Joining an Inclusive New Club

Girls Night Out Image, I am on the
first row far left.
From the Jessie Hart Archives

 In many ways, this is just an extension of yesterday's post concerning transgender love affairs. 

In the post I mentioned indirectly when I was finally able to play in the girl's sandbox without having to deal with un-due harassment or even scorn. In my post yesterday (and often) I mention how difficult I had it dealing with my second wife dealing at all with me as a novice transgender woman. She was having nothing to do with the process, even though she knew from the beginning of our marriage I was a cross dresser. In no uncertain terms did my wife show my emerging feminine self any encouragement what so ever. She wasn't going to help me join an inclusive new club.

I accepted her ideas on my gender because we both agreed being married to another woman wasn't anything my wife ever signed up for. At that point was when I decided to go it on my own and find out if indeed I could carve out a life in a new gender world. Slowly and very unsurely, I found out I could make it as a member of a new club. Game changers as well as the occasional bouts of gender euphoria helped me along. Examples included the successful Halloween parties I went to. Compliments were easy to come by when people told me how good I looked as a woman. For the longest time, I didn't realize the true extended compliment was how good I looked as a woman, who was really a man. None of it mattered as I made my way along a path to becoming a fulltime transgender woman.

Overall, I am proud of all the work I put into joining a new very exclusive club. To begin with I faced the necessity of learning all the basics of makeup and fashion. Starting from point zero, compared to other girls, catching up was difficult. Especially when I really didn't have much of a feminine body to begin with as well as having a very non-approving male dominated family. More than anything else gender confusion reigned supreme in my life.

What I don't mention enough is the feedback I received later in life from other women when I transitioned. I get the idea from other trans readers I hear from, sometimes acceptance is not so hard to come by but is such a powerful tool when it comes to a transgender transition. We all know, women live a different more layered existence than men and a life which takes no small amount of work to learn. If you do learn the intricacies of what if being offered to you when you are invited to women's only spaces, you will know you have made it into an inclusive new club. Once you are there, chances are, you will never have to go back to an old unwanted male life.   

I will forever remember the  women who helped me along in my journey and opened their worlds to me. Being able to exist on my own in the girls' sandbox or club was something I never thought I could do on my own.

They will never know all they did for me. Even to the point of saving my life. It was the major spark I needed to discover my true sexuality and live as I always dreamed of.

Who Do You Love?

Image from Freestocks 
on UnSplash

Along my lengthy transgender journey I learned the hard way I had several love affairs. 

The main one I want to refer to is the love affair with my wife and  the one with myself. Or should I say my feminine self, since I had never really liked my old male side I never asked for. I think the worst part of having two love affairs was the guilt which came with it. I think my major problem came from how much I threw myself into the process of being feminine. If I wasn't cross dressing in front of the mirror, I was spending my time studying all the girls or women around me. I am sure along the way, my wife caught me daydreaming too much and wondered why I was not paying more attention to her and our marriage.

Along with the daydreams came the frustration I felt when my wife was able to do all the things a woman does in her life. Plus, she wouldn't let me in to her world very much and she infuriated me when she wouldn't. The entire process led me to try even harder to improve my makeup and fashion ideas since at that time I was far away from realizing looking like a woman was only the very beginning of my long gender journey. At the time also, since I was putting so much time into myself, I am sure my wife felt unloved and I am surprised we made it through twenty five years of marriage. 

Much later, after she passed away, did I learn to love myself. I learned then the fact you needed to love yourself before you can love someone else was so true. Once I started to complete my transgender transition, I did start to love myself. Or, at the least, I started to have more respect for everything I had achieved in my new world I had chosen to live in.   

It was about that time I was feeling deep frustration because of the way my life was headed. Although I did enjoy the small social group of women I was apart of, I still felt I was doomed at the age of sixty to live my life alone. I found I was still a social creature and did the best I could to change the situation. Fortunately for me, my attempts at dating when I was still a guy were miserable short term failures which led me to believe I was on the right path to living as a trans woman...even if that meant living alone. As a stop gap measure, I still had my friends to hang out with.

For the most part, my experiences in the on-line dating world were failures too. I tried every combination on the sites I could afford to list on. One month I would try "man seeking man" as a transgender woman, then the next time try "woman seeking woman". Again always being up front I was transgender. The only men who responded for the most part wanted me to dress them up as a woman or let them wear my panties, so they were out. 

There was a happy ending to my on line dating woes after sifting through tons of rejections and trash, my wife Liz responded to one of my ads. She lived fairly close to me in a city I had always loved (Cincinnati) so I was interested in knowing her more. After corresponding by text initially, I finally became brave enough to talk to her on the phone. I was so insecure of my voice. From there, our first date was a local drag show at a gay venue midway between our homes. From then on we became a couple for ten plus years until we decided to get married. 

I guess the moral to my story is, the darkest moments of your life can turn around if you continue to put yourself out there. Sure it hurts and is painful to be rejected but often there can be a light at the end of the tunnel. The sad part is, you went through a transition to find your authentic self and you discovered self love and now there is no one to share it with. 

On the positive side, I am seeing an increase in wives staying with their transgender spouses when they transition. I have the utmost respect for the love expressed by these women and wish we could all experience the same. 

Go Get a Life

Photo from the 
Jessie Hart Archives...

Following all the struggles with being transgender in my life, I finally decided I was living a lie and needed to go out and find an authentic life. An existence which helped rebuild my mental health and made me feel natural. 

My struggles have been well documented here in my writings. All the times, I faced the public for the first time as a novice cross dresser and came home in tears. Finally it all led to the magical evening when I decided enough was enough and I went out to intermingle with the world for the first time as a transgender woman and not a cross dresser. The difference was I was trying to become the trans woman I always dreamed of and not just looking like a feminine person. In spite of being scared to death, I managed to make it through the evening and even started a path where I could be a regular in the venue I went to. From there I was bolder and began to check out other similar venues which were much different than the gay bars I was going to because I thought I would have a tendency to be accepted more easily. 

Along the way, I found I wasn't easily accepted in male gay venues and in all but one lesbian bar I went to, so I kept going back to where I becoming a regular was helping me to build a whole new life. Through it all, the problem I was having was while I was on the fast track to achieving my gender dreams, I still had a wife and family to deal with at the same time. In addition,  I hadn't even thought about the possibility of losing my job. I was so busy learning about life as a possible transgender woman, I had a difficult time thinking of anything else when it came to my marriage and employment. 

The gender pressure I was under kept building until I could take it no longer and changes needed to happen to save my life. I was tired of all the self destructive behavior I was subjecting myself to over the span of my life. All the times I set myself up for failure in my male life had to change and for once I needed to succeed at something I really wanted such as living as a trans woman. I found going and getting a new life was going to be scarier and at the same time more exciting than I ever imagined it being. Somehow, I managed to barely hang on to my marriage when I was sneaking out behind my wife's back to explore the world. I was lucky I didn't lose my job because I was good at what I did and the company left me alone so, for the time being, the job was a non factor in my transition. 

What I never factored in were the times when I needed to interact with the world as a woman. How would I talk and communicate primarily with other women became a priority. Getting a life took on a whole new meaning. Plus, I can't speak for the others in the transgender community (women or men) gender affirming hormones were the tipping point for me in my new life. Once I started the medications, there was to be no turning back in my gender journey.

When I went out and finally had the courage to be me, I saved my own life. For once I was a success.