GenderBendy

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!

The end of a whirlwind week

I've had a couple of kind inquiries about how I'm doing since coming out at work on Wednesday, and I'm doing fine, thanks.  A lot has happened in a short time, all of it good.

Thursday:  I had many more e-mails waiting for me when I got to work, expressing congrats and support.  No stink bombs.  Several people said they thought what I had done took real balls, which is funny when you think about it.  There was one e-mail from a volunteer friend who read my blog from top to bottom with real attention and said some really nice things about it.  I am totally susceptible to compliments of my writing (take note if you ever want to try to get something out of me), and enjoyed a warm buzz for the rest of the day.  Otherwise, a more or less ordinary busy day at work. 

Friday:  e-mails trickling off...some people saving saying something nice for a face-to-face encounter.  Still no stink bombs.  Sharing news this personal invites return confidences...I've had more than one conversation which was mostly listening on my part.  And, otherwise, another regular busy day.  Then home to prepare for a trip to western MA for the second laser treatment on my beard.

The Weekend:  The second treatment was not nearly as traumatic as the first.  (See Zap! for an account of that.)  I knew what to expect this time, and also I'm extremely pleased with how well the first one worked.  Afterward Ardis and I started talking clothes (she's an old family friend...we played together as toddlers) and next thing I know, we're at her house and she's hauling outfits out of multiple closets for me to try, and it turns out we wear the same size shoe, and an hour and a half later I'm driving on to Sue's house (Sue is Ardis's mother and a kind of surrogate mom to me too) with two big bags in the back ...some really nice stuff.  Thanks Ardis!  Total pink fog orgy!  :-)

Sue had invited me to a night of comedy improv at a local VFW hall, and I had asked if she minded if I went in femme mode, and she said she was expecting it, so I got dressed, wolfed some stew, and out we went, stopping back at Ardis's house to pick her up too.  This was pretty much my first time out as a woman in a completely ordinary everyday social setting...non-shopping (where they have to be polite), non-LGBT friendly.  Nobody looked at me twice.  Sue and Ardis were great...just treating me like their old girlfriend in town for the weekend.  I got to experience what life will be like when I'm transitioned... and it was a bit of a letdown.  I was tired and feeling a little shook up, and the fact that I was dressed the way I wanted didn't make that go away.  I know this is a lesson I need to learn, that even if my transition goes perfectly I'm still going to have plenty of sucky times, and that was perhaps the beginning of learning it.  I still savored every moment, though.

Before I left Sue's house this morning I had added a third big bag of clothes to the back of my car...thanks Sue...clothes-swapping like this may happen all the time in girl world, but not in boy world, so it feels special, and it's a thrill to have so many more wardrobe options...  :-)

One last event of note:  I stopped for the weekly grocery shop on my way home, and an employee of the store who pointedly declined to serve me several months back was once again behind the seafood counter. (Original account here.)  He saw me coming and moved into a little alcove with his face hidden, pretending to be busy.  I felt the adrenaline begin to bubble up, and without giving myself a chance to really think about it I stepped up to the counter and waited a moment to see if he would acknowledge my presence.  He did not, so I said clearly and loudly, "Could I buy some fish please?" 

Reluctantly, with hostile eyes, he served me.  When he handed me the bag of salmon fillet, I met his eye for just a second and said warmly "Thank you kindly," and then stayed a moment more to cross things off my list before rolling out of sight.  It was a sweet ending to a fine weekend.

I've made an enormous amount of progress in a very short time.  My children are due to arrive any time now for their week with me, and I think I need to slow down now, breathe, rest...show myself I can still take a step back, bide my time...work, write, parent.

Second First Event

I'm up early this morning - it's around 5am - to get ready to go to First Event, a big annual conference for trans folk in Peabody, MA, north of Boston.  It's an hour drive each way for me, so I plan to dress and drive today and tomorrow.  (Gotta come out to my neighbors one of these days so I can stop fussing about how to get from the house to the car in a skirt...)

Last year's First Event was my first time ever dressed in public, less than two months after my initial trans-revelation.  I drove down in man mode in a state of high trepidation, my painted nails hidden inside gloves, and changed in one of the complimentary changing rooms into my Goodwill polyester skirt and a plum-colored silk top, which I unknowingly put on backward.  (Single buttons go in back...)  I didn't have a wig or any shapewear, though I would acquire both before the day was done, in a pink fog in the shopping area.  Until I bought the wig I did the best I could with a hair-tie obscuring my short man-cut, and while I no doubt looked rather patched together none of the gorgeously decked out crossdressers said a thing.  I like that about the trans gatherings I've been to so far...everyone is very accepting.

I feel so much more confident this year, and I'm looking forward to wearing a different nice outfit each of the two days...but, I've made the decision to go once again without wig or shapewear.  I've grown my hair out and gotten it colored, and when I blow-dry and style it right, it looks solidly femme; and with regard to body shape I've been practicing getting by on posture and mannerism.  That's how it will be once I've fully transitioned.  Even with hormones I'm going to be shaped much as I am now, so I figure it's time to go it with only the standard props: my own body, hair and voice, plus clothes, makeup, and attitude.  Chin up, dear.  Loosen those hips...stick that ass up a little higher...

Something I've learned:  a little too much is just enough.  I carry it best when I'm a touch flamboyant, which is a challenge for me.  I'm the shy hide-in-a-corner (for forty years) type.  I can't go back now, though...just gotta keep sashaying forward into the light.

Stay tuned for a report on day one!

Girding my loins, such as they are

I have a date to meet my friend Deb for coffee at 2pm this afternoon.  It is 1030am now...plenty of time to shave, do makeup, select an outfit, change my mind a couple of times about which wig to wear, and go...and I am on the verge of calling to say, I'll be there, but I won't be dressed today.  Despite that being the plan.  Despite it being six weeks since I've gone out dressed.  Despite aching with all my being for a little time in full femme mode.

It was six weeks ago that that man in the Goodwill parking lot looked in through my car window and yelled "faggot" after me, and I still cower inside when I think of it.  I have always been terribly sensitive to what other people think of me.  I can't seem to shield myself from their emotions, especially the negative ones...anger, hostility.  And I feel most vulnerable when I'm dressed.  My confidence drains away.  I feel exposed and tentative and weak.  I feel afraid.

One possible reason it took me 46 years to become conscious of my transness:  I'm just that shy.  So pathetically, absurdly shy that I came within a hair's breadth of standing on the sidelines of an entire life.

I have to go.  I have to return to the public eye.  I have to show the world who I am, and continue to learn to make my way.  If I don't, I deny myself.  If I don't, I step voluntarily back into the cell.  I can't do that.  I can't go back in there.  I have to go.  Out.  Out.  Out.

Didn't somebody once say, true courage is not fearlessness, but being full of fear and doing it anyway?  If so, I guess I am about to be courageous.

Here I go.

Gulp.

Resolve, earrings, and bowling

I have made up my mind: I intend to transition, and I am moving circumspectly but deliberately toward that goal.

The femme ache tracker turned out to be useful only to a point...what I came to realize as I updated it each day was that the way I had set it up, the only way I was going to decide to transition was if I was in constant emotional agony from having to stay male.  What about a positive, life-changing decision freely and joyously made?  This past week, I made such a choice.  It's an emotional decision, more feeling than words, but clear for all that:  I am a woman...I feel no maleness left in me...and I am going to make my outside match my inside.  Not because it will kill me if I don't, but because I want to.  Because I want to feel right in my body, at long last.

As you can see if you care to look in the sidebar to the right, I have changed the name of the tracker.  It no longer tracks ache, but resolve.  I'll keep updating it daily, and I'll be honest if my feelings cycle back again down into doubt and ambivalence...as impossible as that seems to me at the moment, fresh from the crucible of my deliberations...

So once again I find myself planning a talk with my children.  I restrained myself, with effort, this past weekend, counseling myself to patience.  The soonest I would propose to start living as a woman full time would be next summer, so I have plenty of time to ease them into the idea even if I don't stretch the timeline out.  Still, a talk soon would be a good idea, I think...can't let them fall too far behind.  And having had one talk go well, I'm not quite as braced for disaster as I was the first time...and I know the value of friendly ears and minds in the rehearsal and planning stages and will make good use of them again this time.

I roll my eyes at my own compulsive caution...but it is my way, and I embrace it.  I want to come to my goal knowing I did everything I could to help them through an evolution which must seem to them bizarre at the very least.

And then there's the fact that I've mentioned this blog to daughter17...hi sweetie, if you're reading this let me know...we need to have a talk.  No!  Ya think!? 

On a lighter note, I'm going bowling tonight in full femme mode with the Maine Trans Net crew...after an  excursion to the mall to put at least one pair of dangly earrings on a credit card...my six weeks of training studs are up tomorrow!  Yay!  :-)  It will be my first time dressed at the mall, and that's supposed to be a big right of passage, but based on how well I've been passing I expect it to be routine.  I'm a little more nervous about the bowling...anxious about encounters with rude men...but I'll have my boys there to protect me... :-)

Polish after all, and a 5

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.

An ordinary day with piercings

I stopped at the mall on the way home from work yesterday to get my ears pierced--my reward for facing my fear and coming out to the children.  The girl in the chair before me was about seven years old.  She sat up very straight and solemn while the piercer daubed disinfectant on her new jeweled studs, nobly bearing the pain of her new mark of femininity.

My piercing was done by Jasmine, a stylish and  unflappable young woman wearing cute strappy platform shoes...I complimented them, and she thanked me, and said they were hurting her feet, but that she had to wear them, because they were cute.

I asked Jasmine my two questions:

Is it a problem that I have almost no earlobes?  No, we do 3-month-old babies, we can always find a way.

Is there anything different about piercings for men...placed differently, or whatever, because this is for cross-dressing, and I'll want to be wearing big danglies soon?  No.

Then she showed me my choices for my starter kit.  I picked the 4 mm gold balls, but while she was in the back of the store fetching them I imagined sleeping on them for 6 weeks, and asked her to switch out for the 3 mm gold balls, which she cheerfully did, and then click-CHUNK, click-CHUNK, and I was pierced. 

I'm in such a tizzy about my new gold balls...now I'm wearing a little badge of my femininity all the time, for all to see.  I feel hooks on fine chains threaded into my earlobes, pulling me forward into...whatever is to come.

After dinner I dressed and walked the tourist-mobbed streets of Ogunquit for over an hour, watching how men and women looked at me and looked away.  Men's eyes really are drawn to boobs, aren't they?  They can't seem to help themselves.  On an empty side street I was practicing letting my hips swing free and I heard a raucous male voice behind me call "Hey hot mama!"  I didn't turn around, and knew I should be outraged...and grinned all the way back to the car.

...and crash

Did I really write that last entry?  Yes, I did.

Not feeling the femme buzz any more at all now.  Kinda crashed.

I am flummoxed by how completely I appear to pass.  I didn't just go to Goodwill yesterday.  Christina and I stopped for coffee too, and then on the way home I stopped at Target and at the grocery store...no stares, no double-takes, no awkward scenes.

That leaves me feeling stuck.  I need do nothing more than I already am in order to experience life in the world as a woman.  So what do I do now?

I guess I wait to see what I feel I have to do next.

And, it is coming up time to have The Talk with the children.  I predict no upheaval...but I can't avoid the fear of losing their love.  That's what this story is about until the deed is done, sometime in this coming week.

OK.  Just looking after myself until then.

Warning! Femme-y gush!

OMG!  It was so fun shopping with Christina!  I've hated clothes-shopping my whole life, but clearly that was because I was a man.  Man-shopping sucks!  Khaki or denim...that's not a choice...that's a bad joke!

At the Falmouth Goodwill (definitely a jewel among Goodwills, except for having only two dressing rooms) I bought:

A classy-looking femme-cut brown and green button shirt featuring an autumn leaf print
An essential basic sleeveless white top
A lovely soft lavender t-top with a very deep scoop-collar which turns out to be maternity wear... lol!
A pair of daffodil-yellow thin cotton slacks which fits my shapewear most delightfully...damn I'm sexy!
A pair of funky William Morris print stretch capri jeans which I love!
An elegant uber-femme floral print cami/sheer jacket combo which I would never have looked at if Christina hadn't picked it out...thanks gf for stretching my limits!
A crisp dark-blue and brown designer handbag which I like much better than my first stodgy cream-colored purse...A steal at $1.99!
Cute inch-heel round-toe leather shoes which Christina says are in...I trust her absolutely...
A really nice brown bead bracelet with silver highlights...

All for less than 50 bucks!  Goodwill rules!

Christina was awesome!  Holding my purse and purchases, saying my name over and over, giving me all sorts of femme tips, calling me "girly", figuring out my style from watching me sort through the racks and finding things which I liked...gf, I heart you!  :-)

OK, I don't want to totally gack you out, so I'm creating a new page just for outfits...if you want, click on the link to the right for blurry pics and commentary!  Old and new clothes both...Lisa finding her look...it's so exciting!  :-)  [retired Sept. '09 - ed.]

Oh, and by the way, I passed, passed, passed!  My tracker number will be a 3 tonight...if I can go out and have a femme-orgy like this whenever I want (well, whenever I can afford it, which is not quite the same thing, sadly) and never raise an eyebrow, do I ever really need to transition?  Maybe not.  *Happy sigh*.

Quotidian drag

I'm up deliciously late on a holiday morning, looking forward to the treat of a girls' afternoon out with Christina, and I've decided to spend the entire day in femme mode.  I slept naked except for nail polish, and no article of male clothing will touch my skin today...except when I wade through the drifts of laundry by the bed, but that doesn't count. :-)  I've never done femme all day before.  I wonder what my tracker number will be tonight...

I'm going for a plainer look today than I've ever done before...a wanting-to-excite-absolutely-no-notice-at-Goodwill look.  My one and only pair of jeans (with pink & purple canvas belt), a purple woman's cut T-shirt with the logo of my place of employment on it, and the flip-flops.  That's it.  No jewelry, subdued makeup, and maybe just one of Daughter17's hair bands to keep my wig out of my eyes.

The only thing is, the shirt is rather snug, and I am self-conscious about my preternaturally perky boobs...at the supermarket the other night I tamed them a little with my most recent wardrobe addition, a soft light front-buttoning sweater in a browny-gold.  It's supposed to be warm today, but I do believe I'll be bringing the sweater again anyway.

Hey, my italics are back...if ellipses and smilies are my femme-writerly foundation and powder, italics are blush.  Not too much, now...apply judiciously, dear.  :-)