GenderBendy

Welcome!

Hello!  My name is Lisa, but for now you can call me Dee.  In November 2008 I wrote to my own surprise in my journal:  "I just want to be a girl."   Now I find myself on the path to becoming a woman.  The purpose of this blog is to document my ongoing metamorphosis.  Thank you for reading!  :-)

Pretty much done with man-clothes

One morning a few weeks back, getting dressed, I looked at the thick waistband of my jockey shorts and thought, I don't wear these any more.  So I put on one of the few pairs of cotton panties I had acquired up to that point, then stopped on the way to work and bought a couple six-packs more of basic knickers, and it's been girl-underwear ever since.

A few days later, I more or less retired most of the rest of my male wardrobe.  I haven't taken big bags to Goodwill yet, but I have been dressed as a woman for the last couple of weeks, and it is my plan to go on dressing as a woman for the rest of my life, from here on out.  The only time I am still wearing man-clothes is when I go running...and I'll fix that too at some point.

The thing I didn't figure out looking forward to this moment was that I could wear shorts and tops and shoes which, while definitely from the women's clothing half of the store, would appear as basically gender-neutral out in the world.  I thought it was going to be man-jeans and man-shirts until one day it was skirts and blouses.  Androgyny-play, yay!  :-)

Turns out many of my women friends shop routinely on the man-side of the store, and hardly any of my acquaintance of either gender dress very femme at all.  A few weeks ago I went to a play in a dress and heels and was the only woman in the audience wearing a dress or heels.  Getting into dressing femme begins to feel like rediscovering some arcane lost art...Japanese Tea Ceremony...

An advantage emerges of having come out as trans early in the process.  Now everyone around me knows about my gender work, and basically gets along fine with however I am presenting.  On Friday I did push over the line, with the frankly femme white top, big earrings, and hair soft and full with an elastic headband, and saw my friends and coworkers' eyes flicker as they figured out how to deal...but it was OK.   I was still wearing it all when I got home, and waved at a couple of neighbors who stared back, so I'm coming out now in my neighborhood...I used to fear, now I just don't care...people deal.

That's the most important thing I'm learning.  People deal.  Meaning, they just don't care that much.  I mean, think about the big things I've learned about some of my friends lately:  life-threatening disease, sexual orientation, matrimony...and none of these pieces of news has moved me to more than easy condolence or congratulation...I'm as self-centered as the next person...and I take comfort in knowing that you're the same.  So thanks for bothering to read all the way to the end.... :-)

Yay, Pride!

In a few hours I will joyously march with my dear friends behind the MaineTransNet banner in the Portland Pride Parade.  We've gotten a lovely day for it.  My darling Deb is going to march with us, which makes me happy... :-)  I'll be wearing a gorgeous red yellow green wrap-around skirt which she gave me which was at Woodstock, my elegant white top with the silver bead-work at the collar, the red flip-flops with the sparkles in the cork, and of course dangly earrings...  I hope I'll see you there...  :-)

helpful link 

Happy Pride!  :-)

Switching one self-imprisoned self for another?

Three mornings ago I dreamed of a willful dominant little girl gleefully continuing her project of slowly but inevitably encasing in exotic bondage-wear - cuffs, a steel band over the mouth, motion-constricting metal leg tubes - a passive and accepting full grown man...and I felt myself to be both figures, and woke troubled. My primary image for who I was before my gender revelation has been of a true girl-self self-exiled inside a man-shell. Lying in the grey rain-light of that early waking, I made myself face another model: that of a person with two legitimate selves, girl and man, who has been all man too long, and who might in seeking redress swing too far to girl ever to come back...and then someday want to.

(Please note I'm saying "girl" instead of "woman" on purpose, both because I still just feel so new, and also because I am still digging this video to which a friend recently linked me...)

I agonized about starting hormones, and felt it was a point of serious commitment, and it was...but it turns out, taking daily pills, that I'm still re-deciding every morning. Both meds I'm taking, estrogen and an androgen-blocker, build slowly in the system and take effect over months or even years...so, despite teasing my sweetie with texts announcing that my new breasts have come in (flump-flump...just like that!), I've noticed no effect yet, and am not likely to for many weeks yet. (I'm trying to look in the mirror as little as possible...I've also started keeping track of various body measurements, so I have something objective to judge results by.) I could still stop with absolutely no ill effects.

That grey morning I dozed for another hour, trying to feel truly, then got up and fetched my two pill-bottles and decanted the one tiny green and two massive white pills into my palm and looked at them. Then, can of seltzer, pop, swallow.

I've been thinking recently that I need to decide a thousand times to become a woman. That was number 950 or so. 

The three mornings since then, it has been easy and natural to take the pills. No decision at all really...but still I wonder: am I dismantling a false shell, or am I switching one self-imprisoned self for another?

Hm.

I can say this: I've wanted out of that cell for 46 years...but him...well, if he's real, he seems to like it.

My Last Night as a Man

Tomorrow morning, or later this morning to be precise, I have a doctor's appointment which will result in the prescriptions which will allow me to begin hormone therapy.

My regimen will include estrogen and another drug which will suppress the action of testosterone in my body.  Once an initial ramp-up period is done, I should have serum levels of both estrogen and testosterone which are considered normal for a healthy young adult woman.

Gradually, over the coming months, I will begin to grow breasts.  My skin will get softer; I may lose some or most of my body hair (oh, yes please); I will lose strength and muscle mass, especially in my upper body; my fat reserves may redistribute somewhat, settling more in the hips and ass (oh, yes please); and I may become significantly more emotional than I already am, which is already a lot, and find myself crying when I drop the pesto spoon or the like...not so much yes please, but I'm willing to roll with it.

There might also be a third drug which would supplement the feminizing effects of the other two, and possibly reverse some of the head-hair thinning I've experienced over the years as a male-bodied person.

This feels to me like the point of no return.  Once I take that first pill, the light at the far end of the tunnel will be closer than the light behind, and it will be full steam ahead until I emerge into the sun-glare of life as a woman...an outcome which, even though I have been thinking about it and working on it constantly for the last eighteen months, I still cannot really imagine. 

To put it another way, this feels like my last chance to turn back.  My last chance to stay a man.  And as soon as I type the words, I know it is unthinkable.  I am already completely not a man.  I am a woman.  I am a woman.  I am a woman.  And I want this.  I want to be who I know I am.  I want to live.  I want to love.  I want to be.

I also want to sleep, but that may not happen much tonight... :-)

Love,

Lisa

One top over the line

Today at work I am wearing the exact same outfit as listed in my last post except for more overt dangly earrings and a different top (white simply-tailored cotton with a demurely scooped neck and silver bead applique around the collar), but those two changes seem to have bumped me over the line...I'm popping femme.  One of our volunteer hosts had occasion to give me a pronoun on air and picked "she."  A fellow employee just greeted me and one other male person as "ladies and gentlemen."

I'm being a woman in the world.  Turns out to be not such a big deal...and huge.  I'll see if I can get someone to take a pic and post it later.

OK, back to work...

Dressed as a Lesbian today

The gender line in fashion turns out to blur with almost infinitely fine gradations...I am in fact wearing all women's clothing today.  My outfit consists of:

• dark green cotton capri pants
• a Hanes Her Way cotton tee, light blue (the only difference I can see from a His Way is a subtlety of collar design)
• the purple clog-style Birkenstocks my sweetie gave me
• three silver bracelets (two from my sweetie and one from my daughter)
• dangly silver labrys earrings (from my sweetie too...she gives me presents, and it makes me happy...:-))

No makeup, hair loose and natural...I feel, stylistically, like an earthy-crunchy Lesbian approaching the gender midline as closely as she can.  I wonder if anyone will notice.

Pronoun gifts and girl-teeth

A bunch of blogable things have happened over the last several weeks, but I was too busy falling madly in love to post.  Now that it's official that I'm in a relationship with my Darling Deb (it says so on facebook! :-)), I have time to do a little catching up. 

First, pronoun gifts.  I've received two.  The first was from the man who trained me to be a census taker, a rather straight-laced and literal-minded lawyer in his sixties.  I took my old male shell to the census work; man clothes, "Dee" for a name, hair gelled back (more or less) behind the ears, and just my demure green-glass gem ear-studs to remind me of who I am.  I didn't tell anyone that I'm trans.  At the end of the third day of training he asked me to help collect some forms, and he said something to the class like:  "Give them to Dee; she'll be...he'll be collecting them." 

He picked up my femme vibe!  I was pleased.  But what pleased me more was that both the slip (as he saw it) and the correction were unforced...no special emphasis, no flicker of the eyes toward me, no embarrassment. The vibe-catching was completely unconscious.  Cool.

The second pronoun gift was on the job.  I work at a radio station which is administratively a sub-department of a large university.  I am out as trans at the station, but not university-wide...but word gets around.  So, I was in an office cross-campus, arranging to use a classroom for station training, and the person who was helping me was kindly drafting an e-mail on my behalf to a third office which was the one which could actually help me, and she read it back:  "I have Dee Bunker here, and she's trying to reserve a room..."

This pronoun gift was completely conscious, based on what she'd heard through the grapevine.  I wasn't presenting very femme...just how I looked at the census training, actually, except for danglier earrings...but she wanted to respect the self she had heard I professed to be.  I thanked her most sincerely and left smiling.  And I learned something:  when word spreads, you can't manage the subtler points of the message.  My memo at the station said "I'm trans and starting to transition," but at least some rumor-mill listeners have heard that I'm already living as a woman.  That's a little unsettling, but gratifying.

The other thing I've wanted to blog about happened at a visit to my dentist.  I'm out to him because his son is one of my daughter's closest friends (Hi Sam!).  Lee is a kind and humorous man who clearly enjoys his work.  Somehow we got on the subject of masculine and feminine teeth.  There is (or can at least sometimes be) a difference.  It comes out particularly, it seems, in denture-making, because unlike in most other areas of cosmetic body-alteration, the denture-maker is starting from scratch and so enjoys complete creative freedom. 

Lee showed me his sample trays, full of teeth-sets of subtly different sizes, shapes, and colors.  Turns out that boy-teeth are often squarer, particularly at the distal (away from the midline) corner; girl-teeth are more rounded.  Lee had me smile, stared intently at my mouth, then said he could round off just a couple of my top teeth on each side, and lessen the pointiness of the canines a little.  "Very subtle," I said, meaning to imply it was so subtle I wasn't sure I'd ever bother, but he nodded and said just that little change could have a strong impact. 

Hmmm...maybe, someday, after (if) I have the new face I want to get for myself...we'll see.  I struggle to decide how much alteration to undergo vs. how much to just sashay forth and carry it.  I've made the cyber-acquaintance of folks who seem addicted to cosmetic surgery...this stuff can definitely be taken too far.

Coming soon:  hormones.

grinny-face heart heart heart!

I haven't posted for a while because I've been busy falling in love.  My new sweetie loves me too and sees me, admires me, and desires me as a woman.  I am someone's girlfriend!  :-)  It's a fucking miracle.

I find it difficult to put into words how much this new love means to me...but then my darling enjoys rendering me speechless, so that hasn't been a problem... :-)

(If I put in as many smiley-faces as I really wanted here, it would gack even me out...I'll try to restrain myself...)

I thought of being coy again, as in a post a month ago, about my sweetie's identity, but on the other hand her name is Deb Gallagher and she's a lovely sly wise poetic great-hearted Dyke.  She self-identifies as existing between the genders, has many deliciously butch facets, and deeply digs me femme, the femmer the better.  She just absolutely blows me away.

Deb's taking up with me has raised many eyebrows among her friends, Lesbian and otherwise, and she has had some difficult conversations, with more, no doubt, to come.  It takes guts to openly love me.  It's an act of social and political provocation.  Add "courageous" to that list of adjectives in the last paragraph... 

There is so much to write about, and I will in future posts.  For now, one other observation seems pressing:  finding romance has changed, but not blunted, my transition-ache.  Until it happened I couldn't imagine that anyone could love me before I was where I wanted to be, and that made me want to hurry...but now that someone does already love me, mid-metamorphosis, as a woman, it feels more natural than ever just to go on peeling away, gracefully but deliberately, the lingering shards of that old man-shell and simply be, be in the world, be in love, be myself.

"Honor the process" has been, and continues to be, one of my main mantras.  Well, I have to say...that has just gotten *way* more fun... :-D <3<3<3

please stay tuned...

Dear loyal readers, I know I haven't posted in a long time...I've been working two jobs and falling in love...more later!  :-)   Love, Lisa

zenfish

monarch of the ocean
i would swim in you
i would be your zenfish
fleeting lambent silver
through your lights and shadows
your storms do not daunt me
your tide - my breath
your surge - my cradle
i would know
how a fish loves the sea