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. 

Doing it With Mirrors

Image from Paulious
Dragiunous on 
UnSplash.

For a time, I thought my entire female life revolved around my interaction with mirrors. 

In many ways, it did as I could not wait until I could slip away from my family and spend time cross dressed as a girl in front of the mirror. I even had a special mirror I was very fond of. It seemed my Dad was thinking of me when he designed the house he built for us to live in. He laid out the house with a long hallway connecting the bedrooms and a bath and finished it off with a full length mirror. The mirror and the distance it provided gave me precious space to admire myself in the mirror as my femininized self.

The only problems I experienced were I had no feedback from the mirror and would not until I experienced the world as my novice feminine self. So, good or bad, I could convince myself I looked great when in fact I had so much work to do to achieve my goal of passing well in public. Even though I was still barely getting by in the public, I still relied on mirrors to get me by and reassure my mind I belonged. What I did was look for the nearest mirror in clothing stores to see how I looked. It turned to be a singular approach to presenting well with the world. 

There were times when I took my mirror worship to the extreme in stores, one in particular comes to mind. There was a coat discount store I was fond of going to since they had coats which came in my larger size. During my shopping trips I fell in love with a pale blue, wool mix, long coat which I thought looked great with my long blond hair. I so loved admiring myself in the store mirror so much, I thought someone would come up and tell me to buy it or leave. While it never happened, sadly, there was no way I could afford it and end up smuggling it into the house away from my wife. So I needed to leave my dream coat behind. 

It took me years to quit doing it with mirrors and begin to live my truth. It was still a struggle to leave my best friend behind. I had subconsciously trained myself to look for the nearest mirror to fall back on to to reassure myself I was an attractive transgender woman. It was a real struggle to rely on myself for a change without the mirror. All of a sudden, the public became my mirror and it was very difficult to adjust to because not all interactions were positive. I needed the confidence to look a transphobic individual in the eye and win the moment. At the least, the transphobe would have to walk away from the interaction thinking they had actually met a transgender woman and we were not so bad. 

The process of interacting with the public over time became automatic and my only interaction with the mirror became my morning check in or when I am applying makeup for a trip out. Ironically, now the mirror is not always my friend anymore. Now I still have to battle what is left of my gender dysphoria when I look in the mirror. Sometimes I see my old male self peeking through which I hate but others times I see a much more pleasant femininized version of my old self. When my old male self weighs in too heavily on me, now I have developed the coping skills to get by and put him back into his place.

Never, in my wildest dreams, did I think mirrors would play such an important part of my life. From the earliest days of cross dressing to my current days of dealing with gender dysphoria, mirrors have allowed me to survive.      

Kissing as a Contact Sport

Image from Brian Kyed 
on UnSplash

As a transgender woman, I have been at the crossroad many times of to kiss or not to kiss.

Before I proceed, I need to point out, all of this happened before I moved in over ten years ago with my wife Liz here in Cincinnati. 

The first time I was almost kissed as a woman was when I was entrapped by a much bigger than me trans admirer at a small party my second wife and I attended in nearby Columbus, Ohio. He cornered me in a small hallway and for the first time in my life I felt powerless to fend off another human being. Before he came in for a kiss, or so much more, I was rescued by my wife who told me not to wear such a leg revealing dress anyway with my long blond wig. Of course I did not listen and paid the price later on the way home.

Along the way, as I transitioned, I did kiss a few men, mainly to see what it was like. I was attempting to see if my sexuality was going to change with my gender or not. The interactions were few and included two date nights in the regular venues I went to plus another with a guy I met in a coffee shop. The dates ended up being one time affairs which was sad because I had a good time being validated as a woman by a guy but the coffee shop guy turned out to be multiple meetings before we went to his house. We did kiss passionately before he let it slip out he was married. When he did, I slipped out the front door, never to return. 

The only other man I had a crush on and wished he had kissed me was the big burly, motorcycle rider I befriended after his very short lived marriage to a woman I knew briefly. It turned out I was the only one in the group who didn't disown him and we became friends. But not good enough to be asked to ride on the back of his bike or be kissed. Very soon after I got to know him, he transferred jobs and I never saw him again.

From then on, it was back to kissing women for me. During the lesbian mixers I went to, I was kissed by several women I did not know and I was flattered. Along the way also, I did sneak a kiss in with my two party women friends and one was very sweet. Again, sadly a future relationship with all its complications was not to be and we both moved on but still stay in touch to this day.

All in all, kissing a man turned out to be a duty for me. Something which should be done in return for validating me as a woman. But the overall thrill or charge wasn't there to enable me to want to change my overall sexuality. Plus, I did learn how frustrating it could be to be wanted and not the person who was the pursuer. I found the other gender grass was not always greener, especially when I was basically trapped by a person much larger and stronger than me. 

It was all a lifetime learning experience of learning the ins and outs of kissing another person from both sides of the gender border. I learned my preference was always kissing a woman. As a woman. Especially when gender affirming hormones' gifted me with my own set of breasts to enjoy. Kissing as a contact sport became more fun.

Down but Not Out

 

First Girl's Night Out.
I am on the bottom row, left.

There have been many times during my transgender journey which I have felt down.

However, a little voice in my head kept telling me to keep going and if I did, I could achieve my dream of living a feminine life.  I write many times (mainly for those of you who are still new to the transgender or cross dressing world) how I was ridiculed intensely when I first tried to explore the public as a woman. After being laughed at, I always headed home in a hurry and tried to go back to the drawing board to try to determine what I was doing wrong. It took me awhile to figure out I needed to get past my male ego of what a woman should look like and into blending in with the rest of the female world. The mirror and my head turned out to be powerful opponents. 

I need to stress, it took me years of being down to turn my learning curve the opposite way and turn my frown into a smile when I was out in the world. Along the way, I needed to adjust my thinking on how I was accepted. I needed to realize I would never be the most attractive woman in the room and begin to fall back on my personality to get along. I was transgender and different but so what I was a good person. When I accomplished being at the least friendly to others, I began to be accepted into small groups of acquaintances who accepted me for my true self. In one of the venues I became a regular in, I have vibrant memories of a group of five diverse women and even a few men who I could set in with and have a beverage. 

It all proved to me I was resilient and could survive most things, including my growth as a transgender woman. Even though life was about ready to deal me several severe setbacks I was not expecting, I could make it. 

When life did hit me with setbacks, they were sledgehammer type blows. It seemed life was fond of giving me setbacks such as my wife passing away along with most of my best friends. It nearly finished me off when I had to close my restaurant I worked so hard to buy. More or less, I was left with my house, two dogs and an old car to re-erect my life. 

The old saying the darkest hour was right before the dawn was true for me  I was down but I had one huge card up my favorite blouse's sleeve. Since I was so far down why not start all over again as my dream self. My inner female had always been strong enough  to fight for her existence, so why no let her have it. Karma was on my side also, as it was about this time the Veterans Administration  health care system which I was already a part of suddenly approved the use of gender affirming hormones for transgender veterans. I only needed approval from a VA therapist to start the program. It turned out I was with Dr. C. my therapist for over ten years and she worked miracles for me.

Maybe it was because I was able to outlive a suicide attempt and years of self destructive behavior that I was able to come full circle in my life and end up on my heels. I was down but not out and discovered people in the world who could and would step up to accept me as my authentic self. Even though I needed to make the effort first. Which for me was very difficult. In the end, the whole process made me a better person.

The Lifelong Question

Image from Shifazz
Shamoon on UnSplash. 

During my life, I have had several burning questions. One of which of course was how I ever made the determination I was transgender.

Before we get to the main question, we need to examine several of the other issues life threw at me and possibly you also. The first direct non gendered question I encountered was the Vietnam War. Or, how was I ever going to negotiate serving time in the military, as I risked my life. As it turned out, me serving my military time turned out to be a gender question too because the closer I came to being drafted into the Army, I began to resent the fact women did not have to face the draft also. All in all, a waste of time, so I gave it up. As it turned out my service in the military had far reaching positive consequences for me because among other things, I met the mother of my daughter there. 

Another question arose when I was not so blissfully cross dressing parts of my life away and I wondered if I was the only one with similar gender issues, I was stuck in the pre-internet dark age of having very little public information available to me. It wasn't until I served my time in the Army did I discover there were indeed many so called males who wanted to be femininized into women. The problem became was what was I ever going to do with my new family. Certainly, fathering a daughter had not made me more of a man, No matter how macho I acted. 

The older I became, it seemed the more complex my problems became. In fact, my thirtieth birthday was the most difficult for me to negotiate of all my birthdays. At the place I was in then, I was in deep despair over what decisions I would have to make to survive. What I determined was I needed to find better employment, stop drinking as much and resolve to be a better father. I was a success at finding better employment but a dismal failure at curtailing any of my party life, which included the Halloween parties I was going to dressed as a woman of course. All I really did was procrastinate further on the major question I had which were my gender issues. 

When I began to complicate coming out into the world as a transgender woman, I first had to determine in my own mind if I was indeed trans. Once I did, I needed to figure out who I would tell. Since most of my immediate family and closest friends had passed away, the list I had accumulated was very short. First to tell was my daughter, my only child and I suffered long and hard with if I should tell her at all. My reticence was rewarded with relief as she accepted me without question and still wanted me to be involved with my grandchildren's lives. I also questioned coming out to my only brother because I knew his in laws were religious right-wing bigots of the first degree. We both went our separate ways over a decade ago. 

The more life progressed, the tougher decisions seemed to be because there was more to lose. Another primary example was my job which I had worked very hard to be successful. I knew the company I worked for would never accept a transgender manager, so staying put was out. Fortunately by this time, I was old enough to be within reach of taking my social security retirement. So I just retired and started gender affirming hormones. 

The lifelong question of why me mostly answered itself. I played the odds throughout most of my life and was for the most part successful. For better or for worse, I was able to hide my true gender feelings until I could safely transition. Along the way, I also found I may have never had the chance to decide my gender anyway. My Mom had suffered through several still births before me in the late 1940's and had taken the DES medication. DES as I have read flooded the womb with estrogen and has been linked to the possibility of causing  transgender children. Who knows? 

Having all these major questions in life is just another facet of being human. Some questions are more difficult than others. 

Escalation or Escapism

Halloween image from the 
Archives. Min on right. 

During my life, I spent many uneasy moments in my transgender transition when I was caught between escalating my feminine gender craft or escaping back into my well worn, boring male world. 

The problem quickly became the more I escalated my attempts at being a girl, the more I wanted to do. More and more drama set in as I viewed myself in the mirror. Through it all, I wondered if I could ever put it all together and go out into the public as a novice transgender woman. Following years of escaping back, I finally did take a few tentative steps into the public eye. The first night I tried, I had decided to go to a small book and carry out convenience store just to see what would happen. I arrived and walked down the sidewalk near the store in a shopping center. As I tried to gather my courage to go into the store, I attempted to sneak a look at myself in the clothing store nearby. I could not really see my reflection and began to re-think my idea of going into the store I planned on. Then I decided my idea was not a good one and I headed home to escape back into my male self. 

For awhile, I felt relieved at my decision but then began to think I had taken the easy way out and if I continued on this path I would never discover if I could make it in the world as a transgender woman. Once I was able to locate and buy better fashion choices, including shoes and wigs, my mind started to change as far as escalating myself in the world. After going down a very bumpy road, my confidence increased to the point where I could try out the public again without escaping back to my safe male self. Even still, each time I did escape back, I grew increasingly disappointed in myself and very frustrated in the fact I was wasting all the time and effort I was putting into my femininization. 

Through all the ups and downs, I was slowly but surely gaining small amounts of confidence in what I was attempting to accomplish. In fact, I was scared of how intimidating the entire gender transition process was to me. Many times, I thought I was in too far over my head and was going to drown my entire existence in my quest to be a woman. Something always told me to keep going and the dream I was following would be worth it, so I continued to escalate my transition. 

At that point, one of the biggest surprises which happened to me occurred when I found out how welcoming other women could be. Very quickly I found women were way more apt to approach my feminine side and in return, I could learn how to interact with them also. There was nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. so escaping was out of the question. Mainly because I was living through one of the most exciting times of my life. Why would I ever want to escape. 

Still I found I needed to escalate my gender transition. My primary example was when I suddenly had a major mental shift one night when I was going out into the world. As I was going through what I was going to wear and how I was going to do my hair and makeup, it came to me I was no longer going out to trick the world into thinking I was a female, I was going out as a full-fledged transgender woman. I had taken my escalation to a whole other level and one I never wanted to go back to.  When I turned out to be successful. 

When my male life was crashing around me, the easy answer was to keep escalating into my feminine world. Which I did with gender affirming hormones. The magic little pills I started with almost immediately began to femininize my body and my inner emotions. To this day, when I change and apply my Estradiol hormone patches, I thank the powers to be I was healthy enough to undertake the program. 

I believe now, escalating into my feminine world saved my mental health and my life. The more confidence I gained as a transgender woman, the quicker my male self evaporated away. There would be no more escaping. 

Gender Prison

Image from Denis Oliveria
om UbSplsh

Many transgender women and trans men have spent numerous years in their own gender prisons. Sometimes referred to as closets. 

Unless you have had to spend time in your own prison with the walls closing in all the time, you have no idea of how bad it is. Just another proof being transgender is some sort if a choice. Why would we ever choose to possibly destroy ourselves with our gender issues. It all got to the point with me, I was doing all I could to manifest myself being as feminine as I could. When all along my male self was telling me I couldn't. 

I finally arrived at the point where I was given free time from my gender prison to explore the world as my new self. When I did, most certainly I discovered I wanted more and more free time. I discovered also, I needed a ton of work to prepare myself for freedom. I was not prepared for all the challenges I would have to face as a novice transgender woman. Since I had spent so much time cross dressing in my life, I thought how much harder could it be. I never factored in what my second wife was always trying to tell me, I did not really know much about being a woman and she was not going to do much to help me out of my gender prison. 

When she told me that, I reverted back to working ever harder to understand what she meant. Since I had studied women closely my entire life, I resolved myself to trying to get behind the feminine curtain to learn more. It would take me years to get there since it seemed I was living a life time sentence in my gender prison. Outside of a few varied chances to thrive, my prison seemed to be escape proof. How was I ever able to leave my prison without jeopardizing all the white male privileges I had worked so hard for such as family, friends and employment. It seemed the more I tried to escape, the more the walls closed in on me.

Once I staged my big gender prison break, there was no turning back. I discovered that even though my wife would not help me pull back the feminine gender curtain, other women would and I took advantage of their kindness. Even when I was able to, I found I was still looking over my shoulder for any male prison guards who were chasing me. It turned out, even in heels, I was faster than they were and I managed to outrun my naysayers which mainly was myself. 

With practice in the world, I finally put my prison time behind me and I set out to live my dream life as a fulltime transgender woman. One way or another, I had paid my gender dues for nearly half a century before I had the courage to fully transition. It felt so good to be let out of my gender prison and not have to go back. 

My parole officers turned out to be the women friends I found and cherished as I learned so much from them about living in a feminine world. When I used their input and included it with what my own inner woman was telling me, I was able to make a smooth transition even smoother. Plus, I was able to use my prison time as a powerful motivator of what not to do in the world. Even as a man, I tried to treat women differently than the other men around me. Mainly because I wanted so badly to be one of them. 

In the end, spending all the time in my gender prison did not do much for my life. I spent so much mental energy rebelling against my male world, I often wonder how much farther I could have gone if I had used all my resources. It wasn't to be because I was in my own gender prison and could not find the key.