GenderBendy

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.

Butching up for the tire guys

Yesterday I had an appointment to get my tires balanced and rotated at a little garage in Portland.  Of all the places I go regularly in my life, this is the one I would be most nervous about visiting in femme mode, because the place is so completely male.  There are signed pictures of race-car drivers on the wall, a lamp made of an oil-funnel, and in the waiting area (don't as me why) a gas grill tricked up to look like a hotrod engine.  The guys wear work blues, boots, and battery-company caps.  They have old pre-trendy tattoos and grease-blackened hands, smoke as they work, and never seem to smile.  Can you see me going into such a place looking the way I do in my picture?

Yeah, me neither.

If/when I start living full time as a woman, it'll be a challenge to get my car worked on...but in the meantime it's still easy to get most of the way back to MAN when I need to, or at least as far back as I have ever been - a professor-type in a Honda. 

So, I butched up for the tire guys.

I was already not shaving because of an upcoming electrolysis appointment, so with what's left of my beard after the laser I was as scruffy as I am still capable of looking.  I left my earrings and scarf behind, and went to the appointment right after a workout at the gym, so I was able to slick my hair back behind my ears.  At the garage I kept my shoulders squared and my hands in my pockets, and used a deep strong voice.  The only thing I couldn't change was my eyebrows, aggressively plucked a week ago for a party, and my hair color and length - but hey, one of the guys had longer hair than me. 

I passed.  :-)

Yesterday (coincidentally) was also the first day in weeks in which I felt at least somewhat masculine again, because on Thursday I have my first appointment with an endocrinologist, and I'm feeling cautious as I approach the possibility of starting hormones.   It's the first step with real risks (heart attack, for instance) and real consequences if I change my mind...once you've grown the breasts, you can't ungrow them.

It is important to remind myself that until I actually do it I can always change my mind about transition...always find creative ways to settle in the middle and play indefinitely here.  I'd prefer that, actually, if I can manage it...but oh, the drive is so strong.  Even feeling ambiguous as I did yesterday, as soon as I got home from work I still put on my femme comfy clothes.  

Well, what will happen will happen.  So far it has worked to neither force any action nor suppress any healthy-seeming impulse.  So, that's what I'm going to keep doing.

Hair

A couple of weekends ago I took Daughter17 to the college fair at the enormous indoor track at the University of Southern Maine.  Several hundred families of high school seniors milled about between the long rows of tables.  Daughter17 and her friend disappeared into the crowd, so I took the opportunity to sit and observe how the other feminine parents of the college-bound were presenting.

Most of them were wearing pretty much what I was wearing:  baggy blue jeans, sneakers, cotton shirts/tops, and comfy sweaters.  In my standard man-getup, by the dominant style of the room, I was practically dressed in femme mode myself.  (I don't get it...don't the women of this country realize how much fun they could be having?)  Anyway, there were only two femme-markers consistently on display in that cavernous place:  lot of nice earrings, and lots of lovingly cared-for hair.

I'm growing my hair out, in hopes of finding a style which will liberate me from the wig in femme mode, but which I can still also creatively comb, gel, and/or behat into something which will still work in male mode too...but I'm beginning to realize that my options are limited.  I've been paying close attention to hair, and, at least in my part of Maine right now, M and F haircuts appear to be almost completely segregated. 

For example, any hair over the ears on a man starts to look out of place.  Likewise, shaving sideburns all the way off, as I have done, though by itself it doesn't excite comment.  And any bounce or body, even in shortish hair, signals femininity as well.

Heavy bangs would be my best option, to disguise my masculine receding hairline, but I don't think I can pull them off unless I never take off my red sox cap.  Bangs are definitely out for men.

Next best:  a ponytail...but they have their gender-specific elements too.  Women's ponytails tend to have neat flippy ends, having been cut to all the same length, while men's ponytails, even the well-kept ones, tend to dwindle down to a straggly point.  Guess which one I want... flip, flip, delightfully tickling my neck... :-)

And then there is the issue of color.  There are some men my age (47) coloring their hair, but almost all the women are, and more aggressively too, usually completely eliminating the grey...yes, even in the earthy-crunchy liberal company I keep.  The coloring jobs on the women I meet often look professionally done, with streaks and highlights...a lot like my favorite wig as it happens. 

I begin to surmise that as long as I keep my more-salt-than-pepper-these-days natural color, I can get away with a fairly femme cut without tipping the gender balance...including bangs?  Well, maybe not that far.  But the flip side is, even with my hair in the awkward in-between place it is now, if tomorrow I shaved close and wore gender-neutral clothes and then got a professional femme-style color job, I might start eliciting double-takes...

Interesting.  A pro color job becomes another possibly provocative step to contemplate...someday, when I like the length and can afford it.

One nice thing about growing your hair out:  it doesn't cost anything.

The seafood man

I had an instructive encounter last night.

There was a new man behind the seafood counter at the grocery store.  As I approached he was just starting to fish seven female lobsters out of the holding tank for two very particular French-speaking Canadian men.  (They liked the eggs, one explained to a shopper who asked).  I noted that my favorite salmon was on sale, and while I stood waiting for my turn, pleasantly anticipating a treat for dinner, I watched the seafood man work. 

He was a large man, thick and solid-looking through the chest and shoulders especially, with heavy arms.  His hair was grey and conservatively cut.  His face was stony, and that and his forceful way of moving and the jerky fast rhythm as he chomped his gum gave him an air of masculine aggressiveness.  As I often do I started making up details about his life:  ex-marine, immune to tenderness, sometimes threatens his girlfriend with physical harm.  His customer service, as he pulled lobsters from the tank and sexed them, was perfunctory at best, verging on rude, but the Canadians were manly men too, muscular and frank, and I sensed respect between the seafood man and them...that vibe of men being men among men which so often in my life I've had to bluff my through.

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?  :-)