It's Wedding Week

Liz on the left. New Years Eve
Photo

It is here already.  This is the week Liz and I get married. As always, time flies when you are having fun. I can't say I was having fun the entire time but I can say I can't believe the time has gone by so quickly. 

You see, Liz and I have been together for eleven years now and we actually met on an online dating site. Literally, she reached out to me when I was desperately lonely. We quickly hit it off and started to seriously correspond. First by email and then by phone when I became brave enough to let her hear my voice.

Of course one of the major factors in getting together in person was the distance we lived apart. In those days I lived approximately a hour apart. I lived in Springfield, Ohio and she in her native Cincinnati. So we were within meeting distance. Another plus was I had always loved Cincinnati and deep down thought I would end up living there. 

Following a year or so of commuting back and forth I moved my dog, cat and myself to Liz's place in Cincinnati. Without much of a problem we managed to mesh as she had her son, a dog and two cats living there. Spiritually, Liz is a Wiccan and I lean towards the Buddhist faith so again meshing wasn't too difficult. Liz was way ahead of me when she said how deeply she felt the relationship was destined to succeed and flourish.

Fast forward eleven years and Liz and I are obviously still together and thriving even though I am twelve years older the relationship continues to grow. So out of the clear blue sky a couple months ago my daughter said why don't we and get married. I thought about it for awhile and asked Liz to marry me. She said yes and we moved forward and went to the courthouse and filled out the necessary paperwork. Then we had to make a few basic decisions on what would happen next. It is Liz's first wedding and my third so I left many of the decisions up to her. The only thing I didn't really want was a big wedding and I did not need a fancy wedding dress. None of my previous wives desired a fancy dress and neither did I. Then came the names.

Since I just changed my name legally a couple years ago, I didn't want to go through all of that again. Plus I still am proud of the last name I was born with. Liz on the other hand is eventually going to take my last name. But overall, she wants to be able to call me Mrs. Hart which is quite the change for me. As far as the wedding ceremony itself goes, just my daughter's family is coming plus Liz's son. So with the officiant we will be around ten people. We do have one special guest. I have a FtM transgender grand child who is going to bring their serious partner and I am honored.

What I want everyone to know is when this all started I had exactly no expectations I would ever again be in a serious relationship. I was extremely lonely and was searching in some of the wrong places. Out of sheer persistence I finally hit pay dirt. More on that in a later post. 

You Win Some - You Lose Some

Very early in my gender transition I felt I was successful if I "fooled" another person into thinking I was actually a woman. Little did I know how wrong I was. An example was I would recoil at the mention I "made" a good looking woman. I felt I wasn't making anything, I was just becoming my natural self. Perhaps I was being hard on myself because in reality I was working very hard to perfect my feminine new transgender appearance. By doing so I was encourage myself I could actually survive in the world as a woman.

At the Park
Photo by Jessie Hart

When I first began to notice I was succeeding in my feminine quest was when I was shunned by male friends I knew when I dressed as a woman for a Halloween party. My "costume" was way too serious to be mistaken as a casual excursion into the feminine gender. Maybe among all the other clues, shaving my legs for the evening gave me away. 

It wasn't until years later I realized I had witnessed the first vestiges of losing my male privilege. In other words when I was successful at presenting as a woman, I was kicked out of the boys club I had worked so hard to be accepted in. I was naïve in thinking I could to try to live part time in each binary gender. The entire process nearly cost me the ultimate loss when I tried suicide in addition to a very self destructive existence.

As I transitioned into a fulltime life as a transgender woman, I began to understand exactly what I was winning and what I was losing. Naturally what I was winning was a life as my feminine authentic self when I finally let her out of our gender closet. On the other hand, I was out of the boys club forever and needed to adjust my thinking. I learned the hard way, I had become in essence a second class citizen in the world of men. Long gone were the days when my opinion actually mattered in a group of men. Even though I knew more about the subject than they did. It was humorous to me when I was "mansplained" about a sporting comment. I lost the battle in society but won the war personally. 

I also learned the hard way how losing my male privilege could be dangerous. I write often how I was cornered at a party by a much larger man and suddenly found how vulnerable women could feel. To make matters worse I needed to be rescued by my wife. Yet another instance when losing my male privilege nearly led me to harm occurred during a late night excursion to a gay bar in downtown Dayton, Ohio. When I left the relative safety of the bar and headed down the dark sidewalk to my car I was suddenly stopped by two men. Luckily I was able to escape with no harm when I gave them my last five dollars. Never again did I walk that sidewalk alone. 

Even though there is no way I would give up my feminine privilege which included my new cis woman friends, it still is amazing to me the white male privilege so many men take for granted. 

I certainly won more than I lost.       

Gender Euphoria's Backlash

This is an extension of yesterdays post which went into detail of one of the highly successful Halloween parties I went to. In recap, the evening turned out to be so successful gender euphoria ruled my life for several days following. 

Halloween with Kathy
Photo Jessie Hart

By the time this happened, I should have been able to predict it would occur again almost down to the day. Essentially the pressure of being unable to explore my feminine self became so great I nearly could not stand the pressure. The more pressure I felt, the harder to live or work with became. I was so jealous of any cis woman who I perceived was so fortunate to be born female and having the chance to grow into a woman. It was all a throw back to when I was young and woke up in the morning wanting to be a girl. 

Later I learned my all too brief trips into cross dressing as a woman just wouldn't last. My gender backlash would soon be back to haunt me. I also found out, the more intensely pleasurable the cross dressing experience was, the stronger the need to repeat the process. As knowledge of gender became more well known, what I was going through was gender euphoria versus gender dysphoria. In scientific terms, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  

In the case of the Halloween party I wrote about, the euphoria I felt from feeling I was able to compete appearance wise with the other women I was with was intense. In the days following my adventure, it didn't take long for my gender dysphoria to set in. When it did set in, it did it with a passion. I couldn't stand to look at my male face in the mirror in the morning and my day automatically started on the wrong foot. Once again I was stuck wondering why I couldn't live a feminine life more often. My inner self who was feminine in nature was screaming to get out. 

My entire reason in writing this post was my desire to point out no matter how pleasurable to finally burst out of my gender closet it was during these Halloween adventures, finally learning I had a deeper need to be a transgender woman was slowly but surely ripping me apart. When I say was nasty coming down off my gender euphoria I mean it. I was fired from one job for how I treated my employees and almost lost several others. Finally I had to tell my bosses I was undergoing anger management training when in fact I was going to a gender psychologist. It saved my job and helped somewhat with my dysphoria. 

Halloween was such a learning experience for me, I craved the euphoria when I achieved it which was not always the case. Some Halloweens were more special than others and if I knew then what I know now, I would have recognized the true depth of all my gender issues. Putting on the feminine clothes was all well and good but it turned out the clothes were just the tip of the gender iceberg.  One thing is for sure, I would have understood the negative aspects of  backlash better.