Being a Woman is a lot of Work

 

Photo courtesy 
Jessie Hart

Recently I wrote a post about the cost involved with being a transgender woman. Now I am adding a companion post concerning the amount of work it takes to be a woman. 

On occasion I happen along a novice transgender woman who seemingly wants to look, act and/or be accepted in the feminine world immediately.. I usually try to tell her to be patient. The gender journey is not a race, it is a life long marathon. Once you think you have the process down it changes on you. 

Also the gender change process takes an immense amount of work. Lets start with clothes. Many, including me rush out and buy some frilly ultrafeminine outfits which naturally look wonderful on a beautiful  model. It takes time, energy and money to learn what looks good on an internet model may not flatter your testosterone infected body unless you are one of the rare few naturals who are able to transition into an attractive woman easily. 

In my own case I was able to take care of my skin long before I seriously started to gender transition. Which helped immeasurably when I was applying foundation following a close shave. Plus I did realize (like Stana says) shaving actually helped me because it got rid of old skin cells. After I began to become very serious about following the path to a feminine life, I decided I had to shed myself of most all of the extra weight I had gained over the years with pizza and beer. Amazingly I was able to lose nearly fifty pounds to get down to a much more manageable weight, Which meant a wider choice of fashions to wear. Also I became more adept at hiding my masculine broad shoulders and narrow hips by again wearing clothes which tried to not accentuate my shoulders. 

I mention all of this because it just scratched the surface of the work I put into becoming my authentic self and in my case the entire process took years to refine in the public's eye. I'm sure to a novice I am nothing more than an experienced confident transgender woman but they were not around when I was struggling to find my way in a new world. 

Along the way also I found out the hard way being the "pretty, pretty princess, as my wife called me was just not going to be enough to continue my path to living full time as a transgender woman. I found what I had always suspected deep down women were the more complex and often the stronger gender. To join them would require much more than just appearing as a woman in public. The process wouldn't take long because seemingly overnight I had to begin to interact more intensely with the public as my true self.

Were there mistakes? More than I care to count. The times I tried to wear ill fitting wigs to the wrong venue come  back to haunt me even more than my choice of wardrobe. 

My hope is that these days, in direct comparison with the past there are many ways a novice transgender woman can learn the feminine ropes. In many area's now there are strong LGBTQ organizations who offer social functions for all transgender women or men as well as cross dressers also. Plus the social media outreach can be a help if you can steer clear of the crazies. 

Bottom line, as any cis woman will tell you, it's takes a lot of work to be a woman. Be prepared.    

I Was Never a Crossdresser?

 

Image from Alexander Grey
On UnSplash

A couple days ago I read with interest a post from a person saying they were transgender but had never been a cross dresser. Further more, cross dressers were an embarrassment to all transgender women. I wish I could provide just a few of the many derogatory comments which followed. Nearly all of the comments were against the idea of the transgender woman claiming to never have been a cross dresser. The whole post to me sounded like a "I'm transer than thou" attitude. Perhaps even to the point of the poster having internal transphobia.

I freely admit to being what I call an increasingly serious cross dresser. Before I ever admitted to being transgender, I needed to research if such a big move was a fit  for me. Most certainly, the possibility of losing an entire life and beginning a new one from scratch was intimating. Plus, by definition, I was crossdressing from one binary gender to another. Much later on in life I finally realized I was doing my cross dressing as a guy, not a woman although all those years I thought I was attempting the opposite. Doing my best to feminize myself. 

Ironically, the person who posted the comment also came out against cross dressers who come out of their closets at Halloween. This comment went totally against everything I had ever felt and learned from my Halloween experiences. I believe my very short time out of the gender closet provided me so much experience and confidence to move forward in life. All in all, the only time I can think I ever found cross dressers to be distasteful was at the various Pride celebrations I went to when I saw several cross dressers (not drag queens, which is another subject) teetering around on high heels while squeezed into impossibly tight or short dresses. I thought to each their own and they were probably just out of the closet novices. The drag queens to me provided much more of a threat to the visibility of transgender women.

We all have to arrive at a point when we can accept ourselves as being transgender. If being a cross dresser through a portion of your life is needed to do it, then so be it. Over the years, I knew another transgender woman who said she was never a cross dresser and stuck her nose up in the air when she said it. Again I don't understand how a person who at first had to get dressed in her car before meetings could say such a thing. But she did I questioned her on it during one meeting and was soundly rejected for my comment so I just shut up for once. 

I view my life as a cross dresser as going through a series of closed doors. Once I had established myself behind one door, I just had to see what was behind the next door and open it. Finally I found my way to where I am today. Living life as a newly married full time transgender woman. I would guess more than a few "surgically corrected" trans women would pull the no surgery card on me (since I don't desire any) and say they are more transgender than I am. Which I think is truly a shame. 

I am not ashamed to say my decades as a cross dresser in a gender closet most of the time made me what I am today. I transitioned from being a cross dresser to a transgender woman at the age of sixty. So I was very much a cross dresser which helped me to find my way to where I have arrived today.   

All I Ever Wanted

 
Back when I was young I always struggled with which gender I would wake up to be. Of course and sadly the answer was always the same. I never changed and yet again I would have to face the day battling the male gender I never wanted to be a part of. Regardless I learned the rules on how to be a boy and grudgingly survived in the world. 

Photo Courtesy 
Jessie Hart

Against my deep seated desires to be a girl, I learned and played on athletic teams throughout school up to the end of high school. The example I always give is how I yearned to be a girls' cheerleader when I was playing defensive end on the football team. Again, all the yearning in the world couldn't help me jump the huge gender divide I was looking at. The only thing sports did was keep the bullies off my doorstep. It was all so frustrating. 

Also very frustrating was knowing I probably would have my life as I knew it interrupted for several years by military service. No longer could I use my small collection of  shoes, clothes and makeup to relieve the gender stresses I felt. Somehow I made it through Army basic training and was fortunate when my request to be accepted into the Defense Information School was accepted. The next two and a half years of my life turned out to be the most interesting of my life but still didn't bring me to my ultimate goal of living a feminine life. I'm always careful to say a "feminine life" because deep down I knew I was a woman but just couldn't live it to the fullest for obvious reasons. On the rare occasions I was discussing my entire gender situation with transphobes or TERF's, I was always careful to explain females were born but women are socialized. Plus the age old argument that that only women can birth children is not true because of the number of women who can't forever what reason bear children. Others try to make the whole process more complex but I just gave you my simplified approach. 

Along the way, I learned I could and did get socialized as a woman. It meant giving up all of my hard earned male privileges as a beginning and then learning to communicate with the world as a woman. Which meant, as I am fond of saying, I earned my chance to play in the girls sandbox. I was laughed at, threatened and stabbed in the back many times before I finally learned my hard earned lessons. 

Through it all, my journey never waivered. All I ever really wanted was to be a woman. The whole process made me to difficult to live with, I don't understand how my first two wives put up with me. Here is an example.  My second wife and I often used to try to out-run the late summer Ohio heat by vacationing in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. On one such trip, when I had a good job, a loving wife and seemingly all the positives my life could offer I was still miserable. My wife sensed it of course and kept pushing me for what my problem was. I never did tell her my issue was a wanted to be making the trip as a woman. 

Giving up all the hard earned male privilege's I earned was in a word "difficult" but so worth it. With the help of hormone replacement therapy I have been able to feminize my external body to match my feminine soul as well as add more emotional awareness to my life. I never thought I would make it this far and the whole journey was so worth it. It's all I ever wanted.