Member-only story

Sizing up The Crowd

JJ Hart
3 min readDec 30, 2023
Image from Uwe Conrad on UnSplash

One of the earliest lessons I learned when I first began to attempt to present as a realistic woman in the world was how I was always on stage. It presented a problem since I had always been very shy around people.

It didn’t matter because both men and primarily women sometimes went out of their way to size me up. Plus, while I am on the subject, I was very insecure about my size as a novice cross dresser or highly questioning transgender woman. Initially I made the mistake of walking slightly hunched over to hide the fact I was nearly six foot tall. Then I realized there were plenty of other cisgender women around me and I could stand up tall and project confidence to the world. I learned the hard way that people were similar to sharks and could sense another person’s insecurities so I needed to do better in all aspects of my presentation as a trans woman. Ultimately size was not a factor when I discovered plenty of other cisgender women as tall as I was.

One of the key insights I learned quickly was quite naturally, the world I was trying to enter was run by women. So I needed to figure out how to effectively play in their sandbox. On the other hand, men were out since they had a tendency to ignore me anyhow. If a man did pay attention to me, he would normally treat me as a lesser individual. When men paused to size me up, my reaction was to quickly keep moving. I did have a few…

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JJ Hart
JJ Hart

Written by JJ Hart

Thanks for stopping by! I am a married Transgender veteran author and blogger. I write in the hope of helping others with similar gender dysphoria

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