GenderBendy

Radio pronouns

Back in January I came out at work, which is WMPG, Portland's community radio station, where I am Program Director.  Response from station volunteers to my announcement has been uniformly supportive, which is wonderful. 

This week we're fund-raising, which means I've found myself on air with various different volunteers, some of whom I don't see very often, and in the course of our begging for donations two of them have called me "she".  (In my coming-out e-mail I said male pronouns were fine for the time being.) 

One of those two was an old friend who likes to make a point of things, so I felt sure his "she" was deliberate (and kindly meant).  

The other, though, was from a volunteer I don't know well, and it came fleetingly and unstressed in the full flow of her begging, without facial expression or body-language of any kind, so that I really felt that she had used the word unconsciously...and the only reason I could think for her to do that is that she has at least begun to accept me as female.  It's not the first time I've been surprised by how quickly some people have just switched my M to an F in their minds.

It's funny, though, the timing, because, while I still want to be a woman just as much as ever, for the first time in many weeks I feel free of the drive to get there as fast as possible...I think because I've got it all lined up:  a medical team I trust, children seemingly reasonably comfortable, everyone at work already getting used to thinking of me at least in between.  So now I linger for a bit in what is left of my old maleness, holding off on hormones, honoring the slow passing away of a good old self.

I'm glad that maybe my gender issues can take the back seat for a while.  My daughter is graduating from high school this spring and going off to college in the fall, and that's a big transition.  I haven't been ignoring her, but fair to say I've been preoccupied.  I very much want to be fully present in every minute I have left with her before she heads out into the world to begin her adult life.

And, there's a practical reason for staying male for a little while longer:  I've just gotten hired by the US Census to count transient people, and I'll feel a lot safer doing that with my hair pulled back and a Red Sox cap on than in my current workday earrings-and-scarf combo.  :-)

Bits and pieces

I fear my last post built a little suspense which I have since failed to provide the release for...apologies to anyone who was on tenterhooks.  :-)  My sister was visiting from Colorado over the weekend, and then fund-raising started at my radio station (that number again: 874-3000), so I've not had a second to post again until now.

The setup was, I proposed to change into full femme mode in the bathroom at my work in order to be on a panel at a trans conference taking place across campus, then walk back and change again after.  I did it, and it went all right.  I got one scoff-and-eyeroll, but also some smiles and, my favorite, a truly blasé response from the work study students.  There really does seem to be a generational difference:  people my age and older often seem uncomfortable with my gender non-conformity; people under 30 tend to just roll with it.

The panel was interesting because our audience was mostly health professionals - nurses and counselors and such - and it was clear from the questions that most of them had very little understanding of what it means to be trans.  I'm finishing a query letter and book proposal which I will soon be sending out, trying to get an agent for a memoir, and I find myself feeling newly motivated by the sense I brought out of that session of just how much basic education remains to be done.

While she was here my sister took some pictures of my face for me...front, three quarters, and profile, hair pulled back, no makeup, muscles carefully unsmiling...so I can send them to a woman in the UK who specializes in photoshopping what you could look like after facial feminization surgery.  When I have my before and afters, I will post them here.

My most recent development:  I suddenly found myself today coming out to Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!  I had called her to record a pitch for our fundraiser, and she remembered me from previous similar conversations and asked about the name change, and there I was stammering my explanation.  She offered congratulations and best wishes, which was very kind of her.  Who knows what might come of that someday?  In any case, yet another proof is one was needed (it wasn't) of my newfound lack of shyness.

One more thing I've been wanting to record here...a couple of weeks ago now my daughter decided after some trepidation to tell her friends at school about my trans identity.  She was a little surprised, I think, at how well it went.  As I understand it one of them laughed, one just nodded, and the third asked a bunch of questions.  Then they gave me a wonderful gift:  another new name to add to my growing collection.  She texted me:  "They've decided to call you Madame Deeve."  With their permission I have changed the spelling, and whatever other name(s) I also end up using, I will proudly answer from now on to Madame D'Yves.  Isn't that elegant?  I love it! :-)  Thank you Sarah and Cheyenne and Sam!

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.

First Event wrap

I'm home from my second day of First Event, the big trans-conference north of Boston, and I'm still flying.  For two days in a row I got to be myself, and toward the end of the second day, yesterday, I really began to let go into that.  Just a few times so far as I feel my way forward into femininity - and yesterday afternoon was one of them - I have suddenly noticed that I'm talking high and light and fast and expressively, that my voice is more full of breath than it ever is in man-mode, that my hands and in fact my whole body are uninhibitedly involved in my expressing myself, and that a big girl-smile is stretching my mouth wide, because I feel like smiling, I just can't help it.  In those moments I feel the quick warm feminine joy at the center of my being just beaming out of me, and I feel free.  That is such a lovely feeling.  :-)

There were way more people at the conference yesterday, Saturday, than there had been on Friday, including a goodly number of people in their teens and twenties, and many more trans men than before.  The look of the crowd at mixed trans events still makes me smile: tall big-boned women with fabulous hair, and short soft-featured crew-cutted boys in jeans and t-shirts.  We look so different, but in conversation and friendship I find that the sharing of the journey usually seems to eclipse the relatively minor matter of which direction you're going.

By conference end I had had three private consultations with three different plastic surgeons about FFS - Facial Feminization Surgery:

Dr. O is the patriarch of this select fraternity.  He favors thorough reconstruction of the bones of the face, and his results are startling, sometimes to the point of making you look like a completely different person...but, always, an entirely feminine person, and sometimes strikingly attractive.  I can't deny the seductive pull of his work, but I'm concerned about a few things...he dictates rather than collaborates, and he also told me my ideal weight at 6' is 30 pounds less than my current 180.  Who says I have to be skeletally thin to be an attractive woman?  Hm...I don't think I'm the first person to ask that question... :-p

Dr. B. is young, relatively unknown, and hungry.  He offered to cover my airfare and lodging for trips to California to be operated on by him.  He favors a less invasive approach - more soft-tissue, less bone - and he seems less completely bound to an underlying unquestioned assumption about what constitutes beauty.

Dr. M., who also does genital surgery, radiates competence.  He was pleasant to talk with, and seemed to strike a good balance between offering professional guidance and listening to my concerns.

I didn't talk to Dr. Z, because going to him seems to constitute joining a cult.  I don't want to be a Z-girl.  And I missed the chance to talk to Dr. S, but I will definitely talk to him, too, because he's based in Boston, in easy driving distance.  All the rest of them are in Arizona and California...lots of air fare...

And price?  Ah, yes...I'm still waiting from quotes from the other two, but Dr. O's estimate:  $45K, plus another $13K if I need a face lift after, which I probably would. Whee.

Best moment of the day:  a compliment from a stranger..."You take up space in a womanly way."  Typed out like that I guess it looks rather odd, but in context I took it to mean that to the speaker my over-all presentation was coming across as strongly femme...a validation of my ongoing effort to become a woman from the inside out.  Of course I gushed my thanks... :-)

Worst moment (not bad, just mildly yucky):  being one of only four members of the audience for a presentation about dealing with the media by a hard-faced trans man who edits a GLBT newspaper somewhere out west, and observing that he was making good public-speaking eye-contact with the other three people in the room...by appearance, a boy and two girls all in their twenties...and carefully passing over me each time.  It reminded me of the way I have sometimes felt pointedly ignored by activist Lesbians when I am in man-mode.  Whatever.  I left.

I dressed in man comfy-clothes when I got up this morning, just because I'm used to them.  Ordinary life beckons once again...and that's almost a relief.  When you have learned patience, all times are soon.