You got it...Now Live with It!

 

From the Archives, Club Diversity. Columbus 
Ohio.

For some unknown reason, I have been remembering more and more what my gender therapist told me so long ago, she couldn't do anything concerning me wanting to be a woman. Now I don't remember if she told me I could not do anything about it either. 

If she did and had I listened, I would have saved myself so much inner torment over the years from my gender dysphoria. At the time my male self was not even close to being ready to give up any claims to his life which at the time was becoming relatively successful. After all, he had worked long and hard to arrive at the point where he was. 

If I wanted to blame anyone but myself for not accepting my true authentic self, I would blame my home environment. I grew up in a very male dominated family. My Dad had two competitive brothers and his competitive personality filtered through to my brother and I. It seemed no one had girls in the family and if they did, they were second class citizens. How I existed was by keeping my true feminine desires a deep dark secret. I learned early the very male trait of internalizing any negative thoughts or ideas. The whole concept turned out to be very self destructive over the span of my life which included the years of being a very serious cross dresser or transvestite. The whole process nearly took my life before I finally figured out I had it, now I needed to live with it. 

All I wanted was the impossible. Give me back just a fraction of the time and effort I had wasted by trying against all odds to maintain any sort of a male life. The cruel and unusual punishment came in when the more I achieved as a guy, made it more difficult to give it all up. I had a spouse, family, friends and good job to suddenly consider. What would my daughter think? Not to mention my wife and brother. All of a sudden I needed to draw a line in my gender sand and decide which route in life I was going to take. 

Everything changed for me the night I finally decided I had put enough exploration as my feminine self to make the ultimate leap over the gender border. Needless to say, it was a huge weight off my shoulders. I had a chance to go back in life to a point where I was not so jaded by either gender and experience for myself what the future held for me. It was at this point friends jumped in and showed me the way I never thought possible. I found I had it all along. I was a transgender woman and now I had the rare opportunity to live with it. I discovered there was so much more I needed to learn when I entered the world as a trans woman. 

Plus it took a while for the overall excitement of transitioning into my dream life to wear off. Everything I did was new and different and even when I was not accepted, I learned from my mistakes and for a change, my inner stubborn streak served me well. I had it and now I was living with it. I guess if you are able to live long enough as I have, you have the opportunity to see life go full circle. I paid my dues as a guy and what he learned turned out to be beneficial in my new life as a woman.

Quoting the singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides Now",  only when I was able to see the world from both sides of the binary genders, was I able to relax and enjoy my life. All along I had it and just missed out on the real possibilities of what I was missing. Living with being transgender was all that mattered.

Smiles Equal Confidence

 

Go Ahead and Smile from the
Jessie Hart Archives. 

Where ever I go in public, I try to lead with a smile to ultimately disarm any potential transphobic individuals. 

I have to remember also I look better when I soften my face which still has a tendency to go back to my old male scowl if I am not careful. A male scowl in my world always comes off as a bitchy look which I normally am never feeling. 

The whole process goes all the way back to the days when I was cross dressing my way to the front of the mirror. Since all the ups and downs which followed, I needed to learn to put my feminine image in motion if I was to succeed in following my transgender dreams. Since recently I have been getting out into the public's eye more and more again, I have needed to reinforce wearing a smile to boost my confidence as a senior trans woman. This morning was no different when I went with my wife Liz to her eye doctor visit. 

After I applied a light amount of makeup to go with my casual outfit, I thought for once I looked presentable for the world. I even tripped off my gender euphoria for a brief second. My euphoria lasted until I went through the door into the doctor's waiting room. For the briefest of time the two receptionists just stared at me and finally said how could they help me. Not the friendliest of greetings and I became worried about my presentation. Since I had quite a while to ponder the situation, I came up with the problem and it was all me.

I had forgotten the most important part of my presentation which is my smile. For the greatest majority of the public I face, a smile disarms them and allows me to communicate with them on a one on one basis. Plus when I am smiling, I am showing the confidence I need to enable the people in my world to be more friendly also. Most importantly, a smile is my best accessory when I use it properly. Not using it at all takes me back to the day when I was shopping for clothes and suddenly nearly ran into a girl child who was darting between the clothing racks. When she stopped and saw me, she exclaimed to her Mother "Look at the BIG woman." I had long enough to consider the kid at least called me a woman. Then she ruined the feeling by calling me a "BIG Mean woman." From then on I resolved to try to put a nicer look on my face and not scare the public with my bitchy look. 

After living a long unwanted life trying to exist in a male world, some habits are still hard to erase. Putting a smile on my face shouldn't be such a big deal but it is. So big, the whole process is as big as makeup, fashion and hair. Putting the whole image into motion is what counts for me to be truly successful as a full time transgender woman.  

Tenacity of the Transgender Tribe

From the Jessie Hart Archives. I am
in the middle of two friends.

It's no wonder so many women don't trust a transgender woman's desire to play in their sandbox. In my case, it took me years to understand what my second wife was trying to tell me about being accepted as a woman in any form. It took more than just appearing convincingly as a woman to come closer to being one. I was far away from paying my dues and for the most part, she was against me doing it. So, I needed to step out on my own to discover the world on my own. Thanks to all the years of practice in front of the mirror with my makeup and fashion, I had a fairly good basis to work from as far as my appearance was concerned. The only real problem I had was living through my faux fashion adolescence when I tried and failed to dress as a teen girl. Once I made it through that point, I was able to blend in with other women  my age and discovered I had an easier time in the world.

The more I explored, I found I needed more and more tenacity to reach my goal of learning what living the life of a transgender woman could or would be like. At this point the true struggle began. Just learning how to communicate with other women on their level turned out to be the main problem. I learned the hard way women communicate on more levels than verbal ones and often say things of a passive aggressive nature such as, you look good...for a man dressed as a woman. Or they were just trying to find out what you were doing in their world. On too many occasions as I was learning my way around the sandbox, I ended up suffering serious claw marks up my back. Another way to put it might be to equate the acceptance process with trying to jump on a moving merry-go-round and claim the prize without doing any of the work such as having periods. Rejection was not rare. 

It was on nights such as those, I went home in tears wondering if my whole transgender dream was worth it. On those occasions, something told me it was and my tenacity kicked in. Even with more explorations to do. I just had to continue until I got it right. Finally I did and I moved along to adding gender affirming hormones or HRT to my list of exploring ways to better femininize myself. Perhaps then and only then did other women see I was paying my dues to be admitted to their world. I had the tenacity. 

As I reach the age of seventy five, I think now, more than ever before in recent history the tenacity of the transgender tribe of women and men is being tested. Here in my native Ohio, the gender bigots in the state legislature are once again trying to push anti-transgender restroom bills in the statehouse. Hopefully, once again, more rational minds will rise up and reject the measure. If not, I wonder how the whole law will affect me using the restroom which matches my transgender status in the future. Needless to say, I am scared.  I mean how will such a law even be enforced if I am just trying to go to the bathroom. I don't want to even know. All I do know is I won't go back to using men's bath rooms after more than a decade using the women's room. 

Finally, what the bigots don't realize is, the trans tribe has been around forever and is not going away. We just need to move forward as a group to fight. Once the bigots see we are not going away, they will have to find someone else to harass and our tenacity will prevail.