The Grand Search for Discovery

 

Image from Gints Gallis
on UnSplash.

Along the path to transgender womanhood, I made many discoveries. 

It wasn't until I finally made it into the world did, I begin to pick up the pace in being allowed behind the feminine gender curtain, so I could learn for myself what was going on. In other words, I needed to earn my stripes as a trans woman to be allowed in to play in the girl's sandbox. Now, I can't quite remember what my expectations were of being allowed in, I only remember I basically forced my way in. Many times, causing the sand to really fly. 

I discovered most other women accepted me for myself and let it go at that, and I learned quickly to let the others go on their own way. After all, you cannot please everyone at the same time. Plus, the acceptance I gained far outweighed any negatives I experienced. I discovered once I made it past the idea I was attempting to "fool" anyone into thinking I was a cis-gendered woman, the better off I was. When I was satisfied to just be myself, more women reacted to me positively. Probably because they appreciated, I was being truthful with them. I was just busy learning how to live my dream and meant nobody harm.

Even still, my gender path was very winding, and steep with many roadblocks. Similar to many of you, I experienced the pain of separation from family, friends and life in general as I transitioned and femininized myself. Many times, I needed to stop and rest on my path because the effort exhausted me.

Out of all the discoveries I made, one of the biggest ones was when I made the transition from weekend or parttime cross dresser to novice transgender woman. Even though I was just dealing in basic gender semantics, the shift in thought was a major one for me. All of a sudden, I began to feel I was achieving my childhood dream of being a woman. Not just looking like one. When I did make the discovery, to change my life, my path ahead became fairly well illuminated. Now, I had the usual hurdles to jump through such as how to make my way out of the mirror and into the sandbox but overall, I had the confidence to move forward.  

The other main discovery I made as I entered transgender womanhood, was how important the gender affirming hormones would be to me. Of course, I knew the physical changes I would go through such as changes to my body such as breast growth. However, nothing prepared me for the internal changes which would go on. All of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I could cry tears of joy as well as sorrow. In essence, estradiol softened my entire life and quickly took the testosterone related universe I lived in away from me. A huge discovery. 

Of course, every discovery does not have to be a good one. When my second wife discovered I was sneaking out of the house to live as a transgender woman was certainly not a good discovery for me. It took me weeks of apologizing and even therapy to save what was left of our twenty-five-year marriage. Which I managed to do until she unexpectedly passed away. When she did, I discovered what loneliness was all about. 

Every human life is filled with discovery if you are living it right. It seems transgender women and transgender men live have an extra amount of discovery. It is very rare a person who has the chance to explore the two binary genders to determine which one they want to live as. I feel it is one of the reasons so many people these days misunderstand our trans community and treat us poorly or even with hate. We have found how deep trans bigotry suddenly runs in our country, led on by a certain felon as president. Which is all I am going to say about it. 

In the meantime, I hope all your discoveries are positive and exciting.

Should You Be a Jumper?

 

Image from Jeremy Bishop
on UnSplash. 

As we go through life, many of us have chances to jump and try to improve our status. 

As I lived, I certainly registered in the jumper category. I have no idea if many of the decisions I made concerning employment changes and resultant family moves had anything to do with my gender issues, but I always assumed they did. What if I was trying to just jump and hide from wanting to live a feminine life and escape the old male one, I was forced to live. 

The one thing I did learn relatively early in life was I did not have to put up with seemingly huge obstacles put in front of me. The biggest example was when it became obvious, I was going away to serve my country during a very unpopular and deadly war in Vietnam. Immediately, since I worked for a congressman's radio station, I sought out help to work in a very small section of the military...American Forces Radio and Television. I thought, why not try and see if I could pull off a miracle of sorts, so I went ahead and jumped by sending off letters to Washington, DC. Amazingly, I received a fairly positive letter back and went on to eventually landing a spot on the network. So, jumping really helped me, and actually spoiled me for the near future.

When I was discharged from the military, I played around for a while and ended up on a cross-country car trip with my future first wife and mother of my only child. Since we were driving from my home in Ohio to her home in California, we covered many miles with side trips to visit friends in Texas and Seattle. It was fun as my fairly new Chevrolet Vega held together well enough to make the trip. And all the jumping helped me to briefly forget all my gender issues. 

When we returned, I pooled together my savings with a friend and bought a small neighborhood tavern in my hometown. It was quite the jump as my dad described it best as a place which had two doors, so the Flys did not have to stop when they went through. Even though dad's opinion spoke for itself, we worked on the tavern and finally made it a success when we added homemade pizza and deli sandwiches. Sadly, I destroyed all of my hard-earned success because of excessive alcohol abuse, and I lost the whole operation. 

Ironically, I did not learn my lesson with restaurants because later on in life, I quit a very good commercial chain restaurant job to risk a fairly sizeable inheritance I inherited when my dad died. This time, due to a severe economic downturn in the town I lived, I lost the whole gamble after about five years. Proving once and for all, my jumps did not all turn out well. 

Later on in life, I blamed much of my dependence on alcohol as just a way to jump life and not have to deal with being a transgender woman. Even still, I was far from finished from jumping. As I began to go public as a novice trans woman, I learned I could actually live the dream life I wanted. To do it though, I would have to jump through a set of very serious hoops to succeed. What would I do with the fairly successful male life I had worked so hard to succeed with. When each of us considers a total gender jump to the other side, we have to wonder what will become of our family, friends and employment. Rather than considering the process as a jump for me, I always thought of it as sliding down a steep gender slope towards a cliff of unknown depth. 

Regardless, I gathered all of my courage and put my male life behind me. I gathered up all my male clothes and gave them to the thrift store and set out with my gender affirming hormones into an exciting new world. 

In the world of transgender women and transgender men, it is extremely difficult to advise or give much guidance to each other. Frustratingly, many trans people share the same path but on the other hand don't. It shows up in the maddening ways we can't seem to truly unite as a strong "T" under the LGBTQ umbrella. It is difficult for all of us to jump together. I can't say you should be a gender jumper or not. It has to come from deep inside you.

Preparing for the World

 

JJ Hart. Witches Ball Image.

Before we get started, I would like to take the time to respond to a comment from an anonymous reader to the blog.

For the sake of simplicity, I will condense the comment. The reader was responding to my post concerning my second wife never accepting my feminine self. The reader raised the question about if my wife was somehow jealous of the way I looked. Even though my ego often considered it, I never allowed myself the latitude to consider it. After all, I never considered both of us were in any sort of a competition when it came to appearance, we were simply different in our outlooks. As a cisgender woman, she believed in very minimal makeup and conservative clothes. I did not, and considered the makeup, hair and wardrobe process a woman goes through as part of the fun and challenge of being femininized. As it turned out, there was no way I could cross dress down to her level. If I did, I might as well not attempt it at all. As all of your regular readers know, I will never have a final answer to the appearance question because she passed away years ago. Thanks for the comment and now on to the rest of the post.

I found, as I evolved in life, it became more and more evident to me that cross dressing was more than the proverbial "sun" of my life. What I mean is, even though my entire life revolved in many ways around being a serious part-time cross dresser, deep down I knew I had so much more to accomplish in my gender journey. 

To arrive at where I wanted to be as a novice transgender woman, there was so much more I needed to do. When I put my so called "pretty, pretty princess" into motion into the world. No longer did I just have to worry about my appearance, I had to concentrate on how I was moving and communicating with the world. To say the least, it was a struggle to put all aspects of being a novice transgender woman together. My sun became my entire universe as I went out into the world as I attempted to completely feminize myself. I needed to stop with the ignorant way I was trying to present myself and learned the hard way, to survive in a world I found was run by women, I needed to be better. 

My brutal entrance into the world as a transgender woman, helped me to learn all I needed to know. Or so I thought. Every time I thought I knew where I was headed, only to find I had another wall to climb. Finally, I came to the conclusion in life, there would always be walls to climb and my life as a transgender woman prepared me to better attempt the climb. 

Since I was/am very afraid of heights, I could not spend much time enjoying the view when I had successfully climbed a wall. I needed to get busy and search for the next one. Plus, having a soft landing was never guaranteed. No one ever told me how many bruises I would suffer on my path to gender freedom. 

Finally, any purported competition between my second wife and my inner feminine being was put behind me and I could move on the best I could.