It's Not All About You

During my often one sided obsessive goal to be a better transgender woman, my second wife often told me it all wasn't about me. The truth be known, it was all about me. At the time my one sided gender obsession only included her when I wanted to go out with her to dinner dressed as a woman. It was normally all good when she caved in and decided to go out with my feminine self. The problem was,

Photo Courtesy
Jessie Hart

she didn't like my woman self. I believe now it all started with my propensity to dress as what I considered in a sexy nature. To no avail, even when I attempted to dress down for her, it was never enough. It was probably because she felt I hadn't learned enough about what being a woman was all about for me to be considered worthy to be one in her eyes. Along the way she had always accepted the fact I was a cross dresser but never entertained any thoughts of me going on hormone replacement therapy and transition my exterior self to a woman. 

All along I learned and accepted it was all about me. The end result was it was my life and I was attempting to live it the best I could. It just so happened my internal problems with life centered on my gender dysphoria which could be a very visible problem to conquer in public. As I tried my best to present as a woman, I would do things such as wearing sunglasses to see if others were staring at me all the way to trying to look in a mirror at peoples reflections to see if they were looking at me. Eventually I learned it indeed wasn't all about me. The great majority of people had their lives to lead and didn't really want to include me in their lives. 

In other words, my wife was right for perhaps not all the right reasons. She of course was considering the future of a possibly fast disappearing relationship to consider. While I was considering if I could salvage the marriage at all with my gender issues weighing me down. She had to decide what the future would hold.  Since I dearly loved her the entire process was torture for me. 

By now you probably have considered the fact it all was all about me. Call it selfish or not I ended up doing what ever I could to survive. My premise all along was gender was one of the most powerful decisions we ever have to consider in our lives was proven to be correct so many times. The fact the vast majority of people don't have to worry about it at all was a benefit to them. They never had to wake up in the morning wondering what gender I would have to be that day. I would not wish the experience on anyone. 

Perhaps, most importantly I learned the hard way I finally made the right decision as far as my gender transition was concerned. When I became a full time transgender woman I became a better person. Partly because such a weight was lifted off of my shoulders. I was so tired of living a life cross dressed as a man. I say that because it turned out my dominate personality was female. A fact I knew all along but didn't have the personal courage to face. 

It was all about me. 

What I Wear

As I look back on my archived blog posts from years ago, I see many which zeroed in what I was wearing at the time or when I went out into a brave new feminine world. My, how times have changed.

Liz and I at Christmas Dinner

My thoughts are it all has to do with a more or less natural transgender transition, if there is such a thing. Recently it seems I have dwelled on the point I was so zeroed in on how I looked initially when I began to pursue all the work it would take to live a feminine life. The trip at times was an all encompassing journey.  Nearly all of my spare time was spent on trying on my collection of female clothes and trying new ways of applying makeup. 

As I grew, it became increasingly evident to me while what I wore was important, it was decreasing in it's overall importance. Being a girl was becoming so much more important than looking like one. It turned out my feminine appearance was useful in getting by in the world but did not help with my overall problems with gender dysphoria. In fact sometimes it made it worse. Following the times I was very successful in my feminine presentation often I would fall into a deep depression. The more I was successful, the more I wanted to do. The depression was incredibly self destructive and led me to anger issues I internalized until I couldn't take it anymore and began to take my frustrations out on others. The whole process led me to nearly lose jobs or go into frenetic moves looking for new jobs. It took me years to understand completely what was going on. 

These days, since I have been living a fulltime life as a transgender woman for years now, what I wear has become less important to me. Of course any vestiges of my male wardrobe are long gone and I have settled into what is comfortable yet having some sort of style. An example is today I am wearing one of my favorite warm cowl neck sweaters with my black leggings and boots. Ironically even this is being dressed up for me because we are planning to go out and run some errands this afternoon. 

On occasion I miss the buzz I experienced when I first started my gender transition. An example is I follow  @Anna B on Medium who often writes in depth on what she is wearing.  As I said many times I envy her learning curve she is going through as she struggles to find her way. 

I suppose being transfixed with what we wear as cross dressers or novice transgender women is a natural part of growing older. My wife Liz is a prime example. She has seen me at my best and my worst so if I am only going to see in in a day, I naturally spend less time on my appearance. Hormone replacement therapy has helped me also. The process softened my skin and facial lines requiring less makeup. I use a basic moisturizer, eye makeup, lipstick then brush out my hair and I am ready to face the world. 

So what I wear is quite simple these days.

Living our Transgender Passion

 Most certainly living out a dream to change a gender requires a lot of passion. As a matter of fact, a life time of passion. 

Photo Courtesy
Jessie Hart

Early in life I was guilty of living in the mirror and pretending I was a pretty girl but at the same time I knew I had deeper issues. Such as when someone asked me exactly what I wanted to be later in life, I dutifully answered a lawyer, or architect or something similar. My inner truth was telling me all I really wanted to do was grow into the woman I always wanted to be. Naturally, I kept the opinion to myself to avoid all sorts of potential problems. Little did I know my ultimate desire to live a feminine life would never leave me. It would just become stronger over the years as I learned my passion could indeed be achieved.

As I am finding out from more and more readers of the blog our pre-internet upbringing had more to do with holding back our gender growth than we could have imagined. In other words, our gender closets remained smaller and darker than they should have because we had very little ways to reach out to others with the same situation. As I remember it took me all the way until I was in my thirties (in the mid 1970's) before I met another transvestite. As we were called back in those days. Once I was able to meet others who lived fairly close to me, they fueled my passion to explore further if I could follow my goal to live more as a woman. Two of my acquaintances became role models of sorts when they went from so called cross dressers to undergoing genital realignment surgery in the several years which I knew them. I was fairly certain "going all the way" surgically wasn't for me but the fact still remained I still was fueled by my age old passion to live as a woman. To me, it wasn't so much about what was between my legs which was driving me as much as what was going on between my ears in my noggin. 

As I took all of this into consideration, it became clear to me the path I had to take would become increasingly difficult. The more I learned about the new term "transgender" at the time, the more I felt it described me. The tough part was figuring out what to do about it. What happened was a series of disjointed often mis-guided steps towards achieving my goal of leading a transgender life. I found in order to do it I had to completely transition again. Somehow I needed to move from being a cross dresser and looking like a woman to being transgender and following my passion to live as a woman.  After a series of successes helped me to accomplish my goal, I finally developed the courage to leave my male life and all the privileges' I had earned behind. Before I did, trying to live a life with one foot in each of the binary genders nearly killed me. I am sure others have been more successful than me trying to do it. I just couldn't. 

Passion is a difficult creature. For some it is an all out driver to take on and achieve a goal while with others passion provides a more even path to success. Plus it helps also when you can savor a few successes along the way. On occasion I look back and think maybe a higher power was guiding my path and passion because of all the dark times I spent wondering if I was doing the right thing. Or all the times I "purged" (threw out) all my feminine possessions only to reacquire them again. I should have known following my first purge, none of the future purges would work either. Passion just proved to be too powerful.    

Only a Fool

 Only a fool knows everything is a quote I recently heard. Of course when I heard it I made a mental note to try to remember it and use it for a blog post. Amazingly I did remember since my memory is not what it used to be, or never was to begin with. 

Photo Courtesy
Jessie Hart

What I was thinking of when I heard the quote was how many times I was the fool when I thought I knew all there was to know about completing my gender transition to a transgender woman. Living my dream fulltime. Looking back I realized there were many times when I thought I knew everything and was certainly the fool. 

The first time was when I was very young and thought my new exciting girl like image in the mirror really meant something. It took me years to realize the cross dressing process did mean something. What it meant was the mirror was lying to me and the underlying reason I was feeling the gender stress I was came from the fact I wanted to be a girl rather than look like one. I did some foolish things when I came out dressed as a girl to a neighborhood friend of mine. When he refused to even look at me, I knew I had done something wrong.

Following my failed experiment of coming out to a person I knew I went back into my deep, dark closet for years. Approximately twenty I think. I certainly did not want to be the fool again when my deeply hidden secret saw the light of day. As it turned out, I would still have plenty of time to play the fool as I attempted to grow into my authentic self. The most self destructive urge I had was the one I document so often in my writings. By far the biggest mistake I made was when I tried in vain to dress sexy which in turn came out as no more than a trashy attempt at validation. I was so stubborn and the mirror lied to me so much, I'm lucky I came out of my trashy period of life relatively unscathed. The worst which happened to me was to get laughed at. Obviously I was the fool who thought she knew everything about being a woman but was just getting started. 

My learning curve finally stated to kick in and I realized if I dressed to blend in with women and not to supposedly attract the attention of men, amazingly I could exist successfully in a feminine world. But still I was caught playing the fool. In what seemed like a small period of time, I had to build on merely looking like a woman and develop a personality to go with it. I had to quit changing wigs every time I went out and doing crazy things such as changing my name to go with the wig I was wearing. Darcy was the redhead, Karen was the brunette and Roxy was the blond. Of course all I was doing was destroying any attempt I was making to establish a solid base for my brand new feminine persona. This time it took me just a short period of time to quit playing the wig game and settled into to a person who had wanted out of me for so long. My closet finally was coming open.

Even with all of this new found gender success, I had to guard against being the fool again. An example was one night when a cis woman with her smiling face in essence tricked me into thinking we could be friends. I learned the hard way she was carrying sharp claws behind her back and was just making fun of me. From that point on I learned a smiling feminine face did not necessarily mean acceptance into the girls sandbox. Until I grasped the whole world of how women communicate with each other, I was doomed to play the fool when I was cornered in the world.

These days, I am a combination of being guarded and on the other hand confident at reading other women. However, I don't think I know everything concerning a transgender transition which would make me the fool.  

When Did you Kniw

 
Not long ago my daughter asked me indirectly how long was it since I knew I was transgender. Then she corrected herself  by saying I probably had always known. To refresh your memory, my daughter has always been a staunch ally of the LGBTQ community and has a transgender child. Of course I said yes, I had always known. Which perhaps wasn't always true. Back in the dark ages before the internet, as I always refer to, there was a huge gender void filled only by the sparse offerings of Virginia Prince and her "Transvestia" publications or the news of an American G.I. (Christine Jorgensen) who changed their sex. I was having a difficult time figuring out all my gender issues. 

Photo Christine Jorgensen
Archives

It wasn't until social media  became popular along with the world wide web did I learn how others shared the same gender issues as I did. One example is Paula from across the pond in the UK  when she wrote in and said: 

"  Our generation growing up had no role models, no concept of transition, hey, we didn't even have the word transgender. Without the vocabulary it us difficult to understand the concept, or more importantly the feelings we were having."

 And she goes on to write:

"Younger generations growing up now have different issues, but at least they have the vocabulary to investigate them ~ I suspect this is the reason why so many of our generation transitioned later in life ~ long live the interweb!"  

Thank you Paula. I imagine similar to so many age related disparities most younger transgender women and men can not relate to not even having a word (transgender) to describe their condition growing up. 

Looking back also, I discovered many unresolved gender issues which would have led me to believe I was indeed transgender. A prime example of how envious I was of girls my age and the perception I had that they had life so much easier than me. Or how one Christmas I wanted a doll baby but was gifted a BB Gun instead, The list could go on on and on but the point which kept on proving the point indeed I had been transgender my entire life. 

While we are on the subject of generational transgender change, social media and the internet too have contributed to a more cohesive LGBTQ group for political action. I am proud to say the Ohio version of yet another anti transgender bill was rejected in committee yesterday. So at least for the time being the State of Ohio is not joining an increasing amount of states with crippling anti transgender legislation.  

When you come right down to it, young or old, transgender or not we spend a lifetime growing into ourselves. Sadly on occasion we can't see the life forests for the trees. It happened to me, I missed the reality of the fact I was transgender for too long. I should have always known. 

Why Do I Write

 

Image Courtesy Aaron Burden
on UnSplash

As I took on the challenges years ago of writing a daily transgender non fiction based blog, many questions came about. During the years, often who my audience was began to change. Initially I thought my readers would be primarily transitioning gender women and men who may be able to benefit from the lessons I learned. I mentioned transgender men because I know of several who read the blog including one who was my first date with a guy. It was quite the experience. I added non fiction because I see so many fantasy based blogs with their filtered pictures, I felt along the way somehow without being over bearing I had to explain all of these experiences really happened to me and they were not stories. I couldn't make all this up if I wanted to. 

Because I had so many errors in my trial and error periods of my life, I  decided to write about them. When I did I  began to receive so many good comments. I kept it up again hoping I could help someone else. The old don't do what I did sermon which I never listened to anyhow. Like going out to public spaces dressed as a teenaged slutty girl in my oversized male body. It's no wonder my second wife didn't approve of the way I cross dressed most of the time. Luckily, it didn't take me very long to grow out of this phase of my transgender life.

 During this time I considered (and still do) my main reader audience to be transitioning transgender women. I had a real pleasant shock when I received comments from wives trying to understand their spouses gender issues. Then I considered adding more information which may be important to a wife. Until  I thought I wasn't or shouldn't be in a position to offer any advice because I did such a poor job communicating my gender challenges during my marriages. Finally, I thought if anyone learns from my past mistakes again it is a good thing. 

Currently I think transgender women and men of age are my primary audience as well as a small group of people who allowed me to join their circle of friends when I so desperately needed it. I could name a few names but I am afraid I would leave someone out. Also recently I have discovered a growing group of transgender veterans on both platforms I write for, Google and Medium who share similar experiences to me when they served in the military. It always has been amazing to me how the dark days before the internet and social media affected us all as we had little to no help when we battled our gender struggles. A battle we may have to have never fought if we had access to the transgender information which is available today.

Probably, the group I leave out for no particular reason are the crossdressers. Even though I can certainly write, I spent a half century as a crossdresser, I think I don't spend enough time including them in my writings. Or, worse yet end up sounding as if I am better than someone else because I started hormone replacement therapy and made the move to living full time as a transgender woman. Without the lessons I learned from my crossdressing days both as a man and woman I would have never made it to the life I live today. 

 

The Stairstep Method

 Probably there are as many ways to complete a gender transition as there are transgender women and

Image Courtesy
Darius Cotoi on UnSplash

trans men. We are like snowflakes, no one is alike. Over time I have thought I was everything from a gender rat in a maze to someone climbing a steep set of stairs. As it turned out, many of the steps were steeper than others. 

Very early my first steps were basically quick and painless. I snuck around and acquired a small collection of women's clothes, added some of my Mom's makeup and I thought I looked just like a cute girl. My time on this stairstep didn't last long because fairly quickly the realization came to me I just didn't want to look like a girl, I wanted to be one. A huge difference I didn't realize was the earliest precursor to living a transgender life. From the point forward I decided my time on the step would be limited and I climbed to the next step. 

The next step involved me finding a paper route and doing odd jobs around the house and neighborhood to earn my own money which would go towards buying and expanding my small feminine stash of clothes, makeup and even a pair of shoes. During the process I was scared to death to do my own shopping and couldn't believe the bewildering selections of especially makeup there were. Undeterred though I still shopped and finally achieved a level of success. The success would just encourage me to climb another step. By this time I was frustrated by two main things, the first was the fact I had no way to afford a nice wig and the second was I couldn't do my shopping cross-dressed as a girl. What happened was I needed to spend years on this stairstep before I could advance to the next one. 

The years I waited mainly was because of about this time I was waiting to see what the Vietnam War military draft would mean to me and yes the wait was hell. The wait nearly went on as that god forsaken war did and finally I was drafted out of college and chose the Army due to their offer of the job I was interested in. Little did I know, the lessons I learned in the military would serve me well in my life and encourage me to climb another very steep step. An example was the day we were on a very long and hilly forced march in basic and I learned to never look back and look forward to the future if I just kept pushing forward. Many of you regular readers know also during my time in the Army was when I first came out as a transvestite to a few close friends.

After I had successfully completed my military service, the steps appeared to be less steep and easier to climb. Encouraged by several very successful Halloween parties when I appeared as a feminine person, I found I could possibly climb the ultimate step and transition to a full time transgender woman. The problem was I soon tried to climb too many steps way too quickly and even had to retreat back a time or two and refocus on exactly what I was trying to do. Major decisions on sexuality, friends, spouses were just a few problems I had to face.  Plus, once I had climbed this many steps fairly successfully I had to decide if I wanted to take another giant step and begin hormone replacement therapy. Once I finally took the step I found HRT was one of the best steps I have ever taken in my life. Finally my inner soul had another chance to sync up with my testosterone poisoned exterior. 

All I can hope for at this time of my life for a good as possible health and a chance to pass on with dignity as my chosen authentic self. The final stairstep.     

More Conversation

Joanna S sent in this very relevant comment on yesterday's post concerning the conversation I had with my son in law on Thanksgiving. It primary revolved around his family's acceptance of me as an out transgender woman. I mentioned also this was somehow the first conversation I had initiated with him in over a decade. To this, Joanna replied:

"It is very difficult sometimes to have open conversations especially with people who knew us in different wrapping. Here we can be our own worst enemies and assume we know what they are thinking so we clam up. It's an ongoing process of being kind to ourselves as well as others."

Thanks for the comment! I know I have two of the issues Joanna S mentioned. The first is early in my days of coming out of my gender closet I automatically and sometimes completely unfairly formed ideas of what others were thinking of me. It wasn't until the confidence in my feminine self grew that I was doing the right thing transitioning that I began to not care as much or little ( if at all) care what others think of me. It worked because I literally learned not everything in the world revolved around me as a transgender woman. Most of the world just didn't care. Plus, being kind to myself was something else I carried with me from my previous male self. I was very self destructive and it took many years and my wife Liz to relearn how I could actually be kind to myself. 

On any level, obviously any conversation is good when it comes to the LGBTQ community and especially the transgender tribe. Can you imagine how beneficial it could be for all these politicians writing all these harmful anti transgender bills  for once  sit down and get to know a transgender person.  It goes too for all of us within the transgender community. Those who want to put themselves up on pedestals for so many reasons, Examples are being more transgender than you are because of the surgeries they have gone through or they are a better trans person because they transitioned earlier in life. It's difficult on occasion to even have a conversation between ourselves, let alone others who have no understanding at all. 

In fact, it was primarily an often terse discussion with people we called "Trans Nazi's" which led to essentially my conversations with Connie which then led to me to begin to write this blog. By "Trans Nazi's" I mean those who did battle with us on claiming we were transgender at all since we had not gone through any gender surgeries. Seemingly the Nazi's had carried over their old male ego's into their new feminine lives. At the time we all were enjoying the benefits of being able to hide behind our keyboards with our comments. Most likely if we were meeting face to face, our comments may have been more affable. Leading all of us to be kind to others. 

My pedestal is non existent for any of this. It took me years and most likely quite a bit of age and estrogen to mellow out. My partial proof is the fact it took me a decade to have any sort of a quality conversation with my son in law. In todays divided country conversation seems a far away possibility. Plus all sorts of issues such as gender privilege and mistrust get in the way. Not long ago I wrote a post

Photo Courtesy Paula

called why "Men Don't Trust Me" to which Paula replied:

" Two thoughts come to mind, one is " I have nothing against masculinity, indeed I rather like, just not in me!" the other is a phrase that I find I keep using in all sorts of situations, "Nothing makes you understand privilege like giving up" Well said!

One of the reasons I so hurt myself was tied into Paula's comments. I still on occasion liked the male life I had worked so hard to maintain and didn't want to give up.  Trying to live my everyday life in both binary genders nearly tore me to pieces. I was fortunate in that I was able to establish conversations with cis women to learn from and then reestablish myself as a transgender woman. At that point my inner feminine soul took over and life became so much better.

The Conversation

My daughter has been married many years to a man I always considered an acquired taste. She met him all the way back in her college days at the University of Toledo. (Ohio) Over the years we have never talked much about anything. For some reason, all of that changed on Thanksgiving. All of sudden he came out to the living room to join me as I rested my back on a soft surface. The conversation began the way it normally does with him being the know it all on how to try to tune in one of the pro football games on his Mom's television. I tried to tell him how to do it but was quickly ignored so I thought here we go again. About the time I was thinking we would have the usual silence between us, he surprised me by asking about my brother.

Photo Courtesy
Jessie Hart

I said I haven't head anything from him since he turned me down on coming as my authentic self to his house for the Thanksgiving family dinner. In essence he chose his redneck religious in laws over me and that was it for our relationship. To keep the conversation going, I took the chance to tell him how much I appreciated his family accepting me Their support certainly softened the blow of losing any support I expected from my brother. 

Looking back at all the years we never had any sort of a conversation I felt somewhat ashamed it took so long to happen. On top of all of the vocal feedback he mentioned he raised his family as well as ran his scout troops to include diversity in everything they did. Which is all good since one of his three offspring turned out to be transgender. Before the conversation with him, I had basically given all the credit for their incredible family diversity to my daughter. 

Perhaps my entire problem on starting potentially difficult conversations goes back to the fact essentially I am a shy person. When I came out as transgender made it that much more difficult. Plus, the fact my son in law knew me many years as my male macho self made the whole conversation very difficult too. 

As I have written, the Thanksgiving experience was wonderful except for the dining room chairs which give my back fits. My transgender grandchild couldn't make it so I hated to miss them but they couldn't get off work as a novice fire ranger. 

At least now I can speak to my son in law in the future after we established some sort of bond following all of these years. The conversation was better than any of the wonderful desserts we were able to go home with. It's my fault I didn't press the issue sooner. I have with his parents but never with him. How could I miss he had to be a wonderful LGBTQ ally also? I don't know but I am certainly glad we had the conversation.