Connections through Isolation?

 

My wife Liz on left
from the JJ Hart Archives

When I finally began to be successful in my femininized public pursuits away from the mirror, I was content to be alone in the world.

By being alone, I didn't have to face any communication problems with anyone else I faced. Essentially, I just passed through their world quickly and was gone. I did not want to know them better and have to challenge myself into interactions with strangers. Ironically, my idea did not last long as I was increasingly thrust into public interactions as a transgender woman I did not want. In the beginning, I just was not ready to look another person in the eye and risk ridicule.

I learned quickly, my public interactions would be overwhelmingly with other women. Initially, I interacted with clerks in clothing stores who were mainly interested in helping me with my money, except for the few who wanted to help me with my fashion. It did not take me long to realize what was going on and then move on. 

I began to stop and eat lunch to extend my shopping trips which meant ordering from a menu with a server and/or bartender. I found sitting at the bar made for a more personal experience unless the staff was very busy with other patrons and I could try out speaking with others as a trans woman. Very soon out of forced habit, I found myself relaxing more and even enjoying the experience. It was like I was completing a long lost part of my new personality as I left the mirror and entered the world. It was a challenge and I grew to love it. I discovered also many more women than men wanted to know more about me. Women were curious while men were scared of me it seemed and I loved it. 

Along the way, when I first began to communicate I tried to mimic the voices I was hearing from other women and try to repeat doing it until I thought I was doing it right. I even took voice lessons for awhile to improve my vocal presentation for my transgender womanhood.

Still, after my second wife passed away, I was extremely lonely. Not only was I facing finding another person I loved at the age of sixty, I also had the added pressure of doing it as my new version of my authentic feminine self. I was prepared to spend the rest of my life by myself. Little did I know I would not have to. Initially, when I went out to supposedly socialize and find new friends, I was going out to be by myself. If my gender was never challenged I would have taken the easy way out and would simply go back home to my two dogs. 

If it wasn't for a bartender at one of the venues I had become a regular in, I would have remained in the social rut I was in. One night not long after I arrived, she served me my first drink and quickly asked me if I would be interested in meeting her single lesbian mother. Of course I said yes, and a friendship  started that has continued over ten years till today. She is the woman who took me to the NFL Monday Night Football game. A very scary experience which cemented my arrival as a full-fledged transgender woman in the world. But that wasn't all that happened at my favorite venue. Another night, as I sat alone to be by myself, another woman came in to pick up her to-go order. While she was waiting, she slipped a note down the bar to me asking if I was interested in having a drink sometime. I said yes and the three of us ended up having a great time the next couple of years as we watched sports, drank too much and had fun at lesbian mixers. My two new friends ushered me into a world I never thought I could go.

Against all predictions, my connections through isolation worked very well for me. My new friends which included my wife Liz who also identifies as a lesbian, all helped me into my own important version of transgender womanhood. Destiny was certainly helping me during this period of my life.  

Seraching for Me

Image from Selcuk S
On UnSplash.

Ironically, during my life I have spent too much time searching for who the true me was.

Naturally, I am referring to finding the springboard I needed to determine which gender I was. When I was younger, I made the habit of waking up in the morning wondering if I was a boy or a girl. I was very gender fluid for years before I decided which gender direction was the correct one for me. The problem was I needed to put on my gender blinders and attack the world daily as a male. Something I never wanted to do.

It turned out the springboard I needed to find out the me I was looking for was still a long way in coming. I still needed to cross or follow many paths before I found me. More precisely, I had parenthood come into my life as well as many challenges such as military service, marriages and just life in many ways. I was constantly searching for my gender by going out and exploring the world to find out if I could ever achieve my dream of transgender womanhood. The journey was so difficult when I experienced negative feedback From stares and giggles, all the way to people singling me out for pictures, I did it all before I made a better effort to blend in with the rest of the world.

All in all, I found just being me was going to be much more complicated than I ever thought possible. It all started for me in the days when I always thought the grass was always going to be greener for me on the feminine side of the border. I discovered, even though my trip across the border was terrifying at times, on the other hand I felt so good and natural, I knew there could and would be no turning back. No matter how easy it would have been. At times, I was even a bit jealous of men who had never experienced any gender issues and were able to live out their lives enjoying male privileges. It all just was not in the cards for me during my life.

Just me, turned out to be so much more. I am a parent, a grandparent and a spouse to a supporting wife. In other words, I am so fortunate to be surrounded by people who care for me. Plus during my life I have been able to take an in-depth dive into how both main binary genders operate. What really breaks my heart is when one of the bigoted transphobic political commercials comes on with all it's lies. I want to tell the haters that even though I am a transgender woman, I have a life not so different from theirs. I am just busy being me.

Perhaps the problem is, since my life turned out to be more complex than the so-called norm, so people don't want to understand or care. 

By this time in my life, I have learned being just me will have to be good enough. I have worked too long and hard to give it up now. From having a gender fluid lonely youth to finding my true self in trans womanhood, I think I have been fortunate to end up where I am. Plus, I will continue to advocate for all transgender women or trans men such as my transgender grandchild with their whole life ahead. There is so much to do. Maybe I can just be a positive example to another novice transgender person still living firmly in their closet. Who knows? Maybe you can be next to escape and live as your authentic self.

Passing the Big Tests

 

Image from Shifaaz Shamoon
on UnSplash.

Throughout the years, I found out I had time after time when I needed to "pass" or present well as a feminine person in key situations.

Probably, there are too many to remember but here are a few I recall besides the major one I always write about. It was when I went out to see if I could exist in a world of single professional women in a bar/restaurant I went to as a guy. I really wanted to see if I could make it from the other gender side I had always dreamed of. I wanted to be the other women so badly and now I found I could actually do it. Of course from that point forward, my life changed and I could move forward on a different gender path. 

Forward had it's own set of challenges. One aspect I was really successful at was accomplishing two things at once such as going to the grocery store. By doing so, I was accomplishing a task which most women do again as my feminine self. From there I was able to expand my horizons to other venues such as antique malls where I could admire myself in the old mirrors and at the same time shop for a gift for my second wife. The effort was especially valuable around the Christmas season. 

All along, my experiences were adding to my overall confidence in my new exciting life. Even though, I did not really approve of or buy into the concept of passing, I did approve of blending into the world as part of my transgender womanhood. I was cherishing the time I spent in my new life and increasingly hating any of the time I needed to go back to my old male ways. I was fascinated with how quickly I was adjusting to my new feminine ways. The entire process proved to me I should have been living this way all this time.

Still, I had big tests to pass. It seemed I was going back to school and everytime I passed one test, there was another to go. Another one I just went through was having a mammogram. As I wrote yesterday, mammogram day was upon me again and the nurse could not have been nicer. She asked me about my family history with breast cancer and we went on from there without any invasive questions. She was much better than the nurse last year who acted as if I was some sort of bother.

To arrive at the point I am today, I needed to pass the communication test. There was a time when I would be shy and reluctant to look another woman in the eye when I was talking to her. With quite a bit of practice and trial and error, I found myself enjoying the interaction with other women. I have passed the gender test.

Of course life will always present other challenges around blind corners. I just hope I am up to the challenge, especially when someday I know I will have to face off with a transphobic person. In the mean time, I will do the best I can to pass the big tests when I can. It all continues to be so different than back in the male days when I could simply try to out bluster the other guy. Over the years, I have had so many knives I have pulled out of my back from other women, I think I am ready for more claw marks.

It's Mammogram Day

 

JJ Hart, image from Columbus, Ohio.

Once a year, my doctor puts in a request for a mammogram screening for me. Mainly because breast cancer runs in the family. My maternal grandmother died of it back in the 1950's when I was quite young. 

If you have never experienced a mammogram, there is some minor discomfort involved but nothing major. In fact, I consider the whole procedure to be a rite of passage of sorts for me into my own transgender womanhood .Even though I have a difficult remembering for sure, I think this is at least my sixth or seventh mammogram. So by now, I have a very good idea of what I am facing. 

For the most part, I have been met with an inclusive caring staff and have had only only one experience with an unpleasant nurse who asked me vague questions about if I had any work done down below. Like it was any of her business one way or another. She was border line evil and happily I have never seen her again. Anymore questions like that and I would have had to report her.

I am going to a new, closer hospital today for the test and I will be interested to see how it goes. Plus it could be my last breast test because of my age. My Doctor said no one gets them anymore past the age of seventy five. So I guess when you get old, you are on your own. Regardless, I am hoping for a clear mammogram today since my blood work did not come back so good. I have an appointment with hematology coming up in mid November. Even though I want to worry about it, I am trying my best not to build any un-necessary bridges to jump off of before I need to. 

I know this is a short post but I need to get ready to go here fairly soon. It's a fairly rapid procedure, so I should have most of the results back today.  

Running but not Hiding

 

Inage from JJ Hart
at the Cincinnati Witches Ball.

Over the years I considered myself the complete procrastinator. If I could put off anything, I did. 

My running and hiding continued unabated when I began to express myself as a girl. In fact, it got worse. Once I had the opportunity to cross dress and jump in front of the mirror, I could not wait to get back. I wanted to so bad, I tried my best to put my male life on hold until I could. I was running as hard as I could but was making no real headway. The real problem of course was because I was attempting to run my gender life backwards. I was a girl all along who was forced into being a boy and I needed to be increasingly careful to hide it.

The older I became, the more running I needed to do to hide my true gender. Even though I needed to take a break from my running when I was in the military, when I returned to society, I picked up where I left off. This time, I tried changing jobs and geographical locations to hide my true nature which was increasingly leading me to accepting me into transgender womanhood. I picked up and moved my small family from more conservative Ohio to liberal leaning New York City as an example. Deep down I felt I could express my gender desires there more effectively. Within two years, I more or less discovered I was wrong and decided to move back to my native Ohio. 

My moves continued around Ohio as I sought out the ideal job when in fact I was running from myself. I finally discovered no matter where I was, my gender issues would be there also. I was good at running but bad at hiding as I slowly added others into my secret world. For example, both my first and second wives knew I was a cross dresser and/or transvestite before we were married. The problem was I was so much more than a person who wanted to wear the clothes of the opposite gender, I wanted to be the opposite gender. Which was the deal breaker for my second wife.

It took me years to grow into my authentic feminine self as I slowly experimented in the public's eye.. All of a sudden the only people I was hiding from were the most important ones in my life. Which certainly did not make life any easier. I am referring to my family, friends and bosses. By far the three most important people I needed to come out to if I was going to ever live my dream as a transgender woman. At the same time, I was successfully building up a new life as a trans person so once again I was somewhere in the gray area of running but for once not hiding. The entire process, caused me tremendous mental health problems. Running head on into my old unwanted male life when I was trying my best to learn a new femininized existence was no fun.

Essentially what I did was keep running until my second wife as well as many of my close male friends had passed away. Leaving me fewer and fewer people to let into my gender reality. I would not recommend doing a transition the way I did but we are all different and it worked for me.

I ran until I could not anymore and finally was mentally exhausted enough to put my male life behind me and live my truth. All hiding was behind me.   

Out of My Mind, Into the World

Image from
the JJ Hart
Archives.

There were many times during my transgender transition I was thinking I was somehow out of my mind. 

I even went as far as telling others there was something wrong with me. Of course there was something wrong and it was because I was trying to live as a man, not my natural woman. It just took me too many years to realize I was doing everything so backwards when it came to dealing with my gender issues. I was not a man cross dressing as a woman, I was the opposite, a woman cross dressing as a man trying desperately to get by. It seemed so unfair because of all the time and effort I put into having my man card. 

Then, I began to put as much effort as I could into my girl self. I tried my best to observe the girls around me in school and model myself after them. Of course in those days, I was severely limited  by my family and financial situation. Even still, I persisted through the idea I had something wrong with me just because I wanted to be a girl. Plus, I knew if I was ever caught cross dressing into my more normal self, I would be sent off to the first non-understanding therapist my parents could find and he would label me mentally ill when I knew deep down I wasn't.

Adding to my gender difficulties was the fact I was so alone. In the pre-internet days, any information about men wanting to be women was very hard to come by and I was convinced I was the only person in the world who felt the same way I did. It wasn't until somehow I discovered Virginia Prince and Transvestia magazine did I understand there was quite the community of men who called themselves transvestites. Once I did make the discovery, I knew somehow I needed to interact with the nearest group to me in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio which was still quite the distance away. Regardless, I knew I needed to make the connection. I still vividly remember the diversity of the mixers I went to. I thought by reading the so-called hetero restrictions on the members would limit the diversity of attendees but it did not. There were everyone from cigar smoking cross dressers in cowboy hats seemingly afraid of losing too much of their masculinity all the way to the impossibly feminine transsexuals who had  worked hard to lose all of their maleness.

In the middle of it all, was me wondering where I fit in. I was too much woman for the cross dressers and not enough for the transsexuals. Once again I was frustrated with my results as I worked my way out of my mind and into the world. 

It took me quite a bit of work to fully make it into the world. The steps I took led me away from the old restrictive transvestite mixers, all the way to being invited to smaller diverse parties in Columbus, Ohio which I enjoyed immensely. Primarily because I was accepted for the person I was becoming. I was heading into the world for once because no one knew or cared about knowing my old male self. I even took the process another step farther when I began to go out by myself and become a regular in my favorite venues I was used to going to as a guy.

I found I was never out of my mind as the world accepted me. I just had to wait for them to catch up. If I had realized it years ago, how much easier my life would have been.

Turning Your Gender Corner

 

Image from the JJ Hart Archives.

As I made my way towards coming out of my closet and living as a transgender woman, I found I had many corners to navigate.

At first the corners were easy to take on but then became progressively more difficult as I moved closer to my impossible dream of escaping my male life. Through out the fifty years I lived as a serious cross dresser, it seemed I spent too much time researching to see if a life as my authentic femininized self was even possible. What was I going to do about a disapproving group of family, friends and bosses. All corners I needed to see around and judge what was next. 

At times, a few of the corners were more frustrating than others. My primary example always is when I spent years thinking my appearance as a woman (trans or not) was the all important driving factor in how I lived. There was so much more to being a woman than just how I looked. Appearance did open or close many doors but it was only the start. Also, as the internet began to have an impact in my life, I started to research more and more about what the new transgender term was all about and how did it define me. Initially, I thought it did because when I went to transgender - cross dresser mixers I did not mix well with the transvestites and leaned towards the transsexuals in the groups. I was somewhere in between and it was evident to me I had many more corners to turn before I discovered where I wanted to be.

Looking back, during that time in my life, I was gender fluid but had no way to express it. 

As I did begin to aggressively pursue my gender path, I needed to put all the labels behind me and try to determine if my dreams were indeed reachable. Right or wrong, I began to slip out of the house when my wife was at work to live an entire whole new existence as a woman. To do so, there were many blind corners I needed to face, Perhaps the biggest one was when other women wanted to strike up a conversation with me. I found they would start innocently enough with a small compliment on a facet of my wardrobe such as ear-rings and move on from there. Fortunately, most of the conversations were innocent enough as most of the women just were curious about what I was doing in their world. After the first shock of having to communicate in a brand new world, I actually turned the corner and began to appreciate the attention I was getting. I never had that amount of attention from women in my male life. The roles were reversed because I was receiving little to no attention from any of the men I met.  

Even though sometimes we follow similar paths as transgender women and trans men, the gender curves and corners are vastly different. We all have spouses or girlfriends who provide various levels of support or push-back. Often the push-back leads to mental health stress all the way to suicide attempts. 

Through therapy, often turning the gender corners you face may be easier. I know in my case, a mixture of going out on my own to start a new life along with therapy to do away with the old one worked for me. 

Now, at my age of seventy-five, I have come to realize the gender corners I will have to face will always be there as I face the possibility of advanced elderly assisted living. It all seems just a part of the problems we face as transgender women and trans men. 

Halloween and Gender Breakthroughs

Halloween
Image from
the JJ Hart
Archives. 

Back again we go to Halloween and the effects it had on me as I developed into a novice transgender woman.

Very early on I learned when I cross dressed head to toe as a woman for a Halloween party, I would be cut out of the male club and my male friends would ignore me. Very early signs of losing any male privilege I had built up over the years. On the other hand, I was not ignored by many of the other women I knew from before who took the time to comment on my shaved legs and "costume." Both were small but definite signs of what I would face in the future if and when I decided to enter the public as a transgender woman. 

Over the years, my tastes in Halloween "costumes" changed from just wanting to be slutty, all the way to trying to present myself as a cis-woman would at a party. Plus I needed to overcome any fears I had of going to the party as a woman and mostly giving up on having a traditional good time partying with friends I had known for years. Again, just a small dose of what it would be like to cut all ties with my old male life and start all over. 

Everything began to change when my "costumes" began to evolve. One party in particular stands out in my mind. It happened when my second wife and I were living in the metro New York City area and I was managing a food location. It just so happened I was invited by one of my assistant female managers to go with her and several of her friends to a Halloween party they were going to. Without hesitation I said yes and wondered how I was going to explain it away to my wife. She never was into Halloween much and turned out she did not much care so I set out to put together an outfit for the evening. I decided to go semi-sexy (or try to) and chose my short mini dress, heels and dark wig for the evening. Off I went into the great unknown of not knowing where I was going and with whom.

It turned out, where I ended up first of all was at the house of my manager and to my pleasant surprise I learned all of her friends who were going were all tall attractive women dressed approximately the same as I was. As I walked into the room where they all were waiting, you could have heard a pin drop as they all looked me over from head to toe. Once they realized who I was, off we went to the real party which was being held at a small bar near to her house. The first thing I thought of was how far was I going to have to walk in my heels but the distance was not too bad and I was on my own cloud nine. I mean, here I was with three other women my height dressed the same way headed for a party. I was scared but excited by the time we arrived at the venue. Once I got to the bar and had a drink or two I started to calm down and learned another couple of gender break throughs. 

The evening turned out to be my first ever girl's night out because I was able to blend in so well with the other women I was with and I learned the power of being able to blend in with the feminine world. The second big breakthrough I learned was how to handle being approached by a man who perhaps did not know he was talking to a transgender woman. I was even asked to dance by one man. Finally, I learned single women of a certain age have a tendency to mark out their own territory when it comes to attracting male companionship. Once we all arrived in the venue, I was left very much on my own. 

I did not know it then, but all of the gender lessons I learned would come back to help me later in life. So much more than an empty comment about how good my shaved legs looked. As my second wife kept trying to tell me, I hadn't paid my dues yet to be considered a good feminine person. Trans or not.   

Running Against the Tide

Sarah McBride is running for the United States House of Representatives from the state of Delaware. Sarah grew up in Wilmington, and currently represents fifty thousand of her neighbors. Despite her impressive background in community service, one thing sets her off from all others seeking a seat in the House of Representatives, she is transgender.

Even though she is an example of a person going way past being transgender and just being her, she takes it to a whole other height when transgender people are under attack at so many levels by a certain political party I will not mention. At the least, she is an inspiration to the rest of us. 

Just last night I was watching the Texas-Georgia college football game and was unpleasantly surprised when a commercial for Republican Senate candidate Ted Cruz popped up on my television in far away Ohio. As luck would have it, Ohio and Texas have very competitive senatorial campaigns going on. I would estimate over ninety percent of the anti Democratic candidate ads on television involve false transgender claims. Which are brutal and false. Last night I was enjoying a game when the same commercial popped up with only the names had changed. It was a stark reminder that a major player such as an Elon Musk or Peter Theil are aligned against us. I forgot to mention they are both billionaires capable of buying off huge portions of the federal government such as politicians and supreme court justices. 

Enter Sarah McBride, a light in the end of the tunnel which is not the train. Many more pro-LGBTQ political candidates are running in this year's crucial election. As a group we must put our differences behind us and our future in front of us as we must identify and vote for the proper path forward. Sarah McBride is proof it can be done as she is favored to win her race. We need to make sure she is only the beginning.