GenderBendy

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.... :-)

Radio pronouns

Back in January I came out at work, which is WMPG, Portland's community radio station, where I am Program Director.  Response from station volunteers to my announcement has been uniformly supportive, which is wonderful. 

This week we're fund-raising, which means I've found myself on air with various different volunteers, some of whom I don't see very often, and in the course of our begging for donations two of them have called me "she".  (In my coming-out e-mail I said male pronouns were fine for the time being.) 

One of those two was an old friend who likes to make a point of things, so I felt sure his "she" was deliberate (and kindly meant).  

The other, though, was from a volunteer I don't know well, and it came fleetingly and unstressed in the full flow of her begging, without facial expression or body-language of any kind, so that I really felt that she had used the word unconsciously...and the only reason I could think for her to do that is that she has at least begun to accept me as female.  It's not the first time I've been surprised by how quickly some people have just switched my M to an F in their minds.

It's funny, though, the timing, because, while I still want to be a woman just as much as ever, for the first time in many weeks I feel free of the drive to get there as fast as possible...I think because I've got it all lined up:  a medical team I trust, children seemingly reasonably comfortable, everyone at work already getting used to thinking of me at least in between.  So now I linger for a bit in what is left of my old maleness, holding off on hormones, honoring the slow passing away of a good old self.

I'm glad that maybe my gender issues can take the back seat for a while.  My daughter is graduating from high school this spring and going off to college in the fall, and that's a big transition.  I haven't been ignoring her, but fair to say I've been preoccupied.  I very much want to be fully present in every minute I have left with her before she heads out into the world to begin her adult life.

And, there's a practical reason for staying male for a little while longer:  I've just gotten hired by the US Census to count transient people, and I'll feel a lot safer doing that with my hair pulled back and a Red Sox cap on than in my current workday earrings-and-scarf combo.  :-)

Bits and pieces

I fear my last post built a little suspense which I have since failed to provide the release for...apologies to anyone who was on tenterhooks.  :-)  My sister was visiting from Colorado over the weekend, and then fund-raising started at my radio station (that number again: 874-3000), so I've not had a second to post again until now.

The setup was, I proposed to change into full femme mode in the bathroom at my work in order to be on a panel at a trans conference taking place across campus, then walk back and change again after.  I did it, and it went all right.  I got one scoff-and-eyeroll, but also some smiles and, my favorite, a truly blasé response from the work study students.  There really does seem to be a generational difference:  people my age and older often seem uncomfortable with my gender non-conformity; people under 30 tend to just roll with it.

The panel was interesting because our audience was mostly health professionals - nurses and counselors and such - and it was clear from the questions that most of them had very little understanding of what it means to be trans.  I'm finishing a query letter and book proposal which I will soon be sending out, trying to get an agent for a memoir, and I find myself feeling newly motivated by the sense I brought out of that session of just how much basic education remains to be done.

While she was here my sister took some pictures of my face for me...front, three quarters, and profile, hair pulled back, no makeup, muscles carefully unsmiling...so I can send them to a woman in the UK who specializes in photoshopping what you could look like after facial feminization surgery.  When I have my before and afters, I will post them here.

My most recent development:  I suddenly found myself today coming out to Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!  I had called her to record a pitch for our fundraiser, and she remembered me from previous similar conversations and asked about the name change, and there I was stammering my explanation.  She offered congratulations and best wishes, which was very kind of her.  Who knows what might come of that someday?  In any case, yet another proof is one was needed (it wasn't) of my newfound lack of shyness.

One more thing I've been wanting to record here...a couple of weeks ago now my daughter decided after some trepidation to tell her friends at school about my trans identity.  She was a little surprised, I think, at how well it went.  As I understand it one of them laughed, one just nodded, and the third asked a bunch of questions.  Then they gave me a wonderful gift:  another new name to add to my growing collection.  She texted me:  "They've decided to call you Madame Deeve."  With their permission I have changed the spelling, and whatever other name(s) I also end up using, I will proudly answer from now on to Madame D'Yves.  Isn't that elegant?  I love it! :-)  Thank you Sarah and Cheyenne and Sam!

Momentum

Got an electrolysis appointment next week to begin to finish beard-removal.  Got an endocrinologist appointment too, to talk about hormones.  Had a counseling appointment with my children, and my counselor said at the end she is completely comfortable taking their word that they are fine with my gender plans.

Furthermore, I'm going to be prominently featured in an article in the Phoenix coming out next Wednesday (with a photo of my current gender-ambiguous look), the same day that I'm Deb's guest on Lesbian Radio on WMPG.  I'm going to be very publicly out next week.

What is this:  an attempt to make myself do something I'm not actually sure about, by telling everyone, so I have to go through with it? 

No.

Every time I try to doubt, that implacable answer comes back.  I want to be a woman. 

And, it appears, no one is going to stop me.

It's the endo appointment that scares me.  As early as next week I could be taking my first estrogen pills.  Will I do it?  I want to, but I'm afraid...and also sad about the slow passing away of old male self.  I made a good man for a long time.  I wish I could have gone on being that man.  He wasn't real, but he was worthy...and he is worthy of being mourned, and I am mourning him.

I can always wait a little while before taking that first pill...and I think I do want to try to do that.  (Shh...don't wake her up...)

Yeah, there is this sense of dual self sometimes:  I feel like the wary parent of an exceptionally emotional and willful child.  Parent-self does feel feminine, but does not need to insist on that; child-self is all girl, and ready to throw a tantrum at any moment:   IMAGIRLIMAGIRLIMAGIRLIMAGIRL...  I hope that, as my inner parent continues to learn to better nurture and direct the energy of my inner child, and as my inner child continues to learn both to trust my inner parent and to govern her own passions a little, my one deeper self will begin to emerge...as whole and complete a woman as I can be.

There is an outcome here which I have hardly dared imagine, but which begins to really seem possible:  I am a convincing natural woman in the world, and in love with someone who is in love with me, and I've not hurt anyone, and I'm happy.  And now since my daughter has company over, I'm going to have to go into the bathroom to cry.

P.O.I.G.

Now that I have come out at work, I find that I enjoy a new freedom to begin to publicly explore the space between the genders. 

Up until now I've been carefully maintaining my old male style, despite its beginning to feel wrong...men's jeans or khaki pants, brown leather men's shoes, and a selection of subdued shirts, usually a T under a long-sleeve button shirt, and when it's cold, a mannish brown wool sweater and brown canvas coat as outer layers.  Also, I've kept my hair pulled back behind my ears, and I have habitually been wearing a thickly-knitted dark green wool cap.  I do wear earrings every day, but so far it has either been the silver studs with the little green-glass gems, or the tiny silver rosebuds...very little flash or dangle.

Today, dressing, I made just three minor different choices.  I'm wearing a soft dark blue pullover top with a zipper neck which is more androgynous than my usual shirts; I've swapped the green cap for a dark blue one which is softer and thinner, and I've pulled it well back on my head so that my hair curls out from under it in back in a mildly feminine way; and I'm wearing my new favorite earrings, silver, with a small round mandala-shape at the ear itself, and then a little silver-embossed dark purple bead hanging down...they jiggle when I shake my head, and it makes me smile.  :-)

With just these three changes supplementing my plucked eyebrows, my smoother post-laser face, and my continued efforts to relax into more feminine ways of holding my body and moving, I can get a solid femme flash in the mirror, at least looking straight on.  In a side view the masculine structure of the bones of my face still tips the balance to the male side.  But still...I'm edging closer to the line.

So, I've made up a new acronym.  At least for today, while it still strikes me as whimsical, I'm a POIG:  A Person Of Indeterminate Gender.

Things which have to go soon:  the man-shoes and the briefcase.  Next week I think I will shop for women's sneakers, and then try them with my women's cut jeans for a day, see if anyone notices.  And my dear friend Sue gave me a big funky clunky brown leather handbag which I'll try as a replacement for the briefcase. 

Being a POIG can be fun, I tell myself...and I do really need to try to just play for a while, if I can.  I am grateful, these days, for any insight which helps me feel like I can slow down.  The drive toward womanhood has felt so unrelentingly powerful since the First Event Conference a few weeks back...I'm aching constantly.  It's not a comfortable time.

Can't unclick that!

I did it.  At around 2pm this afternoon I transfered my oh-so-carefully worded coming-out memo from its text file to an e-mail and clicked "send," and out it flew to a mailing list of, oh, I don't know exactly, 300 people?  Everyone, in any case, I work with in my people-intensive job.  I don't think I've experienced a moment that heightened since my last child was born.

By 4:30 or so when I left I had answered a couple of dozen kind, warm, generous e-mails from volunteer-friends.  They said some truly blush-inducing things.  I'm expecting dozens more e-mails in my inbox when I get to work tomorrow.  The attention is nice, of course it is...and I'll be glad when it all dies down again. 

No negative responses so far...maybe a puzzled or uncomfortable look or two.  But I know, the down side could come at any point in the future.  I'll be living with that potential from now on.

Every big step so far has felt like a test...do I really mean it?  Any remorse?  Do I wish I could take it back?  The answers this time are:  yes, no, no.  I do mean it.  No remorse...I feel incredible, free.  And it wouldn't matter if I did want to take it back, because I can't.

No going back in through THAT door!  I'm out, baby, out for ever more!

On the way home I rewarded myself for my chutzpah by stopping for a quick shopping spree in a chi-chi boutique in Kennebunk.  Very different from my usual Goodwill jaunts!  I picked up a truly gorgeous hand-knitted grey sweater top, light and feminizing with pretty flared sleeves, and two pairs of lovely dangly earrings...I have a serious weakness for dangly earrings, especially silver ones with a funky antique look.  :-)  All on sale, all on credit...and right back to spending as little as possible...

I'm still high.  What a rush.  What a life-affirming moment.  Hey world!  THIS IS ME!! 

It's miraculous.  I get to be.

The Memo

I'm planning to come out at work.  Work is WMPG, Portland, Maine's community radio station...we have a paid staff of 5 and about 250 volunteers.  I'm the program director there.  I have written (and rewritten and rewritten) an e-mail with the working subject line "Who the heck is Dee?" in which I explain that I am trans, note that I am planning to transition, and asking everyone to call me "Dee" as a transitional  nickname from now on, because "Dave" just doesn't feel right any more.

How this started:  a week ago Monday we had a meeting of the paid staff in which I saw and took an opportunity to tell them that I was planning to transition.  I had previously come out to all of them as trans, but had not yet spoken of a firm intention to become a woman.  I tried to keep it as light as I could, and my dear friends stared at me with unreadable faces.  I asked them to start calling me "Dee," and my friend Dale Robin asked, "Are you going to change your e-mail?"

I had thought of starting small by asking paid staff and a few friends among the volunteers to use the new name, in hopes that it would spread over time, but now that she mentioned it, the idea struck me as a good one.  So, I switched.  "Dave" became "Dee" in the name and signature fields of all my station e-mails.  I started answering my phone with the new name too.  (I had already begun to use it on air, but DJ aliases are commonplace at 'MPG, so that by itself had not been provocative.)  

My old tightly controlled self hardly ever acted on impulse like this.  It's scary, but it feels right.

Naturally people noticed.  A few asked (I gave evasive answers), a few said "cool" without seeming to need an explanation, several folks just took the new name up, one person guessed why (or I should say, guessed and asked if she was right) and there were various small awkwardnesses.  I sensed a definite hum of curiosity about the place...and so I started drafting the memo.

I have other justifications too:  for example, I hadn't counted on this being as difficult a request as it turns out to be.  I have been friends with some of these good people for many years, and all that time they have known me as Dave.  They are struggling with the switch.  Maybe witnessing me ask everyone will help.  Also, I quickly saw how confusing it would be to have some people calling me one thing and some another; and I hate it that so far I have been having to ask the friends I have come out to to keep my transness secret from those to whom I have not.

These are all valid reasons, but none of them are the deepest reason.  The deepest reason is, I just want it.  I want to be out.  I am no longer the person I have been,  I want the world to know who I am now.

The other morning, dozing between snooze-button pushes, I experienced a sudden and intense dream-image.  Everyone I knew, everyone in the world, was crowded into a hotel banquet room, squeezed around tables, laughing and talking and eating and drinking and flirting and just being alive together.  I stood in a dusty shadowy stairwell, listening to their din and watching them through double glass doors.  I glanced up the stairs...it was even darker up there...the way back up to a lonely cell.  Up there was death.  I looked down.  My hand rested on the crashbar.  All I had to do was summon up the courage to push the door open and walk through.

And so I've prepped my boss and a couple other key people higher up in the University administration...I've tweaked the memo a few more times (and will a few times more)...and I've carefully considered my timing.  I've got a big project with a deadline to finish, so I probably need to get that done first.  Maybe Thursday afternoon...but on the other hand, project or not, I may not be able to hold off until then.  :-)

I do believe I am ready to take another big step forward into the light.

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!  :-)

Generations

My parents died many years ago, so the story of my trans-becoming has been simpler than it otherwise might have been.  How would they have reacted?  My father would have been pleased and proud, I think, because he valued eccentricity and individualism highly.  My mother might have disapproved at first, and in the way she had might have pointedly told me that it wasn't so...and this would have been maybe the only time I would have responded to such a pronouncement by saying, oh, my darling mother, this time it is so, however much your first impulse might be to will it away.  And quickly or eventually she would have embraced this new version of her child.  Or so I imagine.

It is more than just wistful surmise to consider what might happen this coming week.  I travel today to New Jersey with my children to stay for several days at the home of a couple who were friends with my parents when I was a toddler.  They have four daughters, the oldest just my age, and they have taken a continuing tender interest in me, and so are as close as I have left to parents in the world.

The wife of this couple is a forceful, opinionated, and joyous Jewish matriarch; her husband is mild and kind and possessed of a lovely wry sense of humor.  Every member of this family is fiercely smart and funny.  I love them.

Shall I come out to them?  I think I must.  The inevitable bracing begins.  I'm afraid the husband will be hurt by the news, though he would never say so...I with my father 30 years gone and he with all girls seem to have forged over the years an unspoken son-father bond.

The children are back for their week with me, and it has been harder than ever to force myself back into simple man mode.  It feels increasingly false.  As I struggle with the question of transition I have to remember that they only just heard the news last week, and a carefully filtered version at that.  I'm still coming out to them too...

My number on the tracker for yesterday is not a five only because I was able to dress, which relieves the ache for a little while.  I bought a bracelet and ring at two different stores in downtown Portland and met the remarkable Jackie Ray at MaineTransNet...I hope to interview her (and others in my growing trans circle) for this blog in weeks to come.

Here comes another vacation which feels like more work than staying home and working... *wry smile*

Aftermath, part II

My greatest insecurity has nothing to do with being trans.  It has to do with parenting.  My father died when I was 15 years old, and so since my daughter passed that same age I have felt myself to be flying blind, making up parenthood as I go along.  How much am I still exclusively taking care of them, and how much is it healthy that as developing adult selves they should start taking it upon themselves to take care of me?  Some, it would seem.  More as we go on.  Soon we will be equals, loving each other equally across a little negligible fence of generation, hardly worth noticing.

I told my children that I felt myself to be a woman, and they responded with love, and that is perhaps the most precious gift I have even been given.  I am still telling them.  This is a long telling, with many steps.  I will make sure they know that I am still the parent, they the offspring, but that will mean less and less as time goes on.  It is an honor and a miracle to have lived long enough to learn this truth.

The biggest development of all is, for the first time in my life, as my children and my siblings and my friends respond warmly to my news, I begin to feel loved for who I truly am.  What a remarkable, joyous sensation.  I can hardly stand it.  And yet, I begin to dare to rejoice.

And now the question is, what will I do with the time left me?  It is a generous portion, with any luck.  I can accomplish much.  Time to get busy.