GenderBendy

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

Naked Romance

There's a certain someone for whom, for a while now, I have been feeling tender feelings, and earlier this week an opportunity arose to mention my crush.  Naturally I was nervous about it, but it felt right, so out the words came...and I could plainly see that my words and the feeling behind them very much pleased and moved the object of my affection.  I don't have any idea yet where we might be headed, but we're talking, and in the meantime, two wonderful things have happened in our exchange which, regardless of outcome, already make it a complete and positive experience for me.

The first is that from my c.s.'s clearly unfeigned tender response I received a powerful message of the inherent value to this person of the love I have to offer.  I strongly exhibit the (what I take to be) feminine trait of instantly internalizing other peoples' thoughts/feelings/judgements about me, so one of the most insidious after-effects of my divorce a few years ago was a sense I could not shake of the worthlessness of my love.  No amount of rational self-exhortation has been able to lessen the profound conviction I have felt that no one could ever possibly want me...until my c.s. was so touched by my expression of affection.  Wow. 

The second wonderful thing is that, for the first time in my life, I approach romance honestly.  Always, until now, as soon as there was a possibility of significant emotional exchange, my gender-lie intruded.  As soon as I felt attraction, I had to start thinking what a man would do.  My dates/girlfriends/wife no doubt found me stiff, stilted, subtly false, because I was trying to impersonate a thing I never was.  And there was another pernicious side-effect:  I felt a secret contempt for women who were interested in me, because I could see that I was fooling them, that they bought the lie.

Now I have the chance to love as, and be loved for, myself.  Such a simple notion.  My risk is greater, because that old man-shell not only obscured me, it insulated me too...but the potential reward is also greater...to be seen, to be known, to be loved for who I really am.  Wow, double wow, again and again.  And one of the things which endears me so to my c.s. is that I do feel that this person sees the woman I am, and values and perhaps even cherishes feminine me.  For the first time in my life, when I begin to sense that the person I care for might also care for me, my respect for that person increases.  I am after all a very strange sort of woman...to be receptive to the idea of romance with me takes, it seems to me, rare human insight, generosity, and self-confidence.  What's not to admire?  :-)

I am keenly aware of the novelty of my experience, and so wary...I am in a way 16 years old and navigating my first crush...but I am also 48 and at least somewhat wise and more than a little strong and able to take care of myself.  So let what will happen happen.  I'm ready.

The astute reader will have noted that I have not only avoided mentioning my c.s.'s name, but also that person's gender.  Clever, no?  I'm enjoying being coy...one of many feminine prerogatives... ;-)

I'll Get You, My Pretty

What about voice then?

For me this is one of the most puzzling aspects of transition:  how am I going to talk when I am a woman?

Oh, there are techniques.  For example, (if you are male) do your best impression of the Wicked Witch of the West.  Now loosen all the places in your throat where breath is constricted...mix in equal parts Marilyn Monroe...keep the pitch as high as you are comfortable going without breaking into falsetto...and the resulting creaky-breathy voice is the beginning of a workable feminine voice for you.

I've met several transwomen who have perfected 100% natural-sounding feminine voices.  With study and practice I too could develop a voice which will go well with my femme look, and with which I'll be able to pass on the phone, on the radio.  I've already started working on this.  It takes a long time.

What I want is a voice which is unmistakably feminine, but which is as free, expressive, funny, attractive, and (in its way) powerful as my male voice has been.  I don't know if that's something I can have.  Or, if I can, some experts imply I will have to give up my male voice to get it.  They say you can only really nail the female voice if you use it all the time...and I have met people who do so, and have listened to them struggle to demonstrate their old male voices.  They really seem to have lost that voice.

I don't want to lose my male voice.  It has been at the center of my work for 20 years in radio.  I enjoy speaking with it, singing with it...there's a physical pleasure in the vibration in my chest.  I like to do impressions and silly voices.  I really don't want to give all that up.

On the other hand, as I continue to feel more and more feminine all the time, I find myself wincing internally at my masculine volume and resonance, my explosive plosives.  I feel too loud, too deep, and my breath feels pent up, un-free.  My current voice no longer accurately expresses my character.  I feel softer than that, gentler...cuter.

What I really really want is both.  I'd like a natural-sounding pretty feminine voice for every day...and then every once in a while I'd like to still do a radio show back as a man again, or sing bass in an all-girl vocal quartet, or other mildly gender-subversive things like that.  The femme ache is so strong all the time now, it's hard to remember that I don't necessarily have to go all the way over to the other endpoint of the gender-spectrum if I don't want to. 

I have no idea if both is something I can achieve.  Even just the good femme voice is slow in coming.  I'm not yet using it out in the world...I'm bashful about it.  In daily conversation so far all that has happened is that my tone has gone up a little and I've become more soft-spoken.  I have a long ways to go.

So, as in so many areas of this work, and as hard as it is to be patient, the best plan seems to be to let the voice change as it will, in its own time, however long that takes.  Sigh.

"I'll get you, my pretty...and your little dog..." *cough*
"I'll get you, my..."  *throat clear*
Ah, to hell with it...just gimme the damn ruby slippers already!

Some emotional heavy lifting

Thursday afternoon at work an antsiness I had been feeling all day intensified into a need to get away from everyone, to be completely alone.  I went for a walk and after a bit found an empty dark classroom auditorium.  (It's vacation this week).  I sat in the back row and tried to meditate, but I was feeling too agitated; then, exhausted, I napped for about an hour, undisturbed; then I woke again and thought, "I'm not done...I need to remember something," so I curled around the awful empty ache in my stomach, hugging my chest to my thighs, and let my mind go back, searching for the source...and remembered a backpacking trip my father took me on when I was about six.

I have thought and written about this trip before, in pre-revelation counseling, and I have always felt that something emotionally shattering happened during it, but I could never figure out what it was.  Now I think I begin to understand.

Perhaps it goes something like this:

First of all, even before bringing gender into it, I was too young.  He took me up into a huge empty dark place in the mountains when all I had ever known was the lights of home, and I was terrified.  But he had singled me out for this trip - my brother, a year younger, had been deemed too little - so I understood that I was expected to be strong and brave, and I did my best to hide my fear.  We ate dinner as the sky went dark, hung up our food because of the bears, and then it was time to sleep.  When I was in my sleeping bag he told me he needed to go away from the tent for a little while and asked if I would be all right, and I said yes, and he went...and I thought I was going to die. 

I waited and waited, and I heard noises, and then (I swear this is how I remember it) I looked out of the tent and saw a ghostly white figure moving in the dark, and I didn't know if it was my father returning or an emissary of death.

Then he was back. 

I needed him to comfort me, to touch me, to hold me, but he did none of these things.  He did not sense my terror..and I think perhaps in that moment I grasped at some fundamental level deeper than words that he could not see me.  He could not see the girl I knew I was.  He saw me as a boy, expected me and wanted me to be a boy.

And of course like any little girl I loved my Daddy with all my heart, and wanted more than anything to please him...so perhaps that was the moment I made up my mind to be a boy and then a man.  For him.  Because I loved him.

Or something like that.  I am wary of pat psychological reconstructions.  Still, there is a lot here which feels close to truth.

In the empty auditorium, as I worked my way through some version of the above, sobs wrenched out of me.  Anger and pain and sorrow and guilt all mixed together were oozing out deep down, a black emotional sludge from long ago.  It hurt hard.

But then later, washing my face in the mirror, I looked in the mirror and thought, "I forgive him.  And I forgive myself."  Easy, just like that.

Who knows how much of this is accurate or lasting...but it does seem telling.  I thought I was going to die that night in the mountains; and I thought I was going die again when my car's transmission failed on the highway, right around the time I reached the age he was when he died; and it was right after that I wrote in my journal, "I just want to be a girl." 

Too tidy?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

Why didn't I die?  I was supposed to die.  Why am I alive?

I don't know.  No reason.  I just am.

So.

So, now I'm going to do what I want.

Competence

Thursday's windstorm ripped some of the asphalt shingles off my roof and dismantled a long stretch of the vinyl skirting that runs around the base of the outer walls of my house.  I went out in the morning to survey the damage and found myself pursuing a truly feeble line of thought...oh, this is terrible, whatever shall I do, who is going to help me?  It took a moment of real effort to make myself remember, hey, I know how to use a hammer and a shovel, and I'm good at finding clever solutions to problems; and then I remembered I had some shingles in my shed and got the ladder and some appropriate nails and went up and patched the holes well enough to hold until I can hire someone to do it right, and then dug out the gravel along the base of the ripped-out skirting and reset the guide-tracks and reinstalled the skirting, better than it had been before. 

While I was doing these things, I felt male.

Something else to consider:  a big part of my job is training people to talk on the radio, and over the years I have observed that many more of my female trainees than male ones are intimidated by the studio technology.  Their hands flutter, they dither...I was talking about this with Deb, and she said that her father never taught her anything, as he did her brothers, about how things are made and work and can be fixed, and that in that moment those women are five years old, struggling with a lifetime of the anxiety of never having been taught such things.

Here's another angle:  romantically, sexually, I definitely begin to feel the excitement of the idea of being the passive one, the seducee...I find I desire someone else's desire for me, and that person's acting on that desire, taking the lead, pursuing me...ooh, yes...

Finally, let it be noted that in the same journal entry, fifteen months ago now, in which I wrote "I just want to be a girl," I also wrote this sentence:  "I am so sick of being strong."

To my working list of what I consider to be my positive feminine traits - that I'm empathetic, collaborative, emotional, nurturing - it seems I need to add something less positive:  an impulse to passivity, weakness, even helplessness.  The more femme I'm feeling, the more I forget that I am smart and capable and strong.  My sense of competence evaporates.

What's up with that?

Um...uh...*scratches head*...that's a toughie.  The whole history of women in the world looms in the mind...

Well, I'll tell you one thing:  I intend to become as much a woman as I can be, but I do not want to give up feeling competent to do it.  So somehow I have to figure out how to combine the softness I yearn for with the hardness I have learned and earned.  I find myself back again at a question I have pondered before, and have not yet answered to my satisfaction.  What constitutes specifically feminine strength?  How can you be strong and still womanly?  What is a strong woman?

I haven't figured that out yet.  Any thoughts?  :-)

p.s.  I got in the paper!  I'm the cover girl (in the paper version) for an article on trans identity in this week's Portland Phoenix:  click here to read.

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.

The chocolate-covered mandarin orange segments were divine

Happy Valentine's Day to me.  I love me.  Thanks me, I'm truly touched.  :-)

I feel giddy.  The party was really fun, and I did in fact do some flirting and also some networking...social and professional.  I feel so young and new, still, when I am inhabiting my femininity, I tend to forget that I'm a smart competent grownup with a lot of good life experience, and that people will respect that.  I have little sense of my own worth, I think...a "what, little 'ol me?" kind of thing.  Which is stupid.  Why should I not be accepted and liked and respected by people?  I'm an interesting person, to say the least.

Fun crowd...a mix of academics, neighbors, and parenting-friends.  Not quite the high-powered literary gathering I was expecting, but that's probably just as well.  Nobody batted an eye at me, even though my shapewear and dress pushed me well past "normal woman" into tranny-caricature.  I was by far the most voluptuous individual there... :-)  It was valuable to be able to  look at other women playing dress-up and to see how close I actually already am without enhancements of any kind, just in my own skin, to being shaped like a woman.

The poem-reading didn't end up happening...I gather our hosts thought it would interrupt the energy of the party, which seemed right.  We all just taped our poems up on a door.  Mine was a little damp...I had been carrying it, folded up, in my decolletage...  ;>

Early in the evening I danced a little in a loose group of dancers, enjoying feeling slinky and sexy, but still really dancing alone.  Then, later, I really felt like I wanted to dance with someone, a man, and a self-confident handsome middle-aged gent with whom I had had a short conversation earlier in the evening was standing there, so without thinking about it I stepped up to him and said "Are you secure enough in your masculinity to dance with me?"  "It would be my pleasure," he said, and we danced.  Not touching...the kind of face-each-other-and-wiggle I remember from college.  He made small talk.

A little later, in the standing around saying goodbye but actually having more conversations phase, I do believe he chatted me up.  He was solicitous, bordering on gallant...he told me if I ever needed an ally, to call on him...and he said he wanted to give me a hug, so we hugged.  And I liked it.  Oh, I did.  This was a social interaction I grasped intuitively (or at least so it felt):  the beginning of a negotiation.  And behold, I become aroused as I type.  I really really might be a heterosexual woman.  I want to flirt with men, excite men's interest, toy and play with and tease men, and in the end succumb to their strength...oh, my, it's getting warm in here...

I did some emerging from the cocoon last night, is what I did.  Not all the way.  Big parts poking out now, though...legs and feelers... hints of wings.  I pause now and respirate, extremities trembling a bit...soon I will be all the way out, drying my wings in the sun...then that first tentative spread and flex, and a launch into whimsical serendipitous flight... :-)

Fashion experiments at work and home

Thursday at work I wore the soft blue androgynous top and matching stocking cap and the mini-aubergine earrings...moderate dangle, no sparkle.  Catching my reflection in windows and such, I still looked like same the old Dave everyone's used to.

Yesterday I left the cap at home and let my hair fall loose and fluffy over my ears.  I also wore my favorite antiquey-chandelier earrings - significant dangle, moderate sparkle - and a short soft-and-fuzzy wool scarf in gender-neutral light tones, and when I caught my reflection, I was snapping more femme.  It's the hair, mostly...that's such a powerful gender-signifier...although it would look much more femme if I had neatly styled it rather than just roughly patting my bed-head into shape. 

Nobody said anything, except my dear friend Deb just before I left...she confirmed my impression that I was closer to the center line.  It doesn't take much, it turns out, to waltz right up to it.  A touch of lipstick would bump me across.

I wish my hair were thicker... :-(

Anyway, this morning when I woke up I lay in bed pondering the question I ponder every morning:  what to wear?  ...and with some trepidation I decided to go with the same hairdo and earrings, plus the super-fuzzy lamb's wool sweater with the big gold-and-white buttons which my children have already seen me in. 

Why trepidation?  Because my son is still uncomfortable with my femininity, so I have been keeping it under wraps at home, at least with regard to appearance.  I've never held back on how I hold my body and move, and I'm letting my voice wander as it wants across the gender divide, with sometimes curious results.  But out of respect for his ambiguous feelings, when he is around I have maintained consistent drab (man-clothes).

At the same time I'm agonizing all the time about how to talk to him.  We have a close and loving relationship, but we don't converse very well.

So, my dressing choice this morning was actually a parenting choice.  I have elected to wear what I want to wear - what I wore in public yesterday - and to let him deal with it as he sees fit.  He's up...I can see him at his computer from where I sit at my computer...and we've had some light chat, about coffee and so on.  His eyes were elusive...but then they often are.  I feel self-conscious, bashful, and vulnerable, but I'm going to play it out. 

Maybe he hasn't even really noticed.  And even if he has, maybe he doesn't care.  And even if he does, maybe small steps like this will impel conversation, and that would be good.  Anything's better than a Talk.

[Note added 5 minutes after original posting:  my son just noticed my earrings.  "Nice earrings," he remarked.  "Why thenk you," I replied, striking a pose.  "They're my favorites."  Then he started joking around about something else.  Yay!  :-)  Once again I re-learn what I have already learned so many times before, that the subtle setting of tone is at the very center of parenting...and that this can not be faked or forced.  Their moods resonate to mine like unstopped guitar-strings...]

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.