GenderBendy

Omniphilic Ambisexual

There are two questions which I sense people often want to ask but usually don't:

"Are you really going to have genital surgery?"

~and~

"So now that you think of yourself as a woman, who do you want to have sex with?"

The answer to the first question is, I won't know for sure until I've done it, but yes, that is the plan.  As they are now, things down there don't feel right any more.  Specifically, I'm tired of testosterone, and want to be quit of it.  It clouds my thinking and my natural being.

The answer to the second question is more elusive.  In recent weeks I have enjoyed flirtations with both women and men...but it's complicated because of the answer to question one.  I don't have a woman's body (yet) and that confuses the issue. 

I have at least been able to come up with a cool new phrase to describe my current emotional/sexual state. At least for the next little while, I have decided that I am an "omniphilic ambisexual."

"Omniphilic" means that I am equally open to loving either a man or a woman.  I can't remember now where I picked it up, but I deeply dig this phrase:  "Love is tender and knows no gender."  I feel open to love...meaning, an intense and exclusive emotional connection with a simpatico someone...and that person could be any gender.  What matters is the connection.  It' doen't necessarily have anything to do with sex, and it feels more important than sex.  A lot more.

The "ambi-" of "ambisexual" is meant to conjure up two associations:  The "ambi-" in "ambidextrous" and the "ambi-" in "ambivalent." I can imagine being sexual with anyone, but on any given day I don't care very much about it.  Funny, in our sex-obsessed society, "none of the above" actually seems like a provocative answer. 

I sure could do with some cuddling though...and sex could still be very hot if the love part was happening...hmm... *gets lost in erotic revery* 

(About whom?  not telling...)

Anyway, one thing I can say for sure:  I don't want to fake it.  From now on, whether it is love or the erotic impulse or both, I will only act if it feels real to me.  As a "man" I always felt at least a little detached, artificial...naturally, since my manhood was an act.  Now for the first time at the tender age of 47 (though it feels like 16) my naked heart turns outward, looking for connection.  That's exciting.  It's also scary, which is another reason to go slow.

One more thing I know for sure:  I never felt comfortable being the aggressor, the instigator.  I feel romantically and erotically passive, receptive.  Not that I want to be less loving than loved - I'm totally into that both ways thing - but I'd really like the other person to take the lead most of the time.

To put it another way, I think I might enjoy being courted.  Now there's a novel concept.  Never thought of that when I was passing as male...  :-)

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.

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... :-)