It's Mammogram Day

 

JJ Hart, image from Columbus, Ohio.

Once a year, my doctor puts in a request for a mammogram screening for me. Mainly because breast cancer runs in the family. My maternal grandmother died of it back in the 1950's when I was quite young. 

If you have never experienced a mammogram, there is some minor discomfort involved but nothing major. In fact, I consider the whole procedure to be a rite of passage of sorts for me into my own transgender womanhood .Even though I have a difficult remembering for sure, I think this is at least my sixth or seventh mammogram. So by now, I have a very good idea of what I am facing. 

For the most part, I have been met with an inclusive caring staff and have had only only one experience with an unpleasant nurse who asked me vague questions about if I had any work done down below. Like it was any of her business one way or another. She was border line evil and happily I have never seen her again. Anymore questions like that and I would have had to report her.

I am going to a new, closer hospital today for the test and I will be interested to see how it goes. Plus it could be my last breast test because of my age. My Doctor said no one gets them anymore past the age of seventy five. So I guess when you get old, you are on your own. Regardless, I am hoping for a clear mammogram today since my blood work did not come back so good. I have an appointment with hematology coming up in mid November. Even though I want to worry about it, I am trying my best not to build any un-necessary bridges to jump off of before I need to. 

I know this is a short post but I need to get ready to go here fairly soon. It's a fairly rapid procedure, so I should have most of the results back today.  

Running but not Hiding

 

Inage from JJ Hart
at the Cincinnati Witches Ball.

Over the years I considered myself the complete procrastinator. If I could put off anything, I did. 

My running and hiding continued unabated when I began to express myself as a girl. In fact, it got worse. Once I had the opportunity to cross dress and jump in front of the mirror, I could not wait to get back. I wanted to so bad, I tried my best to put my male life on hold until I could. I was running as hard as I could but was making no real headway. The real problem of course was because I was attempting to run my gender life backwards. I was a girl all along who was forced into being a boy and I needed to be increasingly careful to hide it.

The older I became, the more running I needed to do to hide my true gender. Even though I needed to take a break from my running when I was in the military, when I returned to society, I picked up where I left off. This time, I tried changing jobs and geographical locations to hide my true nature which was increasingly leading me to accepting me into transgender womanhood. I picked up and moved my small family from more conservative Ohio to liberal leaning New York City as an example. Deep down I felt I could express my gender desires there more effectively. Within two years, I more or less discovered I was wrong and decided to move back to my native Ohio. 

My moves continued around Ohio as I sought out the ideal job when in fact I was running from myself. I finally discovered no matter where I was, my gender issues would be there also. I was good at running but bad at hiding as I slowly added others into my secret world. For example, both my first and second wives knew I was a cross dresser and/or transvestite before we were married. The problem was I was so much more than a person who wanted to wear the clothes of the opposite gender, I wanted to be the opposite gender. Which was the deal breaker for my second wife.

It took me years to grow into my authentic feminine self as I slowly experimented in the public's eye.. All of a sudden the only people I was hiding from were the most important ones in my life. Which certainly did not make life any easier. I am referring to my family, friends and bosses. By far the three most important people I needed to come out to if I was going to ever live my dream as a transgender woman. At the same time, I was successfully building up a new life as a trans person so once again I was somewhere in the gray area of running but for once not hiding. The entire process, caused me tremendous mental health problems. Running head on into my old unwanted male life when I was trying my best to learn a new femininized existence was no fun.

Essentially what I did was keep running until my second wife as well as many of my close male friends had passed away. Leaving me fewer and fewer people to let into my gender reality. I would not recommend doing a transition the way I did but we are all different and it worked for me.

I ran until I could not anymore and finally was mentally exhausted enough to put my male life behind me and live my truth. All hiding was behind me.   

Out of My Mind, Into the World

Image from
the JJ Hart
Archives.

There were many times during my transgender transition I was thinking I was somehow out of my mind. 

I even went as far as telling others there was something wrong with me. Of course there was something wrong and it was because I was trying to live as a man, not my natural woman. It just took me too many years to realize I was doing everything so backwards when it came to dealing with my gender issues. I was not a man cross dressing as a woman, I was the opposite, a woman cross dressing as a man trying desperately to get by. It seemed so unfair because of all the time and effort I put into having my man card. 

Then, I began to put as much effort as I could into my girl self. I tried my best to observe the girls around me in school and model myself after them. Of course in those days, I was severely limited  by my family and financial situation. Even still, I persisted through the idea I had something wrong with me just because I wanted to be a girl. Plus, I knew if I was ever caught cross dressing into my more normal self, I would be sent off to the first non-understanding therapist my parents could find and he would label me mentally ill when I knew deep down I wasn't.

Adding to my gender difficulties was the fact I was so alone. In the pre-internet days, any information about men wanting to be women was very hard to come by and I was convinced I was the only person in the world who felt the same way I did. It wasn't until somehow I discovered Virginia Prince and Transvestia magazine did I understand there was quite the community of men who called themselves transvestites. Once I did make the discovery, I knew somehow I needed to interact with the nearest group to me in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio which was still quite the distance away. Regardless, I knew I needed to make the connection. I still vividly remember the diversity of the mixers I went to. I thought by reading the so-called hetero restrictions on the members would limit the diversity of attendees but it did not. There were everyone from cigar smoking cross dressers in cowboy hats seemingly afraid of losing too much of their masculinity all the way to the impossibly feminine transsexuals who had  worked hard to lose all of their maleness.

In the middle of it all, was me wondering where I fit in. I was too much woman for the cross dressers and not enough for the transsexuals. Once again I was frustrated with my results as I worked my way out of my mind and into the world. 

It took me quite a bit of work to fully make it into the world. The steps I took led me away from the old restrictive transvestite mixers, all the way to being invited to smaller diverse parties in Columbus, Ohio which I enjoyed immensely. Primarily because I was accepted for the person I was becoming. I was heading into the world for once because no one knew or cared about knowing my old male self. I even took the process another step farther when I began to go out by myself and become a regular in my favorite venues I was used to going to as a guy.

I found I was never out of my mind as the world accepted me. I just had to wait for them to catch up. If I had realized it years ago, how much easier my life would have been.