t say how much weight was lifted from my shoulders when I finally saw the sunlight and decided to put my male self in my past and begin HRT or gender affirming hormones under a doctor’s supervision.

I can’t say before then I had any knowledge at all how to live a life without experiencing gender pressure. As I matured into a confident transgender woman, I finally realized I did not have to live that way, and I had the built the confidence to change it.

Certainly, living under pressure is no fun, and I would not wish it on anyone. Also, I know everyday humans have stress in their life, but I am biased, but I think transgender women and transgender men have more than their fair share to deal with. How we are able to handle it can define our lives.

 

 

 

Exorcising my Demons

 

Peaches Grille, Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Yesterday I went back to my hometown to pick up copies of court paperwork I needed on my name change so long ago.

By so long ago, I mean I finally had to sit in front of a judge who I knew to be very conservative to get my final name change signature. It was one super Christmas present as it all happened December 23, 2015. Even “Mr. Conservative Judge” himself said Merry Christmas when he signed my long overdue paperwork. As I remember now, I had many hoops to jump through such as posting a notice in the local newspaper and waiting for thirty days to see if anyone would object to the change. Then I needed to petition the court for the actual name change. My future wife Liz was with me when all of this happened, and we were on cloud nine when we received the final documents.

The only mistake I made was not getting enough court copies of my change due to poor planning and I ran out. So, the only thing I could do was make the hour and a half trip back to the court clerk for more certified copies that I needed to change one of my insurance policies names over from my old name to my new name. My only advice to those of you who are going through the legal name change process is to plan ahead and get plenty of copies and then get more.

By now you may be asking which of my demons did I exorcise. The first major demon was not having to see mail from my insurance company showing up with my previous male name on it and knowing it was not their fault but mine because I did not do anything about it. The second demon was even going back to my hometown (where I was born and raised) at all. It is an old industrial town which has had its heart ripped out a couple times by companies downsizing or even moving overseas. Setting all of that aside, I remember the rejection I received there from certain friends and family members when they discovered my deep, dark “gender secret”. It seems each rejection was burned into my soul.

So much so that I could not sleep the night before Liz and I went back to the city that I think never forgot about me. Even though that is a self-centered idea because it has in almost every way possible. My ex-brother still lives there who I am separated from and is another good reason to dread going back. To take the pressure off a little bit, I tried to meet up with my daughter and son-in-law in nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio which has always been a real treat to go to and has been referred to as the gayest town in Ohio.

My daughter could not be there because they were going to Maine to see my oldest grandchild who works up there as a nuclear engineer. Liz and I’s disappointment in not seeing daughter and son-in-law was short-lived because Yellow Springs was all decked out in its Pride finest as it was all going to happen the next day. We ended up stopping for lunch at a place called “Peaches Grill” for a great light lunch before we resumed our trip. “Peaches” was promoting their after-Pride party and was all decorated out in preparation. It was also the venue where I ended setting next to a “Debra Winger” look-a-like complete with the black “Urban Cowboy” movie cowgirl hat. It was a fun evening and no, she did not ask for my autograph (ha-ha). All in all, Yellow Springs is the direct opposite of my hometown which is only ten miles away.

Now, since I think I have all the papers I will need for any future demands put on me to vote by the Republicans, I am not envisioning any need to go back to my hometown since years ago now, I even sold the two properties I had left there. I don’t know why I have such a deep-seated fear of reliving all the bad moments that I had, I suppose it is just the vestiges of the life I had coming out into the world coming back to haunt me. And it speaks to the amount of suffering a transgender woman or transgender man can go through just to live their lives the way they need to.

I know too that I am one of the fortunate trans people who can get around freely in public since I present as just old now and can get by with my wife’s Liz help. I just have my age-old demons to harass me like I just went through. I dislike my old hometown so much, I even don’t want to mention it by name, but it is the one that the orange Russian in the White House keeps mentioning again when it comes to deporting the Haitians. I will let you fill in the blanks from there.

All in all, my demons are tough critters and the only survivors which still exist from my old male days. They play into my anxiety issues of always worrying ahead for seemingly any occasion. But as always, my feminine side has stood the test of time and has been successful in exorcising my demons. I guess you can say she has always had my back when the times were the darkest in the days when I was visiting Yellow Springs as a short-haired Army soldier when I desperately wanted to be one of the long-haired hippie girls I saw in their bell-bottom pants. It took me awhile, but I exorcised that demon who kept telling me I would never make it.

Most importantly we made the trip safely, even with a police detour set up on a rural highway for what looked like a potential swat situation as well as heavily pouring rain which hit us on and off. We made it past the demons and that is the important part.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Transgender Challenges

 

Image from Beta Builders
on UnSplash. 

For me, the challenges of being a transgender woman ran deep and came often.

The first challenges I faced were just keeping my small collection of feminine belongings secret from my younger brother and parents. From there, my dealings with my cross-dressed self and the world only would intensify as I grew up. Very soon, the move from closet to the mirror would not be enough to satisfy my gender curiosity, and I began to leave the house when I could dress in my clothes and makeup for small walks to our rural mailbox. As puberty took its toll, finding anything to wear became my biggest problem because I was outgrowing my short mom’s clothing. She was only five foot two.

Somehow, I beat the challenge of keeping my deep gender secret to myself and kept up my routine of taking every spare moment to satisfy my desire to be a girl. Of course, it took me awhile to come close to perfecting anything which came close to being acceptable when it came to applying makeup and even shaving my legs. Which I was probably sneaking around and doing before most of the girls I was around who I envied so much. As it turned out, the magic of makeup really escaped me until I had the courage to accept the challenge of having a professional makeup artist do my makeup (and explain what he was doing) at a transgender-cross dresser social I was attending in Columbus, Ohio years later. The makeup pro taught me the basics of foundation, contouring, eyes and lips among other helpful tips. All the compliments I received showed me I was indeed on the right path I had chosen in life, and I could at least expect to fit in with other ciswomen in the world on a regular basis.

Then, as I always point out, the real work and challenge of what I was setting out to do set into my life. At the same time my male counterpart was beginning to establish himself as a successful person in his chosen career. As much as my self-destructive personality kept trying to tear down all he accomplished, it never worked, and he succeeded anyway. Which meant he was increasing the amount of potential baggage I would have to account for if I was ever going to reach my goal of living as a successful transfeminine person.

What hurt me was when I miscalculated what it was going to take to live the life I always dreamed of. The challenge was making the jump of just looking similar to a ciswoman, all the way to having a basic idea of how she lived her life. A great example of how my cross-dressing fun and games became very serious when just after I decided to go full time as a trans woman and had given away all my male clothes, my wife Liz’s dad passed away and I needed something appropriate to wear to the viewing and funeral. I was fortunate that I had several items of clothing in black, so I could be properly dressed for the occasion. A long way from the day-to-day life I was expecting to challenge me as I went through my male to female femininization project.

It turned out to be a huge step in my life when I finally accepted the challenge to live the life, I was always destined to live. I was no longer the lost kid in the mirror desperately cross-dressing his life away dreaming of a world he could not be part of. I was a full-fledged adult with a rapidly clearing view of the challenge ahead if she wanted to survive. Perhaps you noticed I used the “she” pronoun as I increasingly adopted it as my referred self. It made me feel more complete as a transgender woman. If I did not believe in myself at this point of my life, how could I convince the world who I was anyhow.

The next big challenge to me was seeing if I could be approved for gender affirming hormones or HRT which I am still on (thankfully) to this day. Before I did anything with the hormonal challenge, I knew I would have to seek out a doctor’s approval to see if I was healthy enough to do it. I was able to find an ad for a doctor in nearby Dayton who said he specialized in hormonal care and I made the appointment which would change my life forever.

In our first meeting, the doctor gave me a brief physical, asked me a few questions about what I knew the HRT would do to me and started me on a minimum dosage to see if there would be any ill effects. There were not, and very soon I was on a larger dose of the magical hormones my body seemed to take to naturally and the changes to my body were on. In fact, the changes began to happen so fast, the challenge then became to move up my timetable on when I was going to give up what was left of my male existence. It was becoming increasingly difficult to hide my growing breasts, softening skin and long hair from the public and all the internal changes such as emotions from myself. I finally had enough and embarked on the greatest challenge of my life at the age of sixty. I put nearly half of a century of a part-time cross-dressing life behind me and never looked back.

Destiny helped me too, when the Veterans Administration health care system which I was a part of began to treat gender dysphoria in veterans with hormonal care. I needed again to go through the approval process and made it again as it seemed as if the challenges would never end. It was worth it because it tied me in with the VA’s mental health system for my depression and anxiety issues. As luck would have it, I was paired up with a mental health professional who I was with for years and helped me with all my issues such as having my legal gender markers changed within the VA and society at large.

I guess the challenge of any first-time experience can be traumatic for any human being. It just seems unfair that transgender women and transgender men have more than their fair share of challenge.

 

 

 

 

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!