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.

 

 

 

More Changes

 

Image from Brad Starkey 
on UnSplash.

More changes are coming to our house beginning today. Thanks to my wife Liz, we are tearing out one of our old bathtubs and putting in a new walk-in shower. Which is perfect for my immobile status and makes it less dangerous for me to take a shower.

You would think, by this time in my life, I would be used to change but it seems I have just become more set in my ways as a senior citizen transgender woman. As with many of you, our gender issues changed us for the first time quite early in life. Mine manifested itself the first time I felt the magic of trying on my mom’s clothes and I worked my way forward from there.

At that time, I labored under the impression my love for feminine clothes would eventually go away but it was something I ended up growing into rather than away from. The older I got, the more skilled I became at acquiring key items in my wardrobe and hiding them away in places even my younger brother would not find. I even increased the number of odd jobs I would do (such as a newspaper route) to augment my meager allowance and allowed me to buy items such as makeup and panty hose which felt so good on my legs I was shaving earlier than probably half the girls my age that were allowed to do. To shave them I had to use my mom’s electric shaver which I needed to carefully clean after every use. Again, somehow, I managed to escape detection as I continued to cross dress.

It wasn’t until my military days that I really began to push for more changes in how I was approaching my femininity. It was a Halloween party I went to when I only had about eight months left to serve that changed everything. For my “costume” I chose a slutty woman’s look to go with my friends looks. Further down the road, during a night of drinking fine German beer, my “costume” came up in a casual conversation with three of my closest friends, including my first wife. As we talked about the amount of time and effort to look the way I did, I finally thought to hell with it, and told the group I was a transvestite (the term of the day) and I liked to wear women’s clothing. Surprisingly, no one cared and life went on normally for me even after for the first time in my life I risked it all and told someone else my deepest darkest secret. I felt like a huge weight had been taken off my shoulders, but my freedom was fleeting because of what I did in the Army. If anyone of my higher ups had found out about my secret, it could have easily caused me to have be put up for a dishonorable discharge with less than the eight months I had left to go. Which would have been heartbreaking with all the changes the Army had put me through.

As I always write about, my newfound freedom to tell anyone else about my ongoing male to female femininization project came to a screeching halt when I tried to tell my mom. She rejected me totally and sent me scurrying back to my closet as far as telling any blood family about my potential transgender dreams. The only close person to me that I knew was my first wife and surprisingly her sister who told no one. I think sometimes by coming out the way I did at Halloween parties was a plea for the public to listen to me and when I did ever transition, no one would be surprised. Surprisingly, I was so macho in my male life, nobody ever did. Including the few people who were still alive years later when I came out. All I got was surprise from the people I knew. The main reaction was that I seemed too macho to ever be a woman. 

All the changes I went through as a novice transgender woman in my thirties and forties were immense as I learned what I was really facing if I followed my gender path to my ultimate goal of living fulltime as a trans woman. I kept being stopped by blind curves and huge Ohio potholes as I learned the hard way what ciswomen must go through to live their daily lives. I had become a social person later In life and desperately needed it to continue when I went behind the gender curtain and emerged a better person. I spent so many evenings planning to be by myself that the loneliness was really getting to me before changes suddenly began to set in. It all started when a bartender at one of the venues I visited often set me up to meet her lesbian mother to have a casual drink where she worked.

We became friends and were able to see each other often until another woman entered our little group and we became a friendly threesome and gathered to watch sports on the big screens. Of all things, the third woman was another lesbian who slid her phone number down the bar to me one night when I was alone and I responded feeling much better about myself.

The most amazing experience I had was yet to come when my future wife Liz responded to an online ad I placed. Predictably, I had to sort through the ton of online responses I received all the way to being stood up on pre-planned meetings with men I met online who I refused to not meet in public. I met Liz on the other hand in one of the sites where I was advertising in a “woman seeking woman” room and she responded to me and kept responding until we set up our first date midway between our homes which were approximately seventy-five miles apart. We went to a drag show then to a Renaissance Festival and fairly soon she invited me to move in with her. That was over twelve years ago, and I surely made the right decision.

With all this social success, I need to point out again how many dues I needed to pay before I was successful. I look at it as a full circle karma payback to all the lonely times I spent after my second wife died along with most of my closest friends. I had nowhere to turn for comfort and was forced to step out of my usual social conditions to look for connections. But that did lead me right back to the old big sports bars I so enjoyed and felt at home in as a man. Again, a full circle social moment. At least, the bartenders would socialize with me if I did not cause any trouble and tipped well. At that time in my life, any interaction was welcome as I went through the biggest changes in my life.

Change is a natural part of life anyway, but it seems we transgender women and transgender men have more than of our fair share of change to deal with. To be sure it is difficult as we pay our dues to live a life as our authentic selves.