Gender Professionals

 

Image from Alysha Rosly
on UnSplash.

On occasion, I can just sit back and observe other women. Through my observations, it has occurred to me that some ciswomen are better at being women than others. For example, they walk straighter with their shoulders back and are proud of their femininity.

It has also been my theory that all females do not have the right to claim their femininity or the right to be called women just because they were born that way. Transgender women in particular know that becoming a woman can take many paths and we have can claim our own womanhood when our gender workbook is filled out.

Does it make us gender professionals? No, not in its own right but it does give us a leg to stand on when we are out in the public eye just trying to live our lives. It could be argued that transgender women and trans men must be better than our gender counterparts to get by and stand a chance of becoming gender professionals.

The question could be also, what does being gender professional really mean. I am only one gender conflicted person of course but for me to understand what a gender pro really meant, I needed to go into the world and live it. First, I tried to go to gay venues to see if possibly I was attracted to other men, or would they be attracted to me as a transgender woman. They were not attracted to me in any way and considered me no more than another drag queen on their turf. Which I wanted nothing to do with. Next, I tried the few lesbian venues I could find in the Dayton, Ohio area. There were three, and I found I was hated in one, had a neutral reception in another and was warmly accepted in a third. From the experience I mainly learned the different levels within the lesbian community and was it possible to work my way in at all.

The third and final venues I ended up at were the big sports bars I frequented as a man. In them, I was surprised to learn how quickly I could establish myself as a regular if I did not cause any trouble, learned to smile and then tip well. I learned too, to try to carry myself as a gender professional. Leaving no question of who I really was. I had to learn also carrying myself as a gender professional was completely different from being a gender professional. It meant I could carry myself well if I was wearing a fancy sweater and slacks, or my favorite team’s football jersey with a pair of jeans and boots. I discovered, more than anything else, I needed the confidence to do it and the rest of the world be damned if they did not like me. I was just having fun in the world as my self and taking advantage of all the fashion perks of being a woman.

Even with all the learning I was doing at the time, I still made learning from the ciswomen around me a priority. I figured they held the secrets that I needed to complete myself as a professional woman. The times to talk and communicate and the times to keep quiet and shut up and learn come to mind. You might say, I was exploring all the nuances of being a woman and trying to improve myself at the same time. I was fortunate in that almost all of my friends came from the lesbian community, so I came up with a unique view of the world. Especially around men which I learned did not validate my womanhood.

As you can tell, pursuing my quest to be a gender professional overtook much of my thinking. There was so much happening when I met my wife Liz, and I started to accompany her to her meetings she went to for various reasons. What happened was I had no choice but to expand my horizons again and meet a whole new set of people. When I did, I fell back to all the lessons I had learned about communicating with strangers. Not as a transgender woman but as just me.

Most Importantly, I had built back a portion of the self esteem I had lost as a gender professional growing up. I lost the inferiority complex I had put myself through during the rocky days of coming out earlier in life. Believing in myself for the first time as a transgender woman was all it took to get me by and enable me to become a true gender professional.

 

 

Five Million

 

Original image. 
JJ Hart writing.

Recently, I reached a milestone as far as my blogging “career” goes.

This week, I reached and went over my five millionth hit to the blog which was amazing to me when I considered the humble way this all got started. I actually started blogging a long time ago when I barely even knew what the term meant. And I did it mainly because of the discussions I had with “Connie” an online transgender woman friend I had met from Seattle. Along the way, on another site we were on, we discovered a mutual dislike for what we called “trans-nazi’s” or transsexuals who based their worth on the number of gender operations they had undergone. Somehow, they felt better than the rest of us and were not shy about letting us know it.

From there, I had started to relay the experiences I was having as I initially began the trip out of my closet and into the world. “Connie” thought my experiences would be worth sharing and here we are so many years later. In many ways, both of us share the same sarcastic sense of humor, so we matched up well.

On a much deeper level than just harassing the “trans-nazi’s”, I hoped sharing what I went through in my lifelong gender journey would be a great way to pay forward my experiences and help others. Every time I receive a comment or two from a person in need of guidance as a beginning cross dresser or transgender person, I feel honored that they reached out to me. While all our trips are different, at the same time we are similar and have all have the same opportunities to learn from each other.

Five million hits later, I now realize the strain of finding subjects to write about on a daily basis really takes it out on me until I run across a comment or two which keeps me going. It fulfils the original idea I had when I started writing something I did not know I could keep on doing for any length of time. When the comments kept rolling in, I knew I was on the right track because I thought the audience I was writing to represent is a very narrow part of a potential audience. Then I thought, if I was reaching just one person out of the vast majority of readers on the internet, I would be doing my job. I learned to be more satisfied with being more of a niche blog, designed for the transgender audience or those that were questioning being trans and would their life look similar to mine. Because switching your main binary gender is so difficult and intimidating to do.

The bottom line is, I would not have all those hits if it was not for you and I cannot comprehend how many of you come from around the world to visit the blog. My deepest thanks go out to all of you no matter where you are.

Even though now I write on two separate platforms, I still write for free because I feel it is the right thing to do. It just makes me feel better.

Once again, I cannot thank you enough for joining me in my gender journey and I should do it more. Just be assured, it means a lot to me when you read along and even take the time to comment!

May we continue on to many subjects together in the future. 

 

Stranger Things have Happened

 

Image from Alexander
Krivisly on
UnSplash.

My gender journey has proven to me that stranger things have happened, just not to me.

What I mean is, on a scale of one to ten at succeeding in ever living a life as a transgender woman, I would have ranked myself some where around an eight. Meaning I was giving myself very little chance of ever making it to my dream life. Along the way now, I wish I had kept more track of every time I succeeded at and then passed a goal I had set for my feminine self.

In many ways, the early days of shopping in mall women’s clothing stores was easy and gave me a false sense of hope. I was naïve and did not realize for the longest time, I just represented as a dollar sign in front of the store clerks, I was facing. Most certainly, I was not the first man in a dress and makeup they had ever seen in their store and would not be the last. Regardless, the false sense of confidence I was giving myself raised my faint hope of ever succeeding at my dream.

As I went not so blissfully on my high-heeled way, I did pick up bits and pieces of information I would need to survive. For once, I thought far enough ahead to set up time away from my wife so I could slip away and shop with the rest of the women in the malls on Black Friday after Thanksgiving. Which had been on my trans bucket list for years. By this time, I had experienced enough time in public as a woman, I knew things such as wearing comfortable footwear was a must for the long trips from the parking lot to the stores, all the way to being stylish but not overdone in my fashion choices for the day so I could blend in well with the other ciswomen I met. Stranger things happened and I had a great time which I will write about in a later blog post.

All of my continued success combined to make me think maybe, just maybe I could achieve my dream life, and I could increase my scale to a four out of ten. What helped me were the short trips I made to Columbus, Ohio to the small diverse parties I went to where I could meet and interact with anyone such as transsexuals on their way to surgery to cross dresser admirers who were there just to watch. I even met a stray lesbian there one night who I left with briefly to go to a big gay club together. Through it all, I was just trying to see where I fit in at all. I figured if I had any success at all at understanding where I was, I hoped I could see the light at the end of my gender tunnel was not the train and just maybe I could live my dream.

As much as I liked the interaction in Columbus, I knew I had to leave the relative safety of the group and try to carve out my own life as a transgender woman in the world. Sure, I was terrified to do it but I knew I had to overcome my fears if I was ever going to be able to move up my scale from a five to a seven. When I made it to a lucky seven, the pressure to live the way I wanted to really be increased. The reason for the increase came because of the new interactive experiences I was now having with other ciswomen around me. What I did was watch the women around me and try to learn how they were living their life and learn my own way.

From then on, when I could see the dream life I had hoped for was in sight, I could really concentrate on my future as a transfeminine person. At that point, I needed to begin my preparations for what do about telling the family close to me about my male to female gender transition, all the way to what I was going to do about surviving financially. I was to the point where I did not have to make it as a transgender woman, I just needed to let it happen. I had to stay in the new moment I was in and live it for all it was worth. It turned out my scale was worth it, all the way.

Stranger things happened to me. I may not have looked like a ten, but I felt like one.

A Marathon not a Sprint

 

Image from Peter Boccia
on UnSplash.

In my life, I have rarely ever had to run any distance at all. The only times when I did was when I played football and was in the Army. So, I was never a sprinter until I discovered my love of cross dressing as close as I could to a pretty girl. I could not wait until I came home from football practice, and no one was home so I could put on a short skirt like the cheerleaders I admired so much, were wearing.

I wonder now, if I knew how long it would take me and all the trials and tribulations I went through to arrive where I am today, would I have given up on my journey. I doubt it because along the way, my gender feelings ran so deep and I felt so natural as my feminine self, I could have ever turned back. I needed to settle in for the gender marathon I was facing because sprints (which I compare with brief moments of gender euphoria) were hard to come by. It is a good thing, because I was always better at marathons anyway.

I can blame my marital situation on the fact that I was still trying to run gender sprints. Rather than face up to the truth of who I was, for years I tried to maintain the delicate balance of a stable marriage and a rapidly growing love of public living as a transgender woman. All my sprints did were cause problems at home when I was caught and put a tremendous strain on my twenty-year -plus marriage. On occasion, life between us became so bad my wife on several occasions simply told me to be man enough to be a woman. I hadn’t been yet, but I was working on it. She did not know it, but her challenges kept me going during my gender marathon. I just needed time to get it through my old unwanted male head that being a woman (transgender or not) meant more than looking like one.

I receive many comments from those individuals who are just wondering where their gender path will take them. When I do, I try my best to point out I did not magically appear where I am now. It took me a lot of work and disappointment to realize I needed to be better than the average ciswoman to survive in their world. They had a head start on me in the race to womanhood and I needed to work hard to catch up. Along the way too, I found some ciswomen were eager to help me into their world, and some were not. Maybe they had their own marathons they were running in life.

Another thing I learned from running a gender marathon was I had the time to relax and enjoy the journey on occasion. I felt much different than the fast pace of fleeting gender euphoria when I was involved in a gender sprint. Then, it was back again to living in the present as a transfeminine person, rather than living in the future and missing most of the enjoyment. Slowing down also gave me time to research who I really was and who I was, was on the right path in my life. Because I had huge decisions to make. Family, marriage, jobs and friends could have been all on the line. At times I was crushed under the pressure of it all and had to put it down for a different day. Something I could have never done as a gender sprinter.

The moral to the story was that slowing down helped me to determine my own pace. The problem was that I wasted valuable time coming out of my male closet longer than I should of. I finally came to the conclusion that I could not have it both ways. I ended up doing what was right for me keeping in mind that your story you are writing in life could be totally different.

Either way, what you consider is a gender sprint or a marathon is a personal matter and has a lot to do with how old you are. Even though I have read about male to female transitions well after the age of sixty (when I did it) I think it is rarer because those who think they can put it off longer because they have put it off as long as they could. But then, on the other hand, there are people like me who realized their gender truth and could not put off making a move any longer. Before I had to sprint for the finish line of life itself.

 

 

 

 

 

Staying in the Present

 

ss

Image from Ekka Wessman
on UnSplash. 

As I progressed in my cross-dressing life to a novice transgender woman, it proved to be difficult for me in several different areas.

Just one of those areas was the amount of time I needed to stay in the present for the first time in my life. My problem was compounded by the fact I had trained myself to daydream my life away as I wanted nothing more than to be a girl. Then, when I took my feminine image out of the mirror and put it into motion, I needed to constantly stay in the present to remind myself where I was and what I was doing. If I did not, I would be in danger of slipping back to my old ingrained male self. The problem was particularly intense when I was trying my best to mimic the magical way ciswomen moved.

Sadly, I found if I relaxed at all, no matter how attractive I thought I looked as a trans woman, all would be lost if I looked like a linebacker in drag as I walked. And to make matters worse, I needed to quickly learn to change the old stay away masculine scowl I had perfected and replace it with a more welcoming feminine look. As I shopped and interacted with ciswomen in public, they wanted to smile at me, so I needed to be pleasant and smile back. Especially if they suspected all was not as it seemed gender wise with me. I did not want to appear as any sort of a threat.

Staying in the present brought about other pleasant rewards also, such as when I communicated with other women, I needed to look them in the eye and listen to what they were saying, not jumping ahead and anticipating what I thought they were going to say. My communication game with women had really changed.

After a lifetime of hiding in the future, the present started to be a very pleasant place for me to be. I could take the time to feel the different clothes and talk to different people from a whole new viewpoint. I could take and give compliments from others regardless of their hidden motives. I found just the most innocent mention of my earrings from another woman was not about my choice of jewelry at all, she was gently starting a conversation to find out more about me. It all carried into the learning curve I experienced when I began to take lessons in passive aggressive aggression, from other women. I never had needed much knowledge of passive anything with the alpha macho men I hung out with. They were upfront with me for the most part. Ciswomen, on the other hand, could smile at you while they clawed your back for whatever reason they had. For a while, I thought I was going to have to carry band aids in my purse for any surprise attacks such as one night when a woman was coming back from the restroom and caught me talking to her man and took a dim view of the situation.

The more time I spent in the present, the better my life had become, and I got to the point where I missed out on all the time, I spent daydreaming of my life away. As I wondered how it would be if I could shed all my male existence and redo it as a transfeminine person which made me unapproachable to family and friends as well as making me totally miserable. Also, all the jealousy I felt towards ciswomen would have been swept away if I had had the chance to live and compete with them in their own world. To be sure, it was a different world but a life I discovered I enjoyed immensely as I found my new life to be all I thought it would be and more.

To arrive at the point I wanted to be, I first had to be confident in how I arrived at my own womanhood and if someone did not like me, it was their problem not mine. Then and only then could I fully live in the present and most importantly, try to forget most of my past. The future is still a problem for me as I wonder what will become of me if I have to encounter an assisted living situation where my gender issues are not addressed. The difference now is that I don’t spend the time dwelling on it as I used to. The present is just more important for me, which was a hard lesson to learn.

 

 

Playing the Short Gender Game

 

Image from Jayson Hindrichsen
on UnSplash.

During my life, I always have taken the easy way out and thought about important things such as my gender as a short-term issue.

I write often of my love for the mirror when I was young. I hated seeing my male self-reflected back at me but completely enjoyed it when the mirror came to life and I was cross dressed as a pretty girl. Perhaps it was then that I started to think of my life as a short-term basis. Would I eventually outgrow my desire to be a girl when I became older, or if I did not, what would happen to me then. To make matters worse, the Vietnam War was ramping up and I had the constant threat of military duty to think of. Normally when I did, and the coast was clear, I ran back to the mirror and escaped behind a dress and makeup.

As I wrote about yesterday on Veterans’ Day, military duty finally caught up to me when my draft lottery number was fifty-two, so all the short-term thinking and worrying I did was a waste of time. I was going to have to put all my love of being feminine behind me and survive the best I could. It turned out that all the worrying I did about my gender issues and sexuality was wasted too. As I stayed very short-term in my cross-dress thinking, destiny took over in my life, and I started to do more and more in the world to express my new feminine self. Even though I found myself living on the edge more than once, I learned to live there until the next challenge came along. These were the years of changing jobs and moving my family way too much.

As I frenetically moved through life, I was moving too fast to slow down and see what the real issue was. It was gender, and sooner or later I would have to deal with it one on one. Until I did, I would be living a lie and a very messy one at that. Out of the one transgender woman I personally know who told me she was never gender dysphoric, I would guess she would tell me also that she never encountered any messy moments in her life when she transitioned. If she did not, she is one of the few that I know who didn’t.

Many of my messy moments stemmed from me being selfish and wanting to maintain my twenty-five years of marriage to a woman I really loved when she was against me going any further as a transgender woman and starting gender affirming hormones or HRT. By attempting to have it all in my life, my mental health suffered, and I made many mistakes as I tried indirectly to out myself to the world. The biggest one was when I insisted on going into my own restaurant dressed as a woman and being immediately recognized which I could have been fired for.

By this time, I was in a downward spiral which I could see no way out of. It all led me to a suicide attempt and more dissatisfaction with life. Through it all, I had a little voice within me saying everything would be OK someday if I just followed my transfeminine instincts. But before I did, I was stubborn and had a lot of life yet to live. Just when I thought I could not go any lower, I did. I lost my wife and three out of the only four male friends I had to death. Which sent me even lower into depression. I was at a point the experts say with drug addicts who must hit bottom before they can start the path upward. Just change the wording to my male self was at the bottom of his journey and it was time to give my inner female a chance to live. Because, at this time, there was no longer time for short term solutions, my male self just had to be done.

Fortunately, I was able to salvage all the years of practice and learning I put into my femininizing projects and did not have to start from scratch when it came to working on my presentation as a transgender woman. I could look at the long-term benefits of my male to female gender transition. It was such a relief to be able to finally change my thought processes around and not play the short-term gender game at all.

Tired of Looking Over my Shoulder

 

Christopher Morley
1974 movie
Freebie and the Bean.

In a continuation of yesterday’s post in many ways, today’s post is about how I grew weary of looking over my shoulder as a transgender woman.

Looking back, all I can remember from the earliest days I had cross-dressing in front of the mirror were the all too brief moments of gender euphoria I experienced and the all too numerous times I spent looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was going to catch me. Then life as I knew it would be ruined. To stop this from happening, I became very good at hiding my clothes and makeup away from the prying eyes of my slightly younger brother and the rest of my family. I even resorted to hiding a small amount of clothes, makeup and a mirror in a trash bag in a hollowed-out tree in the woods next to our house in the country. Even with all of this hiding, I still found myself spending a lot of time looking over my shoulder.

Somehow, I thought when I grew older, I would conquer all my gender issues, and they would magically disappear, but they just grew with me. The better I became applying makeup and selecting feminine clothes, the more I wanted to do. Like a dog chasing its tail, the more success I had led me to want to do more in the public’s eye. Sadly, as I grew into my high school and precollege years, I was still stuck in the same old routine of dressing at home, hiding from my family and looking over my shoulder. The only relief I remember was the night friends and I went to a high school carnival and one of the male students was parading around dressed as a pretty girl. I was fascinated but again was looking over my shoulder to make sure none of my friends noticed how interested I was.

Which was exactly how I felt when I saw the movie “Freebie and the Bean” in 1974. I did not know it or had never heard of actor “Christopher Morley” who was an accomplished female impersonator. He had a part in the movie which I found amazing because he was so believable as a woman. As with the student cross dressed as a pretty girl, when I saw Morley, I needed to look over my shoulder at my friends to see if they noticed my newfound interest in the film we were watching. I guess I was pretty good at hiding my interest because nobody ever said anything about it.

Moving forward, there were the early cross-dressing days when I was still trying to perfect my everyday presentation as a transgender woman. I constantly worried about someone sneaking up behind me and pulling off my ill-fitting wig. What would I do then? Put it back on or just pick the wig up and run out the door. Fortunately, I never had to find out when I figured it was my inner female paranoia talking to me that I was not looking good enough to pass her standards yet.

By this time, looking over my shoulder became a habit. There was a time when my second wife and I moved to a small town in southern Ohio to run a new restaurant there. In order to suppress all my cross-dressing desires, I started to do the grocery shopping as a woman then go ahead and do a little lite shopping for myself. One day when I was blissfully doing my thing as a transfeminine person, I unexpectedly ran straight into my wife’s boss doing his errands. As bad luck would have it, my wife and I were invited that weekend to a small party at her boss’s house and I needed to really look over my shoulder when I heard him mention to my wife about the “big woman” he had seen in a store. Rightfully so, I was always guilty until proven innocent with my wife and she turned directly to stare the look of death at me. It took me weeks of denial to finally live it down.

Denial, lying and other mistruths became a way of life for me with my wife before she passed away after twenty-five years of marriage. The only thing I am proud of is that I did manage a full out purge six months before she died. To prevent any backsliding, I even grew a beard. Needless to say, I was miserable during this time but nothing like I was going to live through later.

After all the tragedy I went through during this time, I finally had enough of looking over my shoulder for decades and decided to follow my instincts and come out to the world as a transgender woman. Not spending all that time and effort was completely refreshing and allowed me to totally concentrate on my new life as a trans woman.

 

It is Right When you Know it Is

 

Image from Caroline Herman
on UnSplash.

Some have asked me over the years, when did I know it was the right time for me to leave my closet and emerge into the world as a transgender woman. It is a complex question with a very easy answer. I always knew I was having problems with my gender but did not have a clue for years what to do about it.

The only relief I had was the brief time I had to rapidly cross dress in front of the mirror, away from my family and friends. Even when I was able to accomplish my goal of looking like a pretty girl, I still was aware deep down that something was not right with my life. In my own way, I set out to find any gender solutions I could, on my own, with no available sources to aid me. Plus, at the time, my male self was rapidly settling into a relatively successful life, and he wanted nothing to do giving up any of it to my inner feminine self. It turned out, this would be a battle I would have had to face for decades of my life to come. I would spend any available free time I had as a cross dresser, only to have what I learned rejected when I went back to my male life.

The only thing which kept me going was the deep idea I had that what I was doing was actually the natural part of my existence. And the parttime male life was an act. The act which became so good over the years that I shocked a number of people I knew when I finally came out as a transgender woman. I always had assumed they had thought something was up with me when they saw me at Halloween parties dressed as a woman but never did. It was like my male self-tried to dig a deep hole to bury my female self was never quite successful as she kept digging herself out.

The years at that point seem to fly by with the continuing fights with my second wife over considering if I was transgender at all and at the same time, me improving my transfeminine presentation during the times I was out in the public’s eye. I started to do more than just walk around in malls to see if I could present well and started to accomplish small tasks such as doing part of the family grocery shopping as a woman. I found I could do the tasks, and my life began to feel so natural again. The opposite of when I needed to go back to living as a man. It seemed unfair to me when my wife and my male self-ganged up on me to protect their interests in the relationship and I did not know what to do because I was just doing what was becoming more natural to me.

All the infighting only did one thing and that was prolonging the truth from coming out. I had always been destined to be feminine and when the time was right, I would be able to claim my birthright. The longer I lived as a transgender woman among ciswomen I knew I was in the right spot and had to face the facts about myself. My wife unexpectedly passed away from a massive heart attack leaving only my male self to protest any idea of me being trans and starting the HRT medical treatment. Under a doctor’s care of course.

Finally, when faced with the reality of my future life, my male self-gave in to my inner feminine self who had waited so long to live and prosper. More importantly, I was tired of all the internal fighting and knew I had readied myself to make a choice. All the frustrating years of playing with makeup and clothes came back to help me. I did not have to worry so much about my presentation when I made the decision to permanently be in the public’s eye as a transgender woman. I found a great majority of the world either didn’t pay any attention or were just curious of me which was a great surprise. I could relax and enjoy the wonderful new world I had always dreamed of.

When I finally stopped the gender in-fighting I suffered through all those years, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders at the age of sixty. Why I waited so long to face my true self in the mirror and decide to do the right thing will forever be a mystery to me. My only excuse is, I just knew the time was right.

 

The Transgender Fear Factor

 

Image from Darius Bashar
on UnSplash

Even though my transgender fear factor is a relatively dramatic term, it was very real to me.

So much so, I used to walk clear across malls to avoid groups of teen aged girls who in the past treated me with scorn. Finally, I had enough and decided to zero in on what my presentation problems were. When I did, I was able to blend in with other ciswomen I was around and only then did I begin to really address my fears.

Before I did though, I needed to define exactly what transgender fear meant to me. The problem was I could not go to an internet site and read about someone else’s definition of fear could be. I was on my own to decide. To figure it out, the only way I could was to test my new life out in person. At that time, I was used to going to gay venues because of their relatively safe spaces and was afraid to leave the venues and see if I could be successful in so called straight venues where I knew I would like the atmosphere.

Then, my biggest issue was being pulled aside in one of these new venues and being physically assaulted. Ironically, the only place I ever was in any kind of danger was outside of a gay bar I went to a lot. I paid my way out of the danger with my last five-dollar bill. The two men who stopped me took the five and let me on my way. I learned my lesson and never went back there again.

Fear as a transgender woman and fear as a man was obviously different. I was stripped of all my former male privileges. Most importantly, out of all of them the privilege of personal security proved to be the most dramatic change I needed to face. All my life as a man, I was fairly good size and was able to bluster and bluff my way out of any difficult situation I ran into, plus I was always the protector for the ciswomen around me. All of a sudden, I was put into a world of who was going to protect me.

What I learned from my fear factor was what all ciswomen learned from situations early in life. Plan ahead for potentially negative situations is the best way to have very little happen to you. Such as staying out of dark or dimly lit parking lots and go out with other women friends whenever possible. When I did learn my new limitations, I felt better about my new life in the world as a transfeminine person.

Dealing with fear factor with me also was involved in the amount of male baggage I needed to lose to survive. Since I took until the age of sixty to finally completely transition into a cisgender world, I had plenty of baggage to get rid of. What I managed to keep was my life-long love of sports. I discovered I could go to the big sports bars I was fond to going to as a man and watch my favorite teams play, something I could not do in the gay venues I was going to. When I did begin to be accepted as a regular in the big venues, I began to notice the other women around me who were also into sports. Which made my life easier. I began to be more confident, friendly, and overall, more fun to be around.

Predictably, when my sports baggage stayed, many other parts of my life had to go. I was fortunate that I had retained a relationship with my only child, my daughter. On the other hand, I lost all contact with my only brother’s side of the family. We had not talked in over a decade ago when I came out to him right before Thanksgiving and my invitation to the family dinner was revoked. In the long term, I never missed any interactions with my brother and ended up cherishing my time with my daughter. So, putting my fear of rejection proved to be unfounded and I won the battle.

It was never easy for me to put my transgender fears behind me as I transitioned from a male to female dominated world. Mainly because I did not realize all the rules which would change in the world when I aggressively pursued my transgender dreams. Some of my changes came seamlessly, when others came with big obstacles. An example is I was always a basically shy person as a man, which was easy to lose, when I started to live as a woman in a cisgender world. It was worth it to battle and win my wars with transgender fears.

 

A Thing of Beauty?

 

My Trans Friend Racquel.

During my male to female gender transition years, I always stressed to the max about my appearance as a transgender woman or cross dresser.

Every now and then, I go back into my very early blog posts to see what I was fixated on and quickly noticed I was all about how I looked. In those days, I thought being a woman was all about looks and beauty and I wanted to overcome my testosterone poisoned body to achieve what I could.

The big test of my so-called beauty pageant was when I began to free myself from the mirror and break out of my closet into the world. By doing so, I found I had a lot of work to do if I was able to make it in the world as a transfeminine person at all. My first big test was too present well enough that the teen girls would not notice me and send me home in tears. During that time, my makeup had to be just perfect, and I did not want to ruin my mascara and carefully applied eyeliner by crying. Even when my makeup and hair was done just right, I struggled to think I was anything close to being beautiful. I just wanted to be presentable and live my new experience as a transgender woman.

It wasn’t until my second wife began to call me the “Pretty, pretty princess” when we fought about my cross-dressing desires, did I begin to think about what she was really saying. Since she was an attractive but a no-nonsense makeup woman, and she was my idol in so many ways, I tried to tone down my makeup the best I could to please her. On occasion, she would even go out with me as my feminine self, so I wanted to do the best I could to not embarrass her or myself with how I looked. Of course, the problem continued to be I could not get away with wearing no makeup like she did which led to more fighting.

Many years later, after she passed away, I began to build my own feminine self from what I had learned about beauty and how it related to other ciswomen around me. The first thing I did was becoming a better student of women than I had ever been before. I needed to remove the male blinders I still had to get a realistic view of the world I so desperately wanted to enter and be a part of. I discovered I paid an inordinate amount of time admiring the beautiful ciswomen I saw and not notice the vast majority of women who were doing the best they could with the physical attributes they had to work with. An example was, I was always worried about my height as a trans woman until I began to notice plenty of other tall successful women in the world I was in.

I became less of the “princess” and more of the trans feminine person who was just trying to blend in an survive. It was about this time when Racquel, a trans woman friend of mine told me I passed out of sheer will-power. My willpower took me into a world of lesbian women when hers took a different path into facial operations and men. I guess, in our own ways we were successful transitioning into the world at large with her as a tall, slim beauty and me on a completely different level socializing at lesbian mixers with my friends. By doing so, I learned valuable lifetime lessons on how to live my life without the validation of men at all. If they liked me fine, and if they didn’t (which most did not) that was fine too. Afterall, I was not the ideal girl to being brought home to see the family for the holidays.

Years later, after I met my wife Liz and we became serious, it was difficult enough for me to meet her family for the holidays. Her dad was an extremely right-wing gun rights supporter, and her brother never talked so I did not know what they thought about me. I will never know, since dad passed away years ago and her brother lives south of Cincinnati in Louisville, Kentucky. All I know is, I was extremely ill at ease during holidays with the family.

Now, all I know is that I present well as being old with non-age-appropriate long hair. I can’t do anything about my age and love my hair, so it is not going anywhere. Perhaps I am making up for all the years I had to have my hair cut short in my youth and military days.

As with all other ciswomen, over the years, I have learned to work with what I have been given physically. I was extremely fortunate to have found people who accepted me for who I am as I presented as myself out of sheer willpower.

 

What Was I Walking Into

 

Image from the 
Paris Photographer
on UnSplash. 

Many times, in my life, I have wondered what I was walking into. Sometimes, it did not have anything to do with being transgender but many times it did. And sometimes I was wearing high heels which I was not used to which increased the risk of what I was doing.

The main time it did not was when I went into the Army during the Vietnam War. I had no idea what basic training would have in store for me except I would need to get in better physical condition. I did make a half-hearted effort at trying but failed miserably and gave up. On another negative side, I knew I would have to give up all my cherished cross-dressing activities for the next three years of my life.

It turned out, in the scheme of life, three years did not turn out to be that long as traveling the world to three continents kept me plenty busy and I grew used to the idea of not knowing what I was walking into. So much so that I adopted “Call me the Breeze” by “Lynard Skynyrd “as my official song when I was on the radio. Because I was always rolling down the road. Through it all, I learned that my affinity for women never changed. I wanted deeply to live in their world and all the running I was doing would never change that. It was a lesson in life I wished I would have listened to later.

When I served my three years in the military, my restless spirit continued to dominate me and caused me to try to outrun my gender issues. I constantly was trying different jobs in different places unsuccessfully trying to run away from being transgender. Sometimes I had secret agendas, sometimes I did not. Like the time we moved from Ohio to New York City. Somehow, I thought being closer to a more liberal populace would help me to be able to come out of my gender shell. It did not work out that way because of several different reasons which would take another blog post to explain.

Another idea I had which actually worked out better for me was the time we moved from a very rural area of Southern Ohio along the Ohio River to Columbus, Ohio which was a couple of hours away. This time, I knew for sure that I could get back in contact with the friends I had made in years previous at the gender diverse parties and mixers I was going to. I was successful and reestablished myself with the group and tried to make up for lost time and at the same time, settle down.

When I did settle down, I was able to start exploring the feminine world as a transgender woman which meant almost nightly, I was walking into new situations I had never seen before. From gay and lesbian venues to big sports bars, the world was new and sometimes scary. Again, “Call me the Breeze” should have been my theme song due to all the new situations I was facing. Anything I enjoyed doing as a man, I tried to do as a woman to see if I still enjoyed it. Spoiler alert…I did and kept on trying more and more new situations to see if I could handle what I was walking into.

On the flip side, I am hesitant to recommend this type of transgender lifestyle to anyone. Too many times, I boosted my confidence through alcohol abuse and was fortunate to have never caused any major problems all the time I drove when I shouldn’t have. These days I barely drink at all and never drive when I do. The other problem comes from the increasingly nasty anti-transgender reaction which will undoubtedly be stirred up again in the upcoming elections by the orange Russian asset’s minions across the country. We have a close senate race coming up here in Ohio and I am sure I will see the transgender lies about the Democratic candidate before too long. He has run before, and the television ads were nasty.

Regardless, I am fortunate that these days, I present mainly as old and don’t have many problems walking into new situations. I will have several coming up in the next six months or so to keep me on my transfeminine game. I have an eye appointment at the VA as well as a hematology visit coming up soon as well as another bus tour vacation south in January. Not to mention my mammogram which will be in February this coming year.

It has become part of life for me to wonder what I am walking to at my stage of life. Especially hematology where they are going to do a total blood work check up on how my body is working but I will jump off of that bridge when I come to it. Which is what I have done through most of my life. This time I had to do it without all the male privilege I had built up which as scary.

 

 

Up the Down Gender Slide

 

Image from Abbs Johnson
on UnSplash.

Maybe you remember Ralphie (In a Christmas Story movie) who desperately wanted a BB Gun for Christmas and froze up when he was in a department store telling Santa what he wanted for the big day. What happened was Ralphie got kicked down the slide when Santa told him he was getting a football. Finally, Ralphie struggled his way back up the downslide and told Santa he really wanted a BB Gun and was then told he would shoot his eye out.

This scene paralleled my life in several ways. The main one was, I never asked for a BB Gun but got one anyway and secondly, I never asked Santa for the baby doll I really wanted. In many ways, the whole idea of struggling up the down slide when I considered my gender became routine. Instead of shooting my eye with a BB Gun, I became more concerned with hurting my eyes with my mascara stick. Plus, when I tried to hide my cross-dressing activities from my second wife, I tried to be more effective in removing all of my eye makeup so my wife couldn’t tell. It was a challenge to say the least. But not the biggest challenge of all.

First, I needed to break all the male tendencies I had built up over the years. How did I present as a trans woman, all the way to how did I move and communicate. I knew ciswomen operated on a different wavelength than men but how different I never planned on. For example, the amount of nonverbal communication between women surprised me. I quickly learned to watch for the visual cues I picked up when I was in a potentially dangerous situation, I was not aware of.

Ironically, the more I struggled to go up the down slide, the more slippery it became. I had to become more mentally tough as a transfeminine person to even survive in a potentially hostile world. It meant going back to the drawing board when I was pushed down the up-gender slide even more. By mentally tough I mean with my resources, facial feminization would not be possible and there was nothing I could ever do about the testosterone poisoned thick male body, I would have to work with what I had. That damn slide was not going to get to me. What I did do though, was put myself on a highly effective diet which ended up in me losing approximately fifty pounds as well as beginning to take better care of my skin after I shaved every day. By doing better skin care, I was able to use less makeup and look more natural.

With these changes, I was able to actually start climbing up my gender slide, so that someday maybe I could get the baby doll I wanted to have instead of a BB Gun. Mentally, at least.

Other changes I had to make as I climbed to the top of my gender slide was conquering my fear of heights. There came times when I thought I was moving too fast, and I was in danger of losing all my hard-earned male privileges such as family, marriage, jobs and friends. I did not want to beat myself and my male self-had me looking over my shoulder. Then I resolved to never stop working towards my goal of transgender womanhood and moving on to a totally different goal of being able to interact more effectively with the ciswomen I met. I always called it playing in the girls’ sandbox.

Maybe it was my gender paranoia weighing in on me, but I kept seeing potential problems coming at me when I was out of the mirror and into the world. Some turned out to be real, but most were not. I found I did not meet as many gender bigots or anti-transgender ciswomen TERFs as I thought I would. Men were for the most part always standoffish and ciswomen just were not for whatever reason. Maybe, in their own ways, they had climbed their own gender slides and understood what I was going through and did not mind sharing with me.

If you are starting your own gender slide, or even reaching the top, just remember the trip will never be easy. But to coin a saying, if it was easy, would have it been worth it. I know for me; it was the toughest trip of my life. Plus, you are human and will make a mistake on occasion. Especially, when you are not allowed behind the gender curtain to learn the basics cisgender women were raised with. At that point in time, it is up to you to climb your slide and thrive. Not just survive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Halloween and Me

Image from Nice M
Nsshti on UnSplash.

Even though it has been years since I have been to a Halloween party at all, it still fills a special place in my heart.

The main reason it will is because it was the first time in my life that I was able to really explore if I could possibly make it to my dream of ever living like a woman on my own terms. In the recent past, I have written about the very first parties I went to dressed as a slutty, trashy woman, attempting in my own backwards way to be sexy. Also, when I started to go to Halloween dressed as me, I was doing it around people who knew me as a man, so I needed to put up with the idea in their mind that I was some sort of a jokester. When of course I was dead serious. One memorable evening took me to the freshly restored Ohio Theatre in downtown Columbus, Ohio for a midnight Halloween showing of the original “Dracula” movie, complete with background music from the original theatre organ. I went with my first wife who already knew I was a cross dresser and two other friends. I ended up having a fabulous time in my heels, hose and minidress surrounded by many other attendees in costume. The only problem I had was walking as long as I did in my heels. I was still too new to the cross-dressing style game to think ahead about my footwear if I needed to walk very far.

As the years and Halloween’s moved by, my whole focus began to shift about my potential “costume” I was planning on wearing. I began to move away from the trashy costumes I wore in the past, and into “costume” ideas another ciswoman would wear. At the same time, I stopped going to parties with my friends and began going to big clubs where I could see if I could blend in. It all was working out well until one night I was stopped by a guy wearing a full mask telling me he knew who I was. I was in shock and asked him how he knew, and he told me I looked like my mom. It turned out he grew up with me down the road and knew both of my parents. I was relieved as I was proud of my “French Girl Costume.” Which meant I was dressed all in black. Including a new pair of black tights, flats, blond hair and a black beret I purchased for a dollar at a thrift store. Other than being rudely recognized, I had another great time, and the evening ended too soon.

A few of my final Halloween parties I went to proved to me that I could possibly make it in the world as a transfeminine person. One was by pure accident and one I had planned ahead for. The pure accidental party was the one I recently wrote about which happened when I lived in the New York City metro area. Out of nowhere, I was invited by one of my female managers to a Halloween party her and her friends were going to at a nearby tavern, to her house. I don’t know why, but I decided to back slide in my “costume” idea and go to the party dressed a little on the slutty side. Mini skirt, heels, blond wig and all. It turned out all of her friends who were going were approximately as tall as I was and were all dressed to thrill also. What a surprise I had when I found I could blend in with all of them. The only problem I had was my second wife not approving of my “costume” even though she did not want to go. Life around the house was a bit frosty for a while.

The last major Halloween party I went to was a planned affair. I was invited to a party at a vintage restored Victorian mansion, along with a news girl who I worked with at the local radio station.  I was married to my first wife then and she did not care who I went with, so I planned to go as a professional woman just getting off of work. Just to see if I could. I did with a couple a write about often who thought I was a woman and were so entranced with me, they invited me to another party they were going to. I did not go but stayed and had a great time at a fabulous party.

Sadly, all my fun went away when I fully transitioned into being a transgender woman. Instead of putting on some sort of “costume” and going out into the world, I was just being me, and an exciting part of my life was behind me. Forever to be remembered fondly in my mind.

 

 

 

  

The Yin and Yang of Gender

 

Yin and Yang from Gabriel Vasiliu 
on UnSplash. 

You might ask why I would write a post explaining why I was in such a hurry to transition into my womanhood when it took me nearly fifty years to come out of my gender shell. I finally discovered I was in a classic war between my yin and yang personalities.

Today, I am writing to explain the two forces I faced as I decided when and how to transition. My own personal yin and yang of gender. I guess it doesn’t matter which of the two forces I had to deal with, or if my yin side was feminine and my yang side was masculine because both were prominent parts of my life. Yang flourished because he had to early in my life and yin did the same when she finally had a chance to live and exist. I found this description from “Wikipedia” which backs up my theory:

“In Chinese creation theory, the universe develops out of a primary chaos of primordial qi or material energy, organized into the cycles of yin and yang, force and motion leading to form and matter. "Yin" is retractive, passive, contractive and receptive in nature in a contrasting relationship to "yang" that is repelling, active, expansive and repulsive.” It described me completely.

Yin and yang caught me chasing my tail as I would run back to the mirror as quickly as I could to put on a dress, make-up, and convince myself how pretty I was. It was yang’s primary form of escaping any potentially troublesome situations. As I always explain, coming to terms with all of this caused great torment, and now I wished I had someone to at least discuss it with except the one good therapist I was fortunate to be placed with at the Veterans’ Administration in Dayton, Ohio. She was understanding and even had a basic understanding of the LGBTQ community, so I did not have to educate her at all. However, we did not ever get into the clash of my yin and yang genders. On the plus side of our therapy, she never tried to equate any of my bi-polar depression issues with my need to express my yin side of myself.

Ironically, I think my yang side was very active and expansive in pushing my yin into the world. He provided the life lessons I needed to get out and push my gender envelope by learning new things. Without him, the initial exploratory trips to the regular venues I established myself in as a novice transgender woman would have never happened. So many nights I sat in my car for what seemed like forever before I summoned my courage to go inside.

On the other hand, it was yang who did his best to ensure his male world would never be taken away and he made a strong, experienced adversary. The problem became was how I was ever going to join my yin and yang together and form hopefully a good transfeminine person. The answer was I never had to really give up all the life which yang brought to the table. It turned out, I still was able to follow my love of sports, all the way to keeping my sexuality when lesbians took over my life. Altogether the entire process of joining my yin and yang proved to be easier than I thought. I just needed the courage to do it.

It would be too easy to say all transgender women and transgender men suffer from yin and yang gender problems, but the idea may go along way towards explaining what we feel to an outsider. It is far out of my pay grade to predict what anyone may do when confronted with such complex gender problems a trans person has. In fact, when I go back to “Wikipedia”, it even mentions gender in this form:

“When pertaining to human gender, yin is associated to more rounded feminine characteristics and Yang as sharp and masculine traits”.

I don’t know about you, but the whole definition works for me, and I wonder why it has taken me so long to stumble upon it in my research. In some ways, yin and yang reinforces my idea that transgender people deserve a special place in the world. Not one of scorn and discrimination. Maybe the average person just needs to know more about us on a regular basis and not what they hear from politicians. But they can’t even govern well enough to keep our government open, so I can’t see much chance of that anytime soon.

Do "It" or Die

 

Image from Claudia Love
on UnSplash.  

I find it humorous when a gender bigot or some sort of other hater thinks transgender women or trans men had a choice when they decided to transition into the gender they should have always been.

The haters conveniently overlook the fact we trans people spend a lifetime of discontent over our gender dysphoria. In my case, the dysphoria invaded my already frail mental health and nearly destroyed it and me. I suffered from being born into the pre-internet “dark ages” where information on gender issues in particular was very hard to come by. It took years of my life before I was formally diagnosed with dysphoria and even worse, a bi-polar disorder.

It all started when I spent my days off work in bed, not wanting to move at all and forcing myself to work to keep my job. Of all people, the first real gender therapist I had diagnosed my problem when I brought it up in a conversation we were having. She ended up telling me she could prescribe medications for my depression but not for me wanting to be a woman. I should have listened to her and took more action than just cross dressing when she told me that. I was still stubborn though, and my male side thought he could conquer all. Setting up an internal war I would fight for years. I was fortunate when the prescribed medications worked with my depression but not so fortunate when they did absolutely nothing when it came to me wanting to be a woman. In other words, my gender therapist was right.

In the meantime, as my gender war raged on, I was out of my closet exploring the world to see if I could survive at all. As with any other novice, I had my good days and my bad days but something deep inside kept telling me to keep going because my survival was at risk. How much so, I still had not fully grasped.

As with anyone else, the years seemed to fly by and regardless of the unlikely idea I could ever achieve my dream of competing in and surviving in a transfeminine world successfully, I slowly was making it. Ironically, many times when I did make it, the trip up was not worth the trip down mentally. A prime example was the night I went to a cross dresser-transgender mixer on Long Island, New York and was forced to show proof I was actually a man before I was admitted to the mixer. Of course, I was on cloud nine for days after that before I crashed back down into my unwanted male world. I so badly wanted to take the next step in my transition but was afraid to do it which created extra pressure on me. Sadly, I took the pressure out on my second wife who I perceived as a problem when she did not understand what I wanted to do.

It turned out, I needed a ciswoman in my life to challenge me to do more than just look like a woman. She forced me into searching for the elusive lives’ ciswomen lead, and why they were so different than men. Still, I was stubborn and thought I had already put that research in until my path took me to a whole different gender world which I was never allowed to visit before. Until I tried and finally let in to see what my wife was talking about.

By this time, I was reaching the point in my life when all my explorations into womanhood were taking me as far as I could go. I was staring ahead at reaching my sixties and knew I was not getting any younger. It was time to try to be approved for gender affirming hormones or HRT and take the next big step towards my dream life. If I did not, I may never have the chance to do it again. Plus, I was coming off the darkest moments in my life when everyone dear to me died (including my wife) and the only comfort I had was my inner feminine self. At that point, she showed me the reality of where I was in life.

As the pressure mounted to choose which direction my life would take at the age of sixty, I chose female and closed the book forever on my male self. At that point, I never looked back and took the pressure off myself. Finally, a wise move and somewhere I could hear my second wife saying I told you so. She did but I just did not listen. And, by the way, I still suffer from depression and from dysphoria but now I have learned to live with both of them by living the way I was born to be.

I did it before I died.