What I Wear

As I look back on my archived blog posts from years ago, I see many which zeroed in what I was wearing at the time or when I went out into a brave new feminine world. My, how times have changed.

Liz and I at Christmas Dinner

My thoughts are it all has to do with a more or less natural transgender transition, if there is such a thing. Recently it seems I have dwelled on the point I was so zeroed in on how I looked initially when I began to pursue all the work it would take to live a feminine life. The trip at times was an all encompassing journey.  Nearly all of my spare time was spent on trying on my collection of female clothes and trying new ways of applying makeup. 

As I grew, it became increasingly evident to me while what I wore was important, it was decreasing in it's overall importance. Being a girl was becoming so much more important than looking like one. It turned out my feminine appearance was useful in getting by in the world but did not help with my overall problems with gender dysphoria. In fact sometimes it made it worse. Following the times I was very successful in my feminine presentation often I would fall into a deep depression. The more I was successful, the more I wanted to do. The depression was incredibly self destructive and led me to anger issues I internalized until I couldn't take it anymore and began to take my frustrations out on others. The whole process led me to nearly lose jobs or go into frenetic moves looking for new jobs. It took me years to understand completely what was going on. 

These days, since I have been living a fulltime life as a transgender woman for years now, what I wear has become less important to me. Of course any vestiges of my male wardrobe are long gone and I have settled into what is comfortable yet having some sort of style. An example is today I am wearing one of my favorite warm cowl neck sweaters with my black leggings and boots. Ironically even this is being dressed up for me because we are planning to go out and run some errands this afternoon. 

On occasion I miss the buzz I experienced when I first started my gender transition. An example is I follow  @Anna B on Medium who often writes in depth on what she is wearing.  As I said many times I envy her learning curve she is going through as she struggles to find her way. 

I suppose being transfixed with what we wear as cross dressers or novice transgender women is a natural part of growing older. My wife Liz is a prime example. She has seen me at my best and my worst so if I am only going to see in in a day, I naturally spend less time on my appearance. Hormone replacement therapy has helped me also. The process softened my skin and facial lines requiring less makeup. I use a basic moisturizer, eye makeup, lipstick then brush out my hair and I am ready to face the world. 

So what I wear is quite simple these days.

Living our Transgender Passion

 Most certainly living out a dream to change a gender requires a lot of passion. As a matter of fact, a life time of passion. 

Photo Courtesy
Jessie Hart

Early in life I was guilty of living in the mirror and pretending I was a pretty girl but at the same time I knew I had deeper issues. Such as when someone asked me exactly what I wanted to be later in life, I dutifully answered a lawyer, or architect or something similar. My inner truth was telling me all I really wanted to do was grow into the woman I always wanted to be. Naturally, I kept the opinion to myself to avoid all sorts of potential problems. Little did I know my ultimate desire to live a feminine life would never leave me. It would just become stronger over the years as I learned my passion could indeed be achieved.

As I am finding out from more and more readers of the blog our pre-internet upbringing had more to do with holding back our gender growth than we could have imagined. In other words, our gender closets remained smaller and darker than they should have because we had very little ways to reach out to others with the same situation. As I remember it took me all the way until I was in my thirties (in the mid 1970's) before I met another transvestite. As we were called back in those days. Once I was able to meet others who lived fairly close to me, they fueled my passion to explore further if I could follow my goal to live more as a woman. Two of my acquaintances became role models of sorts when they went from so called cross dressers to undergoing genital realignment surgery in the several years which I knew them. I was fairly certain "going all the way" surgically wasn't for me but the fact still remained I still was fueled by my age old passion to live as a woman. To me, it wasn't so much about what was between my legs which was driving me as much as what was going on between my ears in my noggin. 

As I took all of this into consideration, it became clear to me the path I had to take would become increasingly difficult. The more I learned about the new term "transgender" at the time, the more I felt it described me. The tough part was figuring out what to do about it. What happened was a series of disjointed often mis-guided steps towards achieving my goal of leading a transgender life. I found in order to do it I had to completely transition again. Somehow I needed to move from being a cross dresser and looking like a woman to being transgender and following my passion to live as a woman.  After a series of successes helped me to accomplish my goal, I finally developed the courage to leave my male life and all the privileges' I had earned behind. Before I did, trying to live a life with one foot in each of the binary genders nearly killed me. I am sure others have been more successful than me trying to do it. I just couldn't. 

Passion is a difficult creature. For some it is an all out driver to take on and achieve a goal while with others passion provides a more even path to success. Plus it helps also when you can savor a few successes along the way. On occasion I look back and think maybe a higher power was guiding my path and passion because of all the dark times I spent wondering if I was doing the right thing. Or all the times I "purged" (threw out) all my feminine possessions only to reacquire them again. I should have known following my first purge, none of the future purges would work either. Passion just proved to be too powerful.    

Only a Fool

 Only a fool knows everything is a quote I recently heard. Of course when I heard it I made a mental note to try to remember it and use it for a blog post. Amazingly I did remember since my memory is not what it used to be, or never was to begin with. 

Photo Courtesy
Jessie Hart

What I was thinking of when I heard the quote was how many times I was the fool when I thought I knew all there was to know about completing my gender transition to a transgender woman. Living my dream fulltime. Looking back I realized there were many times when I thought I knew everything and was certainly the fool. 

The first time was when I was very young and thought my new exciting girl like image in the mirror really meant something. It took me years to realize the cross dressing process did mean something. What it meant was the mirror was lying to me and the underlying reason I was feeling the gender stress I was came from the fact I wanted to be a girl rather than look like one. I did some foolish things when I came out dressed as a girl to a neighborhood friend of mine. When he refused to even look at me, I knew I had done something wrong.

Following my failed experiment of coming out to a person I knew I went back into my deep, dark closet for years. Approximately twenty I think. I certainly did not want to be the fool again when my deeply hidden secret saw the light of day. As it turned out, I would still have plenty of time to play the fool as I attempted to grow into my authentic self. The most self destructive urge I had was the one I document so often in my writings. By far the biggest mistake I made was when I tried in vain to dress sexy which in turn came out as no more than a trashy attempt at validation. I was so stubborn and the mirror lied to me so much, I'm lucky I came out of my trashy period of life relatively unscathed. The worst which happened to me was to get laughed at. Obviously I was the fool who thought she knew everything about being a woman but was just getting started. 

My learning curve finally stated to kick in and I realized if I dressed to blend in with women and not to supposedly attract the attention of men, amazingly I could exist successfully in a feminine world. But still I was caught playing the fool. In what seemed like a small period of time, I had to build on merely looking like a woman and develop a personality to go with it. I had to quit changing wigs every time I went out and doing crazy things such as changing my name to go with the wig I was wearing. Darcy was the redhead, Karen was the brunette and Roxy was the blond. Of course all I was doing was destroying any attempt I was making to establish a solid base for my brand new feminine persona. This time it took me just a short period of time to quit playing the wig game and settled into to a person who had wanted out of me for so long. My closet finally was coming open.

Even with all of this new found gender success, I had to guard against being the fool again. An example was one night when a cis woman with her smiling face in essence tricked me into thinking we could be friends. I learned the hard way she was carrying sharp claws behind her back and was just making fun of me. From that point on I learned a smiling feminine face did not necessarily mean acceptance into the girls sandbox. Until I grasped the whole world of how women communicate with each other, I was doomed to play the fool when I was cornered in the world.

These days, I am a combination of being guarded and on the other hand confident at reading other women. However, I don't think I know everything concerning a transgender transition which would make me the fool.