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.
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