The Second Time Around

 

JJ Hart (middle) at my first
Girls' Night Out. 

If you are one of the rare human beings to experience a second time around in life, you owe it to yourself and others to live it the best you can.

Being transgender can give you that rare insight into two of the main binary genders which should give you an edge in dealing with the everyday world. Having an intimate knowledge of whatever the other gender maybe thinking of us as trans women or trans men brings out fear in the public's eye. Who are we to possess such a wonderful scope of knowledge anyhow? It is especially bad with the male gender who has such a poor grasp of their sexuality to begin with. I know when I transitioned from male to female, one of my main concerns was my own sexuality. Was I expected to suddenly change my sexual preferences which had always been with women and suddenly start liking men. I even went to the point when I first came out when a straight woman friend of mine told me to buy bananas and practice. I will let your imagination do the rest.

We all know though there is so much more to a gender transition than sex when you set yourself up for the second round in life. I found I was leaving a life as a man where I was mildly successful and entering a totally new world full of women who were able and willing to question my existence in their world at all. Away from men, the women were a complex tribe, and it was difficult for me to be given the access to play with them behind the obvious gender curtains. First and foremost, just looking like a woman just got me in the game and the difficult part was just beginning. I spent hours and hours in the world just learning how to be the new me.

Suddenly, before I knew it, the doors to a totally different world opened for me and I was invited to the girls’ night’s outs. The invites could never replace the learning experiences young girls have when they are in their formative years and they get to go to girls’ overnighters with friends, but they were all I had to attempt to catch up on my gender homework. No chance to experiment with makeup or gossip about boys or other girls.

The main problem was, I had another male life to deal with at the same time. Looking back, I don’t know how or why I put up with all the gender stress and tension I did to make it to my dream. I guess the reason was I did not have the confidence to know if I could make such a major life changing step at all. We all have a lot to lose when we undertake such a step, don’t we? Plus, as I slid towards the idea I could live fulltime as a transgender woman, I was being accused of being selfish. Which made me feel guilty until I finally came to the conclusion I was being selfish. Because I had to save my own life.

As I was accepted into the girls’ sandbox around me by the majority of the women around me, my confidence grew that I could indeed live a second time around life as a transfeminine person. My long hidden inner female took over and surprisingly became a rather social person as I formed bonds with my small group of lesbian friends which was the best of all worlds for me. As I always say, the first and main thing my friends taught me was I did not need a man for validation. Which included my sexuality. All I needed to do was still keep an eye out for the rare bigot who hated me for no real reason. It turned out the haters would have to go through my cisgender friends to get to me, if they wanted to.

At that point in time, I met my wife Liz, and my second time around became easier and easier for me to live up to. I say live up to because I found myself at a point where I always dreamed of being. But I never thought I could make it. Never say never became a reality for me when Liz told me she never saw anything male about me. I was in gender heaven and stayed there until I realized what a heavy burden I needed to face. Here I was with the rare chance for a do over in my life and to not repeat the same mistakes I made as a man.

So far so good I think as I head down the stretch run of my life and I can be thankful for the chance to live two lives regardless of what the gender haters say.

 

Long Labor Day Weekend

 

Image from Anna Storsul
on UnSplash

Labor Day weekend is upon us in the United States which gives us an opportunity to take an extra day off and think about what got us here and how close we are coming to losing it.

Even though I have never been in a union myself, I am an amateur historian and know what unions did to transform this country. All you need to do is some basic research on how bad working conditions were in the steel industry as well as coal mining and elsewhere to see what unions brought about. So, on Labor Day, I salute them.

Elsewhere, the weekend this year features some beautiful weather with sunny blue skies and very low humidity for a change around here in the Ohio River Valley (Cincinnati.) Of course, the early fall like conditions won’t last forever and soon we will be back into summer’s last call. In a couple of weeks, my wife Liz and I will be headed for the East Coast, Boston, Maine and more so I am hoping for the reasonably good weather to hang around until then.

By now, you may be asking what does any of this have to do with being transgender? The answer is it has everything to do with being myself as a transfeminine person. Since this marks our fifth bus tour over the years of hanging out with other cisgender women waiting for my chance to use the bathroom, I still have lingering paranoia with using women’s rooms which goes back to my earliest days of cross dressing in public. Even though I have not had any problems in the past with anyone else, I still have the idea it only takes one bigot on the bus to ruin my trip. At least, this time we are traveling through more liberal blue states, so I won’t have that to worry about. As I said, my lingering fear is subsiding, so I can concentrate on having a good time and seeing the sights of New England. The last trip we were on a woman asked if Liz and I were sisters, so you cannot get more validation than that.

Closer to home before we leave, tonight we are going to dinner at our favorite restaurant with her son. It is another venue I have rarely ever been misgendered in and have never had any serious problems. It always feels good to just exist and enjoy myself since I worked so long and hard to get here as a transgender woman. The more I can fly under the gender radar in today’s world, the better I feel.

Before we go, I will have to shave closely, apply moisturizer, powder and lipstick before I change out of my The Ohio State sweatshirt and into a frilly feminine top and brush out my hair. All of which are still fun for me to do. Not just something I have to do to present better in the world.

Finishing out the day, it will be time to head home and watch the end of summer Cincinnati fireworks display. The display is always huge and attracts nearly a million people on both sides of the Ohio River. Back in the day, when I was younger and another person, I used to come down every year for the Booms. But age and mobility have caught up to me, taken their toll, and we just watch them on television now. Then let the out-of-control neighborhood idiots set their fireworks off and scare the animals and any near veterans with combat PTSD. Out of the two cats Liz and I have; one hates any sort of loud noise.

As with many other holidays, Labor Day presents yet another milestone in my transgender life. I can remember quite vividly when I used alcohol on holidays to dull the pain of not having the chance to spend them as my feminine self. I was fortunate to have escaped my closet and the control alcohol had on me before it was too late. It turned out it was all in front of me all along if and when I had the courage to reach out and seize my opportunity to transition and just be me.

I guess you could say, I needed to labor to do it, but it was worth the effort. When we toast ourselves tonight with our Margaritas, I will propose a toast to all the work we three have put into to where we are today. And, to all of you, no matter where you are today, have a chance to pause and celebrate the gender journey you are on, or have yet to do. Buckle up! It is one hell of a ride. 

Out od Sight...Out of Mind?

 

My wife Liz on left and daughter on right.

Most if not all transgender women and trans men go through phases in their life when they think gender issues are out of sight and out of mind. It is not entirely different than the moves some state legislatures (Ohio) are going through to try to erase us in the public’s eye.

If you read my posts at all, you know how I feel about that. Trans people have always been around and always will be. Attempts to erase us will be futile. On a lesser but just as important level, we try to erase ourselves by purging our lives too. I know the guilt of being a cross dresser or transgender woman became too much for me to handle and I threw out most of my treasured feminine wardrobe and makeup. Out of sight, out of mind I thought.

In the long term and the short term, none of my purges worked because I refused to accept my true self. I had my life all backwards and I was not a man who cross dressed as a woman, but a woman who cross dressed as a man. Until I figured it out, I kept trying to hide the obvious. Of course, it did not help as I started with two gender strikes against me. I went through birth as a male and then had to go through male puberty and suffer from what I called testosterone poisoning. My body kept the bullies away and allowed me to play sports but caused me torment when I was in front of the mirror trying to be a pretty girl.

As life went on, I thought for the most part I had learned to live with my gender dysphoria the best I could. To this day, though, I wished I could be a “normal” male. How much better could my life be if I could socialize with the other males around me without feeling as if I was an outsider. I grew tired of being an actor inside my own skin. The only thing I could do was mentally try to get rid of my feminine self. Taking me full circle back to why I was keeping all those clothes, wigs and makeup anyway. It took me by throwing them away to understand exactly what the problem was. It was not a problem unless I it made one, which I was by purging again.

Deep down I knew I was wrong and very shortly I would be re-stocking my fashion and make up to try my best to present feminine again to myself and the world. However, I was very stubborn and my male self-hung on way too long refusing to give up on his hard-earned male privileges. Life could have been much easier by staying where I was in the gender world, but it was just wrong, and I couldn’t. The more I lived as a transgender woman, the more natural I felt, and I never wanted to go back into the male world I had made the best out of.

Increasingly, the male purge was looking to be the one I was going to attempt to make. I was sick of living a gender lie, and I wanted to reverse my idea of living. I wanted to feel “normal” again but this time around a group of cisgender women. Flipping the gender script on my life was the most difficult thing I had ever attempted to do, but somehow, I made it through the female gatekeepers and did it.

In my new transfeminine life, I was rarely out of sight and out of mind. I had a lot of help to do it who I will never forget. I had spent my whole life chasing a dream and had finally achieved it. As I symbolically and literally gave my male clothes to charity, I stopped to remember the entirety of what I was doing. I was giving up the male side who had dominated me for so long. To be sure, he had served me well, but it was time to go, and this final purge was a triumphant one for my transgender woman who had waited so long to live. After all, she had her life taken away several times when she was purged nearly out of existence.

She survived and so did I and everything in her power to make things better. When I worried how I would be perceived in a new world. She had my back when it mattered, and it did. Even in the days when she had to give me quite a bit of tough love. She had to watch me grow through my ill-advised teen cross-dressing years into a presentation I could be proud of or at least satisfied with.

Out of sight, out of mind never worked for me.

 

 

Diversity versus Adversity

 

Image from Nik on UnSplash.

I was shocked and disappointed when I heard the first flimsy reports that the Minneapolis shooter was transgender and that the Cracker Barrel restaurant corporate higher ups had deleted their LGBTQ page from their on-line presence. As a community, the transgender women and trans men don’t need any more bad publicity or adversity as we careen towards the 2026 midterm elections. It seems diversity in our society is increasingly in short supply led by you know who, TACO tRumpt the clown.

Hopefully, Cracker Barrell can be boycotted to the point that Target was and be led farther down their financial rathole and the public at large will quit listening to the same old lies spewed by the Republican politicians about the trans community, but in my native Ohio at least, I will believe it when I see it. In the two major elections (governor and senator) two tRumpt supported candidates are running and the ignorant populace of Ohio has not figured out yet, they have been fleeced of their rights.

On the bright side, and there is one, I live in a blue (democratic) leaning part of Cincinnati and I have recently seen two new diversity yard signs in front of homes where my wife Liz and I take our morning walks. But we don’t vote for the city of Cincinnati mayor since we are in a suburb, and I fear for the re-election of the Democratic mayor who has done a terrible job dealing with all of the violence mainly in the downtown area. And to make matters worse, his opponent is JD Vance’s brother and is as worthless. Maybe I am being paranoic, but I doubt it the way politics have gone around here. However, the Democratic mayor has done a great job of supporting the local LGBTQ community.

As far as diversity versus adversity goes, it sure feels like we transgender women and trans men must once again get ready for our unfair share of adversity. Hopefully, the “blue wave” midterm vote will wash away all the worthless politicians who have refused to stand up to TACO and are ruining our country. I am so afraid I am dealing with seeing the end of America as I know it.

I always say what can you do? A lot even if you are deep in your gender closet, take the time to research ALL of your candidates down to the school boards where the political roaches first sneak in, because once you get roaches, it is difficult to get them out. Just think about your future and how it may change if your situation changes to the point where you can complete your transition. What sort of world will you want to transition into. One with diversity and kindness, or the one we are seeing now.

Plus, for those of you who are fortunate to live in more liberal parts of the country, appreciate and hold on to your freedoms. Hopefully you will never have to go through the barrage of lies against the transgender community that we go through in Ohio. Such as the man running for senate approved all elementary school sex change operations. At some point, all the serious Democratic candidates (including Newsom) are going to have to learn the proper response to the BS questions such as do you approve of men playing women’s sports. It is a simple answer, if they just use it. Trans women are not men at all.

It's happened folks. It is time for an all-hands approach to supporting our candidates for office. I just hope it is not too late for diversity over adversity to triumph. It can be done, look at what happened to Target when they rejected the LGBTQ community. Do it to Cracker Barrel now.

The elected officials in Washington are not clowns, they are dead serious about taking your rights away, no matter how you identify, cross dresser or transgender, it does not matter, the warning signs are there.

 

 

 

Gender Immigration

 

L'eggs said it best.

With all the negative publicity being brought to the new immigrants to this country by the orange felon/pedo in Washington, I thought it might be time to connect the dots to my own immigration. A gender one.

My immigration plans began as a vacation. I was tired of the male world I was competing in and taking a break as a cross-dressed girl in makeup was a great way to escape my life. Little did I know, from these humble beginnings, I was starting a lifelong journey which in many ways, I am still on over a half a century later. Had I known, I would have ever attempted to undertake such a radical immigration.

Early on, I was just looking to grab the so-called low hanging fruit of cross dressing. I enjoyed the feel of the clothes, all the way to the thrill of hose on my freshly shaven legs. Then, I slowly began to realize so much else was happening. Increasingly I wanted to be more and more like a girl and started to wonder about pushing my male self out. It was difficult because I came from a highly male dominated family. As I pushed forward, my immigration into the feminine side of life became more intense. I tried my best to acquire new more fashionable clothes and even bought my own makeup and panty hose. Do you remember the “L'eggs” panty hose which came in plastic egg shaped containers which it seemed you could buy everywhere, and is still made today. I learned the hard way; how easy it was to destroy a pair when I unfortunately ran one of the legs. Ruining my outfit.

Progression was slowed by a late-teen collision with serving time in the military due to the Vietnam war. Obviously, I could not bring any of my “stash” of women’s clothes or makeup with me, so I was stuck. No more gender immigration for at least three years of my young life. There were several major positive things which happened for me while I was stuck being a man in the Army. A prime example was all the traveling I was able to do around the world in places such as Thailand and Europe (Germany). The whole process enabled me to keep my mind off my gender issues and set me up with the idea I could outrun my problems. Which, of course, turned out to be impossible. Which should be the topic for another blog post.

After the Army, my life changed again as I entered the world of parenthood. Being a parent of a daughter was an unexpected but pleasant surprise, and my gender immigration was put on hold briefly again. I say briefly, because I discovered my transgender issues ran deeper than I had thought. My presentation as a novice transfeminine person was coming along. My first wife did not care, and I was able to explore my potential future as a gender immigrant at events such as Halloween parties. Each party to me represented a chance to see how I was being accepted as a woman in society.

After a few years, I ended up divorcing my first wife and marrying my second. She also knew about and accepted my cross dressing from the beginning of our relationship but never accepted me being transgender as I immigrated towards being a woman. My male side was like being the Titanic, slowly sinking and then picking up speed with her fighting me all the way. It turned out, the issues I was facing were like the tip of the iceberg. With most of it being hidden from everyone. Including me. She tragically passed away before the final resolution in our relationship was ever decided.

When she moved on to the other side of existence, it was left up to me to decide the future of my immigration. I had certainly paid my dues by taking on all the menial and not so menial work of being a woman. I was on gender affirming hormones and was living as much as I was able as a transgender woman, so I was close to filling out my immigration papers and was ready to go into a world I had only dreamed of. My presentation had improved to the point where I was not the most attractive woman in the room, but I could handle myself to the point where most of the world just did not notice me. So, my immigration was more successful than I ever thought possible.

Perhaps the best part of immigrating was learning to accept and love myself for who I really was. Which meant all the hassles I had over the years as I tested out the world, made my immigration worth it.

 

 

All I Had was Time

 

Image from Natalia Rabinovych
on UnSplash.

When we are younger, time seems like it is less of a commodity. When we are in school for example, all we want to do is graduate into the world.  For transgender women and transgender men transitioning, we often take time for granted. At least I did.

As I was coming out of my gender closet, regardless of not having much guidance on where I wanted to go to achieve my dream of living as a woman, I took my time. For a while, when I had finished serving my time in the military, the only outlet I had to being out in the public’s eye were the yearly Halloween parties I went to. Finally, I could see the writing on my gender wall and knew I would somehow have to do something, so I did not have to wait another long year to go out again. Time was being wasted.

It turned out, I could not see the forest for the trees, because there was a huge world just waiting for me if I just had the courage to do something about it. I needed to hitch up my big girl panties, not be a victim because of the bigots, and do something about escaping my closet. The problem was, I was always making excuses about why I could not do something as a novice cross dresser or transgender woman. So, what if my ego was wounded when I was laughed at early on, I just needed to go back home and figure out what I was doing wrong and fix it. Time was going by, and I was not getting any younger. Little did I know then, as I was in my thirties, how much farther I would have to travel.

I had my own transgender biological clock I was dealing with. Like any woman, I knew I only had a finite number of years to look my best to try to socialize in the world. All of this happened before I learned appearance was just the stepping off point when I tried to interact with the feminine world. My wife tried to tell me, but I would not listen, and I lost years in my male to female transition to learn for myself what she was talking about. Again, I was spending too much time as a victim wanting my wife to explain what she was talking about and not explaining it better to me. The problem was, I would not have listened anyway, my old male ego was still too strong.

In the meantime, I was getting myself caught up in major gender contradictions. I was spending up to three days of my week trying to learn the basics of being a transfeminine person and then turn around and having to revert back to the old male life I increasingly wanted no part of. It was no way to live and often I felt as if I was one of those jugglers I saw on television when I was a kid, keeping several plates balanced at once in the air. Ultimately, the entire gender back and forth nearly killed me.

My suicide attempt, among other things, woke me up to the fact I did not have all the time in the world. Especially if my self-destructive actions were trying to take it away. If I ever was going to have a chance to achieve my dream of living as a transgender woman, I might have less time than I thought to do it. At that point, I shifted my transition plans into high gear and began to explore in earnest if I could do it at all. Maybe it was my impossible dream. One way or another, I was in my fifties and needed to decide what I was going to do.

As I began to carve out my new life as a transgender woman, I needed to quickly learn what worked for me and what did not. My biggest move was when I worked my way out of gay venues where all they did was perceive me as a drag queen and enter the real world where I needed to prove I was more than just a man in a dress, wearing makeup and a wig. With more than a little help from my inner female who had waited so long to live, I was able to establish myself as a viable person to the public. As my trans woman friend Racquel said, I passed out of sheer will power, which I did. I proved I was not trying to fool anyone into thinking I was someone who I was not. For better or for worse, my friends knew they were dealing with a unique woman who had used her lifetime to arrive at the same point as they did.

Maybe I had spent my time wisely. One way or another, I learned a lot about the binary genders as time flew by. 

 

More than Theatrics

 

Christine Jorgensen circa 
early 1950's. 

Deep down I knew being feminine for me was much more than a theatrical exercise dressed in front of the mirror as a girl. I wanted to do more than just look like a girl; I wanted to live like one. I wanted to be the one with the pretty clothes that all the boys admired.

It turned out I was ahead of myself as far as my gender dysphoria was concerned. Gender dysphoria, as well as the term transgender had not yet caught up with the public at large. It was still transvestite, transsexual or Christine Jorgensen or nothing for me as far as having any idea anyone else in the world was like me at all. Perhaps you may not know it, but Jorgensen was supposedly the first widely known transsexual to come out with the very public news of her gender realignment surgery in the early 1950’s.  No theatrics involved, just a lot of publicity, I guess.

I thought of Jorgensen and the gender loneliness I felt the other day when I got to watch “Some Like it Hot” on our local PBS station. I was approximately ten years old when the film was released in 1959 and I remember being mesmerized by the idea men could be women at all. Even still, I don’t think, or remember, if I connected the dots yet to how I was feeling about myself. I was still very much stuck in the everyday struggles of being a boy.

When the internet became popular, I began to discover a whole, wide wonderful world of gender possibilities. Including a term which I had never heard of before, transgender. As I understood the term, it took away all the possible theatrics of just looking like a girl and brought up the possibility of living as one. At that point, I began to wonder if I was a cross dresser at all, and not more. The only thing I thought I knew was I was still in some sort of middle ground as my gender dysphoria went. I felt much more that I was so much more than the average cross-dresser, but not quite there yet as far as I wanted all the surgeries Jorgensen and others were going through.

To maintain any sense of mental stability at all, I began to explore the world the best I could to see if I fit in with this new transgender term I was reading about. My best and exciting evenings came about when I was able to be invited to and attend small diverse parties at a transsexual’s house in nearby Columbus, Ohio. It was there I learned about the dangers of being trapped by a much bigger and powerful man, all the way to being picked up by a lesbian I had never met before. Most importantly though, I was there to observe and learn anything I could from the hostess, a transsexual retired fireperson from Columbus who was headed to surgery. Michelle was beautiful and I was dazzled. I discovered there were no theatrics from her, she was as real as could be and I wondered if I could ever achieve what she had.

The main thing I did learn was, my deep feelings about living as a transfeminine person may not go the same way as Michelle’s did, but it was possible for me to live my own successful life as a woman if I tried hard enough. That is when I learned to put my cross-dressing theatrics away which had served me well and I entered another phase of my life. Michelle was beautiful and exotic in her own way, but I could do it too, just in my own way.

I would be kidding myself and all of you if I said finding my new self was ever easy. I needed to make all the difficult decisions about risking everything in my life which was important to me. Such as a loyal, long-term spouse, family, friends and good employment. The same things we all go through as we struggle to transition as a transgender woman. When I finally decided I needed to go the distance and give all my male clothes to charity, the weight was off from my shoulders to not live a theatrical existence as a man anymore. I spent over fifty years fighting a gender battle I could not win as the cards were stacked against me.

I was able to put all the gender questions I suffered through in my past and build a new transfeminine life the best I could. I just had to quit the theatrics to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

Come Out Swinging

 

Image from Chase Li
on UnSplash.

Often, I write about running home to dress in my skirts and put makeup on to hide the failures I was feeling as a male.

My plan worked well until I discovered I was advancing so far and so quickly as a novice cross dresser or young transgender girl, I was unknowingly destroying my hiding place. Someone turned the light on in my closet and suddenly I had nowhere to go. I needed to come up with a plan to come out swinging or I was doomed. In addition, I still had to be very careful not to be caught and end up in a psychiatrist’s office declaring me mentally ill. Then I would really have nowhere to hide.

The better I became at the art of makeup and dressing myself, the more I needed to consider what I was doing and wondering if I should come out swinging at all. The problem continued to be, I was building more male privileges in the life I was living. My life was like shadow boxing myself as I sought out answers. Like most of you, I was risking a lot as I came closer to pushing all my life’s chips to the center of table and betting it all on the fact I was a transgender woman all along.

Then I went into my highly recommended experimentation years of my life. In order to have any sort of an idea if I wanted to live as a transgender woman, I needed to walk a mile in my new high heeled shoes. Those were the scary yet exciting nights when I escaped the gay venues I was going to and began to attempt to establish myself as a regular in lesbian and other straight venues I was used to going to as a man. When I did, I discovered I needed to make another transition from serious cross dresser to transgender woman exploring the world. To my amazement I was successful when I went to venues such as TGI Fridays and socialized with other professional women. Maybe I did not have to swing so hard after all to escape the dark confines of my gender closet.

To be sure, I still had setbacks when I came out into such a different world, but I had enough gender euphoria to realize I could live out my dream if I worked hard enough at it. At first, I suffered from the “what I thought a feminine life would be” syndrome. I was trying to put all those years of closely watching how women lived into actual practice without paying my dues in the world. While I resented the fact, no one would let me see behind the cisgender woman gender curtain, I was becoming a victim which did me no good in the short or long term. So what if I did not understand what I was doing wrong, I just had to figure it out and do better.

One of my major problems was solved when I finally came to the conclusion I was never going to be accepted as a cisgender woman, but I could find my own version of womanhood on my own path. That is when I started to wear only one wig, settled on one name and began to build a new serious life as a transfeminine person in the world. As I settled into a new life, I found that many people (especially women) appreciated my honesty in a world of fake people. I was surprised at all the female attention I received and was relieved I did not have to attempt to change my sexuality.

The more I changed, it seemed the more I stayed the same as my long hidden feminine soul took control finally. I was dealing with life on a one-to-one basis for a change without having to swing away all the time just to survive. As HRT hormones entered my life, it was just another example to me of what took me so long. My body took to the gender affirming hormones flawlessly and I was off to yet another transfeminine adventure. My age and hormonal status led me down a new road of dealing with confrontations, no more could I try to macho my way through trouble, I needed to take the feminine path and try not to get into a situation I could not get out of before it happened. Or no more swinging away for me. I needed to use my brain for a change.

As I have pointed out in previous posts, I was never a good athlete and could never hit a curveball when I tried to play baseball. I finally took it all to heart and quit trying to hit a curveball altogether and settled into watching the boys play baseball (and girls too) when I did not have to play. I was tired of banging my head against a hard gender wall and ended up where I always should have been as a transgender woman. I just wish I had not been so stubborn when I was doing it and had shed my male self-long before I did.

 

Trans Woman at a Photo Shoot

 

Example of Liz's hand beaded work
from Liz T Designs,

This happened years ago when the world went through an all too brief softening on its views of different kinds of women. Way before the current orange felon/pedo came along trying to destroy our world.

As I remember, it all started with a few big brand beauty products moving away from the same old skinny models and began signing women who were closer to the norm for their commercials. I was encouraged when I saw new models who never looked the same and even closer to what I had achieved in my cross-dressing adventures.

At that time, our native Cincinnati had just opened its second huge crafters mall in an old shoe factory. It featured everything from artists painting to blacksmiths working their metal. So, you can tell, perhaps crafters was not the right word to use for these serious working people. It just so happens; my wife Liz is a very talented crafter of her own right. She went to art school, and she works on everything from painting to hand-beaded work to knitted clothing items which she sells online. She was very interested in everything which was going on in the mall and we stopped in many of the shoppes.

One of the unique stops we made was at a handmade book shop. Liz had been wanting to try her hand at trying to make her own journals, so she struck up a conversation with the owner as I browsed. It turned out the owner and crafter was interested in me too and was very nice to me. She also had a book to sign for any interested followers. We signed up and I thought that would be the end of it, but it wasn’t.

To my surprise, a couple of weeks later I received an email from the owner asking me if I would be interested in participating in a photo shoot, she and a photographer she knew were putting together a book project which featured women from different backgrounds to submit to an exhibition in Chicago. After the initial surprise and shock subsided that they had thought of me after such a brief meeting, I jumped at the opportunity. Even though the idea scared me to death. I just could not turn down the chance to have a professional photographer take my picture. Such a long way from using my old cellphone in a mirror.

Before I knew it, my appointment time had arrived and it was time to hitch up my big girl’s panties and head to the photographer’s studio, also in the big mall, so I knew how to get there. Once there, I was dressed in the requested neutral black sweater and ready for my leap into the great unknown. One of my first questions involved my makeup and was assured I looked fine, and I sat back and let the photographer do her work. My immediate reaction to everything was my ego enjoyed being the center of everything around me and outside of an old Glamour Shot appointment years before (remember them?), the only time this would happen for me in my life.

Then I had to sit back and wait for the next part of the process, when the book was actually published and sent to Chicago. I just hoped I could represent the Cincinnati transgender community well. Finally, the news came back that the book did not win the competition but there would be an official party for it to come up at one of Cincinnati’s smaller museums. As one of the models, I was invited. Of course I had to go, but what would I wear to a book unveiling party? To be honest, I don’t remember what I wore after going through my closet. I did not want to be too formal but look nice at the same time, and I think I achieved my goal.

For the first time, I was able to see the book put together and of course I was not satisfied with how I looked. Being the perfectionist I never was, I thought the photographer could have done a better job at lighting my face to de-emphasize my jawline. But she didn’t. As far as the other women in the book, there were a wide range of choices they made including women of color and heavy-set women away from the usual beauty stereotypes cisgender women must deal with.

Sadly, I don’t know whatever happened to the pictures I received from the photo shoot, so I can’t show them to you. All I have are the memories of being singled out in a positive way because I am transgender and the once in a lifetime chance to do a photo shoot because I was.