Transgender Life

Often I am amused when less than knowledgeable individuals or transphobes say we transgender women or trans men had a choice of transitioning our gender. Those of us who are in the middle of traveling a gender transition path know our decision was never a choice. Many times the whole process is a matter of life and death as is proven by the extremely high suicide rate in the transgender community.  

Photo from the Jessie Hart
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Using my own gender path as an example, I can easily highlight the highs and lows of the journey. Highs included the times I tried and succeeded in breaking out of my own very dark gender closet. Early on, I was excited when I was accepted and even helped by clerks in clothing stores. Soon I learned most of the clerks were just doing their jobs and went out of their way to sell me something. From there I went on to seeing if I could present well enough as a woman to easily be able to prowl the malls around me looking for the occasional bargain. When the malls started to become mundane and boring, I decided to step up my journey by stopping different places to eat lunch. What I didn't realize was, how going face to face with servers and hostesses would expand my need to establish a real live feminine personality. As I climbed my gender affirmation staircase, for the most part I had more successes than failures when I learned how to dress to blend with the rest of the women around me. The less attention I created the better. 

When I was successful, there was nothing better in my transgender life. Even before I really knew what the term transgender was all about and how it fit in with me. On the other hand, when the lows set in, they were really low. I still remember vividly the nights I was laughed at and literally went home crying. Slowly but surely I recovered and re-committed myself to the goal of being able to present as a woman to the public without being stared at and ridiculed. Once I went through going back to the drawing board as many times as I did, I finally made it to a point where I had the confidence to go out as a transgender woman and exist in my own little world. Little did I know, my own little world would not stay little very long. My new and improved transgender life proved to provide the force to propel me forward. Sadly, the force was sending me straight on a collision course with my life as a man. 

Predictably as I was trying desperately to live parts of my life as a man and then as a woman, something would have to give. That something was my own mental health as I stepped up my attempts to sneak out behind my wife's back as the woman she disliked so much. The more I was successful doing it, ironically the more depressed I became. Leading me to a suicide attempt following a fight in which I was caught out in public by my wife. As with any other suicide attempt, I saw no other way out. 

Luckily I wasn't any good at self harm and the bottle of pills I took wouldn't have killed me anyway I found out later. Life is but a circle and if we are fortunate enough to live long enough to find out the bad times can reverse and become the good times. Most certainly a transgender life can be fulfilling if we are given a fair shot of being able to live it.     

More Gender Travel

 This is an extension of yesterdays post concerning many of the moves I had to make during my college and military days. As it turned out, these moves were not the only ones I was destined to take. As the years went by after I became a civilian again I ended up back on the road several times. 

Photo from the Jessie Hart
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Before I did, in my hometown I founded and owned a small bar/pizza parlor for several years with a couple of friends. Until I lost it due to various factors such as an economic depression and in house theft. I just didn't know what I was doing. Seemingly the only real advancements I was making were my crossdressing strides. Finally given the opportunity to pursue feminine opportunities drove me further into an alcoholic driven desire to do more to look like a woman. Somehow I managed to hold onto reality, have a daughter and pursue a career in the commercial food business in the cut throat world of fast food management when chains were going on mega expansion binges. 

Following losing my tavern, I fell in love with and eventually married my second wife whom I was destined to spend twenty five years of my life with until she passed away at the age of fifty. Somehow I managed to talk her into getting married and moving with me from our native small city Ohio to the major metropolitan area of NYC. (New York City) I received a handsome raise for taking the job, rented a moving truck and off to a new world we went. Of course I managed to pack and bring along my feminine wardrobe, wig, shoes and makeup with us. I always mention she knew about my cross dressing before we were married.  Plus I was looking forward to moving to a decidedly more liberal environment so I could possibly expand my feminine pursuits. Along the way in New York my plan did work as I had a couple of occasions to attend transvestite mixers as we were called in those days. One in particular was successful when I presented so well as a woman I had to show my male I.D. to be admitted. I managed to survive NYC for nearly two years before I got the moving urge again and we moved back to our native Ohio. In order to do it, I had to promise to restore our old two story brick tavern into a loft style house While I was doing the work, it was very difficult to dress as a woman at all. So somehow I had to control my urges. 

Once we moved back, I managed to stay at a couple jobs locally so moving was not an option. Plus another option cropped up which tried to curtail my progression towards becoming my feminine dream. At the time I joined a local service organization and rose through the ranks as president. It was all good until I realized the more recognizable I became in the community, the more pressure I felt not to be discovered as a cross dresser. What did I do then? Decided to try to talk my wife into moving again. This time to rural Southern Ohio along the Ohio River. Again I was driven by the obsession to succeed as a man and push my feminine desires to the background. Once we settled into our new house out in the woods, it didn't take long for the old gender desires to creep back in and before long I progressed to doing shopping trips to the grocery store and shopping center dressed as a woman. The problem was I was becoming successful doing it and everytime I was, I needed more. 

The answer again was another move. This time back to a more metropolitan area around Columbus, Ohio where I knew there was an active transgender or cross dressing community. By this time it was difficult to tell exactly what was driving my frenetic urge to change jobs more...my gender dysphoria or the desire to improve my employment and finances. I managed to do both until after my wife passed away and I lost nearly everything I had worked for as a man but gained a life as a full time transgender woman.

Hopefully, my final move was made when I moved in years ago with my wife Liz in Cincinnati, Ohio. I always had enjoyed my trips to Cincinnati in my past and felt the move would do me good and was my destiny in many ways. Perhaps my lifelong obsessions will lead to a positive senior life and I won't have to do any more gender travel.   

Alawys Going Somewhere

Image from Louis Paulin
On UnSplash

 Back in what I call my formative years, I grew used to trying to outrun my problems. Between college and my military service I literally was moved or decided to move on my own an average of every year and a half. It all started when I left home for college for a year and a half. Amazingly, during this time my gender dysphoria disappeared and suddenly I was free to live a somewhat normal gender life. I say normal because during this time I had several dates with girls from the East Coast who were much more sophisticated sexually than anything I had seen in my shy Midwestern upbringing. In fact, my Mom unknowingly set me up with my first sexual experience with one of her older (not a minor) students where she taught high school.  I think she was nineteen and I was eighteen, so I had a lot to learn. 

The school I went away to was one a group of Midwestern Ivy League schools for students on the East Coast who couldn't make it into the top notch schools or universities in their back yards. What happened was I ended up partying with my friends mainly from Philadelphia and Baltimore and not studying enough to maintain grades to not get drafted into the Vietnam War. After a year and a half I picked up and moved back home to attend a much more academically forgiving nearby university where I could thrive. Which I did by even making the Dean's List several times before I graduated. More importantly to me back then was the fact I was drawn back into my old cross dressing memories of home while I was able still to land a Disk Jockey job at a small local radio station which happened to be owned by a very powerful congressman which turned out to be very important to my future. For awhile I was quite satisfied with satisfying my cross dressing desires by putting on my feminine clothes when my parents weren't around just like the old days while at the same time attending to school while I built my self a career in the commercial radio business. 

Just when I thought I had it all together, Uncle Sam came along with several all expense paid tickets to work and travel in exchange for three years of my life. I was able to salvage my radio career with the help of the congressman I worked for but my cross dressing would certainly have to be on hold for the foreseeable future. My first move was a bus trip to beautiful (?) Ft. Knox in Kentucky for Army basic training. I didn't get to see any gold but I saw many fellow recruits going through tank infantry school. A nice way of saying they were headed to Vietnam to be cannon or grenade fodder for the war. Basic was tough but not tough enough to wash out any or all ideas I had of ever following my feminine dreams. In fact in many ways I think basic just made my dreams stronger because I couldn't wait to get out and live them.

Following Basic at Ft. Knox, little did I know the amount of travel Uncle Sam had planned for me. It all started innocently enough by getting transferred for advanced training at the Defense Information School in relatively close by Indianapolis, Indiana. It was close enough to my home I could drive back and forth for weekends and leave but not close enough for me to cross dress when I was home. It turned out I wasn't going to stay in Indy long before I was sent to Thailand along with my close knit classmates to help run a radio/tv station in Udorn which had recently been destroyed by a battle damaged F-4 fighter jet which crashed at the end of the runway killing all working in the station. Since we were Army working for the Air Force, we received extra pay to live off base. Of course living off base put me face to face with the Thai Ladyboy culture. As advertised, many were indeed beautiful but all I did was admire from afar. I was afraid of any stigma which would have been attached to me if I had tried to know any of the alluring creatures further. 

After my year in Thailand, I was trying hard to get assigned to Europe and work for the AFN Radio Network. I finally did make it but not with more moving around. What happened was I had two sets of orders. One verbal and one paper. I decided to follow the one on paper and report to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland for duty in their information office. What turned out was I wasn't supposed to be there and was sent back home with another weeks worth of leave before I had to leave for Germany, where I wanted to go to start with. After all those convoluted military moves I finally had the chance to live out my dream of seeing Europe because once again I received extra pay to live off base.

I am fairly sure all of this moving affected me in many ways when I was honorably discharged from the military and through with school. More on how it affected my gender dysphoria in another post.