GenderBendy

Switching one self-imprisoned self for another?

Three mornings ago I dreamed of a willful dominant little girl gleefully continuing her project of slowly but inevitably encasing in exotic bondage-wear - cuffs, a steel band over the mouth, motion-constricting metal leg tubes - a passive and accepting full grown man...and I felt myself to be both figures, and woke troubled. My primary image for who I was before my gender revelation has been of a true girl-self self-exiled inside a man-shell. Lying in the grey rain-light of that early waking, I made myself face another model: that of a person with two legitimate selves, girl and man, who has been all man too long, and who might in seeking redress swing too far to girl ever to come back...and then someday want to.

(Please note I'm saying "girl" instead of "woman" on purpose, both because I still just feel so new, and also because I am still digging this video to which a friend recently linked me...)

I agonized about starting hormones, and felt it was a point of serious commitment, and it was...but it turns out, taking daily pills, that I'm still re-deciding every morning. Both meds I'm taking, estrogen and an androgen-blocker, build slowly in the system and take effect over months or even years...so, despite teasing my sweetie with texts announcing that my new breasts have come in (flump-flump...just like that!), I've noticed no effect yet, and am not likely to for many weeks yet. (I'm trying to look in the mirror as little as possible...I've also started keeping track of various body measurements, so I have something objective to judge results by.) I could still stop with absolutely no ill effects.

That grey morning I dozed for another hour, trying to feel truly, then got up and fetched my two pill-bottles and decanted the one tiny green and two massive white pills into my palm and looked at them. Then, can of seltzer, pop, swallow.

I've been thinking recently that I need to decide a thousand times to become a woman. That was number 950 or so. 

The three mornings since then, it has been easy and natural to take the pills. No decision at all really...but still I wonder: am I dismantling a false shell, or am I switching one self-imprisoned self for another?

Hm.

I can say this: I've wanted out of that cell for 46 years...but him...well, if he's real, he seems to like it.

My Last Night as a Man

Tomorrow morning, or later this morning to be precise, I have a doctor's appointment which will result in the prescriptions which will allow me to begin hormone therapy.

My regimen will include estrogen and another drug which will suppress the action of testosterone in my body.  Once an initial ramp-up period is done, I should have serum levels of both estrogen and testosterone which are considered normal for a healthy young adult woman.

Gradually, over the coming months, I will begin to grow breasts.  My skin will get softer; I may lose some or most of my body hair (oh, yes please); I will lose strength and muscle mass, especially in my upper body; my fat reserves may redistribute somewhat, settling more in the hips and ass (oh, yes please); and I may become significantly more emotional than I already am, which is already a lot, and find myself crying when I drop the pesto spoon or the like...not so much yes please, but I'm willing to roll with it.

There might also be a third drug which would supplement the feminizing effects of the other two, and possibly reverse some of the head-hair thinning I've experienced over the years as a male-bodied person.

This feels to me like the point of no return.  Once I take that first pill, the light at the far end of the tunnel will be closer than the light behind, and it will be full steam ahead until I emerge into the sun-glare of life as a woman...an outcome which, even though I have been thinking about it and working on it constantly for the last eighteen months, I still cannot really imagine. 

To put it another way, this feels like my last chance to turn back.  My last chance to stay a man.  And as soon as I type the words, I know it is unthinkable.  I am already completely not a man.  I am a woman.  I am a woman.  I am a woman.  And I want this.  I want to be who I know I am.  I want to live.  I want to love.  I want to be.

I also want to sleep, but that may not happen much tonight... :-)

Love,

Lisa

Pronoun gifts and girl-teeth

A bunch of blogable things have happened over the last several weeks, but I was too busy falling madly in love to post.  Now that it's official that I'm in a relationship with my Darling Deb (it says so on facebook! :-)), I have time to do a little catching up. 

First, pronoun gifts.  I've received two.  The first was from the man who trained me to be a census taker, a rather straight-laced and literal-minded lawyer in his sixties.  I took my old male shell to the census work; man clothes, "Dee" for a name, hair gelled back (more or less) behind the ears, and just my demure green-glass gem ear-studs to remind me of who I am.  I didn't tell anyone that I'm trans.  At the end of the third day of training he asked me to help collect some forms, and he said something to the class like:  "Give them to Dee; she'll be...he'll be collecting them." 

He picked up my femme vibe!  I was pleased.  But what pleased me more was that both the slip (as he saw it) and the correction were unforced...no special emphasis, no flicker of the eyes toward me, no embarrassment. The vibe-catching was completely unconscious.  Cool.

The second pronoun gift was on the job.  I work at a radio station which is administratively a sub-department of a large university.  I am out as trans at the station, but not university-wide...but word gets around.  So, I was in an office cross-campus, arranging to use a classroom for station training, and the person who was helping me was kindly drafting an e-mail on my behalf to a third office which was the one which could actually help me, and she read it back:  "I have Dee Bunker here, and she's trying to reserve a room..."

This pronoun gift was completely conscious, based on what she'd heard through the grapevine.  I wasn't presenting very femme...just how I looked at the census training, actually, except for danglier earrings...but she wanted to respect the self she had heard I professed to be.  I thanked her most sincerely and left smiling.  And I learned something:  when word spreads, you can't manage the subtler points of the message.  My memo at the station said "I'm trans and starting to transition," but at least some rumor-mill listeners have heard that I'm already living as a woman.  That's a little unsettling, but gratifying.

The other thing I've wanted to blog about happened at a visit to my dentist.  I'm out to him because his son is one of my daughter's closest friends (Hi Sam!).  Lee is a kind and humorous man who clearly enjoys his work.  Somehow we got on the subject of masculine and feminine teeth.  There is (or can at least sometimes be) a difference.  It comes out particularly, it seems, in denture-making, because unlike in most other areas of cosmetic body-alteration, the denture-maker is starting from scratch and so enjoys complete creative freedom. 

Lee showed me his sample trays, full of teeth-sets of subtly different sizes, shapes, and colors.  Turns out that boy-teeth are often squarer, particularly at the distal (away from the midline) corner; girl-teeth are more rounded.  Lee had me smile, stared intently at my mouth, then said he could round off just a couple of my top teeth on each side, and lessen the pointiness of the canines a little.  "Very subtle," I said, meaning to imply it was so subtle I wasn't sure I'd ever bother, but he nodded and said just that little change could have a strong impact. 

Hmmm...maybe, someday, after (if) I have the new face I want to get for myself...we'll see.  I struggle to decide how much alteration to undergo vs. how much to just sashay forth and carry it.  I've made the cyber-acquaintance of folks who seem addicted to cosmetic surgery...this stuff can definitely be taken too far.

Coming soon:  hormones.

grinny-face heart heart heart!

I haven't posted for a while because I've been busy falling in love.  My new sweetie loves me too and sees me, admires me, and desires me as a woman.  I am someone's girlfriend!  :-)  It's a fucking miracle.

I find it difficult to put into words how much this new love means to me...but then my darling enjoys rendering me speechless, so that hasn't been a problem... :-)

(If I put in as many smiley-faces as I really wanted here, it would gack even me out...I'll try to restrain myself...)

I thought of being coy again, as in a post a month ago, about my sweetie's identity, but on the other hand her name is Deb Gallagher and she's a lovely sly wise poetic great-hearted Dyke.  She self-identifies as existing between the genders, has many deliciously butch facets, and deeply digs me femme, the femmer the better.  She just absolutely blows me away.

Deb's taking up with me has raised many eyebrows among her friends, Lesbian and otherwise, and she has had some difficult conversations, with more, no doubt, to come.  It takes guts to openly love me.  It's an act of social and political provocation.  Add "courageous" to that list of adjectives in the last paragraph... 

There is so much to write about, and I will in future posts.  For now, one other observation seems pressing:  finding romance has changed, but not blunted, my transition-ache.  Until it happened I couldn't imagine that anyone could love me before I was where I wanted to be, and that made me want to hurry...but now that someone does already love me, mid-metamorphosis, as a woman, it feels more natural than ever just to go on peeling away, gracefully but deliberately, the lingering shards of that old man-shell and simply be, be in the world, be in love, be myself.

"Honor the process" has been, and continues to be, one of my main mantras.  Well, I have to say...that has just gotten *way* more fun... :-D <3<3<3

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 Breath Before the Plunge

My appointment last week with the endocrinologist went well.  I like him and trust him, and he's ready to write me a prescription for Estradiol as soon as I'm ready to ask for it.

I'm not ready.

I ache as much as ever to be a woman...but this feels like a big step, The Big Step, in fact. The moment of commitment.  Once I start taking those pills the closest light will be up ahead, at the far end of the tunnel, and, knowing myself, I know I will move deliberately forward until I reach it.

So, I pause...and find that I feel drained, exhausted.  Time to rest for a little while, if I can.

While I rest, I continue to grieve the passing away of my old male self, especially at the moment with regard to parenthood.  I have been a good dad, and I will always be the best parent I can be, but I still feel a loss, and I think my children must too, if not now then sometime.  They have called me "Daddio" since they were small, and I love that...I couldn't bear to ask them to stop...but a point will come when out in the world at least, around other people, it won't make sense any more.  A new label will need to be found.

Not yet.  I feel a need to linger now, close to the gender-divide, but still on the male side.  I don't know how long...not just a few weeks, but not years either.  At some point in a small number of months, I guess, it will feel right to call my endo back and set hormone-treatment in motion...and then the rest of the journey will follow.

Meanwhile, work, children, writing...life.  Let's see, what needs to be done next?  :-)

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.

Momentum

Got an electrolysis appointment next week to begin to finish beard-removal.  Got an endocrinologist appointment too, to talk about hormones.  Had a counseling appointment with my children, and my counselor said at the end she is completely comfortable taking their word that they are fine with my gender plans.

Furthermore, I'm going to be prominently featured in an article in the Phoenix coming out next Wednesday (with a photo of my current gender-ambiguous look), the same day that I'm Deb's guest on Lesbian Radio on WMPG.  I'm going to be very publicly out next week.

What is this:  an attempt to make myself do something I'm not actually sure about, by telling everyone, so I have to go through with it? 

No.

Every time I try to doubt, that implacable answer comes back.  I want to be a woman. 

And, it appears, no one is going to stop me.

It's the endo appointment that scares me.  As early as next week I could be taking my first estrogen pills.  Will I do it?  I want to, but I'm afraid...and also sad about the slow passing away of old male self.  I made a good man for a long time.  I wish I could have gone on being that man.  He wasn't real, but he was worthy...and he is worthy of being mourned, and I am mourning him.

I can always wait a little while before taking that first pill...and I think I do want to try to do that.  (Shh...don't wake her up...)

Yeah, there is this sense of dual self sometimes:  I feel like the wary parent of an exceptionally emotional and willful child.  Parent-self does feel feminine, but does not need to insist on that; child-self is all girl, and ready to throw a tantrum at any moment:   IMAGIRLIMAGIRLIMAGIRLIMAGIRL...  I hope that, as my inner parent continues to learn to better nurture and direct the energy of my inner child, and as my inner child continues to learn both to trust my inner parent and to govern her own passions a little, my one deeper self will begin to emerge...as whole and complete a woman as I can be.

There is an outcome here which I have hardly dared imagine, but which begins to really seem possible:  I am a convincing natural woman in the world, and in love with someone who is in love with me, and I've not hurt anyone, and I'm happy.  And now since my daughter has company over, I'm going to have to go into the bathroom to cry.

Steps

I had a doctor's appointment yesterday, which I had made weeks ago because of the persistent redness on my neck from my first electrologist.  That was just to get me in the door, though...my real reason was to take her measure as a possible transition-ally.  When I broached the subject she told me she has had other trans patients, and was matter-of-factly open to working with me, if very brisk...she was running an hour late and wanted to try to catch up with her schedule, I think.  I asked if she was going to be around for a while...some of the doctors in that clinic are just passing through...and she said yes.

She asked if I was on hormones yet, and I said I wasn't, and she asked if I wanted a referral to an endocrinologist, and I opened my mouth and said "yes."  I had been thinking of waiting until summer to start hormones, but that's just an arbitrary plan from back when I told my children that I was planning to transition.  And even if I do go see this endo soon, it doesn't mean I have to immediately start taking the pills.  Still, I'm moving toward that first consult, and that is a step.

After the appointment I fetched my children, who were hanging out at the music store (they're on vacation this week) and took them home, and when we got here I really wanted to be dressed femme.  So far when they are here I've felt OK about going back into drab for them, but this time I asked them each separately if it would bother them if I put on slightly more feminine comfy-clothes than they were used to seeing, and they both made faces (twisted mouth, eyes averted) but said OK, so I went into my room and put on the soft white hip-hugger pants with the flare below the knee which Ardis gave me, and the black scoop-neck sweatshirt with red and white flowers crocheted on it.  Plus I still had the mini-aubergine earrings in I had already been wearing, and one of my new Rayon-disguised-as-natural-fiber Indian scarves, and I took off my stocking cap and let my hair fall forward...and we had an evening.  After the first few minutes there was normal conversation, joking...I think they were both a little uncomfortable, but it went all right. 

A big step actually.  I've been pondering for some time how to take it, and in the end, as with coming out at work a few weeks ago, I found myself in a moment which felt right, and acted. 

I have a new question I ask myself these days, not just around being trans, but in all my interactions with others:  What do they need?  Not, what do I want in order to feel I have been helpful, but how can I really help them?  Right now I think my children really need the opportunity to safely express what they are feeling.  I have offered them counseling in the past, and they've declined.  Last week I made an appointment with my counselor for this coming Friday and told my dear offspring that I want them to accompany me. I really want to get them talking, and I am, I hope, prepared for them to express hurt or fear or anger or sorrow...if these are feelings they are feeling.  If they do, I expect I will feel very bad, and it will no doubt slow me down...but I don't think it will stop me.  I can't think of anything non-catastrophic which could stop me now.

Sleepless morning

I woke at 2:30am half-dreaming about just being done, about being as much a woman as I will ever be able to be, and yearning aching for it...but also doubting, once again, this whole enterprise.  My concern:  I have always been a zealot - totally into whatever I'm into - and with each new enthusiasm I have felt utterly convinced that I have found It, the Answer to All My Life's Questions...but many of these fads have failed to last.

Some examples: 

In college I invented Lifegame, a social-group game where players asked in other players who asked in other players, and you had to make up a secret symbol for yourself and then make a life-long commitment to contribute annually to a group mailing.  (This was obviously pre-Internet.)  I became passionately involved in this idea and recruited all my closest friends, and I did keep it up for a couple of years, gathering people's annual narratives and sending them back out again.  Then it began to feel like a chore, and after a few more years Lifegame petered out.

In my early twenties I test-played a custom-made bodiless electric standup bass and fell in love with it.  I didn't feel I could afford it, though, so I promised myself that at some future date I would get one, learn to play it really well, and then find personal fulfillment as a jazzy funky bass player.  I held onto that dream for twenty years.  Two years ago, as a present to myself on the occasion of surviving divorce, I bought the bass - I even splurged on the five-string - and there it stands in the corner, silently rebuking me every day for never playing it.

In my late twenties I fell in love and got married and begat babies, and deep down inside, in my fierce secret girl-heart (wait, can I say that and still make the point I think I'm trying to make here?  Well, keep typing and let's see...) I really felt that I had succeeded at last in my greatest life-project, manhood.  My love was real...I know because when it was no longer wanted and I had to kill it I felt like I was going to die...but I couldn't make manhood last either.

OK, um...so I was going to say, what if this idea that I'm actually a woman is another temporary enthusiasm...but then I had to go and write that last paragraph.   Well, I can still say it, and should, because of the devious cleverness of the zealous mind.  I have thrown myself wholeheartedly into the idea of my femininity, and my zealous mind does pounce on each new bit of evidence which favors the precipitous drive into womanhood, at the same time discrediting any doubts or lingering mannish impulses.  I am biased, headstrong, quite possibly self-blinded.  I must strive to doubt, even as I inevitably spin every new datum and compulsively seek to subvert the process of doubting itself.

On the other hand, it does needs to be noted that I have not always been wrong about my enthusiasms.  I was right about wanting to be a parent.  I am right about being a writer.  Despite how hard they sometimes are I have embraced these passions for life, and they have become much of who I am.

[long pondering silence]

Once again I feel my way back to the insight that the best real-world answer is that I must trust the process.  Be in each moment, and allow myself, if I can, to act on every healthy-seeming impulse, either to move ahead or hold back...while always thinking of those I love.  Unclench.  That has been a crucial mantra since the beginning, and here it is again.  Unclench.  Unclench.