GenderBendy

Resolve, earrings, and bowling

I have made up my mind: I intend to transition, and I am moving circumspectly but deliberately toward that goal.

The femme ache tracker turned out to be useful only to a point...what I came to realize as I updated it each day was that the way I had set it up, the only way I was going to decide to transition was if I was in constant emotional agony from having to stay male.  What about a positive, life-changing decision freely and joyously made?  This past week, I made such a choice.  It's an emotional decision, more feeling than words, but clear for all that:  I am a woman...I feel no maleness left in me...and I am going to make my outside match my inside.  Not because it will kill me if I don't, but because I want to.  Because I want to feel right in my body, at long last.

As you can see if you care to look in the sidebar to the right, I have changed the name of the tracker.  It no longer tracks ache, but resolve.  I'll keep updating it daily, and I'll be honest if my feelings cycle back again down into doubt and ambivalence...as impossible as that seems to me at the moment, fresh from the crucible of my deliberations...

So once again I find myself planning a talk with my children.  I restrained myself, with effort, this past weekend, counseling myself to patience.  The soonest I would propose to start living as a woman full time would be next summer, so I have plenty of time to ease them into the idea even if I don't stretch the timeline out.  Still, a talk soon would be a good idea, I think...can't let them fall too far behind.  And having had one talk go well, I'm not quite as braced for disaster as I was the first time...and I know the value of friendly ears and minds in the rehearsal and planning stages and will make good use of them again this time.

I roll my eyes at my own compulsive caution...but it is my way, and I embrace it.  I want to come to my goal knowing I did everything I could to help them through an evolution which must seem to them bizarre at the very least.

And then there's the fact that I've mentioned this blog to daughter17...hi sweetie, if you're reading this let me know...we need to have a talk.  No!  Ya think!? 

On a lighter note, I'm going bowling tonight in full femme mode with the Maine Trans Net crew...after an  excursion to the mall to put at least one pair of dangly earrings on a credit card...my six weeks of training studs are up tomorrow!  Yay!  :-)  It will be my first time dressed at the mall, and that's supposed to be a big right of passage, but based on how well I've been passing I expect it to be routine.  I'm a little more nervous about the bowling...anxious about encounters with rude men...but I'll have my boys there to protect me... :-)

Polish after all, and a 5

Monday morning early, and I'm going to work today with sparkly crimson polish on my nails.  I have no more desire than I did last week to get in peoples' faces...and I have no more relish for fielding comments than I did before...but I just don't want to take it off.  I like it.  I want to keep it.  So I am.

I dressed on Saturday to go to the Tiffany Club, a non-profit support group and social club for crossdressers in Waltham, MA which I found out about on the Internet.  I expected something grand, but it turned out to be a run-down suite of rooms on the second floor of an aging industrial building in a quiet residential neighborhood.  It was cluttered with 70's furniture and decorated in shades of brown.  It was comfortable and homey. 

The women I met there were mostly older than me.  Some were talkative, some silent.  The conversation bounced from light chat about broken computers and old TV shows to serious interludes about someone's trans struggles and then back again.  I felt welcomed and not judged. 

I had a long talk with one woman I'll call Evie.  She was tall and thin, 50-something, dressed in a simple skirt and top.  Her long grey hair, parted in the middle, framed her gentle face.  As she told me about her long-growing desire to transition I kept nodding, recognizing myself in her words.  She changes as soon as she gets home.  She struggles to take off femme-clothes.  She has started to feel like male-mode is the  masquerade.  Then she told me why she hasn't transitioned.  It would mean the end of a marriage.  A grown child is not accepting.  She has health issues which make hormones and surgery life-threatening choices.  And I thought, I face none of these challenges.  No partner, accepting children, healthy strong body...only the lack of piles of cash holds me back.

Then, on the way home, the timing was just right to stop in at a midnight performance of a raunchy live stage show of Rocky Horror in Portsmouth, so I did.  And I passed, passed, passed.  Nobody looked at me twice.  At Rocky Horror.  All that was unusual about me in that crowd was that I was over thirty and dressed conservatively.

So, between resonating to Evie's story and feeling like just some woman at the play, it was the first 5 in a long time yesterday on the tracker...and nail polish still on last night when the children got home ("oh, look at that"/one-second pause/new subject), and still on as I head to work now.

Hmm...maybe I'll take the bottle of remover in my gym bag, in case I start to wig.  Don't think I will though.  No way to go but forward.

No polish...more ache

The ache is back.  I could have sworn I was not suppressing, but it appears I was, because there was a moment mid week when I was journalling when, as a few other times, I hardly knew myself what I was going to type next, and it was the same refrain:  I want I want I want; and then the next morning, a sudden flood of tears as I daydreamed a scene of welcoming among friends after transition...

I did a blog entry at the start of the week about maybe painting my nails and wearing them that way in man mode, getting in people's faces with it...but that's just not the point.  I feel no need to confront.  What I need to do is solve this conundrum of my life.  Am I going to become a woman?  Once again I think I am.  I am moving forward on that project.  And it feels even stronger this time because the reasonable adult part of me is on board, along with imperious aching child me, who knows what she wants and demands it now.

The key to this new step was letting go of the idea that I have to decide for good and all before I do anything.  No, I don't.  There are several steps I can take right now while the decision still evolves.  I can work on making more money; I can grow my hair out; I can practice my femme voice (which is really starting to happen...an amazing exercise); I can keep meeting and talking with other trans people; and I can start seriously pursuing the project of getting rid of my beard.  I am consciously applying myself to moving all of these projects forward.  I am moving towards transition.  The question now really is not, will I transition, but will I stop?

Well, typing that is good for a shiver.  But that's where I seem to be.

It's a four on the tracker.  I specifically do not feel compelled.  I just want, and feel deliberately headed in a direction arising out of that want.

I'm thinking of painting my nails

Big deal, right?  I've painted my nails lots of times.  But only once, and briefly, have I gone out in male mode with my nails painted.  I stopped for a bottle of wine at a local grocery on the way home from having been dressed somewhere, and the clerk gave me a sour look.  (I might have imagined it.)

This time I'm thinking of painting them and just leaving them painted as I make my way through a regular week...shopping, at work, at the gym, with the children on Thursday night.  If I do it I'm going with my favorite sparkly crimson, not the dark-plum-verging-on-black which might pass as a goth affectation.  Unabashedly femme nails.  Add them to my gold ball training earrings, lengthening hair, aggressively plucked eyebrows, and increasingly feminine carriage and demeanor, and there will be comments.  I've already gotten comments from puzzled-looking friends I haven't seen for a while...they tend to focus on one element..."You got a different haircut!"  I take that to mean I'm still shy of the tipping-point beyond which someone will say (or at least think), "You look like a woman!" 

It's also worth noting that painted nails are much more exclusively feminine than anything else I've done in male mode so far.  This would be an escalation.

One thing that is holding me back is that I don't want to have a dozen unplanned coming-out conversations with randomly selected acquaintances...but on the other hand, I find the social task of deflecting curiosity with jokes or pat phrases or fibs distasteful.  The other thing is, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to cross the line all at once, instead of by inches.  I've imagined sending an e-mail to all staff, announcing my transness and setting up a test week of 24-7 Lisa mode...requesting the use of the femme name and pronouns...referring anyone who feels uncomfortable to appropriate University offices duly notified in advance.  A splash.

That's assuming I will be crossing the line...but I do seem headed that way, one way or another.  Underneath, the same old deeper question lurks:  stay as I am and play in the middle, or transition?  Who will be my model, Eddie Izzard, or Jenny Boylan?

In any case, if I am going to paint my nails, it won't be until Tuesday, because on Monday, tomorrow afternoon, I have a first date, and I don't want my nails to be the first thing we talk about...wish us luck!  :-)

Math-geek take on tracking ache

There's an amazing phenomenon in the world of math called the Mandelbrot set.  (Google it!)  It's a beautiful numerical design with an infinitely lacey border.  Points on one side of the border are in the set; points on the other side are not. 

The way you figure out if a point is in the set or not is, you plug the numbers into a simple equation, and you get an answer which you plug in again...around and around and around.  The answers either settle down to a stable repeating pattern of finite numbers, or, after some number of plug-ins, they suddenly shoot off into infinity, never to return.  Stable pattern:  in the set.  Infinity:  not in the set.

This pattern has become my working mental model for the transition decision.  I've done the daily femme-ache tracking for several weeks now (see page), and despite losing a chunk of data to a hasty mouse-click, I can see that I'm cycling.  A couple of weeks ago it was all fours and fives...wanting, needing to become a woman.  This past week, all in the 1-3 range...feeling femme at least a little all the time, but content to stay male.  And now I feel the ache coming on again...if I was doing today's number right now, it would be a 4.

I've always been fascinated by the third space or energy or twist of meaning which manifests out of the tension between opposites, so I can't help but ponder:  In this model, staying male would seem to map to the finite set, and transitioning to female to the infinite outside it.  But what is it to just keep zooming deeper and deeper into the lace forever?  Hmmm... *strokes chin, and wishes there was no rasp of stubble...*

Oh, and one more question...is a math-geeky analogy like this an inherently male thing to come up with?  Discuss...  :-)

An amusing twist

In the early days of my self-discovery I blamed my mother for the long repression of my femininity, but that's wrong.  I did it myself. 

It's a matter of character.  Central to my being is a fierce drive to thrive, coupled with a perpetually renewable naive enthusiasm...which means that, all my life, every time I've found something (or someone) new, I've thought, "This is it!  I've figured it out!  I'm set for the rest of my life, oh joy!"  I'm a willful survivor with an unfortunate propensity to get carried away. 

So at age four, despite confusing feelings I couldn't express even to myself, I perceived that my only real option was to be a boy and someday a man, and I threw myself into the project so completely that for 42 years I remained unaware of my own feminine nature.

Then I quit.  I gave up on the man thing.  And, perhaps inevitably, I immediately launched myself just as hard into the femme thing--this is it, oh joy!

That was eight months ago, and the femme thing has filled my mind since then...until this week.  This week, all of a sudden various other things, work, a flirtation, seemed more important.  I still dressed each night when I got home, but not full aiming-to-pass dressing, just comfortable clothes with no makeup. And I've been thinking, maybe this man thing has its points...I was good at it...it still feels fairly natural...maybe I could keep doing it at least part time...stay in the middle.

The amusing twist is this:  I consider the "I've made up my mind and I'm sticking with it no matter what" way I've always been to be one of my more male traits; and I consider my quickly developing comfort with flux and willingness to change my mind constantly to be more feminine.  So:  The more hard-driving, decisive, and masculine I feel, the more likely I am to end up pushing hard toward transition; and the more comfortable with ambiguity, flexible, and feminine I feel, the more likely I am to sojourn indefinitely here in the middle and never seek transition.  Each gender tends to the other.  Isn't that a fun little paradox?  :-)