Sports and the "Big T."

 As football season winds down, for the first time in over three decades the Cincinnati Bengals are playing the Kansas City Chiefs for a chance to play in the Super Bowl. Kansas City is a tough talented team so they will be difficult to defeat

None of that hurts my enthusiasm. In my long life of 70 plus years, I have witnessed only two visits to the Super Bowl by the Bengals and both were heartbreaking defeats. On one occasion I even suffered a broken bone in my foot trying an ill advised leap during a touchdown run. I have written before how I had to make up a weak excuse for my boss why I worked the next several days on crutches.    

During todays' game you can bet I won't being trying any leaps. In fact with my testosterone levels so low and my estrogen so high, I'm definitely aren't so passionate anymore. I used to be so competitive I had a difficult time playing any sort of a game because I hated to lose. On the other hand, I am a better fan. I watch the games with more nuance. Maybe why there are so many more women these days who are sports fans.  

On another topic away from football, I received several great comments on my post "What's in a Name". The first is from Lisa :

"I completely understand. I went through several names before settling on Lisa, but it is a diminutive for Elizabeth, which is what I plan to use on my birth certificate, if I ever change it. I too have the grandkid issue, and have thought of putting my current first two initials as my middle name so they can use that. Not too different from your solution. "Great minds think alike!"

Thanks Lisa! And, another from Paula:

"It is a revelation to many that anyone can change their name, like you I went through a lot of names, more or less exotic. But when I realised that this was for keeps I went for the pragmatic answer, and the one that meant I didn't have to change my signature!

We grow up with the name our parents gave us and it becomes a part of our identity, so when we choose a new name we have to make sure it is one we are going to be happy taking as part of our identity. A while back my name was printed in a concert program as "Pauline" I was horrified as I though "No, I could never be a Pauline!"

As always thanks Paula! 

Finally GO BENGALS!!!!!

Party Down in "C-Bus"

 The city of Columbus  in Ohio is known often as "C-Bus."  I grew up and lived for years approximately a half hour away in Springfield, Ohio. 

One of the first places I used to go to attend transvestite or cross dresser mixers were in Columbus. It is a much larger city than Springfield plus it offered me a place to go where no one would recognize me. It was at several of those mixers I started to try to follow in the steps of the group's "A" listers. I didn't want to adopt their attitude in anyway. They were similar to the ego trips most likely seen in the cheerleaders where I went to high school. 

What I did value was the chance to go out with them after the mixers were over. I tagged along when they left most of the group at the mixer and went out to various gay and lesbian venues to party. Needless to say I learned a lot about attempting to go out in the world as a novice transvestite/cross dresser. 

As time went on, the group who staged the mixers went away and many of the "A" group who lived in the area began to meet at one of the members houses. If you are familiar with Columbus at all, the house was in a fully restored brick home in the German Village historic district. In other words, it was a great place to have a party. 

One of the benefits of tagging along with the "A" listers was my wife and I received an invite to the parties which normally happened about once a month. Since I worked in the restaurant business, Saturday nights off were difficult to come by and the rare ones I did get were cherished. As you can imagine, my wife wasn't totally on board with spending one of our rare Saturdays with a group of men in dresses. I had to mix in a powerful mixture of  persuasion mixed with pouting to get her to go. Normally me going by myself was out of the question. I wasn't trusted to be on my own in other words and she was right. 

Normally the parties featured a wonderful who's who of gender dysphoric people on a rapidly developing gender spectrum. Being transgender was still a new idea but being a transsexual wasn't. It was still during the time when transsexuals were expected to go through what then was known as sex change surgery then disappear into society. Never to be heard from again. In fact, the person who organized the parties identified as a transsexual. 

What fascinated me were the number of different individuals who attended. All the way from male admirers to transsexuals considering surgery to all the questioning people such as me. One night, a question I never considered was presented to me in a way I would have never considered.

Photo of model in mini skirt
 by Edward Howell on Unsplash

On the night in question, my wife and I had the usual fight over what I was wearing. My dress was just too short for her liking. I hate to say it but she was right and her point was proven dramatically. One admirer (or a man who admired cross dressers) was a big guy, around  six foot four and probably approximately two hundred sixty pounds. I wasn't a small person but he towered over me. 

What happened was he caught me in a hallway of the house in a position I couldn't get out of. I learned quickly how tables could be turned on women in an instant as I was trapped. About the time I was starting to panic and he was reaching for my thigh I looked up and saw my wife looking at me from down the hallway. It turned out she had let the lesson play out as far as she thought it needed to and then loudly cleared her throat. When the admirer heard it, he quickly backed off and as I said my lesson was learned. 

Of course, I had to hear about it all the way home. Partying down in "C-Bus" would never be the same again and I knew how quickly all women could be put in compromising situations they can't escape from.

Batgirl

From Rolling Stone:

 Ivory Aquino has been cast to portray Alysia Yeoh, the roommate and best friend of the titular superhero also known as Barbara Gordon, in upcoming HBO Max film Batgirl, as Variety reports.

Aquino’s character first appeared in a DC Batgirl issue by Gail Simone and artist Ardian Syaf in 2011. She will star opposite Leslie Grace’s Barbara Gordon. Both Aquino and Yeoh are transgender. This is the first time a live-action film adaptation of a DC Comics movie will feature an openly trans character.

In 2017, the Filipina actress portrayed transgender activist Cecilia Chung in the ABC miniseries, When We Rise.

What's in a Name?

 2016 it turns out was a big year as I progressed through my MtF gender transition. It was the year I completed my legal gender name change,  My process turned out to have a couple different layers of paper work I had to go through because I needed to include the Veterans Administration in the process. Which meant I needed the help of my VA therapist to do it. She provided the timely paperwork to insure certain medications crucial to my transition continued, especially my hormone replacement therapy needs. 

I vividly remember the day I was able to erase the "M" on my Ohio driver's license and replace it with a "F". Second only to the first time I needed the license to vote. The only legal document I have not gotten around to changing yet is my birth certificate which only fairly recently became legal to do here in Ohio. It's my fault for procrastinating because the whole process turned out to be fairly simple after the gender bigots quit fighting it.

Over the years, my feminine name has proven to present quite the challenge. Early in life I chose the name of girls who I admired such as the one who sat across from me in study hall. Not that is as important today, her name was Karen which of course is not the most popular name these days. Anyhow, Karen had a short lived time in my life because there always seemed to be another girl/woman I was to become enamored with and adopted her name. For awhile.

Just before I settled into a steady feminine persona as I entered the feminine world, the name game became a little crazy. In fact I would buy wigs to match a certain name. An example was Roxy was always a blond while Darcy was always a red head. After realizing I was defeating the chances to establish myself as one unique person in public, I settled into using Cyrsti as my name. It was pronounced the same as Kristi but was spelled different to reflect light going through a crystal. This was all well and good as I began to be able to exist in the woman's sandbox and the Cyrsti's Condo blog was born.

Cyrsti was destined to be part of my life for many years, in fact all the way to my early sixties when I came out to my daughter. Her only real concern after wondering why she was the last to know I was transgender to what was up with the name (she disliked it) and what would the three grandkids call me. Since I was close to choosing a legal name change anyhow, the time was right for a revision.

This time I decided to stay within the family history for my new name. I chose my maternal grandfather's first name (Jesse) and just spelled it different and added my Mom's first name as my middle name (Jeanne). That way the kids could just call me "JJ".

At that point, the biggest question was what would happen to the blog. Should I sacrifice all the years of posts and millions of hits I had and change the name? I decided not to and kept Cyrsti as sort of a "pen name" Just to confuse the issue more though I decided to use JJ Hart fairly recently when I began to publish on the Medium writers platform. 

In the future, my goal is to retain a professional to help me with my blog ideas. When I can afford it. Perhaps they could advise me on what to do with my pen name versus my legal name. In the meantime, I'm afraid my schizophrenic name use will continue. 

Pride in January?

 Pride month for the LGBT community should be a year around celebration.  Once you reach the certain point of your life when you are comfortable as your authentic gender self, it's time to celebrate yourself.  In other words the tipping point of having total confidence in yourself. Confidence of course was the topic of a recent blog post which Paula commented on:

" Confidence is key. It took me a while to inhabit the world confidently as a woman of mature years. We missed out on a lot of the learning process, we had to compress so much into such a short time. But now, I find that I have the confidence to do things I would not have before, because I am not just confident in my femininity, but in myself. " 

As always Paula,  thanks for the relevant comment.

Pride can be expressed in many different ways. You don't have to go watch garishly dressed drag queens strut around in heels to participate in Pride. 

You can dress in your favorite jeans or leggings depending on the season or you can be the occasional cross dresser in your local bar.  The important part is you are living your life as you feel natural doing.

I know also, many of you think you are impossibly stuck in your transgender/cross dresser closet and will never escape. There was a time when I felt that too. I was just able somehow escape the tragic situation I was in and sheer destiny led me out of my closet and into a feminine world. 

I will say though I had to work very hard to put myself in a position for destiny to find me. I searched high and low on dating sites looking for someone. Either male or female to spend social time with and was a miserable failure. My Pride comes from  from finally being persistent enough to find friends such as Kim and Nikki who I met in sports bar venues and had a great time. All the while I was learning valuable lessons on how to navigate a feminine world. Then there was Liz who responded to a online dating site, saying I had sad eyes.

Along the way, being a partier didn't hurt me when I did attend various Pride events as you can see in the second picture which was taken in a very busy gay venue in downtown Cincinnati several years ago. 

To make a long story/post short, have Pride in your journey. Even though it may consist of being able to exist in a very dark closet.

You deserve it.