Check Up and More

 

Out to eat with Liz on Left.

Yesterday turned out to be a busy day for a number of reasons. So much so, I am really enjoying my cup of coffee this morning. The extra caffeine is needed and appreciated. 

Back to the day I just went through. I knew I had an appointment with the dermatology department at the downtown Cincinnati Veterans Administration hospital. I was referred there by my local VA clinic because of several spots I had on my face which concerned them and me. At my age of seventy four, I was naturally concerned the spots were pre cancerous, or worse. 

The good news was the two bigger spots were not cancer and could be taken care of with a liquid nitrogen spray they had on hand and the smaller spot was sprayed also. Just in case. So I was very relieved. I was also happy I was treated with respect by the entire team of a doctor, a doctor in training plus a medical student who was following them around. The older doctor even referred to me as "young lady" which I found humorous and thanked me for my service. 

Liz took the day off to take me to the hospital which is in a very congested area of Cincinnati. I always appreciate her doing it because if worse comes to worse and parking is at a premium, I won't have to walk along way. Especially during the heat we are experiencing. As it turned out, the trip to the hospital was not the only driving congestion she was going to have to drive in. Her son's car lost it's brakes and he needed a ride to work which was easier said than done. His job location is a good half hour away in busy interstate traffic and Liz ended up driving it four times in two days. I specifically was glad she was off and I did not have to do it. The car shop was able to fix it and we go back to pick it up today.

In the meantime, I wanted to celebrate my good medical news with a visit to our favorite Mexican restaurant. I always feel at home there and last night was no exception. No one paid me any extra attention and the food was good. Even Liz's son, who was feeling bad decided to eat something and felt better. 

By the time we arrived back home, I was exhausted and ready for my nightly ice cream treat before bedtime and was able to relax and enjoy it also.

Speaking of enjoying something, my first VA LGBTQ support group session came off fairly well. I did not say much and let the veterans who saw the most combat action do the talking. Since what I did was support combat troops in a situation where we were attacked a couple times at the air base I was working at in Thailand, I felt as if the others should speak more. Plus, unless the others were deployed overseas most had never heard of the American Forces Radio and Television Service I worked for anyhow. It turns out the session is scheduled weekly, I missed the second one because of a previous commitment I will have to see if I will go back or not. 

For me, the next month is going to be busy. I have to schedule my annual mammogram, get a new drivers license and get the transmission fluids in the car changed among other things. Being forced out of my comfort zone with the public keeps me more active and challenged to take on the world before this very important election. For our future, vote Harris/Walz!

Broken

 

Ohio River image from the
Archives of Jessie Hart.

I am selfish, I want all the time back when I felt I was broken somehow because of my gender issues or dysphoria. 

The way I look at it, I lost years when I stressed over what gender I wanted to be in my day to day life. If I just had a portion of it back how much more I could have accomplished. 

I guess the problem would have been, if I had followed my truth, how many barriers outside of my control would have been placed in my way to stop my progress. For example, I can not imagine any scenario where my parents would have accepted me switching over from my boy self to live as a girl. The best case would have been endless, fruitless trips to a therapist who knew little to nothing about gender issues and back in those days, I would have been labeled with some sort of a mental illness.

If I had gone the route of trying to live as my authentic feminine self at an early age, I would have been broken to start with and have had no chance to change it. So, I needed to develop ways to cope with my broken situation. Early on, I resorted to wearing what I could of my Mom's clothes and buying my own makeup to experiment with. It was a fairly easy fix to get me by until I could risk my life by trying to cross dress again. If I was caught, I knew all hell would break loose in my family. Somehow, I hid my emotions and desires and got by.

As the years flew by, I became used to feeling broken and so alone in my gender issues. I had only one friend who seemed to feel the same way and he ended up moving several states away before I could find out if he shared my desire to be feminine. I ended up with another dead end and feeling broken again.

Fortunately, all this negativity has a good ending. I finally learned I was not broken at all. Society was and all I had to do was learn to exist in my own little transgender world. Not to say, the whole process did not take a tremendous amount of work but it all turned out to be a singular gender effort which was so worth it. Plus, I needed to remove the chip from my shoulder I felt from worrying about all the time I had wasted in my life before I made the all out effort to femininize myself and live my truth. Time is nothing you can ever get back, so I hoped I could learn from my losses. 

I had so much help along the way when I became older and more secure in my gender. Hopefully they all realized I was not trying to live a lie and just was trying to get by and it was the reason we all could become friends. During our lives, we meet so many people who are just passing through and a few leave lasting impressions, I was just lucky I met positive ones. People who showed me I was not broken and never had been.

Transgender Guilt

Image from Civil War Cemetery
Cincinnati, Ohio.

 For many years I felt guilty about having my gender issues.

After all, I felt so alone in my desire to leave my male self behind and live in a feminine world. Not only was I alone, I even was scorned when I tried to express my desires. As I grew through the stages of being a weekend cross dresser into a novice transgender woman, I waited for the guilt to go away or at the least diminish. It never did. In fact, my guilt increased. 

Factors arose such as what would I tell my daughter and my wife, all the way to how I would manage to support myself and my family when it seemed I could lose everything if I transitioned. Selling my life out to be a woman seemed at times to be such a selfish idea and I felt guilty. So much guilt, it stressed me out so badly it wrecked my already fragile mental health. I would not have wished my gender problems on my worst enemy and even a bigger problem I had was there were few people I could even talk to about it. 

Sure, I had a therapist, but even then I felt guilty of sacrificing my masculinity and talking about my inner feelings. I had a gender storm inside me I could not get out and I was stuck between a cruel rock and a hard place. The reason was I was trying to live in both of the main binary gender worlds. For three days, I was learning if I could exist in a feminine world and in the next three days I had to go back to my boring male world. On the extra day, sometimes I lived in both genders, at least in my head. Of course doing all of this did nothing to relieve the guilt I felt on how I was living my life.

The more I lived my life between the genders, the more I could see what was coming. I was lying to myself when I tried to tell myself my inner woman was winning the contest for my soul. When I was spending my three days experiencing life as a trans woman, I felt more alive and excited about my future than even before. At the same time, I still felt the doubt creeping in about if I could make it at all. Perhaps freedom from guilt was on the horizon if I could just make it. So, I kept trying different things to enhance my future.

As I always point out, my male self pulled out all the stops and threw in guilt as one of the main weapons to keep the status quo he always fought for. As he fought, he made sure he brought up all of the fond memories of the time we spent together. 

Finally, his efforts proved to be to no avail as I started to put together a new life as a transgender woman. It turned out he could not compete with my truth, I had always been destined to be feminine. It was an unfair fight, guilt or no guilt. I could take the battle no longer and gave in before the stress literally killed me. I will forever remember the night when I gave in to my feminine side and decided to research if I was healthy enough at the age of sixty to undergo gender affirming hormone therapy. Which would signal a point to me which I could never to back to life as a man. 

From that point forward, I was able to give the remainder of my male clothes away along with the guilt they carried with them. I moved forward to legally changing my name and all the identification documents which could be be legally done in my state and with the Veteran's Administration. I was doing my best to put all the transgender guilt as far as I could into my rear view mirror.