A Busy Day

 

JJ Hart

Today will be a busy one for myself and my wife Liz as I am going with her to two doctors’ appointments. So, I will have no time to write.

Going with her on her visits is normally not a big deal because everyone else is normally wrapped up in their own worlds or on their phones. Not enough to notice a stray transgender woman in the waiting room. Also, going dressed casual is no problem because I blend in with all the other ciswomen.

Today, I am getting radical and wearing one of my pro-LGBTQ elder care lavender T-shirts, which if anyone decides to read close enough, they will surely identify me as a trans woman. I don’t care because if I encounter a gender hater, it is their problem not mine. I relish it because of all the years it took me to have the confidence I do these days when I encounter the public.   

In addition to the new T-shirt I am wearing, I am just going to wear a pair of blue leggings along with my new tennis shoes for a comfortable walk. I am putting off a close shave until I am done with this post because I also have my Veteran’s Administration virtual LGBTQ support group meeting later this afternoon and I want to look my best for it too. These days, it almost takes me as long to brush out my long hair as it does for me to shave and apply a light coat of makeup and lip gloss.

I doubt if anything very exciting will happen, but if it does, I will write about it.

 

Loving the Skin You are In

 

JJ Hart.

Loving the skin, you are in is often difficult for a transgender woman or transgender man. In fact, we often come to hate the skin we are in. 

We start early in our lives boxed into a gender we were born into but never felt comfortable with. Many of us go through times of discomfort as we try to sort out who we really are. We have many questions such as are we going through a phase, is it just a fetish and someday will we somehow outgrow our desire to be the gender we always wanted to be.

In my case, it took me decades to accept the skin I was in and to learn to live it in the world as a transgender woman. Recently, I was reminded of my past when I attended a virtual LGBTQ support group meeting at the Veteran’s Administration. Normally it is a very tight knit group of the same people who come every week, but this week we had a new person who joined us who was coming out of her gender shell and slowly learning to live a life as a transgender woman. During the session, she asked if anyone had any advice on dealing with public in general and the police in particular when you are out in the world.

I am not good at giving much advice in situations such as that, so I mainly kept my ideas to myself. Such as the fact that I have had few interactions with the police over the years and those have been mostly positive. Even the ciswoman who called me a pervert once in a women’s restroom, did not call the cops on me. Leaving me with the time I was in a venue I was not a regular in and two women at the bar made it a point to call the police on me after I had used the women’s room. All that happened was I was stopped on the way out by a female cop who told me not to do it again and I went a short distance up the road to one of my regular venues where I knew I would not have any troubles. To make a long story short, I was sorry, but I did not have much of any ideas on a magic cure to dealing with a potentially unaccepting public. You just must develop a thick skin and complete confidence that you are doing nothing wrong and you can make it.

Another problem I have with giving any trans person advice is that I came out seriously so long ago and times have changed. You see reports of so many toxic men harassing ciswomen these days which were barely seen in the days when I was trying my hand at being a single woman at a big sports bar. Plus, I am lucky to live now in a fairly liberal part of Cincinnati where the public at large does not notice me, or care. I am allowed to exist in the world as my true self in my own skin for the first time in my life.

I was fortunate to be one of those trans women who could get out of her gender closet and exist in a stable world where I could flourish and share my ideas about my femininity. Hopefully the new member of the support group will stick around long enough so that I will be able to share thoughts with her about appreciating her own skin. Another problem too is that the group time is at a premium, so I am reluctant to take too much up with my thoughts. Such as, if she is already out enough to wear feminine clothes and paint her nails, what is she waiting for. Maybe she is waiting for someone to come along like I was and kick me out of my closet for good. Which is what happened to me when I was miserable trying to juggle living in both genders, and my future wife Liz told me that she had not seen any male in me at all

Destiny really set in with me when my daughter came on board with knowing the true me by saying among other things that I looked so happy. I mentally added, because for the first time in my life I was having the chance to live in my own skin.

Even with all the positives I was dealing with, I still had to get out into the world and live my new reality. I always had some sort of an idea that ciswomen live more of a complex life than men do, but I had no idea of what I was walking into in my new high heeled shoes. Primarily learning to deal with curious ciswomen and their passive aggressive behavior and potentially drama-filled toxic men filled my evenings when I was going out in my new skin in the world as I knew it. Through it all, I needed to adjust my way of thinking quickly and radically away from the old male way I viewed the world.

What kept me going was the fact that I felt so good and natural in my new transfeminine skin. Deep down I felt this new life I was living was always the way things should have always been for me until the cruel joke of being born a biological male set in. It was something I would have to battle for my entire life.

As far as the physical part of having a new skin, it was way past time for HRT or gender affirming hormones to set in and help me. When I was approved for my life improving hormones, it was like my body was telling me I should have been on them all along. As my overall body skin softened dramatically, along with bigger breasts and longer hair.

The best part of adding hormones to my body was the fact that my emotions set themselves up to better appreciate the whole process. For the first time in my life, I could cry tears of joy which I did when I began to live my life in my own skin. I certainly loved it.

 

 

 

 

 

The Vampires Approved Me

 

Image from Mike Lloyd 
on Unsplash. 

Yesterday I needed to visit the Veterans Administration vampires to have my blood labs done. Fortunately, I could just go to my local branch office to get them done and not have to go to the congested mess which is the downtown Cincinnati VA Hospital.

I chose yesterday to go because it was a beautiful early August day here in Ohio with coolish temperatures and bright sunshine for the relatively short drive I needed to make to get there. For the occasion, I decided to wear my new Libra themed tank top with leggings and my new tennis shoes. After a close shave, a lite coating of makeup, and lipstick, I brushed out my long hair and was ready to go. Actually, compared to the few other ciswomen I encounter at the VA, I was nicely dressed and ready to face the world as a transgender woman.

When I arrived at the VA, it was a very uneventful visit as no one seemed to notice me for anything other than who I was, an elderly woman who did not have to wait long to be seen and have my blood drawn. Since I was emboldened by the experience, I decided to stop by my wife’s Liz and I’s favorite coffee shop to pick up some breakfast sandwiches and coffee. My morning continued to go good as their drive-through was nearly empty and I was greeted cheerfully. Before I knew it, I had my order and was headed home. It is the coffee shop we go to which has the big LGBTQ flag on the wall, so we always try to support it.

The best part was that only a couple of hours later, the doctor who wanted the bloodwork done received the results and everything came back OK. Which means I am clear with the vampires until I have my Hematologist visit downtown this fall. It is important mainly because it is when I have my Estradiol levels checked. It is certainly no fun going downtown and having to find a parking place and walking but there is nothing I can do about it.

In the meantime, I took my brief moment of gender euphoria and enjoyed it for what it was…a brief moment to be the person I always wanted to be. I was just being me basically for the first time in my life. Now all I need to do is string together more of these moments to make them my reality.

Just a short post today to let you know where I have been and I will be back with you with a longer post tomorrow.

When Nothing Else Mattered

 

Image from Klara Khokhlova
on UnSplash. 

Perhaps, similar to many of you, you have been described as selfish when you pursued your gender desires. I know, I was by my second wife as she told me many times my desire to be a pretty cross-dresser in my life was not all about me.

During this time of my life, sadly or not, all my spare thoughts and time dedicated to my cross-dressing activities, so yes, it was all about me. I did my best not to be that way, but I was failing miserably. Especially when I figured it out, I could leave the house as me and do a portion of the household chores such as grocery shopping. I figured by doing so, I was helping my wife and at the same time helping myself.

The more proficient I became at doing my new portion of some of the weekday household chores, the more I felt that nothing else mattered to me than my quest to explore my inner femininity. Increasingly, I broke the rules and made excuses to leave the house and explore the new, natural and exciting world I was experiencing.

As years always do, mine flew by in a blur as I became more proficient in perfecting my feminine appearance and it began to be more apparent to me that the life as I was living as a man would have to be sacrificed at some point if I wanted to pursue my dream goal of living as a transfeminine person. That is when I began to fall back on my ill-fated male habits of internalizing all my feminine feelings. Hoping that eventually, they would just go away. Compliments of my latest purge of my cross-dressing belongings.

Very soon, it became evident that all the purging in the world would not rid me of my deep-seated gender issues and nothing else began to matter, not even the massive fights my second wife and I were having when she caught me out of the house as myself. I would go to any extent possible to try to mend the wounds from my breaking the promises not to ever go out again unattended, all the way to promising I would go to a therapist in Columbus, Ohio who specialized in gender care to attempt to solve my “problem.” Even then, I would not listen to the therapist who told me that my gender issues were not a “problem”, and there was nothing she could do about them. I made the mistake again of thinking there was something radical I could do about how I was attempting to live my life. I could keep trying to sneak out of the house and try to learn more about my possibilities of living life as a transgender woman, while at the same time continue to live with my wife. She always know I was a cross-dresser but was completely dead set against me going any further towards being approved for gender affirming hormones (HRT) and living as my authentic self.

Perhaps the biggest problem was I was not sure what my authentic self really was. I knew I loved my second wife as much as the day I married her years before, but I really was not sure of how deep my transgender issues were going to run. Plus, all the research I was doing into a new life, jeopardized my old life which at times was not so bad because I was accumulating all the male privileges such as wife, family and job that I did not necessarily want to get rid of. The whole situation just mentally tore me up as I did not know what gender I was going to be from day to day. Was I going to try to be my true self or go out into the world again and “act” like the strong man I was not.

It all led me to feeling completely detached from the world and wanting to end it all because I felt so worthless to everybody. Fortunately, after I hit rock bottom, I got help from a good therapist and was prescribed medications which helped my on-going Bi-polar disorder and anxiety. It turned out my anxiety was triggered in many ways by my gender issues so that was easier to solve, but my depression was not so my new meds really helped. Giving credit to where credit is due, my help came through the Veterans Administration health care system and as luck would have it, I was teamed up with a therapist who knew what she was doing when it came to depression and LGBTQ care.

By this time, my second wife had tragically passed away from a major heart attack leaving me totally alone with my thoughts. Quickly, since nothing else mattered, I took the path of least resistance into my own form of womanhood. All those dues I was paying as a cross dresser working with my appearance came back to help me when I could hit the ground running in my heels (not really) and concentrate on rounding out my persona of the trans woman I wanted to me in the world of alpha cis women around me. I was able to see and learn from what they did to make their lives more fulfilling as women, and I wanted to do that too. I was having fun while at the same time was secretly learning everything I could from the ciswomen around me.

Most certainly, nothing else mattered when I sought out approval for my gender affirming hormones from a doctor I found in an LGBTQ newspaper. Along with the hormones, I was putting my new life together by legally changing all the gender documents I could with the VA and in the civilian world. Very soon, my old male life was in my past and my “dead” name faded away.

The only thing that did matter was building a new life with my third wife Liz, a lesbian ciswoman who accepted me for what I was. I could not let a second chance such as that pass me by.

 

 

Visiting the Vampires

 

Image from Mike Lloyd
on UnSplash.

Today was a rushed visit to the Cincinnati Veterans Hospital for bloodwork before they shut down for a week to switch over to a new digital system that we all know will cause new headaches.

Most all my bloodwork can be done at an off-site closer clinic to my house which does not require a trip downtown into a very congested area. Plus, with my mobility issues, it makes the entire process of going downtown for specialized work very unpopular with me and my wife Liz who must do all the driving.

The specialized test I needed to get done before the shutdown June fourth was for my Estradiol blood levels. For some reason, my levels had dropped nearly fifty points from a level they had been at for literally years. For that reason, my endocrinologist requested another test of my HRT levels. When this level comes back, if it stays low, it will be interesting to see what ideas she has, such as maybe doing away with the patch system and switching to injections which for no real reason, I have always stayed away from.  I am not afraid of needles; I am just lazy about the possibility of giving myself injections. One way or another, I will have to jump off that bridge when I come to it. I think my hormonal levels have jumped back up because of an overall increase in the fullness of my breasts, so I may be jumping to conclusions I did not have to.

Past that, we were able to beat the rush this morning at the VA because the vampires (blood lab people) open up at six thirty and we were able to get an early start and be there before seven. For the appointment, I chose a three-quarter sleeve feminine lace trimmed blouse, leggings and flats. Along with a light application of makeup which seemed to work because I was not misgendered at all and was actually smiled at by several men who passed me by on the way to the second-floor labs. I will take that as a win everyday since I have had mixed results over the years at that hospital. Usually, the smaller clinic I go to is better because they know and remember me, but they just could not do the specialized Estradiol test because they needed to send it out for testing.

Now I play the waiting game (which if you were in the military, you know what I am talking about) before I can get the results back. I doubt if it will be very soon because of the overall system disruptions which are coming up.

This is a short post today because it is my transgender grandchild’s birthday today who is working up in Maine and I have to send them birthday wishes plus a small gift. Happy Birthday “A.”

 

  

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.

 

 

 

 

A Special Kind of Crazy

 

JJ Hart

In my youth and even later when I was struggling with my deep-seated gender issues, the thought entered my mind that I may just be a little crazy to think that way. I even went as far as telling others I was not the well-adjusted person they thought I was.

Looking back now, I think I was just preparing in my own way to tell others I met that I wanted to be a woman. Which I never did for decades when it became obvious to strangers I met at cross-dressing, transgender socials I went to that I wanted to be feminine, or I would not have been there.

The first time that I told anyone that I liked to wear women’s clothes was after a Halloween party I went to in the Army of all places. Weeks later, over way too much good German beer, the topic came up with friends about how realistic my “costume” was, all the way to my shaved legs. Since I was among a few very close friends, I took a big chance with risking the remainder of the time I had in the Army and told them I was a transvestite (the term used back then) and I liked to dress as a woman. I said nothing about being crazy, and I just liked to do it.

Of course, at that time in my life, I was busy running from the fact of how deep my gender issues went. I was hiding the fact from myself that no I was not crazy, I just wanted to be a transgender woman in the days when the term was first being used. “Running” for me back in those days meant changing jobs and locations frequently to keep my mind off what I was truly running from, my gender issues. Even with all the moves I was making, I could not outrun my life and occasionally the term “crazy” snuck into my thought pattern.

To compensate, I began to do “chores” which I considered feminine in nature such as doing part of the grocery shopping for my wife dressed as a ciswoman. When I succeeded with no problems, I started to feel so natural that I continually wanted to do more. So, I began to combine my grocery shopping adventures with new visits to big shopping stores to pick up small items I could afford such as a pair of panty hose, or new makeup. Amazingly, no one bothered me or shouted, “There is that crazy man in a dress.”

As the years went by, I learned that the ciswomen around me did not think I was crazy. They thought I was more curious than anything else as they wondered why I would leave the men’s club to play in their world. Ironically, as they were taking care of their curiosity, at the same time, I was learning from them. I had always envied girls (then women) so much as I followed them from afar, and now I had the chance to go back behind the gender curtain and learn first hand about the pluses and negatives of a ciswoman’s life and did I want to be a part of it or was I just following a crazy path off a cliff.

I learned quickly that I was following the right path, no matter how crazy it seemed at the time. The more I explored the world as a trans woman, I found the more exploration I needed to do but that was OK with me because again, my life for a change did not feel forced and so natural because I was not fighting to be something I was not…a man. All of a sudden, my life made sense and a was a special kind of crazy, a transfeminine person. At that point, I knew I would have to lose for good all the formidable white male privileges I had earned over the years. Even I was surprised to say “buh-bye” to all privilege I had built up.

Not all benefits I had living as a man were so easy to give up such as part of my intelligence and my personal security. I did not have many interactions with men one on one, but I learned the process of letting the man take the lead in most all situations. Especially when it came to sports, where I knew a lot about what was going on. The other privilege or benefit I needed to give up quickly was when it came to my personal security. I was not prepared for the world I was facing now in which I was fair game for any toxic man. I was fortunate to have escaped injury a couple of times when I broke the rules that ciswomen grow up with such as not finding your self in a compromising position on a dark city street all alone. I thought at the time, I was crazy to do it and never did it again.

Most recently, the craziest thing I have done is to let my precious Estradiol prescription run nearly all the way out. In fact, I am down to my last applications of patches this week as I am waiting for another refill which I have been notified is coming today. I have written in the past a couple of times about the paranoia I felt when I had a recent appointment with my endocrinologist who prescribes my HRT medications. It turned out that that all my crazy paranoia about the far reach of the orange felon in the White House rejecting any ideas of me receiving gender affirming care through the Veterans Administration would ever happen again. Instead, I received a prescription which will last me through another year until our next appointment.

Once again, it was proven that I am a special kind of crazy which I wish I had learned to embrace earlier in life. It would have made life so much richer just knowing I had the chance to experience life on both sides of the binary gender border.

 

 

 

 

 

Working Smarter not Harder as a Trans Girl

 

Image from Erik Mclean 
on UnSplash.

Before we get started on today’s post, here is a little background on my annual visit to the endocrinologist yesterday at the Veteran’s Administration in Dayton, Ohio.

It turns out, I was just wasting a lot of mental time and effort as I was worried about this appointment. I was worried that she would not renew my Estradiol prescription for the next year. But she did with no questions asked. The only other real problem I asked was why my Estradiol blood levels dropped as much as they did on my last visit to the vampires to have them checked. She did not know and thought I should have them checked again and see where they checked out. So, that is where we left it.

In the same vein, I had a great question from reader “Morgan” asking me if I could sense any differences in my moods when my levels went down since we both are older and on the hormonal patches. I told her no, I did not see any difference except in a new infuriating amount of hair I needed to get rid of on my arms. Since that time, the hair seems to be retreating, so hopefully that signals my levels returned to where they usually were. And, as far as moods go, normally I do feel an overall sense of wellness on the days I change my patches as well as a welcome swelling of my breasts.  I hope that covers the question Morgan, and thanks for asking.

As far as the deeper problem of feeling so much paranoia that I felt before the appointment, I think it goes back to my entire progression on the gender path I took to my transfeminine womanhood. It always seemed I was working harder not smarter as I attempted to fill out my feminine gender workbook as fast as I could. It was because I did not have the benefit all the other girls had growing up in a world of ciswomen where I was excluded. Every gender stop sign that I faced deepened my paranoia that I could ever have a chance of making it to my dream goal of crossing the male to female gender border and settling in as a successful transgender woman.

The first part I faced was just working to blend in with the ciswomen public I was around. I wanted to live the old saying that if it walked like a duck and looked like a duck, then it was a duck. My problem was even when I thought my clothes and makeup were on point and looked good, here I was walking like a circus clown in drag in my high heels. Putting my transfeminine persona into motion presented a real problem for me. It seemed like it was not so long ago that I was having the problem learning how to walk like a man out of puberty so I would not be called a sissy by the bullies and here I was trying to reverse the process. It took me a while to try to perfect my version of a woman’s unique style of movement but with a lot of practice I calmed my paranoia when I entered a room full of strangers and did the best I could. Then, I needed to work smarter, not harder trying to remember which gender I was on which day I was presenting. I worked in a pressure packed male dominated industry and it was as if the clock had been turned back and I was worried about being called a sissy again.

Another problem I was having was keeping my mind on whatever gender I was. An example would be all the time I wasted at work wondering what it would be like to live the life the ciswomen around me were living. Or better yet, daydreaming of the next time I could try when I could flip the switch and sneak out of the house again as a convincing transgender woman. If I could reclaim just a portion of the time I wasted, I worked harder not smarter as a person caught between two genders, what a relaxing, extra successful life I could have led. I was stubborn though and persisted through the decades just getting by thinking I could juggle being a parttime woman and a parttime man. Finally, it all became too much for me to handle mentally, so I needed to make a choice. But even then, I had to make certain that I was making the right decision, so I set out to change my path into a more challenging direction.

What I did was to throw caution to the wind and try to experience situations I always wondered what it would be like if I was an actual ciswoman. To do so, I had to finally earn my way behind the gender curtain and really attempt what my own unique path to trans womanhood really required of me. Essentially, the whole process required total commitment from me, and I needed to start making future decisions which would dramatically change the rest of my life. I was nearing sixty and my transgender biological clock was ticking loudly in my mind. If I was ever going to make my move to live fulltime as a woman, I better do it and it was time.

Better yet, I had a circle of women friends to help me socialize into the feminine community and I set out to secure a doctor’s approval to start HRT or gender affirming hormones. The timing was all right for my big move, and I no longer had to work harder more than smarter to do it. Most importantly, my paranoia about doing it all was at an all time low as for a change, destiny was on my side. Against all odds, I was able to meet a stable loving woman online as well as my daughter came on to accept me when I told her my deepest secret about wanting to be a woman my entire life.

Karma was coming around to pay me back for all the paranoia I experienced when I was working harder more than smarter. For the first time in my life, I allowed myself to be happy.

 

 

 

 

Endocrinologist Visit Today

 

JJ Hart at a recent
Cincinnati Pride. Ohio River
in background. 

Just a shorter post because my endocrinologist annual visit is today.

The only paranoia I have is that for some reason, she will not renew my HRT medications for Estradiol and Spironolactone. You may ask why I would have any nervous energy before my virtual appointment, and it is because I am part of the Veterans Administration health care system which is always making changes.

Recently, I had another one of my medical providers “retire” and I needed to switch my care from the Dayton VA to the Cincinnati VA which is closer to me. Fortunately, I was able to make it a seamless switch and even was able to visit my local VA clinic for my initial appointment with my new therapist, which I really liked. But all of that had to do with my mental health medications which the VA puts a higher priority on than prescribing medications which have made my gender transition possible. In fact, it was not so long ago that the orange felon in Washington DC assigned a new VA commissioner who was making threatening suggestions about doing away with gender affirming therapy in the VA altogether.

To my knowledge, nothing ever really became of that statement and the rank-and-file VA employees found ways of getting around it.

Another paranoia I have is my “Endo” in Dayton is being retired too and I will have to seek out new assistance in Cincinnati which in itself is not a bad thing except when it comes to where I must go for appointments. Going to the main VA hospital downtown is always a congested mess and I always must ask Liz to take me because of my mobility issues. If I can just go to my local clinic or have a virtual appointment, there are usually no problems.

My current “endo” usually prescribes me a years’ worth of medications unless there are any changes in my Estradiol blood levels. For some reason, after years of staying the same, my levels went down quite a bit on my last test. Which is the last thing I wanted to happen. So I will have to see what she says about it because I am still undecided on switching from patches to injections at my age.

Most importantly, I am who I am, and my HRT does not define me but it surely has helped. I will never forget all the extreme gender changes my new hormones put me through and would hate to lose all I gained. Who knows, maybe I am just building bridges to climb when I don’t have to with this upcoming appointment. She will maintain the long-term stability and status quo we have built up over the years, and our annual visits will continue.

One way or another, I will let you know.

 

 

 

The Last Line of Defense

 

Image from Gayatri Malthroa 
on UnSplash.

Throughout nearly half of a century, my male self-fought the complete transition I made into a feminine lifestyle.

During that extended period of time, I think I tried everything possible to convince myself that I was wrong to want to play in the girls’ sandbox at all. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I “purged” many times of my feminine belongings. Leaving me with nothing but my most cherished pieces of girl’s/woman’s clothing and makeup. The makeup was easy because I knew I could always buy more. Perhaps the most precious items I never threw away were the nice wigs I was able to buy and the silicone breast forms which ironically were given to me by a fellow cross dresser who was purging also. Deep down inside, I knew I would need the wigs and breast forms again when my urge to cross-dress returned. As my own personal history told me it would.

It turned out that purging was not my last defense, no matter how hard I tried. In fact, the more I tried not to be feminine in any way shape or form, it seemed I slipped closer and closer to it. Especially when I learned I could dress to blend with most of the ciswomen around me. It was then I learned how natural I felt when I began to get it right and could feel all the gender euphoria I could feel.

What I did continually feel was my masculinity slipping away and I only used it on occasions with my wife in mixed company and when I was working in a high-pressure environment. For years, when I was out in the world experimenting living a new life, I felt as if I was sliding down a steep hill towards a transgender cliff which I had no idea of how I would be able to land.

In all fairness to my second wife, she never opposed me cross-dressing and knew about it when we got married. But on the other hand, completely opposed any idea of me becoming a transfeminine person. Between her and my male self, they made formidable opponents in my life when I thought about living as a trans woman. What made it all worse was when my wife kept saying she did not want to live with another woman and did not agree to that when we got married and I had to agree with her. Putting me in a very difficult situation in my life. I escaped the best I could by sneaking out of the house behind her back at any given time I found to test the world time and again to see if I would be allowed to go back behind the gender curtain. Which in many ways, represented escaping the last defense to staying in the male world I had.

Of course, my wife found out on numerous occasions what I was doing as a trans woman and resisted all my progress. When she did, we had giant battles which she normally won and I tried the therapy route to help me with my gender issues. Therapy helped me in many ways in my life but not so much with my deep-seated gender issues. I was expecting too much when one therapist told me if I thought our sessions would ever relieve my tensions, I would be wrong until I was able to make the final decision on if I was able to be a woman or not. At that point, I had two of the most far-reaching quotes that I ignored which were told to me. One of which was the time I was told I was the only one who could decide my gender future and the second was when my wife told me to go ahead and be man enough to be a woman. I was so sure I could do it my way and it cost me dearly. Especially, in terms of my overall mental health when juggling two genders and two lives at once became too much to handle. I did not know if I was coming or going on which day it was on how I was expected to act.

As many of you know, my second wife tragically died of a massive heart attack, leaving me with only my male self to do gender battle with. His last defenses deteriorated quickly as I became deeply unhappy and lonely and took solace in my inner female self for comfort. She stepped up big time, and very soon when I was not working nights, I was in one of my regular drinking venues seeking company. That was when I discovered I had more in common with the lesbians I met than with any man. Since most of them rejected me anyhow for leaving the good old boys club. I was able to say good riddance and go forward in my life into a world I never thought possible could ever be a part of. I had never really got along well with men in my life, and it turned out nothing had really changed. Except the way I was exploring the world. Finally, as my true self. As I was finding me after all those years of searching.

The last defense my male self-had was when my third wife Liz and only daughter came to my rescue with unwavering support for my final dive off the steep gender cliff. They made the landing very soft, and even easy. More precisely, Liz made me a believer in myself again and my daughter gave me support I needed from what blood family I had left since my brother rejected me, and my parents had long since passed away. Add in the couple of lesbians I always socialized with and I had all the support I needed to succeed in where I had dreamed of going and being accepted behind the gender curtain.

By far, I would be remiss if I did not mention the power of HRT or gender affirming hormones in removing any of the final defenses my male self-had going for him. I could not believe how fast the hormones acted as my body began to change, inside and out. It would take a whole post to describe all the impacts the hormones made to me. In fact, I have my annual appointment with my endocrinologist coming up this week, and with it, the chance to get refills on my hormonal patches.

Maybe I can thank her then for helping me to win my battle with my male self. Since I receive my HRT meds through the Veterans Administration, I always hope nothing changes from the top down with my ability to keep receiving a huge part of what makes me whole. I worked too long to get here.

Thanks again for joining me on my journey and I hope my experiences help you too.

Any comments, claps or subscriptions are welcome and make my work so worthwhile!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transgender Day of Visibility

 

JJ Hart doing trans outreach work. 

Transgender Day of Visibility was yesterday, and I did not post because I was out most of the day being visible.  Which was a change for me.

In the morning, I had several low impact visits to venues I feel secure in, so I did not feel any undo stress in going.  My first visit was to my local Veteran’s Administration Clinic to have my annual hearing check.  Even if my wife Liz perhaps may disagree, my hearing stayed the same and my next appointment was set for two years from now. From the VA, my next stop was at our bank where I needed to pick up a certified check. I was surprised when the bank was relatively busy and I needed to wait. Which is a problem with my mobility issues. Two very nice women helped me out by directing me to a chair saying they would guard my place in line if anyone else came in and tried to cut ahead of me. From there, it was clear sailing because the teller I went to was young and did her job very well and I was out the door before I knew it and there was no reason for anyone to question my gender. I was just a woman running errands as me. The best possible response I could have to my day of Transgender Visibility.

I knew my next stop would be easy because I was going to our favorite coffee shop to pick up a late breakfast and coffee of course. Over the space of time I have been going there, I have never had any problems with any of the staff concerning who I really was. The staff is always immersed in what they are doing to be concerned about me and even had a LGBTQ flag on their wall for a while when they had a decidedly non-binary manager in charge which was good to see.

My third and final interaction for the day came with a young woman who was a bath consultant at a company we were considering putting in a new walk-in shower to replace a dangerous (for me) old bathtub we had enough of. While we were in the small talk get acquainted part of the process, she asked what I did with my time since I was retired. I said, mainly I write a blog, and I am writing a book for my family to read after I am gone on my life. She was interested in what I blogged about. Then I broke my own rule, outed myself and said I write mainly about what goes on in a transgender person’s life. Of course, I needed to say I was transgender and today happened to be the Trans Day of Visibility, so here I was. Since the consultant was young and wanted to sell us something she did not react negatively to the idea I was transgender and married to Liz.

I came away from my own limited day of visibility hopefully thinking I had done my own small part to further the cause of transgender women everywhere to contradict all the negative publicity we get from the politicians. It is important to show the world we are just people like they are attempting to live our lives with no problems. Sadly, with my mobility problems, I cannot be as active as I once was in the community and go to public events like I used to.

Plus, more and more at the age of seventy-six, I am actively becoming me finally in life. It was like going through another major transition. I went from me being a cross dresser to accepting myself as a transgender woman, and now I am completing the circle and going back to me again. Only this time, with a big difference. I am the feminine being I was always meant to be. I was just fortunate to live long enough to live my circle. And celebrate another Transgender Day of Visibility.  And, if you are in the process of thinking of escaping your closet and having your own day. Celebrate those who are leading the way for you! Plus, on a positive note, the younger generations seem to be blinder to gender bias than the older ones, so all is not lost for the future you. Then, you can be involved with your own day of visibility and feel good about yourself.

 

 

Pulling Your Gender Band-Aid Off

 

Image from Possessed Photography
on UnSplash. 

I am sure you have encountered a time when you just had to pull a band-aid off quickly from a tender area of your body. Even worse, maybe the band-aid was in a spot where your unwanted male hair was thick, and it hurt.

After I began to realize what was going on in
my life with my gender issues, my time to remove my lifetime band-aid was coming closer to being done. I could put it off no longer once I started to get out into the world as a transgender woman and begin to live. Sure, I was scared, but my whole new life felt so real and natural to me that I just had to keep moving forward.

What helped me gather the courage to finally rip the band-aide off was that I was becoming quite successful in carving out a new feminine life were no one knew or cared about the old male me. Even with the protests of my second wife and my male self, it just seemed possible that someday I could live my dream of being a fulltime transfeminine person. On the negative side, I knew I had a lot of work to do to be able to even think I could ever rip the band-aid off and move on with my life the way I always thought it should be. Courage was always my problem, along with the possibility of causing loved ones around me pain if I made such a perceived selfish move.

Until I arrived at the point of self-preservation, I did think it was selfish the way I was living. After all, I was spending every spare moment when I was not working either living as a woman or planning the next time I was going to do it. I was completely obsessed with making the next move up my gender path and could not wait to fill out the next chapter of my gender workbook. The problem was, ignoring my path was causing me damage to my mental health all the way to me trying self-harm to myself with a suicide attempt when I thought all was lost. Until I finally regained control of myself before I did more harm. When I did, my life began to go  full circle and the future seemed brighter. If you find yourself looking down at that dark tunnel of self-harm, please remember what might be true today, may not be true tomorrow and there might are people to help you on various hotlines. Especially if you are a veteran and have Veterans Administration health care.

I am sorry I digressed from my original topic of pulling off your band-aid into suicide, but it just so happened to me that suicide helped me to make the final decision to take the gender jump from a male to female life. Was there room for me after all behind the gender curtain I so desperately wanted to explore because I felt I belonged there. If I did not make the jump (or attempt to), what reason did I have to keep living, kept sneaking into my subconscious thoughts. At the same time, I wondered what was going on under the wound I was carrying around as I tried to live a successful male life. My habit of living half and half in both genders was just not working for me. I had always heard that if takes three repetitions in a row to form a habit, so what I was doing was completely wrong when I needed to go back to my unwanted male gender after spending three days as a trans woman leading my best life.

My life finally got to the point that even I could not ignore the ignorance of how I was choosing to live. I needed to face the truth of living the male life I had since birth was false and I needed to move on to a brighter future away from all the male influences I lived under. The band-aide which had become such an integral part of my life had to go away. No matter how much pain it might cause. I was fortunate in a way because I had most of the people in my life who had mattered to me, including most of my family. When I came out to my remaining blood family, my daughter wholeheartedly accepted me and my only brother rejected me. So, I earned a fifty-fifty split when the band-aid came off.

The next big problem was averted when I was able to take an early retirement, so I would not have to worry about working a new job as my trans woman self. I supported myself by selling collectables and with my Social Security.

I guess you can say, taking the hard way out and waiting as long as I did transition worked for me. Even though I had to go through enough anguish along the way to wonder why I did it. I was doomed to life of opposites. Gender being the main one, and honesty being the second one. If I had dealt with the second one first, maybe I would have saved myself a portion of the problems which were presented to me. Certainly, emerging into the world at an early stage would have not necessarily been ideal either, but if I had just pulled the band-aid off and did it, I would have had the opportunity to build a new life earlier. Probably in a new job and with a new family because my blood family would not have accepted me.

At least, if I had done it then, I would have had more years to adjust to the radical changes I would have to go through and figure out away to do it. One way or another, we can not go back in life, so we have to live with the consequences of what we have done or haven’t. Who can say which time would have been easier to join the public as a transgender woman, twenty years ago when I was seriously exploring ways to do it, or now with all the anti-transgender rhetoric which is going on as politicians use us as a scapegoat.

I guess we are doomed as transgender women and transgender men to have a giant band-aid to pull off one way or another. In my case, I should have just pulled it off and got on with my life.

 

 

In Touch with Nature

 

Image from Brice Cooper
on UnSplash.

The “Ostara” ritual came off yesterday as expected with the usual suspects attending.

The weather cooperated with all the other plans, and it was a beautiful spring day here in southwestern Ohio. The only gender drawback did not even come because of me because there was a young very androgynous child there too. I could not tell the gender of the child and of course I did not pry. All went well until one of the other older women in the circle just could not leave the matter alone and said something to the child which elicited a loud response. Suddenly I heard “I’m a girl!”, and I thought the woman just could not leave it alone and had to go where she should not have been. Other than that, the woman sat next to Liz and I when we ate lunch and persisted on lighting up some sort of a cigarette after she ate which did not go over well with Liz and I who are confirmed non-smokers. The only good thing was after she smoked if was time for us to leave the ritual.

What I don’t think I realized was until after I received a comment from “Alex” who is transitioning from female to male was how much the opposite path of my gender male to female gender transition has meant to me. Now I can really feel the power of nature is a small example of how much more the Ostara ritual meant to me than I ever thought it could be when I was a man and too busy thinking about guy stuff such as work and sports to be overly concerned about my inner connections with Mother Nature. I credit the power of HRT or gender affirming hormones with unleashing a new appreciation for the world around me as I progressed with the hormones. All of a sudden, I was more in touch with the world around me with senses such as temperature and smell. I was very appreciative of permission I was given by the doctors I saw to go down the gender path I did, and I worry that the orange pedo in Washington and his followers will take it all away from transgender people of all ages today. Already it is happening here in Ohio, and I fear for my next estradiol prescription which is due to be renewed early in May.

It comes through the Veteran’s Administration health care system for me, and hopefully I still will be protected from outside political influence since I have been taking the hormones for nearly a decade now. Maybe I can fly under the radar at the VA and tie it all into my mental health (which is true) and something the VA is ultra-sensitive about. Fortunately, I have an appointment set up soon for a new psychiatrist who I hope will be sensitive to my entire situation. With that, maybe I can explain the power of the ritual I just went through on my overall mental well being and he will be behind me.

I think in many ways, getting back in touch with nature during “Ostara” takes me back to the innocent days of my rural childhood when my brother, friends and I had our run of the fields and woods around us. Growing up that way, with the freedoms we had, set in motion a lifetime of appreciation of nature that somehow got away from me as I grew into a false sense of manhood. Where “camping” out during Army basic training in Kentucky was as far as I got into nature. What a relief it was for me to make all the positive contact I had missed at least for a hour or so during the intense ritual experience.

I had no idea that my sense of gender was so intertwined with the world until I began to reach out to others and live it. And I am sad that mankind has managed to abuse the only world we have to call home, but that is another subject altogether. It all came back to me yesterday as I remembered the love I had for the woods which surrounded our house when I was growing up. I guess it took a jolt to my system which included a male to female gender transition, to bring myself back to a full circle experience with the world and back in touch with nature.