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.

 

Gender Binges

 

Image from Andy Arjun
on UnSplash.  

Binge cross-dressing happened a lot to me when I was quite young.

Once I was able to scrape together my meager finances to put together a small wardrobe of feminine clothes that barely fit me, I could not stay away from wearing them more and more. In fact, I was able to come up with two main hiding places away from the prying eyes of my family and most importantly, my slightly younger brother. It was about that time that I really became involved with binging in my new clothes which I felt made me look like a pretty girl.

Very soon, regardless of the risk involved with me cross-dressing as a girl, I was doing it as much as I could get away with. I think now that my mom had to know something about my cross-dressing but was either afraid to say anything about such a complex subject or thought it was a phase that would go away. Obviously, the joke was on her. My wanting to be a woman never did go away; I just matured into it. Plus, back in the late 1950’s and early 1960's, there was very little good information about gender issues to deal with, so we were on our own as gender issues were called mental illnesses. Which even I knew at such a young age was not true. For all I knew at the time, I really liked experimenting with mom’s clothes and makeup and binge dressing was becoming routine.

As I said, once I began to mature into being a more accomplished cross-dresser (even before I considered myself transgender) I managed to dress more and more. I was even able to buy a beautiful long blond human hair wig that she hated and I loved. Finally, after I changed girlfriends, she went away and I kept the most important part of the relationship to me which of course was the wig. It brought me to a whole other level of cross-dressing away from Halloween wigs into the real deal. Back in the 1960’s when miniskirts were in, I could not wait until I could find a chance to slide on pantyhose and miniskirt and top it all off with my blond wig. Yes, I did binge any chance that I got!

Sadly, my binge dressing needed to come to a complete halt during my military years in the Army. Instead of worrying about how short I could wear my miniskirts, I had a more immediate and important problem of how to deal with weapons and drill sergeants in Army basic training. How I survived was that I put all my fond memories of cross-dressing in the back of my head and daydreamed about the future I knew I could have shaving my legs again and binge dressing as a woman.

After I served my time in the military, the only immediate release I had from all the tension I felt to be feminine at all was with all the many and varied Halloween parties I went to. During that time, I went from being a French woman with my blond hair, black outfit, tights and beret, all the way to professional woman one year when I was mistaken for a ciswoman just getting off work. The good news was I was learning a lot, and the bad news was Halloween only came about once a year. I needed desperately to find another way to binge with a purpose and express myself as a transgender woman. A term I was beginning to accept as my own.

Once I began to accept who I was, I needed to set out to prove it to myself and the world that I could live my truth. It was then that my binging took a whole different direction from where I was before. Thanks to the basic acceptance I gained from successful Halloween parties, I had the confidence to know I could look the part and blend in with society as another ciswoman. Little did I know then, the hardest part of my male to female femininization project was yet to come.

It took me finally getting out of the gay bars I regularly went to for some sort of validation I never received and into being accepted as a regular in many of the straight venues I went to and enjoyed as a man. My validation as a regular gave me the confidence to keep trying to improve myself as a transgender woman rounding out her life in the world. As I achieved goal after goal I set up on my trans bucket list, I really binged out every chance that I got which put me into a direct collision with my second wife who did not want to live with another woman and my male self who was dead against giving up his life all together.

By all out gender binging, I had set myself up for an internal war I was fortunate to survive. It took me all I could do to keep all my lives together as the years progressed. All I knew was I was able to carve out a dream existence as a transfeminine person. No one knew of my male past, and I loved experiencing every moment of my new life. Deep down, for once I felt I was fighting my self when I was binging as a trans woman and expressing my true self.

By turning back, the clock the best I could, I tried to take the best that I learned from my male life and apply it to building a solid base for my female life. I think it worked because I was able to decide which of my male baggage was important enough to bring along and I benefitted from being blessed with a long life, so I can see a number of important things come full circle (which is another blog post.)

The bottom line is I have always been an impulsive person which helped me all the times I just had to binge to satisfy my needs. Dealing with my gender issues was just an integral part of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Staying in Rhythm as a Trans Woman

 

JJ Hart gaining my rhythm with women.
I ma in first row on left.

 

It took me years to get into rhythm as a new transgender woman when I no longer considered myself a weekend cross-dresser.

The main problem I had was I needed to go back and forth between my male life and the feminine life I was trying desperately to learn. My wife and I had come to an uneasy truce about my increasing need to explore the world of ciswomen. She thought it was fair that I took three days out of my week to cross-dress and would even see that I had the money to go to a motel to complete my male to female femininization. Anything but me leaving the house dressed as me.

As you can tell, that was more than a fair deal but not a deal I could keep. Every time I was getting used to the makeup, clothes and movements of being a woman, I had to have it all taken away with a jolt of reality when I had to go back fulltime into my unwanted male world. Before long, I grew tired of the truce and having my gender rhythm destroyed and started to leave the house as me any time I wanted. As with most good times, my brief on an off life as a transgender woman was threatened with ending as my second wife discovered me time after time, I had excuses for being dis-honest and jeopardizing the good marriage I had but deep down I had no choice if I wanted to keep my feminine rhythm going.

Through all the good times and bad times with my second wife, I was learning what it would take for me to express my femininity and it was all me who drove us to our breaking point. More than once when I tried things such as gender therapy to curb my desires to be a woman. The only time that therapy helped me was when I was diagnosed with being a Bi-Polar depressive person which said a lot to me. Mainly it explained why I was spending days at a time not wanting to get out of bed and others when I thought I could conquer the world and it had nothing to do with being transgender. After trying several medications, I did not tolerate well, I found some that I could, and they keep my moods stable to this day. I was able to work my depression issues into my life and build them into the rhythm so I could live a good life.

Even with all the success I was having on my depression medications, I still had to face the problems I had switching back and forth between the two main binary genders. Most of the time on a daily basis. As I would rush home from work, pull off my shirt and tie and be the woman I always wanted to be until my wife came home. I was able to juggle my genders and make some sort of a life with all of this until the untimely passing of my wife from a massive heart attack at the age of fifty. Even though we never saw eye to eye on my transfeminine desires, I still loved her deeply and our marriage made it to the twenty-five-year mark.

Naturally, the whole tragic deal sent me into a tailspin, and I had to figure out what to do about my all of a sudden very lonely life. Was I going to go back to try to establish a male life with another ciswoman or get rid of my male life altogether and start all over as a transgender woman.

By this time in my life, I did not want to try another relationship with a ciswoman I would have to lie to, so the answer was clear. Take all the time and effort I had put into building my new rhythm as a trans woman and head for a new life. All the time and effort I put into presenting as well as I could as a woman, as well as communicating well as one too came back to help me. Confidence as well as an extreme amount of destiny opened doors for me that I never thought possible would happen. As my third wife Liz told me very few people ever have the opportunity to stop their lives, learn from their mistakes, and start over again. Don’t screw it up.

I took the insight I received from my time as a man observing how ciswomen live around them and tried to mold that into a new life. Because I fell into the arms of loving women during my male to female transition, I did not have to worry about such rhythms such as my sexuality ever becoming an issue. I had always desired women sexually as a woman myself, and nothing had to change. Add in my passion for history and sports and I hit the trifecta of being exactly in the place I wanted to be. Through it all, I could not believe it was all finally happening to me after all the years of sneaking around and struggling with my gender.

Better yet, I had reached the point where if I looked like a woman, walked like a woman and communicated as a woman, then I was a woman. Even though I did not gain my status the same way most women do. Their gender rhythm came naturally while I needed to work to find mine was the only difference.

Even though I was a slow learner when it came to learning to finally live how I was always meant to live, I was a survivor which was all that mattered and when I learned my feminine rhythm I never had to let it go.

As always, thanks so very much for reading along with my exploits in exploring the transgender world. Any comments you might have are always appreciated!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

More Serious Stop Signs

 

Image from Steve Lieman
on UnSplash.

“Tia” wrote in yesterday and commented on my recent “Stop Sign” post. She wanted further insight into what my biggest stop signs were and how did I get through them.

First, thanks for the insightful comment, Tia and here are the answers as I remember them now.

By far, my biggest stop sign was put directly in my path by my second wife. As I was stuck between the rock and the hard place with her because of the transition I was slowly making from cross-dresser to transgender woman and my wife. Rightfully so, my wife pointed out I was breaking the marriage covenant we had and she did not want to be married to another woman. The last thing I want to do here is make her the bad person in all this gender turmoil because she knew and accepted my cross-dressing before we got married.

She even went as far as attending the social activities I went to in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio and supported my efforts to leave the house to explore the world as a transfeminine person for the first time by backing me with money for motel rooms to get ready in. The only real stop sign I had was to agree to never leave the house dressed as me. Was it enough for me? No. I blew right through the stop signs and started to throw caution to the wind and go out into the world like the authentic me. Regardless of the heavily populated area of town, we lived in.

I kept on doing this until I was caught time and time again by my second wife and could not lie my way out of me breaking our agreement. I resorted to even going to therapy for help which never actually came. Mainly because I was not doing anything wrong in my struggle to just be the inner female I always thought I was. I even had a therapist I respected totally tell me that and I just ignored her. Thinking I could balance my gender issues and fight on to maintain the status quo. By ignoring the stop signs I was facing, I was just making my life worse and not helping our relationship in the long term which I will get back to later. Because, as it turned out, there would not be a long term relationship anyhow.

In the meantime, as I became more serious about the possibility of living out my life as a transgender woman, I began to see other stop signs ahead. They were major signs too such as how I would support myself in the world without my wife and perhaps the rest of my family. Obstacles which face nearly all transgender women and transgender men as we attempt to cross the gender border and live out our lives as normal everyday citizens. It is difficult to end one life, pick up the pieces and start over again. Something I wish all the transphobes who try to attack us would try to understand but that is a whole other topic.

Pure destiny helped me to negotiate the other major stop signs I faced with the attitude that if others could complete a male to female transition, why couldn’t I. Life became a circle for me as I went through the darkest period of my existence before I was able to pay my dues and take advantage of the new world I was in. The most tragic part was losing my wife to a major heart attack. I never ever thought she would ever die before me with the stressful lifestyle I was leading but I did, which led me to wonder what I would do about the biggest stop sign of all in my life. In the new darkness as I searched for my new path which had existed so long. All I needed to do was remove the stop sign and continue to live.

I also found I needed to do a quick look into who was important to me in my life and who I could afford to lose if I crossed the gender border. In my darkness I guessed my daughter who would support me and my only brother would not. Which was exactly what happened. It has been over a decade since I have talked with my brother, and my daughter has become one of my biggest supporters. My parents had long since passed on so I did not have to worry about coming out to either of them. Even though I did try to come out to my mom years ago and was rejected. I took that stop sign down and forgot about it.

It seemed, once I got used to taking down my gender stop signs the easier it got. Although that was not necessarily the case. Destiny stepped in again and provided me with an age excuse when it came to how I was going to support myself. I was fortunate to have worked a good job with a good wage which helped my Social Security retirement payments. I turned out if I was able to sell the collectables my wife and I had collected over the years, I could retire and support myself. Which saved me having to look for a job as a new transgender woman.

Of lesser importance was when the Veterans Administration started to provide care for gender conflicted veterans such as me. I jumped at the chance for lower cost HRT meds and the mental care to get them. The mental care provided me with a qualified therapist who helped me with the legal documents that assisted changing my legal gender markers within the VA and the public sector.

Perhaps removing the biggest stop sign of all that remained was discovering a loving relationship which I could cherish for the rest of my life. That person of course was my wife Liz who discovered me on an online dating site. I was always a social person and had resigned myself to a life of being alone before I met Liz and we are still going strong over fifteen years later.

I hope all of this answers the questions Tia and all of you may have had about my transgender stop signs and how I handled them. Some stopped me for years while others I simply rolled through or ignored altogether but one way or another I made it. As always, all of your comments are appreciated!

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Burning my Gender Bridges

 

Image from Kellen Riggin 
on UnSplash. 

Sadly, following  my gender path included burning many bridges behind me which connected me to my old male past.

I think the problem stemmed from the self-destructive behavior I always exhibited when I did anything remotely successful as a man. I still had not yet faced the fact that I wanted nothing to do with being a guy, and everything that came with it. Including the potential of living with the white male privilege that was an automatic addition to my life.

Then, there was always the part of relief if I was ever caught cross-dressing early in life. Finally, I would be exposed as the deeply feminine person I really was. Life was much simpler back in those days, and I wondered how bad it would be to go to a psychiatrist and try to explain to him or her how I was not mentally ill; I just wanted to be a girl and my ultimate goal in life was to grow into a woman someday. The only way to get there was to risk everything and not get caught, but I never did and did not have to burn any bridges to find my way into early forms of conversion therapy.

It was not until much later in life did, I really began to torch my bridges behind me. The problem was, I needed to build my bridges longer and stronger to carry all the increased male baggage I had accumulated. Most of which was against my will. This was when my male life was outpacing my female life and I was building a small family and a very good job while at the same time managing to hang on to a long-term marriage where my wife was learning about and fighting against any thoughts of me sliding towards leading a transgender lifestyle. I desperately did not want her to be on any bridge that I burnt, and the pressure built on me not to light the match on my life if I took the huge step and decided to keep femininizing myself.

As I reached deeper and deeper into myself looking for an answer, I felt increasingly natural when I was attempting to put together my feminine self. No matter how risky burning my previous gender bridges behind was, I could not shake the idea I was doing something right by transitioning my old male life away.

The next big problem I faced was letting the world I was in know I was switching from my male club membership to the girls’ club. As I was being increasingly successful in carving out a new secret life as a trans woman, I did not want it to be secret any longer. So, I did the natural thing for me, I tried to make it impossible for me to turn back on my gender path. I started to go into my own restaurant dressed as me to see if I was recognized which I quickly was. I could have lost my executive general manager’s job immediately if I was but I was prepared to burn that bridge when I came to it. Looking back, it was not the smartest decision I ever made in my life but one I was desperate to make as my female self was crying out for attention.

When I progressed to a certain point in my male to female transition plan, burning bridges became just an automatic part of the plan because I did not need the male part of my life anymore, I was getting rid of. The prime example as I always point to is the night that something had changed in my thinking that I was not cross-dressing to go out and socialize, I was finally trying to formally join the world as a full-fledged transfeminine participant. The evening was a resounding success, and I knew from that point forward that I could never go back to being a man again. I could see my bridge burning over a not-so-distant horizon and it actually was scary and good at the same time.

I probably would have burnt more bridges earlier in my life if it was not for my second wife and my male self who was hanging on for dear life but still refusing to give up his hold on me. They put up a formidable fight to the point of putting out the fires I started on purpose. It lasted until my wife passed away, leaving only my weakened male self to fight me.

The final bridge to burn was when I was approved for HRT or gender affirming hormones. It was an all hands-on deck torching when my external and even internal body began to change. My sudden change in skin tone, slightly protruding breasts and longer hair which I refused to cut gave my external transition away and the part no one saw, but I felt, such as my emotional growth made itself known to me.

Following years of gender turmoil and change, having nothing in my way felt very good and I loved the hormonal changes I was going through with my new wife Liz. Which was well over a decade now. As I said, burning bridges in my life was always a scary idea but one I needed to do to get to where I wanted to go as a transgender woman surviving in the world of ciswomen everywhere.

I was fortunate in that I did not get burned as much as I did along the way in the process. I must have been quicker than I thought as my trans destiny showed me the way during the darkest nights. Who knows? Being caught on one of my bridges may have been for the best when I needed to work my way out of danger, but it never came to that with me. I became quite good at burning my bridges…or lucky.

Thanks to all of you who have taken the time to comment, clap or subscribe and just read along with me.

Without you, it means nothing!

 

 

 

 

New Therapy Visit

 

JJ Hart with "Brutus" Buckeye
at Columbus, Ohio. 

As promised in a recent post, I am passing along the results of my new psychiatrist visit this morning.

First of all, I needed to run the waiting room gauntlet after I got checked in. The woman checking me in was very nice and I had no problems with my pronouns which was different from the past. After that, I needed to walk past the rest of the waiting room men waiting for their appointments. When I did, I received the usual number of stares and glares I normally get, so I was not upset over anything new.

Very quickly, my new therapist came out to greet me. I was relieved when he turned out to be a younger man as I have found to be more accepting of gender situations such as transgender women and trans men.

As we started to go through my past, I was surprised at all the information the Veteran’s Administration mental health system acquired on me during my previous appointment. All I needed to do was fill in the many blanks he asked me. Immediately, I tested him by telling him my former fulltime psychiatrist separated my transgender issues with my struggles with depression and anxiety. He agreed with me that the issues I have are separate and should be treated separately. Furthermore, coming out in the world and expressing myself as a transgender woman fulltime had helped me express that side of my personality, the help never resolved my other issues.

Other issues we covered in-depth were my suicide and self-harm attempts. It was decided my medications were working and we should stay on the course for the most part. Those were the difficult issues we talked about and others we finished up with included my childhood and military service.

This appointment marked the next to the last move from all my care from the Dayton, Ohio VA hospital to the Cincinnati VA. All I have left to do is my endocrinology doctor services from Dayton to Cincinnati which could be the most difficult move of all. My next appointment is coming up early in May and I need a refill on my Estradiol prescription. With the current situation in Washington, I do have a constant paranoia that my HRT hormones can be cut off at anytime by the VA under direct supervision of the orange war criminal. I think what I am going to do now is go ahead and get my refill then try to transfer my needs down here and close out my need to deal with Dayton at all. As a point of reference, Dayton VA is in close proximity to where I used to live before I moved the nearly one hundred miles to move in with my wife Liz.

From there, my appointment was over and my next visit was up as a virtual appointment in three months. I finished the early morning off by stopping at our favorite coffee shop, drive through and picking up coffee and a breakfast sandwich. I am happy to say the shop’s LGBTQ flag is still up on the wall and the young man at the window probably was gay and very friendly to me. All the better for me and the perfect ending to a great morning.

Just a short post to check in on my progress with my VA mental health care which has overall been a very positive experience over the years. When I started many years ago, I had to educate everyone about what a transgender woman was all about. These days, they know and I don’t have to.

Fortunately, I did not have to explain myself this morning and I look forward to my next appointment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Gender Woes were Always Pending

 

Image by Samual Regan Asante
on Unsplash. 

From the earliest days of my life, my gender always seemed to be “pending” as the bank likes to call my most recent on-line deposit.

In my cross-dressing days, when I could afford it, I jumped daily into different wigs, clothes and makeup styles. I was desperate to find the next best thing which would help my feminine presentation along and I was always waiting for the public to acknowledge me. Positive or not, I was always pending their approval in my life.

Along the way, I did get better with my looks and became better at blending in with the ciswomen in the society around me. But I never lost my desire for approval. It became key to my survival as a novice transgender woman, long before I discovered there would be so much more if I ever wanted to slip behind the gender curtain and live my dream life. By then, I was lapsing back into my brainwashed family idea that nothing was ever good enough which carried over to my male to female femininization activities. My confidence was so low, and fragile that the smallest negative comment would send me back to my cross-dressing drawing board as I wondered if I would ever make it.

At that time, I survived in my world by listening to a little voice in my head which was telling me all this turmoil was pending if I just stayed on my path. To do so meant negotiating many blind curves, bumps, and stop signs along the way. Before I knew it, my path was littered with failed fashion choices, wigs and drag style makeup. I needed to choose wisely what I would need to keep before I attempted to move on.

One of the most dramatic pending issues I had was when I made the jump from gay to straight venues. When I did it, I had no idea if I could, so I had to gather the confidence to do it. I needed to be better at blending my style so I would fit in but not too flamboyant to attract unneeded attention as a single woman by herself in a bar. I became very good at using my cell phone as a prop to act like I was saving a seat in the venue for a friend. Among other things I was doing to present and blend in as a transgender woman. I was not concerned so much about being read as trans but was concerned about not being a distraction. Even though I became successful and was able to become a regular at a couple venues, my relaxation was always pending as I needed to stay on guard for any crazy reactions to my being there at all.

The whole process helped me to heighten my senses to where ciswomen normally operate on a daily basis. Since I was primarily dealing women in my new life, it was key that I was able to read my gender cues correctly because the cues were coming from a different angle than they ever were when I was a man. Women primarily were curious what I was doing in their world and was I projecting an honest view of myself. When I passed their tests, I was allowed in to play in their sandbox. There was room for me after all and my dreams of living in a feminine world suddenly became so much more feasible. Something which was always pending before I was able to get out into the world and experiment as a transfeminine person.

The problem became; I was forced to remain pending in my life at a time of extreme gender discovery from me. As the world of ciswomen were exploring me, I was exploring them and learning tons of information on what I would have to do if I ever chose the final male to female transition. In other words, I was able to turn their curiosity around to satisfy my own.

Finally, I arrived at the point of no return when I had done enough experimentation as a novice trans woman to know where I wanted to go to live my dream and I knew I could if I played my cards right. I knew in many ways, this final transition I was planning on making would be the most difficult to do. I would have to try to wrap my male life up the best I could. Which involved deciding what baggage I wanted to bring with me following nearly a half of century of living.  As far as family went, I was down to only two who were still living and I knew I really wanted my daughter to accept me, which she did and my brother who I figured would be a problem and he was. He rejected me and we ended up going our own separate ways over a decade ago.

I knew too, I would have to find another way to financially support myself because my employers never would. For once, age came to my rescue as I was close to being able to take an early social security retirement and augment it by selling the numerous amounts of collectables my second wife and I had collected over the years. With the two sources of income, I calculated I could not have to work another job as I transitioned.

With those two major potential problems behind me, I had very little pending to stop me from moving ahead to the hormonal world of HRT which proved to be immensely satisfying and something I should have done years before. Rather than making the process another pending idea I wanted to try.

By now, you probably know the rest of the story. I am seventy-six and the remainder of my life is shorter than what I have previously lived. Even though I am immobile, I am fortunate to still get around and have someone who loves me. I just hope good health is not pending and I can live peacefully with myself. Which at times during my life has been an issue, including my mental health. I am meeting with my new therapist this week and will have more to share later.

 

What is THAT Sound?

 

Image from Jason Rosewell
on UnSplash. 

What’s that faint noise I hear far in the distance? It took me awhile to figure it out, but it was the sound of my feminine self-yearning to be set free to live. Very early on, I thought she would go away as I aged but the opposite turned out to be true. She grew stronger as the years of my life progressed.

That is when I started to realize just looking at my cross-dressed self in the mirror was just not going to be enough. I wanted more of the feminine life I had experienced. What I was experiencing was the idea of I had much more than a casual interest in women’s clothes and makeup. I was more into how they lived. The term transgender had not even been invented yet, so I had nothing to compare my feelings with. I did not think I was transsexual like Christine Jorgensen, but I was certainly different from other cross dressers I was seeing in my well-worn copies of “Tapestry” and “Transvestia” magazines. When all of that happened, the sound kept getting louder and something larger was wrong with me and it took me years to realize what was wrong with me was not what the sound was telling me.

I went on fighting myself searching for the truth I was looking for when it was right in front of me if I chose to see it. I ignored the advice of my handpicked gender therapist (one of the few I could find back in those days) who told me she could do nothing about me wanting to be a woman but could do something about my manic depression. Which I always had thought was something to do with my gender dysphoria. She told me it wasn’t and helped me by prescribing medications to help me in everyday life. At the time, it turned out, I was ready for help with my depression but not ready to face the facts about my gender future. I was used to loud sound from my days as a radio DJ and I was stubborn enough to want to hang on to a dual gendered life.

At the same time all of this was happening, I was beginning to explore the world as a novice transgender woman and learning every time I went out what the sound I was hearing really meant. I had life all backwards with my struggles to live a male life and the sound was telling me increasingly I was destined to be a woman all along. Not in the mold of having extensive major gender operations but doing it on my own schedule as I marched to my own drummer. Yet another sound which was growing in volume. Before I did though, I needed to undertake an extensive program of more exploration. I desperately did not want to make the move across the gender border at some point and find out I had made the biggest mistake of my life. My spouse, family and job meant so much to me, giving them up for no real reason scared me beyond belief.

Every time I began to have doubts about my upcoming gender decisions, my drumming sound grew louder as I felt more alive and natural when I was allowed behind the gender curtain with cisgender women. The work I was doing to prove myself to the world finally was paying off, for the most part. When I suffered a setback, I had the confidence and experience as a trans woman to do the right thing and move forward in my new life as I followed the sound of gender success. During this time, even though it is a blur to me now, I still remember that it all was not pleasant as I went through the turmoil of deciding which way I was going to turn next.

I know what you are thinking, what was she doing even thinking about turning her back on the gender future she had worked so hard to build. But I did as my male self stubbornly tried to drown out the sound my feminine life was making. Perhaps desperately would be a better term because of all the male privilege he had built up. He was desperate to hold off any more change.

Finally, the sound of change became deafening to the point where it could not be ignored anymore. I was not getting any younger and my transgender transition clock was ticking, loudly. As I had a huge heart to heart talk to myself, I came up with the decision to seek a doctor’s approval for HRT or gender affirming hormones as a natural progression of my feminine progress. In addition, I decided the hormones (if my body responded positively to them) would be the point of no return. I would have to come up with a different way to support myself financially, plus gather the courage to tell what was left of my family the truth about myself. As it turned out, the hormones began to feminize me faster than I ever thought possible and soon it became increasingly difficult to hide my protruding breasts, longer hair and softer skin than ever before. Long story short, my daughter accepted me and my brother rejected me as I revealed my life to them so I had the best of all worlds with the support of my daughter.

Ironically, one of the changes I went through was I had a greater, deeper appreciation of sound and music as a transfeminine person. I had gone full circle in my life understanding what that sound was and better, yet what it meant to me.

I always loved being right when it mattered most, and it did when I relaxed and listened to the sound of my gender spirit. I should give all the credit where credit is due…to the little sound inside of me who said keep trying when the going gets rough. Through the good times and the bad times, she was always there to help me survive.

 

Trans Girl on the High Gender Board

 

Image from Navy Medicine
on UnSplash.

I remember completely when I was a kid, intensely afraid of heights, and my mom made me jump off the high diving board at the swimming pool we were at. It was the last thing I wanted to do, and I still don’t know till this day how she convinced me to do it. But she did. I am sure she thought that once I did it, I could do it again, which I never did.

Perhaps, by this time, you are thinking what does this have to do with being transgender but of course I can connect the lines as always. Fast forward to the days when I was first gathering all the courage, I could muster to leave the house and attempt to explore the world as a woman. To do it, I needed to jump off that high diving board again and again. Plus, I would have to raise the diving board even higher every time I tried it.

As I did, I discovered little pockets of cross-dressing acceptance I could exist in. Such as the women’s clothing stores where almost everyone was nice to me. It took me awhile to realize the clerks who waited on me were not being nice just because I was another woman, they were being nice because I had money to spend. To them, my gender was not trans, it was green. Even though I took acceptance and built on it to other potentially mellow venues in malls such as bookstores and coffee shops. I was successful in them and was able to build my confidence from there and move up to a higher diving board and jump off. No matter how scared I was, I needed to force myself to climb and jump.

The next comfort zone I forced my way out of was by forcing myself to stop for lunch to see if I would be accepted. For the most part I was, because again, my money was green and I smiled and tipped well. The magic ingredients it turned out to be accepted into a challenging new feminine world. Or so I thought until I kept on climbing. It turned out the climbing part was the easiest. Once I arrived where I thought I wanted to be. I added “thought” in because once I made it to a higher board, the jumping part really scared me. Mainly because I was leaving so much behind me, along with all the male privileges I had worked so hard to gain. Such as fighting back when someone made fun of me for the way I looked. When it happened, the only recourse I had was to go back to my cross-dressing drawing board and try to determine what I was doing wrong.

Before long, my drawing board became quite littered with fashion mistakes I had made. Going through my cross-dressing adolescence was quite painful because I was a thirty-year-old male trying to do it before I learned otherwise. I was exhausting myself climbing up the high dive and then down when I discovered there was no water in the pool. Finally, I learned the hard way to cross-dress to blend with the other ciswomen around me because they ran the pool I wanted admission to.

It turned out that the pool was much farther down than I thought it was, and I had too much time to think about what I was trying to do before I hit the water. I had not made the time to build up the feminine muscle memory I would need to allow me admission to the world as a transgender woman. It did me no good at all if I vaguely looked like a woman if I could not move or communicate like a transfeminine person.

At that point, jumping off the high board became very real to me. I was rapidly coming to the point of decision about what I would do with my life. By this time, I was in my fifties and was beginning to carve out a respectable life as a trans woman. My new world knew what I was and did not care. About my present, or more importantly, my past as a man. I was able to bring what baggage I wanted from my male life without any interference. It made all the difference in the world to me when I needed support from wherever I could get it in the worst way.

As I lost my fear of the high dive, I began to consider other transgender alternatives such as taking advantage of therapy and HRT through the Veteran’s Administration health care system which I was already a part of. I wondered then what my mom would have thought (she had long since passed away), about teaching me to take the long and difficult path to the high board would come back to help me so much later in life. Especially when she was the one who was dead set about me coming out to her after the Army when I tried. Karma came back to help me when I needed it the most. I could jump off the highest diving board I could just to prove I could.

Of course, the final high board I jumped off was the one which saw me do away with all my male clothes and live life as a fulltime transgender woman. In reality, I was never a stylish swimmer or diver, but at least I made it to the point where I could make it in a woman’s world. A world which would prove to be much more complex and difficult for me to succeed in than I ever thought possible. Probably, because, for the most part (except for a few friends) I was filling out my gender workbook as I went along. Preparing myself for when I could achieve the ultimate goal, my lifetime dreams of living as a woman to the best of my ability.

At the least, I was happy I gathered enough courage to go ever higher on my gender diving board and more importantly jump.

 

 

 

Is Your Life Running Away

 

Image from Zac Ong
on UnSplash. 

Running more and more over the years described my life on so many levels. Most all because of my desire to be a woman. Over the years, I have moved many times, mostly because of a search for better jobs along with cross-dressing opportunities. I thought moving from my conservative smallish Ohio town to the huge metro New York City area would provide me with a more liberal base of people to work with. Which just wasn’t true, I found for the most part, I was still hiding my desire to go public in my skirts and makeup most of the time.

Mainly, it was a learning experience until I began to get older and all of a sudden saw time was moving away from me. Maybe you could call it my transgender biological clock. No one lives forever, and I still needed a chance to live out a chance to live life as a transfeminine person before I died. My new attitude added a certain importance into learning what I could about living as a woman. Or what I like to call, slipping behind the gender curtain to see how the other half really lived alongside a world of men who thought they ran the show. After several attempts of running straight ahead into failure in the public’s eye, I began to get it right with my presentation. Allowing me to explore more the true world of ciswomen who had carved out successful lives for themselves.

When I did all of that, I ran directly into communication problems. I will forever remember the first night when I attempted to add my thoughts to a group of men, I somehow found myself a part of. Suddenly, I found myself being totally ignored in the conversation and I needed to leave. There were pros and cons to what happened I found because the positive was I had presented as a woman well enough to be ignored but the negative was the whole affair marked the first time; I felt a major part of my intelligence along with my male privilege was being taken away from me. For the longest time, I felt the impact of running directly into a gender wall.

Happily, I did not receive any black eyes I needed to cover up with makeup from the running collisions I was having with the public as I set my high heels in motion to conquer my little part of the world. The personal stubbornness I had to succeed came back to hurt and help me when I moved forward in the feminine world of ciswomen. It hurt me when what was left of my old male self-tried his best to dictate how I should look for the world, which led to many fashion disasters. It helped me when I needed to pick myself up after getting knocked down again and again as I was trying to see what I would have to do to be a successful transgender woman. When I was able to put all my old self behind me was when I was able to finally see my future and run to it successfully.

The whole process of male to female gender transition was very exhausting as I tried to live in both major gender binary worlds for a short while. I always mention it to pass along a warning to all you who are thinking of trying it too. In the short term, painting yourself into a gender corner you cannot get out of is no fun unless for some reason you want it to be. For me, all it did was wreck my already fragile mental health situation. Since I already had been diagnosed as being Bi-Polar, I was already trying to keep one clinical depression controlled when I had another creeping up on me when I could not express my feminine self. I needed a lot of good therapy to separate the two potential huge problems. When I was doing it, I was still running as fast as I could to continue to chase my dream of living as a successful trans woman. Which would ultimately lead me back to just being me.

The frustrating part was the running target I was aiming for kept moving on me. Once I thought I had all I needed to play in the girl’s sandbox safely, I discovered another aspect of a woman’s life I never considered. Mainly because I was naïve and knew a woman’s life was different than a man’s, but I was not prepared to find out exactly how different. All the varying layers of a ciswoman’s life really got to me for a while until I began to get my gender workbook filled with relevant new ideas on how I was supposed to live. In other words, all the doodling in my workbook started to make sense and I could see all the running I was doing to catch up coming to an end.

Either way I was getting into shape from all the running I was doing, or I just began to give it all up as I began to become much more successful in the world as a transgender woman. At this point too, the HRT or gender affirming hormones I was approved to take helped to calm me down and sync up my internal and external selves. Internally I began to feel emotions I never knew I had and externally I was helped along by softer skin, longer hair and my own breasts. Among all the other changes the hormones brought about. I just wished I could have started HRT earlier in my life because the changes felt so natural and I would not have to spend my whole life running from an invisible foe, myself.

Now in my advanced senior years, I am finishing out my workbook on its final pages. My final transition is just being the true me I always was meant to be. Deep down, I was never meant to be a runner after all.