What's in a Name?

 2016 it turns out was a big year as I progressed through my MtF gender transition. It was the year I completed my legal gender name change,  My process turned out to have a couple different layers of paper work I had to go through because I needed to include the Veterans Administration in the process. Which meant I needed the help of my VA therapist to do it. She provided the timely paperwork to insure certain medications crucial to my transition continued, especially my hormone replacement therapy needs. 

I vividly remember the day I was able to erase the "M" on my Ohio driver's license and replace it with a "F". Second only to the first time I needed the license to vote. The only legal document I have not gotten around to changing yet is my birth certificate which only fairly recently became legal to do here in Ohio. It's my fault for procrastinating because the whole process turned out to be fairly simple after the gender bigots quit fighting it.

Over the years, my feminine name has proven to present quite the challenge. Early in life I chose the name of girls who I admired such as the one who sat across from me in study hall. Not that is as important today, her name was Karen which of course is not the most popular name these days. Anyhow, Karen had a short lived time in my life because there always seemed to be another girl/woman I was to become enamored with and adopted her name. For awhile.

Just before I settled into a steady feminine persona as I entered the feminine world, the name game became a little crazy. In fact I would buy wigs to match a certain name. An example was Roxy was always a blond while Darcy was always a red head. After realizing I was defeating the chances to establish myself as one unique person in public, I settled into using Cyrsti as my name. It was pronounced the same as Kristi but was spelled different to reflect light going through a crystal. This was all well and good as I began to be able to exist in the woman's sandbox and the Cyrsti's Condo blog was born.

Cyrsti was destined to be part of my life for many years, in fact all the way to my early sixties when I came out to my daughter. Her only real concern after wondering why she was the last to know I was transgender to what was up with the name (she disliked it) and what would the three grandkids call me. Since I was close to choosing a legal name change anyhow, the time was right for a revision.

This time I decided to stay within the family history for my new name. I chose my maternal grandfather's first name (Jesse) and just spelled it different and added my Mom's first name as my middle name (Jeanne). That way the kids could just call me "JJ".

At that point, the biggest question was what would happen to the blog. Should I sacrifice all the years of posts and millions of hits I had and change the name? I decided not to and kept Cyrsti as sort of a "pen name" Just to confuse the issue more though I decided to use JJ Hart fairly recently when I began to publish on the Medium writers platform. 

In the future, my goal is to retain a professional to help me with my blog ideas. When I can afford it. Perhaps they could advise me on what to do with my pen name versus my legal name. In the meantime, I'm afraid my schizophrenic name use will continue. 

Pride in January?

 Pride month for the LGBT community should be a year around celebration.  Once you reach the certain point of your life when you are comfortable as your authentic gender self, it's time to celebrate yourself.  In other words the tipping point of having total confidence in yourself. Confidence of course was the topic of a recent blog post which Paula commented on:

" Confidence is key. It took me a while to inhabit the world confidently as a woman of mature years. We missed out on a lot of the learning process, we had to compress so much into such a short time. But now, I find that I have the confidence to do things I would not have before, because I am not just confident in my femininity, but in myself. " 

As always Paula,  thanks for the relevant comment.

Pride can be expressed in many different ways. You don't have to go watch garishly dressed drag queens strut around in heels to participate in Pride. 

You can dress in your favorite jeans or leggings depending on the season or you can be the occasional cross dresser in your local bar.  The important part is you are living your life as you feel natural doing.

I know also, many of you think you are impossibly stuck in your transgender/cross dresser closet and will never escape. There was a time when I felt that too. I was just able somehow escape the tragic situation I was in and sheer destiny led me out of my closet and into a feminine world. 

I will say though I had to work very hard to put myself in a position for destiny to find me. I searched high and low on dating sites looking for someone. Either male or female to spend social time with and was a miserable failure. My Pride comes from  from finally being persistent enough to find friends such as Kim and Nikki who I met in sports bar venues and had a great time. All the while I was learning valuable lessons on how to navigate a feminine world. Then there was Liz who responded to a online dating site, saying I had sad eyes.

Along the way, being a partier didn't hurt me when I did attend various Pride events as you can see in the second picture which was taken in a very busy gay venue in downtown Cincinnati several years ago. 

To make a long story/post short, have Pride in your journey. Even though it may consist of being able to exist in a very dark closet.

You deserve it.

 

Confidence

 I am always fond of sharing the idea of the importance of a transgender woman's confidence. In fact the argument can be made her confidence is her major accessory

Photo Courtesy Cyrsti Hart 

In all the years of studying how cis women carry themselves there always seemed to be a certain amount of women who just exuded more femininity than others and it had nothing to do with being more sexy.. Although it translated into just that.  

It's no secret either that humans are apex predators and will gather like sharks to any sign of blood in the water. Transgender women and men are often very fragile when traveling in public and the least small set back can cause the proverbial blood in the water. I know in my case confidence was difficult to come by in my early years in the world. Often I would experience a couple days of success and gain confidence in thinking I could navigate a feminine world only to experience a setback. When I did, often I would become depressed and think I never stood a chance to live as my authentic self. Ultimately I continued down my path and became successful. Finally achieving my goal of living full time as a transgender woman.  

Of course too, I was my own worse enemy along the way. Trying to dress like a teenage girl didn't help me at all as you can imagine. But even then I had to learn to accept what I chose to wear and try to make the most of it even though I was leaving the blood in the water by attracting unwanted attention. Finally I found and adopted a style I thought I could live with  and began to blend in successfully with other cis women.

Probably one of my most recent examples of confident transgender women came last week when my partner Liz and I joined two other transgender women for dinner. As we moved about the venue to our seats and when we left no one seemed to give us a second glance. Plus, through out dinner we engaged in what I called trans girl talk concerning acceptance by our families among other topics relating to our lives. 

Unfortunately, confidence is often difficult to achieve and the only way you can gain it is by living as your authentic self. I am true believer these days if you are near an urban area you can find an LGBT group to socialize with. Once you do, your chances to increase your trans confidence will rise and you can keep your blood out of the water.