Another Trip to the Doctor

Image from the Jessie Hart Archives

Today, I needed to go to a follow up appointment to the  doctor's office. 

You regulars know, I am a transgender veteran and take advantage of the Veteran's Administration health care system. I know over the years, I have heard from many trans vets with differing ideas on how they were received in the system. 

During the earliest days in the system (approximately ten years ago) I felt as if I was the teacher in the system and that most all of my providers knew nothing about trans people at all. Fortunately, over the years my perceived ideas of how I was treated started to change. So much so, the Cincinnati metro VA hospital as a whole began to solicit ideas on how they could improve their service to the LGBTQ community, especially the trans population they serve. It worked, because I saw a big improvement in even the most backward sattelite clinic I had ever been to. Which happened to be the closest to me.

In the past, it is the clinic where a receptionist basically out and out refused not to call me sir. It was so bad, I was almost to the point of filing an official complaint if she was still there when I went back, which she wasn't. I haven't seen her since and everyone else has been nice to me. To be clear, there are several ways of respect I expect to be shown. One of which is to use no gender markers what so ever when it comes to referring to me such as "he or she or sir or ma'am." Or just refer to me as my first name which is cool also.

This morning all went well with everybody except with one person. The receptionists I checked in and out with didn't mis-gender me at all and were very pleasant as was everybody else. So much so, one of the dermatologists who was checking a spot on my face complimented me on my makeup. In addition, my actual appointment with my primary provider went off as it usually does...very well and she treated me with respect. 

The only problem moment came (and there always seems to be one) was when I was being escorted into what I call the vampire's home, where I had my blood labs taken. Primarily because my endocrinologist always wants to see a reading of my estradiol levels.  When we entered the room, she announces me as "Mr. Hart." I was quickly shocked when she did so but I recovered in a hurry and corrected her and she changed her greeting to "Ms.  Hart" which I was satisfied with.

The most important point of course is how all the labs and reports come back on my health. As far as the spot on my face goes, they took pictures to send down to the main Cincinnati VA hospital for them to take a look at. The results probably will take a couple days to come back. 

I have always said, my most precious possession is my health and how I am treated as a transgender woman is just icing on the cake.  

Saving my own Life

 

Image from the 
Jessie Hart Archives

As I began to transition into a transgender life in earnest, the more and more I knew I was saving my own life.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, all the obstacles I conquered on the gender path I was on just made my entire life more complex. Every time I met a stranger and established myself as a transgender woman to them was a new exciting time but not one which had it's share of fear. After all, I was losing all my well secured male privileges I had worked so hard to have. As a guy, I knew how to react to almost any situation negative or not. As a trans woman, I was in a different world and still had so much to learn. When I was first confronted with losing part of my so called intelligence in a group of men I somehow found myself in, I knew then my life had forever changed. I discovered the men just wanted to ignore me and my thoughts on what they were discussing.

In order to save my life, I needed to adopt what the other women in the world around me were doing. In many ways, they ignored men the same way men ignored women and it became very evident to me why the two main binary genders had a difficult time communicating. I was lucky because after my male upbringing, I had many of the tools to understand what men were really saying. While, at the same time viewing their comments from a woman's viewpoint. Even though the whole concept seems so easy for me to grasp now, back then, I really needed to understand which side of the gender fence I was on since for the longest time I tried to live in both a female and male world.

Soon, I found myself in a gender pressure cooker. On one hand, I had all the male positives to live by which I had learned to expect. On the other hand, the new and exciting (but scary) feminine side of life was increasingly opening gender doors for me. Since I was beginning gender affirming hormones, my world became a softer more sensitive place to be in. The ripping and tearing of my reticence to make a final decision on how I was going to live was slowly but surely destroying me. I was stuck in a gender world never never land which I would not wish upon my worst enemy and I needed to get out and save my own life.

It's no secret what decision I finally made. With the help of several close women friends, I donated all my men's clothes to a thrift store and never looked back. I equate the entire process with jumping off a huge cliff, then having a soft landing in a feminine world. It was difficult, yet it saved my life by making life fun again while at the same time restoring my mental health. 

Saving my own life never felt so good.    

Climbing Transgender Walls

 

Image from Katherine Hanlon
on UnSplash

Just when I thought I had conquered one obstacle in my gender transition, another obstacle suddenly appeared for me to climb.

The problem I had was I am very afraid of heights and some of the walls were taller than others. For example, makeup was not a big wall since I had so many years at home alone in front of the mirror to practice. By the time I went public, I had perfected most all the makeup ideas I needed. Plus, benefiting completely from having a professional makeover at one of the transvestite/cross dresser mixers I went to. The makeup artist really showed me how to scale the wall which on occasion had made me look like a clown.

At approximately the same time, I was fighting climbing another obstacle called fashion. For years I dressed my feminine self for what my old male self thought was appropriate  The whole process was completely backwards as I should have been trying to present as close as I could to other women of my age so I blended in. Once I scaled the obstacle, my life as a novice transgender woman in public became so much easier. Once my life became easier, I thought I had it made but I was so wrong. What happened was gender doors began to open for me I wasn't really ready for. I found it was much easier for me to move around in society as my feminine self than it was to actually sit down and have a conversation with another woman or man. Communication for me was a huge wall to climb. So much so, I even ended up taking vocal lessons at one point in my life to sound like a woman. 

As I write this post on walls, it occurs to me, I should have added in all the stop signs I went through on my path to living as a fulltime transgender woman. Coming to mind were all the times my male self was screaming stop!!! when his domain was being challenged. All the times, I put my marriage at risk by sneaking out behind my wife's back when she was at work is an example of running a stop sign just to try to climb another gender wall. What I was doing was slowly but surely building a way around the old male obstacles I faced, to build a new life as a transgender woman. At that point, if I had been honest with myself, I would have known my new life felt so natural, it would win out in the end. But, I wasn't honest and boxed myself into what was left of my male life which I had hated so much.

Finally, the world around me changed because of dire situations where family and friends had died leaving me the freedom to climb the final walls out of my gender closet. I came to the point where I had the tools I needed to conquer my fear of existing in public as a trans woman thanks to gender affirming hormones and pure courage to live. 

The walls I kept facing kept declining to a point where I had no choice but to do the right thing for myself and go ahead to live my lifetime dream of living as a woman. Looking back, maybe I should have described all the obstacles or walls I went through were more of a maze. Maybe I should have paid more attention in the scouts or the military to find myself an easier way through. Although, after communicating with all the other transgender women and trans men I do, maybe an easier way just wasn't possible.