Party Down in "C-Bus"

 The city of Columbus  in Ohio is known often as "C-Bus."  I grew up and lived for years approximately a half hour away in Springfield, Ohio. 

One of the first places I used to go to attend transvestite or cross dresser mixers were in Columbus. It is a much larger city than Springfield plus it offered me a place to go where no one would recognize me. It was at several of those mixers I started to try to follow in the steps of the group's "A" listers. I didn't want to adopt their attitude in anyway. They were similar to the ego trips most likely seen in the cheerleaders where I went to high school. 

What I did value was the chance to go out with them after the mixers were over. I tagged along when they left most of the group at the mixer and went out to various gay and lesbian venues to party. Needless to say I learned a lot about attempting to go out in the world as a novice transvestite/cross dresser. 

As time went on, the group who staged the mixers went away and many of the "A" group who lived in the area began to meet at one of the members houses. If you are familiar with Columbus at all, the house was in a fully restored brick home in the German Village historic district. In other words, it was a great place to have a party. 

One of the benefits of tagging along with the "A" listers was my wife and I received an invite to the parties which normally happened about once a month. Since I worked in the restaurant business, Saturday nights off were difficult to come by and the rare ones I did get were cherished. As you can imagine, my wife wasn't totally on board with spending one of our rare Saturdays with a group of men in dresses. I had to mix in a powerful mixture of  persuasion mixed with pouting to get her to go. Normally me going by myself was out of the question. I wasn't trusted to be on my own in other words and she was right. 

Normally the parties featured a wonderful who's who of gender dysphoric people on a rapidly developing gender spectrum. Being transgender was still a new idea but being a transsexual wasn't. It was still during the time when transsexuals were expected to go through what then was known as sex change surgery then disappear into society. Never to be heard from again. In fact, the person who organized the parties identified as a transsexual. 

What fascinated me were the number of different individuals who attended. All the way from male admirers to transsexuals considering surgery to all the questioning people such as me. One night, a question I never considered was presented to me in a way I would have never considered.

Photo of model in mini skirt
 by Edward Howell on Unsplash

On the night in question, my wife and I had the usual fight over what I was wearing. My dress was just too short for her liking. I hate to say it but she was right and her point was proven dramatically. One admirer (or a man who admired cross dressers) was a big guy, around  six foot four and probably approximately two hundred sixty pounds. I wasn't a small person but he towered over me. 

What happened was he caught me in a hallway of the house in a position I couldn't get out of. I learned quickly how tables could be turned on women in an instant as I was trapped. About the time I was starting to panic and he was reaching for my thigh I looked up and saw my wife looking at me from down the hallway. It turned out she had let the lesson play out as far as she thought it needed to and then loudly cleared her throat. When the admirer heard it, he quickly backed off and as I said my lesson was learned. 

Of course, I had to hear about it all the way home. Partying down in "C-Bus" would never be the same again and I knew how quickly all women could be put in compromising situations they can't escape from.

Batgirl

From Rolling Stone:

 Ivory Aquino has been cast to portray Alysia Yeoh, the roommate and best friend of the titular superhero also known as Barbara Gordon, in upcoming HBO Max film Batgirl, as Variety reports.

Aquino’s character first appeared in a DC Batgirl issue by Gail Simone and artist Ardian Syaf in 2011. She will star opposite Leslie Grace’s Barbara Gordon. Both Aquino and Yeoh are transgender. This is the first time a live-action film adaptation of a DC Comics movie will feature an openly trans character.

In 2017, the Filipina actress portrayed transgender activist Cecilia Chung in the ABC miniseries, When We Rise.

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.