GenderBendy

Four years and counting

No post in ten weeks. Bad blogger! Bad bad blogger!

Yes, I know, I'm so sorry. There can be no excuse, so I won't mention how NaNoWriMo ate my November. Nor will I note that after a point there is so much to tell that one starts feeling overwhelmed. Nor will I bring in my still-evolving ideas about where the fact of being trans fits into my life. No, I won't say any of those things.

I've had an anniversary since my last post. It was just this time of year four years ago that I finally figured out that, my whole life long, I had been getting my gender wrong. I have often quoted a line from the life-changing journal entry I wrote back in November of '08: "I just want to be a girl." It was one of the most curious moments of my life, writing that, because I realized it was true even as the pen moved over the paper. But, it is not actually the first gender-laden sentence on that journal page. A couple of paragraphs before, I wrote this:

What about the writing part? Does that come out of a feminine place in me? Is my inner child a dreamy girl? Could be.

Looking back I see now that my desire to write, which I've had since I learned to read, contributed to my gender self-repression. I remember early on feeling captivated both by the floaty self-sufficient internality of making up stories, and by the idea of being a purely detached observing eye. No wonder I was able to just hang out inside myself for so long.

Speaking of writing, in November I participated in National Novel Writing Month. Along with hundreds of thousands of other people all over the world, I wrote a 50k-word rough draft of a novel in 30 days.

All my life I have had this idea that writing had to be a solitary act, and I failed and failed as a writer. NaNoWriMo was a revelation of communal creativity. I joined a facebook group of other participants in Maine, and we encouraged and challenged each other. We had writing sprints every evening. It was glorious. I finished, and I think I have the beginning of a good saleable book which I will try to sell when I have finished rewriting. I could not have done it without my total stranger writing buddies. Yay for teamwork and community!

On a writing-related note, I'm also planning to do standup again. I had an initial good experience back in summer of 2011 performing in the Femme Show for a boisterous audience of young queers, and then got to experience what it's like to bomb at an open mic for straight people. Bombing was no fun, so I withdrew and regrouped. Now I've worked up an all new routine and am looking around for the right room to try it out in.

I think I might be good at comedy. I had an insight: it's like classical music. You carefully craft your set, practice long hours, tweak and adjust and refine...and then you step up into the light and have one chance to make it seem like you just spontaneously thought of all these jokes. I grasp this intuitively. It feels comfortable and safe to me. So, this could be fun.

BTW, if you're thinking, she just said she's getting all teamworky and communal and now she's talking about being a solo performer...what's up with that? Well, I'll tell you: the big payoff of comedy for me, I project, will not be laughs and applause, but the feeling, when it goes well, of synergy and collaboration with the audience. Comedy (like radio, my life's work) is a conversation, not a performance. Communal, social. So there.

Yes, yes, of course I want to get laughs too. :-p

What else? Oh, yeah, surgery-recovery. Not much to report, which I know must be disappointing to those among my acquaintance who seem so fascinated by the topic. It's going fine. I'm still not orgasmic, but haven't given up hope...though I'm also reconciled to the possibility of never getting that back. And I'm still a revirgin, and may remain so for quite a while, the way dating has been going, which is, it hasn't. A lot of my new comedy routine, actually, is about how uncomfortable I still seem to make most men. "Look," I'm going to say to them, "This is really simple. There's nothing to worry about. Just look at it this way: now that you know I'm trans, if you laugh at any more of my jokes, it *does* mean you're gay." 

Four years gone by, and if I had to sum up I would say, I made the right choices, and it's going well. What then will the fifth year bring? Continued transformation. These days I feel this physically as still more previously undreamed-of unclenching. For example, I have discovered that I can move my legs apart from each other right where the big femur-balls lock into the pelvis-sockets, opening up down there in a way I never have before. I have been clenched so hard my whole life I've been clenching my bones.

Same thing emotionally too. That still feels more perilous, though. Another reason besides being a writer that I repressed for so long was that I got the message early on that nobody wanted who I really was, nor the love I had to offer from within who I really was. I have a lifetime of rejection to overcome. Most days I do feel confident and strong, but deep down the insecurity still throbs, and I still feel tentative and vulnerable as I turn toward the possibility of intimacy. Tra la, here we go - life.

Oh, and the novel? It's a fantasy story for young adults about Felix Yz, a 15-year old boy who, at the age of four, because of a science experiment gone horribly wrong, was fused at the atomic level with a hyper-intelligent fourth dimensional being. The alien, whom they call Zyx, communicates with Felix by using his fingers to type. The novel takes the form of Felix's journal entries in the last few weeks before a risky (and amusingly high-tech) procedure which will either separate them again, or kill them both. It has a couple of trans characters in it, but the fact that they are trans is incidental to the story.

Which matches where I am now in my life. If I'm going to keep writing this blog, which I do want to do, I think I'm going to have to think of it not so much as a blog about being trans, but as a blog by a fascinating exciting creative sexy intensely alive woman who incidentally happens to be trans. 

I can do that. Works for me...aaand, that's my set. I'm Lisa, and you've been a fabulous audience. Good night!

Fame!

Six weeks post-surgery now. Healing is going fine, I guess. No complications. I can tell that the new parts and I are going to get along all right, but they’re still no fun. The sutures over the clitoral area and the labia minora are taking forever to dissolve, the long incisions itch, I’m still too swollen to sit without a donut, my back hurts from all the awkward sitting, and the aftercare is still a lot of work: three dilations a day until the end of September, when I will be permitted to drop to two. At least in a couple weeks I get to stop douching and taking sitz baths.

I still tire easily. I returned to work full time this past week and had to take a couple of short days, as well as going next door from time to time to the Women’s and Gender Studies house ('MPG has no unencumbered horizontal space) to lie on the couch. Healing is long hard work. I hope my energy will improve soon.

Also, I still have no sexual feeling. The nerves work, but even when it's not just annoying, stimulation fails to build to anything. I may never have an orgasm again. It's funny though: when you have no desire, you don't desire desire. I *have* experienced a couple of moments of tender yearning with both male- and female-bodied acquaintances - emotional instead of physical arousal. God, I am such a girl. And sexy may still come back. I haven’t given up hope yet.

But anyway, on to the really important question: how do I *FEEL*?!

Uh. Befuddled.

Surgery has changed me. I find myself more than ever before floating serendipitously through life. Specifically, my sense of ambition has gone missing. All my life I have wanted to be famous. I have wanted to have my new book at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, or to sell out my one-woman show on a big city tour, or both. Furthermore, this wanting has had a resentful muttering tone...I'll show you, world...I may be invisible now, but someday you'll see just how fabulous I am, just you wait...gn mbl fbl ntl mbl.... I had a book proposal all ready to send out before I left for Montreal, figuring during six weeks at home I would have plenty of time to start pushing it. I haven't looked at it once. I just don't feel it.

I have two theories why:

1. With my testosterone down to almost nil, I am no longer motivated by the classic male logic that  you should strive for the big time, because if you make it you can fuck whoever you want. Even when I was in its grip this idea always felt a little icky - remember, I was always a girl underneath - but it had force in my life. Needless to say, I'm *so* glad it's gone.

2. I didn't ever actually want to be famous; I just wanted to be alive, as myself, in the world. I wanted, desperately, to be *seen*, but I was self-repressing so hard that this could only come through the filters as a muddled desire for fame. And now, hey, look, I'm Lisa, all the time, for the rest of my life. I did it. I'm here. Everyone can see me.

Sooo, what about that whole GOTTA BE A STAR thing? Um...I dunno. Maybe not so much. Sounds like a lot of work and not much fun. One thing I am clear about: from now on I want to have as much fun as possible. Fun is extremely important. There must be fun.

Of course, I could possibly have fun writing a book and/or putting together a show, and maybe I could approach the work both in a more joyous and free way, and in a more mature and detached way, because my need to express my basic being in the world would no longer be tangled up in it. And, people have hit the big time with stuff they did just for fun. Richard Adams' Watership Down started out as a story he made up for his kids. Tolkien cared so little about the bestseller list that he almost wrote The Lord of the Rings in Elvish, in which case it would still be an incomprehensible manuscript lying on a shelf in the deepest dungeon of the Bodlean, waiting for some grad student to stumble across it.

Hm, what would be fun to write? This blog is fun to write, but so far it has escaped the notice of the editors over at The New Yorker. Oh well, there are other things too...but, I don’t talk about what I’m writing, or even whether I am; it sets up pernicious structures of feeling like I’ve promised something and now have to please someone.

Please yourself, is the (for me) radical, revolutionary new concept with which I have been tentatively experimenting, after a lifetime of utter self-effacement. At the tender age of fifty I am finally trying to learn how to answer the question, "What do I want?" 

 

Genderqueer conversations

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with three fascinating people who identify outside the gender binary. Jules, Lyndon, and Taffy challenged my preconceptions and broadened my perspectives about gender in the same way that I hope my transsexualism challenges and broadens my cisgendered friends' and relatives' preconceptions and perspectives. Our conversations resulted in an article in the summer 2012 edition of Out In Maine, which can be viewed here. (Note this link takes you to a browsable on-line mockup of the magazine; the article starts on page 24.) Happy reading! :-)

Five weeks to go, and a shiny new metaphor

...surgery and counting. I have just finished paying for it, taking an exchange rate hit in the process. Oh well. The pre-surgery tests are done, though there’s still the task of making sure the results have gotten to the clinic. And of course, there’s always the chance that the tests will show something wrong. I feel healthy, but I’m not going to stop worrying about some last-minute monkeywrench until the deed is done.

I’ve secured my extended leave time at work, with a sense of gratitude to my boss, Jim, who mentioned ruefully that I might need to make special arrangements in advance. If he hadn’t spoken I would have blundered into trouble when I naively tried to enter six weeks of sick time through the regular timesheet system. Thanks Jim; I think perhaps you thought you were giving me bad news, but it has turned out well.

There’s even this thing where after two weeks I can start claiming short-term disability on top of my sick pay. I’ll actually be making more staying home than when I’m working. I’ve checked twice, and it’s above board. In fact, it was my hr person who told me about it. This strikes me as very odd, but I’ll take it, thanks, as a chance to get back a little of what I’m paying out of pocket on account of the surgery not being covered by insurance.

Arrangements for coverage at work and help at home are coming together. I picked summer on purpose; no trainings to conduct. I’m teaching Ross, a wonderfully adept workstudy student, to keep things together while I’m gone. We get along well because our levels of compulsiveness about details match exactly. Just one notch shy of OCD, and so what if we are - what’s wrong with that, huh? Huh? You trying to make a point? (Um, could you please brush that one hair into place? It's bugging me...)

In a few weeks it will be time to stop hormones - there’s a three-week buffer zone because the estrogen increases the risk of blood clots. By the time my sister Sus and I start driving north, my estrogen and testosterone levels will be back to normal middle-aged male levels. One last round of male sexual response, hair growth, aggressiveness...a necessary evil. I will endure it, because it means soon I'll be rid of the detesticles forever.

The biggest task left is waiting. There are still details to track and supply shopping to do, but overall things are falling into place. (Touch wood.) For a little treat I bought myself a book of Rachmaninoff preludes so I’ll have something new to practice (sitting on my toroidal pillow) while I recuperate. And, I have re-read the descriptions of preparation, surgery, and aftercare, wanting to really understand what I’ll be going through. Some of it sounds harrowing, but it doesn’t matter. I have to avoid thinking about how badly I want this, because I need to stay sane and functional.

On a completely different subject, I’ve been puzzling for a long time about the best metaphor for where and who I was during the long male time. The obvious first choice was prison: a cell in the mind. I’ve used it and it’s useful, but it’s also clichéd and not quite right - I wasn’t locked away, just elusive, obscured. Exile? Kinda works, but also not right. Mask? Projection on a screen from a secret place in my inner dark? I’ve used them all, but I’ve not been satisfied...until now. I have a shiny new metaphor of which I am foolishly fond.

I was dutiful and obedient. I took a vow of silence, and then dedicated my life to service to an exalted external masculine ideal. I disappeared completely into the task, glimpsed only at rare intervals as a flicker of the selfless doer behind the good works. So, not a prisoner, not an exile. Nope. Sister Lisa. I was a gender nun.

 

Naked ambition!

The symptoms are clear: I’m preparing once again to ask the world to love me. Danger danger *sirens* whoop whoop whoop...

To wit:

• Yesterday I stopped at Starbird Music and tried out some of their pianos by playing on them various of the pieces I have been working up for the past couple of years. A normal thing for some people to do, no doubt, but for me, a rare and perilous foray into public performance.
• I’ve thought again in the past few days about sending out the book proposal. Except for a few tweaks it has been ready for months, and I have been sitting on it, inventing excuses, but really just avoiding the next step out of terror of the inevitable rejections.
• Last night I Noticed Someone, and I think perhaps vo noticed me too, and today I’ve been thinking of actually doing something about it...you know, like asking ven out...with trepidatious pulse, breath caught in throat, etc. 

I roll my eyes at myself.

So what the fuck? Why does any act which involves the least risk of rejection feel so life-and-death? Hyperdeveloped ego? Or just sen-si-tive?

No doubt both. But there is also this: back in the old days, gender was my safety buffer. When I got rejected it still hurt, but I could always think in my secret heart, “I’m still OK, because they rejected Male Self, not me.”

Another thing happened last night: a person I had never met before said “How’s your book?” I gaped at ven. “Didn’t you write a book?” Ves face was intent.

“Um...I’ve written two books, but neither is published.”

“Oh. Well, I’m psychic. You’re going to be very famous.”

“I won’t let it ruin me,” I said with fervor.

Do I want to be famous? Really? Well...yeah, actually, I do. I want to write a bestseller. I feel like I should be ashamed about that, or that it’s delusional or weak or doomed to failure, but you know what? Fuck all that. Ambition? Check.

And really truly, if I do hit the big time, I won’t let it ruin me. That’s important to say, because, as impossible as it seems at the moment in my absurdly vulnerable squirming, I might actually succeed.

One other symptom of resurgent ambition: a higher than usual rate of blog posting. Can’t you see I’m on my knees, begging you with all my heart, read me, please? Love me, please? Please please pleeeeeeeze?

More soon, no doubt. I’m insatiable!

Oh, and, I love you too. :-)

 

Biography of a former self

It has been a month since my last post, because I’ve been waiting for The Letter. Suzanne at the Montreal clinic told me to expect my official surgery letter early in the new year, at which time my first down payment would be due. That down payment is non-refundable should I chicken out about the surgery, so I see sending the check as the final proof that I’m going to go through with this. (I am, but still.) The Letter hasn’t arrived, and as a result transition has been on pause while I crouch, braced for its impact.

Well, fuck that. Some domino has fallen on its own. Today or tomorrow I will e-mail Suzanne (in French - I’m enjoying conducting as much of my SRS business as I can in French) and ask quand est-ce que la lettre va arriver. And today I am going to work on a project I have long procrastinated about: a book proposal for a memoir. I am going to try to sell my story.

Since the transition story has already been told many times, and since what is most unusual about my own story is that I was not self-aware until recently, my emphasis will be on the biography of my former self. From early childhood on a female person born by accident into a male body feels so pressured by society to be male that she never consciously thinks “I am female.” What sort of maleness does she project into the world? How does her gender truth still peek out through the mask? How does it at last emerge? I hope these are questions provocative enough to interest an agent, then a publisher, in a book.

Which is not to say that the story of transition won't be in there too. After some false starts I have found a narrative approach I like, alternating between third-person narration of vignettes from my old life as a boy and man with excerpts from the written record of my revelation and transition - journal entries, e-mails to early confidants, blog entries. I’m now well along in my second, accelerated life...why not tell both stories in parallel? Offer the reader the opportunity to compare and contrast?

Speaking of books, one of my final procrastination moves, back in January, was to impulsively join with an old friend in a documentary project. She was going to make photographic portraits, and I was going to conduct and transcribe interviews, with enough trans Mainers to fill a book. We were going to fundraise (grants, Kickstarter) and pay ourselves for doing this work.

This seemed like a really good idea for a couple of weeks, but then I began to have misgivings. It began to feel icky to seek to profit from telling other trans peoples’ stories. Also, for many trans folks being trans is of so little importance, it seemed rude to ask to tell their stories because of it - as if to say that it were the only interesting thing about them. And, I realized I had a problem with proposing to “explain” trans experience through this project. Trans stories do need to be told again and again, so that the world can learn, but my (still evolving) sense, for now at least, is that this telling needs to be done by the trans folk themselves - if not by writing or performance or activism or whatever, then simply by living. 

So I bowed out of the project and am back to staring at a blank computer screen and ordering myself to write.

There was another, more personal reason I left the documentary project, which is that I am beginning to think that I don’t want to be professionally trans. It’s a workable shtick, and I’ve been playing with the idea - trans comedy, the trans doc project. And, yes, the trans memoir - but the plan is to write it and then write a second book about something completely different. I have desired and sought success as a writer my whole life. I don’t mind if I finally achieve it because it turns out I have an unusual story to tell; but I would want to sustain it simply by being a good writer.

The curious thing about that is, for the first time in my life I wonder if I really do want to write for a living. Perhaps the hot kernel of that desire arose out of my self-repression. I couldn't truly live, but at least I could write. Now I can truly live. Hm. Tell stories, or live them...or both. We'll see. 

I'll do it if I have to, is what it comes down to. Just like transition.

OK, it's different doing comedy for straight people...

I did it - comedy open mic at Slainte, earlier tonight. Way more people in the room than when I went before to check it out - actual audience members, this time, instead of just the Soggy Biscuit Club. (Don’t ask me, I don’t know - some inside joke among the regular core comics, sure to be disgusting). I asked for the second slot, Brian the MC introduced me, I stepped up and did my routine...and the room was almost completely silent the whole time. I could tell some of my lines struck people as funny, because there was this whisper of suppressed laughter, but the rest of the time everyone sat frozen. Scanning the room I saw some listening faces, some carefully immobile faces, some clenched faces, and some crossed arms and heads down. Scattered applause at the end.

Did anyone read me until the moment I said my first line, "So, I used to be a man"? I don’t think so. That’s when I felt the room freeze. Not freeze like ice cold; freeze like deer in the headlights.  Possible thoughts among the audience right then: "Oh fuck, for a second I thought she, I mean he, I mean she, I mean he, was hot!" "Jesus, a fucking tranny." "Jesus, a fucking faggot." (The prejudiced are not always precise with their labels.) "So what?" "I don't want to know about this."  "Woah...she’s so brave!" "Cool!" And maybe mostly, "Shit, am I allowed to laugh at this?"

Did I, as they say, bomb? I don’t know and I don’t care. I went in wanting to work the material and get a little more stage experience...mission accomplished. I do believe I made some people squirm though, and upon reflection, that makes me smile. Fuck yeah. I’m a tranny, I’m smart, I’m funny, I’m kinda cute, and worst of all, I’m actually pretty normal. Deal, my dears. Unpucker your assholes and deal.

I caught Brian the MC between intros and gave him my e-mail address with a request for honest critique. I wonder if he’ll respond, and if so, what he’ll say. He did look me in the eye and talk normally to me, so he at least was not completely freaked out by my transness.

A couple of friends came to cheer me on - thanks Katz and Sophia! And thanks Chris for videoing! Katz and Sophia stayed after I left, so I asked Sophia to tell me if anyone ragged on me after I was gone. Will the PC impulse keep them mute? Will the juiciness of the material be too much to resist? I’m really curious if they will, and if they do, what tone it will take.

Will I go back? Not sure yet...it’s not out of the question. Tonight turned out to be about the one-shot opportunity to surprise a whole roomful of people. That won’t happen again...so, really I think I should go back at least once more and see what happens when they already know I’m trans as I approach the stage. We’ll see.

I get told I’m courageous a lot, which is really nice, but honestly I don’t usually feel courageous. Usually I’m just doing what I have to do to be me, sane, and alive. This was different, and this time I'll own the label: this *did* take courage. Yay for me! :-)

Voice truth through comedy

Almost a month since I last posted. Sorry! It’s because of a big development still in process, which I’m not ready to write about. Soon. In the meantime, a reverie on performance and voice.

I posted back in early August about my first experience performing on stage - a monologue I presented as a guest in the Femme Show which came touring through from Boston. Well, tomorrow night, it’s stage two of my performance project: I’m trying out a completely new routine (this one for straight people) at the comedy open mic at Slainte in Portland.

I am so not nervous, which I love. Of course, as in the Femme Show, my heart will be beating as I step up, but there is none of the old male-era fear - just an eager hunger for the rush, the heightened awareness, the challenge.

Last month I went with my friend Jessica, who has comedy performance experience, to check out the venue. Small crowd, young, male - mostly comics waiting their turn. The comedy was generally raw and profane, often pushed hard in an attempt to shock. Jessica leaned and whispered, “This is why I stopped doing stand-up...it’s such a boys’ club.”

Interesting wrinkle - I don’t think anyone read me that evening. “You ladies,” the MC said, addressing Jessica and me, and then we were the two ladies at the front table. Just in the past few months I have been passing more and more; and once people read you one way, I find, they really seem wired to stick with that. Illustrative anecdote: I presented a workshop at a conference a few weeks ago, and at the end, after an hour of me talking, one of my participants complemented me on my voice - she said it was so deep, I sounded just like Lauren Bacall. When I have to talk a lot I tend to drop back into male range, but she had read me as female in the first minute, and that remained her take.

Anyway, I hope that tomorrow night I continue to pass right up until the reveal of my first line - it’ll be more fun that way. Might be the only time too...if I keep doing this, soon I’ll be known as that trans woman comedian, and I may never get to startle an audience with my transness again.

I’ve had a lovely exchange of e-mails about comedy theory with my friend Dan who does volunteer voice work (of a very high caliber) at my radio station. He’s a serious student of standup, and gave me valuable critique of the video of the Femme Show routine. He has also urged me not to worry about whether I get big laughs or not, but just concentrate on the material and be as real as I can. This has always been exactly my plan, so I was grateful for the corroboration. And, he offered advice about finding a character’s voice, about letting go into it - and he was talking about “Lisa” as the character.

Hm. Fascinating. First reaction: no, that’s not right. Lisa is me; “Dave,” that guy you knew before, he was the character. But wait: I played Dave for my first 46 years, non-stop; I didn’t speak a single word myself. Surely at some point it’s not acting any more, it’s just being. And also: when I stop thinking about talking and just talk, I still sound more male than female. And I do continue to struggle with voice, so much...not to find a “feminine” voice, whatever that is, but just to find a voice I can be comfortable speaking in - a voice which sounds like me to me. Also, there’s no changing that I got a male vocal instrument - so the reaching for feminine feels artificial, often strained. So: am I Lisa who used to play Dave, or someone as yet unnamed playing Lisa, or what? No. I’m Lisa. But finding my voice is still much more a fruitless and frustrating labor than a natural relaxing into deeper realness, and it’s making me crazy.

Which brings me back to tomorrow night: the dominant vocal sound at the open mic was loud and deep....one male voice after another. The MC was particularly in our faces, as though he was projecting to a thousand-seat coliseum rather than a narrow bar. I think my best approach when I step up to that mic is going to be to take a deep breath, let most of it out again, and then nearly whisper my first line...and then, all the way to the end, keep it light, gentle, glinting with twisty little touches of humor in pastel hues. One of my worst lines at the FS was when I went loud and deep to convey vehemence. So, emphasis with vocal music rather than vocal strength. Capricious; whimsical; eccentric. Breathe! As I interpret my routine, I’ll be feeling deep for the sweet strong bizarre feminine voice I know I have hidden somewhere in me...striving to let it free. Breathe! The more radically my work differs from the dominant male mode of the room, the better it will be. Breathe! Take the time to be in the moment, then see the bigger joke this all is and ride the wave. Breathe! Yes, OK, I believe I'm ready.

Worry less, write more

I am alive! And significantly altered on left-over wine on a Monday night. But what the fuck. I’m 49 and working in an absurdly easy job until my youngest graduates from high school. In the river of life this is a long back-eddy, Mercury in retrograde, whatever. Moving backwards to move forwards. Backwards! (Onwards.)

Being interviewed at L.L. Bean was a surreal experience. The dead faces, the exquisite cheerfulness. Do you realize I have never in my life worked for a corporation? Except that one summer between sophomore and junior year, when I worked for the Curry Company, renting rafts to tourists and making their camp beds in the back-country of Yosemite. It is so fucking odd to go into a place where a whole bunch of people are making good money subscribing to the imperative of a commercial myth. World Class Customer Service. Figuring out how to feel good about riding the cash cow, I call it. And if anyone from Bean reads this blog, my job chances will be fucked. So be it. No one is paying attention.

And hey, I’m provisionally second-job employed. Money does turn out to matter, when you don’t have enough of it. Beyond that, I read somewhere recently, once you’ve got enough to live on more doesn’t make you any happier. So how did dollars become the ultimate measure of success? Nothing else turns people into such craven grasping wretches...not sex, not love, not alcohol, not drugs, not the hope of fame, not the fear of death. From time to time I think, I never learned to care about money, I fucked up my life. And the rest of the time I think...what an incredible moment! What a fucking rush! Once safe housed fed, the greatest pleasure is just to be alive; the rest is meaningless quanta of difference. You drive a fancier car than me. So the fuck what. I got to work safely today, and home again too. That’s all that matters.

Oh, and connecting with another. That matters too. What were the most important parts of my day today? Talking to friends. Jessica. Jenny. Feeling those moments of sympatico, empathy, non-exclusive non-familial non-sexual love. You spoke to me, I heard you; I spoke, you heard. Thank you. I love you.

Except for me mentioning it in this sentence, nothing in this entry is particularly about being trans. Being trans doesn’t define me. If anything defines me, it is that I write. Go ahead, I dare you...read me. It’s like fucking, only more intimate.

In between the previous two paragraphs I checked my e-mail and read a post in the Facial Feminization Surgery Yahoo group, in which one trans woman advised another to go to Dr. Z if she wants to be made artifically stunning, and to go to Dr. D in Argentina if she wants a natural feminine version of her old face. If you weren’t beautiful before, she says, you won’t be after, just female you. And just like that, I long-term plan to get a  Dr. D face. So, something trans after all.

Speaking of which, a friend taped my performance at the Femme Show for me and I put it on YouTube as a link you have to know to access. It so doesn’t suck, and I’m eager to share it with people, but I’ve kept it private out of concern that the wrong person at my son’s school might get ahold of it, and he would be embarrassed. but if you’d like to see it (and you don't go to Wells High School), let me know, and I’ll send you the link.

As part of an ongoing experiment the nub of which is to edit myself less the older I get, I’m posting this now.

Up side update

A friend e-mailed me the other day to ask if I was OK. She was feeling motherly concern based on a couple of my recent blog posts (this one and this one), which, reading  back, I can understand. I was doing hard emotional work when I wrote both of them, and they are dark. I don’t want to minimize those posts; but on the other hand, I’m doing fine overall, and it occurs to me that if I want this blog to reflect my total transition experience, then I’m overdue for an up side update. As a matter of fact, many parts of transition are going well.

Parenting: Transition is a narcissistic process, and from time to time I have become so engrossed in myself that my parenting has faltered. Most recently this took the form of pointing both my emotional neediness and my stress about money at my children in ways which were unfair to them. In effect I was asking them for the kind of support one might expect from an adult friend or partner rather than from one’s teenagers. Sensible and empowered as they are (I do have amazing offspring) they called me on it. At their request we went together to a short course of family therapy, and talked a bunch of stuff out. End results: I’m feeling better and stronger about my parenting than I have for a long time (and, I trust, doing a better job at it); I also got to say some things I think they needed to hear; and in our little household the tension-level has gone way down and the fun-level has gone way up. Yay for all three of us! :-)

Hormones: It has been about a year now since I got up to full doses in my hormone regimen, and I am totally digging the physical changes. I’m already happy with my new breasts; even if they don’t grow any more than the modest amount they have so far, I have indefinitely tabled the idea of surgical enhancement. My face also looks much more feminine, mostly perhaps because I’ve lost about twenty pounds, but there could be skin changes and fat-distribution changes too. (Likewise with my neck, shoulders, arms, legs.) Some days at least I think maybe I’ll never have to get facial surgery, and considering how desperate the need for that has sometimes felt, that’s big. I can’t quite say I’ve tabled it indefinitely, but at least for a couple of years I have, and that eases the money worry. And, one other hormone plus: back hair completely gone. That makes me smile every time I think of it. :-)

Surgery plans: I have pretty much settled on a surgeon and a date for Sexual Reassignment Surgery (Dr. Brassard in Montreal, summer of 2012), and have a working plan for how to pay for it (retirement savings, which I recently discovered I have more of than I thought). The Montreal SRS experience sounds about as wonderful as it could be: Dr. B is by all accounts as good as any other SRS surgeon working, and for a day before and several days after your procedure you stay in a residence with other patients, nursing care, full meals...and all for the same price as other surgeons who send you off on your own after a couple days in the hospital. One of the things I was dreading most about SRS was a week spent recovering in some anonymous hotel room, which seems to be the dominant model here in the States. A week of pampering and peer support for no extra dollars? Yes please!

Performance/writing: As noted in previous posts, I recently realized a lifelong ambition and performed a piece in a show. (Gushy post here.)  I want to see what it’s like to perform for a straight audience next, rather than a room full of twenty-something lesbians, so I’m going to check out the comedy open mic at the Slainte winebar here in Portland. One visit to get the vibe, and then work up a routine and step up to the mic. Oooh, butterflies. I’ve got the bug bad...performing is *such* a rush, and I turn out not to suck at it, so, onward.

Meanwhile, after several false starts, I have figured out a way to write long-form about my trans experience. Success as a writer is my earliest, most intense, and most enduring ambition in life, so when a project is going well I feel a deep sense of fulfilment and happiness which nothing else can give me. It’s going slowly, but it’s going...joy!

Feminine life: the daily experience of living as woman in the world has lost the gee-whiz factor which leads to blog posts, but it continues to be deeply satisfying. I’m not sure how, but I’ve managed to reduce my anxiety about presentation (dress, carriage, mannerisms, and especially voice) almost to zero and just focus on enjoying every moment. I still get such pleasure from such simple things; a nice new pair of earrings, walking down Congress Street in a skirt, an unforced and natural “ma’am” at the grocery store.

So, in sum, yeah, I have money troubles, and sometimes my self-esteem plummets, and sometimes I feel desperately lonely, and I have no idea at this point even what sort of partner I want, let alone might ever find...but overall things are going well. The curious burden of being trans is also the source of most of the pleasure and sense of forward motion in my life, and it is *never* boring.

Next time the rollercoaster dips down into one of those low tunnels, remind me to come back and re-read this post.