GenderBendy

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.

Aftermath

It has taken me a couple of days, since having The Talk with the children on Tuesday evening, to feel the emotional impact of it.  This morning I spent half an hour sobbing in the bathroom at work, followed by a walk to my secret meditation-park with a wad of more tissues in my pocket, just releasing the tension...

In all my anticipating and planning I never considered the one reaction they actually gave me:  love.  Every time I think of their quick tenderness in response to my news, I am instantly on the brink of tears again.

And I can't quite tell them what I most want to tell them, which is, "I will always be your father."  Parent, yes.  Same heart and mind as ever, loving and caring for you for as long as I live, regardless of what gender or combination of genders I end up settling on.  And I guess that has to be enough.

I have given them my vulnerable honest self, which is all I have to give.  It is enough. I do feel that it is enough.

Tonight's the night

Unless the vibe is wrong, I plan to talk to my children this evening about being trans.  My speeches are all rehearsed...their mother is in the know...it's the easy slow time of summer.

I have a number of reasons for wanting to tell them.  The most important for me is that I am not ashamed, and do not feel that I am sick or damaged in any way, so why not share with them this thing which is so much a part of me?  My most important reason for them is that if either of them is LGBTQ in any way, then I fear that no matter how much tolerance I preach, if I practice secrecy, I will teach them shame.

They are delightfully open-minded young persons who value eccentricity highly, so I hope it will go well.

And, inevitably it seems, I'm braced for it to go badly.

Wish us luck...

Perfect evening

My children are back with me for the week, and last night we went out for ice cream.  Then we continued on to the beach.  The tide was in, but there was almost no swell, and the moon was rising and a day from full, so we were able to walk all the way out to the end of the jetty.  There we sat and watched, far down the coast, the tiny soundless explosions of fireworks no doubt delayed by weather from the Fourth.  The big bang-flashers lit up the undersides of the clouds.  Son14 and I belted out the national anthem just as the grande finale came on...and then we went back to the beach and sat three in a row on the life-guard stand and made raunchy jokes and watched the moon-sparkles dance on the water.

I love my children more than anything else in existence.

Two more days until The Talk.  I endure.