Think Natalie

Boundaries, my need to feel attractive, thoughts about being more stealth

2014-12-10T15:55:00.003-08:00

So I've been in a bit of a bad mood for the last week or so (possibly due to the days on end of overcast weather). Long story short: I'm lonely.

I haven't really dated much. It isn't that I haven't wanted to, it's--I don't exactly know why, I've never really been good at getting myself into a relationship. I'm thirty-two, which I know isn't old, but I am closer to forty than I am to twenty and I'm really worried that maybe I'm just not the type of person people want to date. I have to admit that a thought running through my head a lot recently is: "What the hell is wrong with me!"

For one I have very strict boundaries, stricter than most people. I learned recently that the best way to deal with someone who is bipolar is to have strict boundaries with them, which I'm glad I learned, because it really helps me make sense to myself. My mother, and my younger brother both are severe bipolars. Also, I have the body that I have.

Okay, about that, I think the issue is more my own than anyone else's, but still it is an issue.

Basically, I like my body. I can truly say that, and considering I am trans* I'm very lucky in that regard. I'm fairly curvy--I mean I wouldn't call myself a curvy girl but I'm not boy shaped--I have big breasts, dainty hands(yes dainty--I tell people this and they don't believe me until we actually compare hand sizes--they are definitely no man sized), and really I'm fairly well within female averages (well except my breasts are actually bigger than average). I mean, there are definitely times when I don't like how I look, times when I think I look particularly trans, but if I look at myself objectively (which is admittedly much harder to do now than in was before I transitioned) I look fine. Actually I look good--no need to be humble here--I'm rather beautiful.

Still, there's that unseen thing down below...I can't enjoy it. Masturbating alone I do my best to imagine it as a vagina (always have actually) and it's disappointing at best. With someone else--well I just couldn't. The thought of it makes my skin crawl. I mean for someone to see it and treat it like a penis would be for me absolutely horrible, like really horrible.

So before I could consider physical intimacy with anyone I need to make sure that they would absolutely respect that...and that is something that most people don't even understand. I don't think people can understand how someone can be a sexual person and absolutely hate their sex organs. And having dated a lesbian who actually wanted to me to expose that to her...I have some trust issues, or anyway, I need to know someone well enough to know they wouldn't do that to me.

So I'm standoffish, and then when someone does seem to be interested in me they usually lose interest after a while because it takes me a long time to both open up and get to know them well enough that I am comfortable being attracted to them.

The girl I dated before I transitioned and I had a very not intimate relationship, as in she was very clear that she didn't love me and didn't want me to love her. Honestly I was fine with that, and even now I'm not particularly resentful. I hadn't dated anyone before her and I just needed to feel attractive. I was willing to do the whole heterosexual guy thing just for that. I was younger then, and still deeply closeted.

I'm kind of at that place again. I mean, I am much more clear in what I am willing to do. Anything involving my penis* (as such) would not make me feel attractive. Anything but actually, like skin crawling. But I really need to feel attractive.

Like, I know I'm beautiful, but that is such an abstract thing. I need to feel wanted and desirable as myself.

And I guess that's it. Really, I would like (for once in my life) to have a somewhat serious relationship. I would really like to (mutually) fall in love with someone (something that I've never experienced) but honestly...

Just someone I like, respect, and am attracted to. Just so I know that there is someone out there who finds me desirable.

I really need that right now.

On that end, I was thinking this morning about how maybe it is time for me to leave the trans* label behind. I've written before that I'm not really transgender (because there isn't anything trans about my gender). There is a physical reality about my body and the pills I have to take. There is also the reality of my past, though I think especially recently I'm letting it go--it isn't me any more. And I think there are lesbians who can accept those realities. I think most people, if they really think about it and soul search, aren't attracted to women as walking vaginas. I think for most people, it's other things: someone's smile, her laugh, her hair, breasts, the way she does her make-up (or doesn't) how girly (or not girly) she is. I think the majority of people are really attracted to all the other things that make a woman, not the idea (because let's face it in most social situations we don't walk around naked) that she has a vagina. But, in being as out as I have been, I haven't just been asking for that. There's the social stigma that comes along with dating an out trans*woman even (if not especially in) the LGBT community, e.g. "So are you still gay? Are you into that type of thing? Do you like penis now?" and though I can't condone someone for not being willing to go through that for the sake of a relationship, but (since most relationships don't work out anyway) I can't condemn it either.

I think it's bull that things are like that, and it's why I have been as out as I have been, but honestly at the cost of never dating (or having chasers as my only option)?

I don't know.

In the short-term, I need to get certified for substance abuse counseling so I can get a better paying career. Once that has happened maybe I should move elsewhere, somewhere where no one knows I'm trans* and I could pick and choose who I told. Or maybe I should step back from it, maybe people will start to forget.

And then thinking about all this I stood in line at the grocery store behind an obviously trans* woman. It was the checkout girl's first day. She was very polite and I didn't get the impression was judging the trans*woman, but I could also tell her perception of the woman in front of me in line was completely different than her perception of me. I was the normal one. She smiled at me differently. I had to check my privilege. It made me feel better, not that I'm proud of that.

Stealth for me is an option, and honestly outside of my small section of RVA's queer community, I am. A lot of trans* people don't have that option.

Being stealth is really a complicated thing. You know, outside of my small section of RVA's queer community (and even to an extent within in) people don't know I'm gay either. Is it my responsibility to tell everyone?

Trans panic, a revision to "Lesbians, Pretendbians and the rest of us," a few things about trans* life, and a little bit of how hormones have changed me over the past four years.

2014-12-02T12:06:00.001-08:00

So I've been meaning to write this post for a while. My opinion has changed slightly since I wrote the post "Lesbians, Pretendbians, and the rest of us." It's my most read post so I wanted to write an update. Also a friend had an attack of trans panic, and that has me re-evaluating that post further, and just a few conversations I've had over the last few days that makes me realize how little non trans* people, even within the LGBT community, actually know about trans* culture and reality.

I wrote about trans panic recently in my post All about trans panic: what is it? and love. I think all trans* people experience it. (I just want to clarify that this is different from the legal defense of the same name) I told my friend that the thing to remember is that there isn't anything wrong with us, it's the society that we live in that is wrong.

Honestly, given our situations, we react as any boy or girl/man or woman would react. I realized this when I allowed myself to ask the question: "Hypthetically, if I really am a girl [as in my mind is wired (for lack of a better term) to have a female anatomy] how am I any different from how any other girl would be in my situation?" The answer: I'm not.

Suddenly, everything I've done and thought my entire life, (eg: all the times when my pre-teen self put on a bra and stuffed it to see what I would look like with breasts, etc.) and my sexuality, became uncomplicated and basically normal.

It took me a long time to reach the point where I was willing to ask that question. I think I always knew what my answer would be, just like I think I always knew that if I ever allowed myself to go out in public as a trans-feminine person (not going out as a woman--I'd done that a few times--but admitting that my dressing as a woman wasn't just something I did but an integral part of who I am) there would be no stopping my transition.

So really, if you accept trans* people as what we say we are, we aren't that weird, or different. We're just dealing with a circumstance most people don't have to deal with, and can't hardly even imagine.

Really, a lot of the time, I don't think it's that cis people can't understand, it's that they don't want to understand. In a weird way, the insistence of some cis people that our genitals determine our gender is proof that trans* people do exist.

Here's that logic:

-If we look around and human culture we can observe just how important one's sense of gender is to their sense of self. One's gender, (a trans* person I know), is an unchangeable, immutable fact (and I'm not arguing for a binary, or even against bi-gender people). Expressing our gender is apparently incredibly important to the human psyche. Just look at all the tools (makeup, clothing, voice intonation, body language etc.) that we use to express and categorize ourselves (largely) into one of two categories, male or female. Also there is a very fine between a "male" appearing body, and a "female" appearing body, I know, I've crossed it. It amazes me how seemingly blind most people are to that, or for that matter how blind I was to it for so many years. Proportionately I am average for woman, and my actual size is well within common averages.
-But we aren't actually that blind. For our entire lives we've encountered large muscular women, and small dainty men.
-So there is a conflict between the physical reality that men and women aren't actually all that different--we're actually talking slight differences in averages, not polar opposite sexes--and how important our internal sense of gender is.
-The proof is just how willing people are to think their entire identity and sense of self is determined by our sexual reproductive organs.
-It's absurd, really: Oh, this baby has a penis. He'll grow up and like sports, and cars, not have any desire to express himself through makeup or clothing...
-But gender is for some reason something that is primary for most people, whereas gender stereotypes rarely fit anyone perfectly. So instead of being able to say "I'm this because I like these things." we say "I am this because I have a (insert genitalia here)"
-And it scares people that maybe (insert genitalia here) is not what makes you a (insert gender pronoun). It really scares people because it is SO important to our sense of self.
-And the importance of gender to our sense of self is exactly why trans* people exist.

Convoluted, hard to follow argument?

A trans* person's sense of self must be self-justified, or unfortunately they rely on stereotypes and make the rest of us look bad.

But people need to categorize.

And constantly we hear that a man is "x" and a woman is "y."

You know every once in a while I start thinking: what if everyone was right? What if I am really just some sort of extreme cross-dresser living a fantasy? Because that it what a lot of people think, whether they know it or not.

No, I'm not. For one, cis-gender people (even cross-dressers) can't live for extended amounts of time as someone they are not. Norah Vincent, in Self Made Man lived for a year as a man as research for a book--it caused her to have a nervous breakdown. Living as a man nearly caused me to have a nervous breakdown. It's been four years since I went anywhere as a man and the very idea of doing it again makes my skin crawl. No, this is what I got. My experience as a man was similar to Norah Vincent's. I felt it confining, and inauthentic.

I have to go through this whenever I get trans panic.

Here's where I changed my opinion from "Lesbians, Pretendbians, and the rest of us:" I could date a pre-op trans* woman, and it's hard for me to defend someone (attracted to women) who couldn't. I would have to be attracted to her (which for me means she'd have to have a lot of cis feminine features) and she'd have to have the same attitude towards her penis that I have towards mine--I'm not into dicks and it wouldn't work with anyone who expected me do anything with one. But just the fact that she had one wouldn't rule her out.

This is what I get as an out trans* woman. I'll be talking to a lesbian and I sense her initial attraction, and then almost immediately afterwards I sense her fear, and whatever attraction she felt she suppresses--I'm sorry, but I'm now more apt to blame that on prejudice or ignorance. Except for one body part (that I am not comfortable exposing or sharing with a partner) my body is a woman's, an attractive woman's, and I wouldn't be comfortable doing anything sexually that would be like being with a man--worse is when it's her friends. It doesn't happen so much anymore because everyone knows me and I'm really out, but when I'm making out with a girl and her friends pull her aside to tell her about me and she's no longer interested.

It's the idea of something they haven't seen and wouldn't see that kills my chances. It isn't what I look like, or who I am, it's just an abstract idea of something people think I am that I don't identify with.

Still, some people are attracted vagina and not women, or rather vagina first and women second. I don't think that's necessarily wrong, but I also don't think that's the majority of people.

No, really it's a problem with our culture and the ideas people have about trans*women.

When I got my second letter of support for my Gender Confirmation Surgery it almost felt like the therapist was trying to talk me into dating men. "You know," she said, "as a trans* woman it will be really hard to find women to date. Men, men don't really care, but it's really hard for trans* women who like women."

I wrote a status on Facebook once that said "You know, to me all you LGB people are straight." It didn't go over well. "What do you mean by that?" was the common response.

Okay.

My sexuality is not entirely compatible with my body (and won't be until I have a surgery) so I've had to work around that. Even talking masturbation any sex I have/any sex I am capable of having is queer. TMI, but I don't masturbate like a man (and never have), and because of my anatomy I don't masturbate entirely like a woman.
I've talked masturbation with my trans guy friends and it's a similar situation. But beyond that...

It's every once in a while I'm talking something trans* with another member of the community and I have to explain just so much that for me is just common knowledge and experience. So I thought it would be fun to make a list:

Tucking, and techniques for tucking. One technique is to tuck you pop your testicles back up into your body (where your ovaries would be) and then secure your penis between your legs It is actually possible to make a penis look like a vagina. It's a bit of work and still can't be penetrated so I haven't really done it in a while but it is possible.

For that matter there is the vee-string which can be penetrated, but they look kinda gnarly, and are a little expensive. Also it seems they're geared more to cross-dressers than to trans*women.

Trans* men DO have penises. T (testosterone) makes them grow. I've seen them they're legit, but small. Most trans* guys I know wear and use packers and refer to them as their penises. They're good for peeing, penetrating, and packing. I don't know a whole lot about them because I've never used one.

Some abbreviations I'm familiar with. TV, CD, TS, TG, MTF or MtF, FTM FtM, M2F, F2M, T2M, T2F, (I've even seen) M2M and F2F (the idea that we were always men and women to begin with)

There's top surgery, and bottom surgery and a lot of different techniques.

As far a vaginoplasty goes Thailand is probably the best, Trinadad Colorado was the world capital for a while, I don't know if it still is. The results are good, near perfect. Gynecologists can't always tell the difference between a natal vagina and a reconstructed vagina.

I will have to dilate though, and that will be painful for the first month or two. Oh and also I'll be bleeding, and my hormones will be all out of wack because I'll have to stop taking them for a bit. So I'll never have a period, but recovery from surgery will be no walk in the park.

"Tranny" is now considered by most to be offensive. As is "She-male," and "He-She, Chicks with dicks" etc. Oh and for that matter. We shrink when we start hormones, so the likelyhood of finding a trans*woman with a huge dick isn't very likely, and we (I for one) don't like it up the ass.

Tranny chasers do exist. They're usually creepy men and feel they have the right to say really nasty things to trans*women. I've been asked (more than a few times) if I liked it up the ass (see above) and usually this is how they introduce themselves. Women chasers aren't as rude, but still I don't want to be anyone's fetish. I'm not the best of both worlds.

Oh and hormones are really effective. My hips are five inches wider, my waist is four inches narrower, my breasts are pushing double d cups and it's all natural. I've also lost a lot of muscle mass, and do not have body hair like I used to. I can go a couple weeks without shaving my legs and it not really being noticeable, vs like two or three days, and I haven't shaved my chest in like three years. Oh and softer skin, softer hair, my face shape has changed, and a whole bunch of other things. Also if you're wondering, my testicles are probably about 1/4 the size they used to be, my penis is smaller also (I'm not sure how much) I rarely have a full erection or ejaculate anymore. If I do it's a very small amount and clear.

Happy Thanksgiving

2014-11-27T09:53:00.000-08:00

The day before Thanksgiving four years ago was the last time I went anywhere as a guy. I wore a fedora, black and white wing tip shoes, a vintage skinny tie and I don't remember whether it was my dark gray suit or my black one--guess it doesn't really matter, they looked the same.

I had started living socially (aka: "part time) as a woman for my twenty-eighth birthday two months earlier. It had been my plan to live that way for an entire year and transition to living "full-time" for my twenty-ninth birthday. By Thanksgiving weekend that year I was "passing" in most situations (even though I wouldn't start hormones for another month) and surprisingly I had found that it was easier and much less stressful for me than "passing" as a man. I was looking forward to my four day weekend and not having to worry about doing the man thing.

Actually, my ability to "pass" as a man was really suffering. Clients were noticing. It isn't that I'd changed much physically or that my mannerisms were effeminate, but something else. My last client that day was a woman nearing seventy who had seventeen cats. She loved me. She told me I had a really sensitive soul. We talked for about two hours--I never got acclimated to the smell in her house.

I ate Thanksgiving dinner by myself at Shoney's. My parents were out of town, but honestly having just come out to them I didn't want to spend the day with them anyway. All weekend long, no matter where I went people called me "she, miss, and ma'am." No one gave me any second looks. When my alarm went off on Monday morning for me to go into the office (as a man), I just couldn't do it. At that point there was no turning back. I haven't gone anywhere as a man since.

I guess I could bind my breasts and cut my hair if I ever wanted to be read as male again, but honestly that isn't something I could do. I really don't have that ability anymore. I guess that's why telling me I'm doing such a good job at being a woman is so insulting to me...it isn't really like I have anything else to choose from.

And still people think this isn't my authentic self...in subtle ways. Every time I'm talking to a lesbian and I see she is attracted to me and then immediately I see that it scares her and she dismisses it--just how many people would never even consider dating a woman like me. The TERFs who call me a rapist, people who care about me mis-gendering me because they don't/won't understand that things like that can get me killed, the fact that as a trans* woman I have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered, the fact that if I am murdered my killer will likely only serve three years (if that or any) because "trans panic" is still a viable defense and lawyers will say I tricked my killer into thinking I was a woman, or the occasional gay guy who thinks I'm like them, or for that matter how incredibly unbelievable it is for so many people that I am exclusively attracted to woman--I've been told I'm lying about that so many times. Or how people see maleness in my proportions and size even though something like 60% of all women share my proportions and that I am hardly outside the average size range or American women (actually I'm thankful for those two facts)

Really, as important as I think it is to be out as a trans* person I really feel how being one really negatively affects the quality of my life.

Still, I'm thankful. I'm thankful in so many ways that I couldn't even begin to explain, like the feeling the softness of my breasts when I wake up, and not feeling like a clown every time I have to dress up, and not dealing with the [masculine] gendered assumptions people used to make about me from the moment they met me, or for that matter people don't tell me I'm a "really weird girl" like they used to tell me I was a "really weird guy," and knowing my instincts are "normal."

Everyday I wish I was born cis-gendered. I wish I could have the childhood, and teens, and early twenties years that I missed out on, or even that I didn't remember thinking my life was a horrible weird nightmare just praying I could wake up and it would be over.

It is over. And every morning the first thing I think when I wake up is "Thank god! thank god! thank god I'm a woman."

Not going home for the holidays,

2014-11-13T22:13:00.002-08:00

That Arctic cold front has hit and it's getting chilly outside. It's chilly in my apartment so I have the oven cranked at 500 and the door open, as well as a space heater going. The thermostat is not hooked up properly and my apartment is really drafty. It reminds me of the house I grew up in.

It really reminds me of the house I grew up in. That house has since been demolished. I liked it. It was on a 365 acre farm, in the Northern Neck, and it really wasn't that dilapidated--just old and drafty. Anyway, I'll never be able to share it with my future wife and kids.

Well don't know about the kids anymore. I don't think I was put on this earth to be a parent.

Anyway, I was talking to a friend today about surfing the internet back in the early nineties, looking up the personal pages and blogs of other transsexuals, waiting five to ten minutes for each page to load, and feeling guilty about what I was reading, thinking it was along the same lines as porn. (I kept a solitaire game and ready to click on, and my email in another window in case my mother or father walked into the office where I surfed the web)

So, weirdly, perhaps nostalgically I felt like getting on line in this chilly apartment and blogging about being trans*.

No, not about being trans*. I transitioned. It's in the past. Thank GOD! (if you want to read about it click here!)

So my mother is rather pissed off at me right now. I'm not going home for Thanksgiving. Nor will I go home for Christmas. I won't say never again, but definitely not this year. It would be too stressful for me.

One thing I've realized over the past few months is that I definitely have some PTSD related to my life before I transitioned. So the Northern Neck is a trigger for me, my brother and I do not get along, and I've (guiltily) been contemplating cutting him out of my life entirely--we've never really gotten along, and this year he's sent me some texts that I found particularly offensive, and both of my grandmothers will be visiting.

One grandmother sent me a very sweet letter when I came out, that I really appreciate and still have on my fridge (and perhaps always will), but she's gotten really senile since and last time I saw her constantly messed up the pronouns even so bad as to call me a man. The other never responded when I came out...I wrote three letters, and I am a little embarrassed about what I wrote (I was very much an adolescent girl). I'm done justifying myself.

It's a combination of all these factors. It hurts every time someone calls me he. (That's another trigger) so with both grandmas and my father messing up the pronouns all day, my grandmother who has never responded to my coming out, my brother, and being in the Northern Neck is just too much.

Despite what my mother told me on the phone last time we spoke, I am an adult and I'm not being selfish by refusing to put myself through that.

If I hadn't transitioned I'd be dead right now. I did what I had to do for my health, my sanity, and my life, and now I am basically living the life I wanted to live. I am not going to put myself in situations that make me feel like my transition never happened. I do not deserve to be punished for the decisions I've made.

Oh yeah, my mother told me that I couldn't live in a bubble with people who don't ever refer to me with masculine pronouns, and that I made this decision and had to live with people mis-gendering me--I don't and I can.

She must not see me. I can wake-up hungover, throw on a guy's t-shirt without a bra, not shave, not put on makeup and walk groggily with unbrushed hair to the convenience store (or grocery store, or laundromat, or where ever) and people will still call me "Miss" and "Ma'am," and refer to me with female pronouns.

It's been four years and getting the pronouns right isn't that hard. My senile grandmother messing up I understand, my father I grit my teeth and correct him. But it really hurts...especially coming from people who know and love me.

Other people have written about what that feels like, and believe me it feels awful (it says that you think I am wrong in my most basic understanding of myself among other things) so I won't write too much more about it. Or how if you're accidentally messing up on my pronouns at home you're going to slip in public sometime and you and I don't know that that person at the next table or in line behind us isn't one of those transphobic people who would come after me and kill me. Yeah, it's that serious.

Did you know that in the United States "trans panic" is still a viable defense for anyone accused of murdering a trans* person. It usually results in the charges being reduced to manslaughter.

I am not mis-representing myself when I say I'm a woman.

And as a woman, I don't feel like I need to put myself in an environment, or surround myself with people who constantly refer to me as "he and him." Nor would I work with someone like that, nor do I tolerate that. I also don't think I need to justify myself as a woman. I am because I am.

But anyway...I don't even need to explain this that much. I do not need to go to my parents' house for Thanksgiving. I did briefly want to talk about it because of my mother's manipulative reaction--I found out (from my therapist) a very typical reaction of bi-polar people, and that the best way to deal with bi-polar people is to set firm boundaries.

Which was really nice to learn. For one, I don't have to repeat, or fear, that type of manipulation in my relationships. It isn't normal or healthy. Also, my firm boundaries that I have with most everyone suddenly makes a lot of sense--two things I've wanted to leave behind, and two things that have been very destructive for me in trying to find a fulfilling relationship.

Also, apparently in our thirties we start to separate ourselves from our nuclear families...I'm developmentally doing (by taking this firm stand with my mother that I won't go home) doing exactly what I should be doing. So contrary to what my mother told me, me not going home is not me being a child, it's me being a grown woman.

Well, at any rate, (and I told my therapist this) I can't go home now; my mother would continue to use guilt trips to get me to do what she wants. Quite honestly she doesn't know what is best for me anymore.

And on top of everything else, I really like the direction my life is heading in, and I'm not going to let something like family derail that.

Since leaving home I've found the entire holiday season to be really depressing, but I think I'm going to have a good holiday season this year. I'm not going to put myself in the stressful situations I did before, and I'm not going to feel guilty about it.

All about trans panic: what is it? and love.

2014-10-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

I meant to write a post Sunday night, and then Monday, and then yesterday, but well...I never got around to it. I'm painting again, not that that has anything to do with why I didn't post, but I thought I'd mention it. I'll write more on that later.

Really, what I meant to write about is the case of trans panic I had Saturday night.

I don't get trans panic very often anymore. Really, this is only the second time since early in my transition. It used to happen frequently. It halted my first two attempts at transitioning hormonally in their tracks.

Which is why, when I did start hormonally transitioning the third time I spoke to a therapist for several months prior...I wanted someone to be there when I had that inevitable trans panic attack.

Okay, I need to back up a bit. It turns out that a lot of people don't even know what trans panic is. I define it as something separate from dysphoria. Dysphoria is something I feel constantly about my genitals, and used to feel constantly about the gender I was assigned to. Dysphoria is no joke. I wish I could make people understand how intense it feels, then no one would have any questions about why I transitioned in the first place or why I need Gender Confirmation Surgery urgently. Trans panic is when I feel panicky about being trans, as in: Oh my God! What am I? Where do I fit in? I'm never going to be completely accepted as a woman and now I'm somewhere in between and I can't deal with it. Or, it was that fear of being in between that made transitioning so difficult in the first place.

I go a few months on hormones, my body would start to change, and I was terrified to come out as trans to anyone, and terrified of ending up somewhere in between male and female.

I guess, no scratch that, I know that ~~some~~ most people think I'm in between genders now. If only because I haven't been able to raise the funds for my surgery yet. Sometimes only because I'm out of the closet as a trans person.

It is so tempting to go stealth. I think about it a lot actually, to move somewhere where no one knows I'm trans and not tell anyone and just be treated like a normal human being...God that would be nice.

But no, for me personally it is really important to be an out trans person. It shouldn't make any difference if someone is trans or not, and we need more people willing to be out so that trans can be seen for what it is: a naturally occurring variation.

I think my trans panic stemmed from a couple things: I've been putting a little more effort into finding a relationship. When I first started transitioning it was my intention not to date until after my surgery, but well...I'm really lonely, and I'm tired of not having anyone to hold me, or stay in with. So, I've been trying to talk to some people on Okcupid. One girl, a bi girl (not that that makes any difference, but I guess I ignorantly assumed she might not have the hold-ups a lot of lesbians do about dating someone like me) told me she'd never dated a trans person before and didn't think she could deal with it—thanks for being upfront (no seriously actually, I appreciate that). Another girl contacted me, was really interested, and wrote like a page about herself. In my reply I told her I was trans, haven't heard back from her since. The second thing--I think the trigger--was a post I saw on Facebook. Some celebrity (I haven't heard of) was caught with a trans woman prostitute. I guess there was a huge scandal, and he responded to the press that she fooled him into thinking she was born a woman and then tried to extort him when he found out she wasn't. The trigger was the comment the person wrote who shared the article: see maybe was shouldn't judge people when these things happen—Seriously! The fact that he was with a prostitute is trumped by the fact he was with a trans woman? I'm so sick of people thinking it is somehow less straight (or less gay for that matter) to find women like me attractive. The hormones I take orally are the same hormones that occur naturally in cisgender women (who haven't gone through menopause or had a hysterectomy). The changes in my body they have caused are identical to the changes cis women go through in puberty. Everything about my body is natural, and my “sex change” surgery won't be a “sex change” so much as it will be genital reconstruction. Fuck, if I'd served in Iraq and had my vagina blasted out by a grenade no one would judge my vaginoplasty then...would they?

I think all this culminated with my having a case of trans panic on Saturday night. Slow breaths, calm down, looking at my boobs in a mirror helps actually.

So I wanted to write about that. But then it makes me think about how much love is dependent on the body someone has. If I was dating a girl and she told me one morning that she was really a he how long would it be before I was uncomfortable in the relationship? For me, it probably wouldn't be until after he started taking T and his body became a body that I related to as male, but still...

Most relationships and marriages end when one partner transitions.

So every person I have ever fallen in love with has been female bodied, and when I really think about it, a huge part of that love I've felt has been because of their bodies, not just their personality. We like to think that we exist as an entity separate from our bodies, but how many of us are capable of actually seeing someone as not their body. Our bodies are as much who we are as our souls. And I know this, because it wasn't enough to come to terms with having a female mind and soul, I needed a female body. How can anyone love me if they see me as anything other than female?

Of course then I think about friendship. Someone (I think CS Lewis) said friendship is the purest form of love...but is it really? Most friendship is circumstantial, and honestly selfish. Friends are people we enjoy spending time with, they're the people who enjoy the same things we do, who are going through the same things we are. What happens when we change? The sad truth, (and I know a lot about change) is that your friends don't want to see you change. They love you as you are, not who you are becoming. Every time I've gone through a major change I've lost friends.

It's the people who are still there when change happens. My two best friends have been there for a long time now. They were there when I was a huge partier in college, and while I was a drunk after college, and when I came out as trans, and while I grew up in my second puberty, through all my crushes, insecurities, and flaws.

I don't see either of them very frequently. We have completely different lives. The circumstances that brought us together in the first place have changed. But they're still there, and most other people aren't. It's like they always saw me, not the momentary me but the permanent me. The me that stays the same no matter what changes I go through.

So, I'm looking for a partner like that. Someone who loves me.

I finished my memoir about a month ago. It's something I worked for over two years on, then self-published on kindle. I'm not the same person I was before I published it.

There's been some upheaval in my friendships since, but I'm not really upset about it. I expected it. I'm disappointed because the people who stick are rarely the ones I expect. The people who seem to love me more than anyone else are usually the people who love who I was in that moment, that circumstance, and when change happens they're not the ones who stay.

But we always meet people in the moment. I guess part of what I was trying to share (with my friends specifically) in my memoir, is who I was before now, and maybe a glimpse of the permanent me. The part of me that hasn't changed. The way I think, the way I feel, the way I reacted to having a body at complete discord to who I am.

It's a need I have, that I think we all have, to share our inner-selves (to greater and lesser extents considering the relationship). I must say that having transitioned people see me more than they did before, but still to be trans is in some respects to be invisible. People see someone in transition, or someone who isn't quite a woman, or someone who isn't quite female, when my inner-self isn't at all in-between.

Surgery will relieve this to an extent, hopefully enough that I can live a full complete life. But it scares me that maybe it won't. Maybe people will never see me for how I see myself. Or worse, they will but I won't ever know it.

I grew up with the same prejudices about trans people everyone else did. I've read the same articles about “Men” who want to be or think that they are really women, and I've seen the same talk shows with linebackers in mini-skirts insisting that they are real women.

And I think, that's trans panic. It's when the prejudices that I grew up with, and the prejudices that are so prevalent around me, and the prejudices I face collide with the fact that I am trans.

A Sample of Straight Boy/Queer Girl: a memoir

2014-10-24T12:24:00.001-07:00

Here's a sample of my recent book that is available on kindle. By contract I can't give away a larger sample.

Chapter 1

I was probably four, so my younger brother, Alex, was probably two. The two of us were waiting in the lobby of a free clinic for a dentist appointment, or a doctor's appointment, I'm not sure which. We sat on the floor. My mother sat above us in a cheap plastic bucket seat. I was playing with a doll whose name was “Me Me.” I tried to get my brother to play with it also, but he wasn't interested and started rolling a toy truck back and forth on the tile floor instead.

“Dummy” I called him.

“Don't call your brother that!” my mom said.

I looked up at her. “Why?” I asked.

“Because it's not nice,” she said.

I picked myself off the floor and sat beside my mother. “But he doesn't even know how to play with Me Me,” I said showing her the doll. It was a strange doll, a cross between a stuffed animal and a person.

“Well,” she said, “he's younger than you. He doesn't know how to play with those types of toys yet. They take more imagination.” My brother continued to roll the truck around on the floor, back and forth. He picked up a block and put it on the truck. “Maybe you could teach him how to build with blocks,” my mom suggested.

“No,” I said, “They're boring.”

My earliest memories are from the time just before my brother was born. I had just turned two. I lived with my parents in a rental house that was clad with wood and painted white. It was hot outside, some time in the late summer. I ran in front of my parents, out the back door, down the concrete steps, and across our grassy, but treeless yard to our next door neighbor's house. She was an old lady in her eighties who gave me candies whenever we visited. I liked visiting her, but I hated our backyard. I ran across it as quickly as I could to get out of the sun.

My mother was pregnant. I understood what that meant and hoped for a sister. Instead my brother was born. I remember my mother sitting with us on the living room floor, breast feeding my brother. “He's the baby and needs milk,” she said. “You can eat real food.” I sat a few feet away and watched. “This is how mommies feed their babies,” she said.

“Like cows?” I asked.

We moved into the farmhouse where I grew up as a hurricane approached. I sat upstairs in my bedroom next to a trunk of toys. Two girls a couple years older than me who had been my playmates were over to say goodbye. They gave me a wiffle ball. It had holes all over it. I didn't really know what I was supposed to do with it. I looked at it.

One of the girls picked the ball up, tossed it in the air and caught it. “There,” she said. She handed it back to me. I tried to do the same but the ball bounced off my fingers and rolled away. The girl picked it up and showed me again. “Here,” she said, “keep your hand open when you try to catch it.” The ball bounced off my palm instead. She handed it back to me. “You'll get the hang of it,” she said. “Just practice.” I held the wiffle ball in my hand as we drove the last load of stuff into my new home.

It was sunny outside. I only know that it was the eve of a hurricane because of stories I've been told since. I followed my mother and father into our new house. It was empty and smelled musty and un-lived in. My mother started cleaning the bathroom downstairs. It was filled with mold.

I went outside and lay on my back. Our fenced in yard was filled with large maple trees. I looked up at the blue sky through all the leaves. It was breezy and they rustled back and forth. I decided I loved my new home.

I went back inside and looked over my mom's shoulders. She had finished cleaning the bathroom and was now scrubbing out the inside of the oven. She wore rubber gloves. “Get back,” she said. “This stuff will burn if it gets on your skin.” I stood a few paces back and watched her. My grandma held my younger brother in her arms and walked back and forth. My father and grandfather carried in furniture. A few days after we moved in I looked for the wiffle ball I had been given. It was lost and I never found it.

The farmhouse, I found out later in a course I took on architecture, was laid out very traditionally. A hallway and staircase divided the house in half. Two large rooms were on either side of the hallway on both floors. It was built in the decade prior to the Civil War without indoor plumbing. As a result, when plumbing was added later, the bathrooms were a little strange. The first floor bathroom cut one of the four large rooms in half, leaving a room too small to do much with. It became a playroom while I was young, and later, when my father wrote his thesis, it became an office. Upstairs, our bathroom and three bedrooms were all the same size.

At the top of the stairs there was a large walk-in closet where my parents hung their “grown-up” clothes. To the left my father kept his corduroy suits that I thought were hideous, ties, and brown loafers with tassels. He wore them to the middle school where he taught English. On the right side of the closet my mother kept her old clothes: dresses and high heels that she rarely wore, and sweaters with horizontal stripes left over from college that I only saw her wear in photos taken before I was born. On the closet door, reflecting the staircase and the second story hallway, there was a full length mirror that my father stood in front of straightening his tie and combing his hair before going to work. I stood beside him with a little comb of my own and parted my hair to the right. I had a blue birthmark just behind my bangs, the same color as the eyeshadow that the pretty teenage girls at my dad's school wore. I admired it in the mirror often because I was still too young for make-up. During the day, while my dad was at work, I played dress-up and practiced walking around in my mother's heels. I looked forward to growing into them some day.

Once, I played dress-up with my brother Alex. I showed him our parents' clothes hung in the closet: my dad's ugly brown and green suits and the tassels on his shoes, my mothers clothes and her shoes with high heels. I put on a pair and started walking around. He put on a pair of my dad's shoes. They were much bigger than our mother's. He put on one of my dad's dress shirts. It hung to his ankles.

“No,” I said. “You're doing it all wrong!”

My friends were all children of my father's co-workers at the school. Katie was my best friend. She had a younger brother, Charlie, who was the same age as Alex and they'd play together anytime he came over. Her parents had a station wagon with wood grain on the side and a trunk that converted into a second back seat. The year before we started preschool our mothers decided that they were going to take us on field trips during the day while our fathers worked. Our brothers would be strapped into car seats and we'd ride in the converted back seat, looking out the back window as scenery vanished into the distance.

Once we rode on a ferry. “You know what a ferry is?” her mom asked.

“Like Tinkerbell?” I volunteered. I'd just watched Peter Pan the night before.

“No, a boat!” said Katie.

“It's a boat,” her mom said, “that cars ride on.”

“See!” said Katie.

“Tinkerbell is a fairy too, but a different type of fairy,” my mom said.

“See!” I said.

Katie, my two other friends Paul and John, and I would play together, catching lightning bugs in the backyard and watching animated movies until late when our parents would take us home and put us to bed. One evening, while our parents were talking, we stacked all my toys in the doorway of the play room, making a dam. When we finished, we climbed over the dam into the hallway. “Let's play wedding!” Katie said. She decided she wanted to marry John.

“Why don't you want to marry me?” I asked.

“I can only marry a boy. You're not a real boy,” she paused. “You can be the minister.” She suggested.

My youngest brother, Jack, was born during a snowstorm in November. Once again, I had wanted a sister. Alex and I stayed at my grandparents' house. They lived in a cottage by mouth of the Yeocomico River, where it met the Potomac. My brother and I walked through the snow by the river with our grandmother. “Are you excited to meet your baby brother?” she asked us.

Almost from the moment he was born, Jack liked balls and guns. On long car trips, he'd sit in his car seat between Alex and me, clutching a baseball. I'd make him hats out of yarn and place them on his head. He was blonde.

Another hurricane postponed my first day of kindergarten. Alex and I shared a bunk bed that Dad had built with two by fours and plywood. I had the top bunk. Jack slept in a crib in the corner of the room. It was dark outside when Mom tucked us into bed. She gave us flashlights, large square yellow flashlights with colored filters that could be adjusted to make the light green, red, or yellow. “Keep these near you,” she said, “in case we have to leave and go to the middle school.” The middle school gym had been made into a shelter. My dad was there, helping to keep it organized. They had evacuated Tangier Island and people said it might not be there in the morning.

“Are we going to be okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said my mom. “We'll leave if it starts to get bad.”

“Will the house be okay?”

“This house is old,” my mom said, “it's been through a lot of hurricanes worse than this. It was built well.”

It was dark that night, but I don't think we ever lost power. I stayed awake in bed for a while, shining my flashlight on the ceiling and switching its color between red, green, and yellow before I finally fell asleep. Mom didn't wake us in the middle of the night, and in the morning, on what would have been my first day of school, we slept in. The hurricane never hit. That afternoon was clear but gusty. On TV I watched a documentary about Pompeii, but the stone figures that were once human scared me so I went outside.

On a Sunday night, the last weekend before I'd start the first grade, my brothers and I lay in the spare bedroom bed with our mother, Jack in her arms, and Alex and I sitting beside her. Outside the sun was setting. We watched The Wind and the Willows on television, (or perhaps my mother read it to us; I don't remember having a second TV). Alex and Jack fell asleep, but I was still awake when it finished and we took the car to go pick up my father from his second job. He worked weekends at a bar called The Boathouse.

The Boathouse started as a snack bar and bait shop for a campground and most of its regulars were still campers. Once it had been an actual boathouse. It stood mostly above the water, only the kitchen was on land. A large pier ran alongside and past it into the river, where people docked their boats. It was run by a man who was excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and his wife. He'd started as a dishwasher in Richmond, and then he worked as a cook for a while, and finally as a bartender at an after hours club, before he mixed a good drink for someone who offered to let him run a campground in the Northern Neck. He was a large man, with a big belly and a couple missing teeth, who could tell a story like few others. During dinner he ran the kitchen which served fried fish, crab-cakes, pizza, and burgers. After dinner he sat at a table in the bar and told fishing stories to any who would listen. He usually entertained a large audience.

When we got to the bar they had just finished a bottle of Mescal and a waitress was eating the worm. One of the regulars, a boat captain, always had a pocket full of balloons. He blew one up and made a poodle with it. Then he gave it to me. We waited while my dad finished pouring drinks, wiping the bar, and putting away glasses. He stood behind the bar, pouring shots for the chain smoking waitresses; restaurant people smoke and drink. When he got off, I sat in his lap while he drank a beer. He smelled like a bartender, of cigarettes, booze and sanitizer. We got home late at night. My brothers were still asleep when we were put to bed.

Some afternoons, I rode the school bus home with Katie and we played in her tree house. Alex would already be there with Charlie, playing games that didn't look like much fun. We as older siblings thought their games too childish for us. Occasionally, we'd let them play house with us, giving them chores, usually outside, to do. We pretended to be grown up. We pretended to bake cookies and brownies, or help each other put away groceries and clean, things our mothers seldom did together After a few minutes Alex and Charlie would get bored with our game and go back to playing whatever it was they played. Our mothers sat on the patio furniture and watched us play.

When house got boring we'd play with the little figures that came in Legos: cops, truck drivers, and firemen. We liked the cops because they were girls. It was the eighties, and both of our mothers had drilled into us that a woman could be anything that a man could be.

Alex and Charlie were playing with dirt, and Katie's mother was inside making us lemonade. My mom stood watching us and holding my youngest brother Jack. I ran over to her. “Mommy,” I said tugging her arm, “I decided what I want to be when I grow up!”

“Oh that's great!” she said.

“I want to be a mommy like you,” I said.

“You don't want to be a daddy?” she asked. “You can be a daddy.”

I thought about my dad, and the ugly corduroy suits he wore to school. I didn't want to be like him. “No,” I said, “I want to be like you. I want to be a mommy.”

“Well, you can be a daddy.” she said. “Daddies are the same thing as mommies except that they're boys.”

“I thought that girls and boys could grow up to be anything they want. Like girls can be police officers and fire-women.”

“That's true,” she agreed, “but they're still girls. Boys have penises and girls have vaginas.” Her reasoning sounded so obvious that I was ashamed that I hadn't thought of it before. “Do you want to be a daddy?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Why?” she asked. “You wanted to be a mommy.”

“They're not the same.”

There's a picture of my family around that time. My mother dressed Alex and me in sailor suits. We wore white shorts and sailor hats, and had matching blue and white striped shirts. I hated dressing like my brother. Alex and I stood in front of our parents. My mother was seated holding my youngest brother Jack. She had a perm and looked too thin. I held up the hem of my right leg because I didn't feel comfortable. When the shoot was over I gave my mom the sailor hat. I didn't want to be a sailor. The photo hung on the wall of my parents' dining room, with other family photos, my senior picture, and baby pictures of my brothers and I until a few years ago.

Sometime after I told my mom that I wanted to grow up to be a mommy, my parents decided they were going to teach me how to shower. There was a new shower head, that Katie's parents had installed at their house, that was attached to a hose. It mounted to the wall in a bracket and could be removed to spray various parts of one's body. Katie stood in the bathtub and demonstrated how it worked. She held her head back so that her hair wouldn't fall in her eyes and washed her hair. It was the first time I saw a girl my age naked. My dad installed a similar shower head in our bathroom, and I started showering by myself. I didn't want to be seen naked anymore.

The next day I sat on the toilet in the big bathroom at home. It was on the second floor and we had no neighbors, so there were no curtains on the windows. The window beside me was blocked by a large maple tree. I could see sky out the other window, which looked down on the area where my parents parked. The door was latched closed. I sat on the toilet examining my penis. It seemed rather unnecessary. I pushed it inside my body cavity hoping it would stay there, but it didn't. That settled things. “Boys have penises,” I said out loud, “and girls have vaginas.” From the vent in the floor a few feet away I heard people talking and realized Katie had come over with her mother and brother. I hoped that I hadn't been heard and was embarrassed.

Chapter 2

When I was a small child my parents woke my brothers and me and packed us in the back of their brand new 1987 Nissan Sentra with pillows, blankets, and a coloring book of deep sea creatures. We drove fourteen hours to Ithaca, in northern Indiana where Mom grew up. My mother read to us from Little House on the Prairie until she could read no more, and fell asleep. Then I occupied myself by asking about the weird fish in the coloring book, fish with needle teeth and glowing orbs. My brother Alex poked me at intervals until I became mad and Dad smacked me from the front seat for losing my temper. This continued for the rest of the car ride. I tried to imagine myself in the deep ocean but found I couldn’t. I decided I was glad fish like that only lived deep in the ocean and I decided I was glad that I wasn’t a deep sea fish.

My maternal grandparents lived in Ithaca, the small town where my mom’s family had lived for generations. Grandma’s house meant Tang, sugary cereal, candy, and other treats we didn’t have at home. Visiting meant the smell of coffee and bacon in the morning, playing with cousins and second cousins, eating hamburgers, hotdogs, and potato salad, if it was summer, or ham, turkey, and cookies at Christmas. Whatever the time of the year, it meant lots of good hearty Midwestern food. My grandmother had two kitchens.

When we arrived it was well after my bedtime and it was dark outside. My grandpa was sitting against the wall, at the kitchen table. Beside him sat my great-grandmother, his mother, who was famous for her pies, and across the table from him sat my grandmother with a white eye patch taped under her glasses; she had just had cataract surgery. We had been warned about her eye patch during the ride, but I was still shocked when I saw it. I'd expected a pirate's eye patch. It didn't make her look as different as I'd imagined. Grandma served us pie that my great-grandma had brought and poured coffee for my parents. Alex and I sat on the carpeted steps which led from the dining room into the kitchen and ate our pie. We let the grown-ups do the talking. My brother and I went to bed shortly after eating, and shared a bed in the room my mother once shared with her sister. I stared at the ceiling and listened to the air outside. It was comfortable. Summers in Northern Indiana aren't blazing hot like summers in Virginia can be.

When I asked, my grandma gave me a Fudgesicle. I wasn’t allowed to eat it inside, “Now eat this outside,” I'd been told, “Little boys are too messy to eat Fudgesicles inside,” so I sat outside on the steps in front of her house and tried to eat it before it dripped down my hand and onto my arm. I tried extra hard to be clean, but it was a hot day and the Fudgesicle was too cold to eat really fast. I sat on the door step wondering what my life would be like if I had been born a girl. “I’d be eating this inside and wouldn’t be getting so sticky with fudge drippings” I thought. I licked what was left of the frozen chocolate off the Popsicle stick and walked inside to clean up.

When I said I didn't feel like coloring Grandma asked me if I wanted to see my uncle's artwork. I agreed and I followed her upstairs into his bedroom. “He’s going to school for art down in Terra Haute,” she said as she pulled out a folder of drawings he had done. “I’ll leave you up here and let you look at them for a while. Be careful with them, and don’t get them dirty.” My grandma left and I flipped through drawings of gumball machines until I thought I’d spent enough time to show I was interested. Then I went downstairs and asked for a glass of Tang, and talked with her for a while.

My last memory of my family before my mother's nervous breakdown was at a carnival. It was late August, and the sun had set. The air smelled like funnel cakes and cotton candy. My dad had a string of tickets to spend on games and rides. We rode the Ferris wheel, the swings, and the spider, a machine with eight legs and sixteen baskets that dipped and spun us around. The spider made me nervous. I was worried our bucket would come loose and we'd be thrown into the sky, over the people waiting in line. They weren't going to be able to ride. Then again, they probably wouldn't want to after seeing my dad and I hurled through space. Dad assured me that wouldn't happen but I clutched the guard rail tightly with both hands until the ride was over. Then we walked around eating cotton candy and met my mother and younger brother at a picnic table with crab-cake sandwiches and fries. We left after eating and I was asleep by the time we got home. I woke while my father carried me upstairs. He tucked me into bed and I fell back asleep.

I never realized at the time that my mother was ill. My father didn't either. A police officer had to tell him one rainy Sunday morning. Our family was on the way to church in our '87 Nissan Sentra. I sat behind my mother on the passenger side. Alex sat behind my father who was driving, and Jack sat in a car seat between us. He was still an infant. I looked out at the gray sky and rain water as it beaded and ran down my window. Blue lights flashed behind us and Dad pulled over, but Mom wanted to talk to the priest. She urged my him to keep driving. “No,” he said, “I'm not going to run from the cops.” The officer tapped on my dad's window, and he rolled it down.

“License and registration,” the cop said.

“Go!” said my mom. The police officer looked through the car at her. He shined a flashlight in her face. “Anything in here I need to know about?”

“No.” said Dad. The officer left with my dad's license and sat in his car.

“Go!” said my mother again.

“I can't go,” said Dad, “He has my license.”

After a while the police officer came back. “Can I talk to you outside?” He asked. Dad stepped out of the car and they talked together under a black umbrella. The police officer told my father to get Mom to a hospital. It was obvious she needed it.

I have been told since that my mother had a couple nervous breakdowns and that my brothers and I stayed my my grandparents while she was in the hospital. I remember spending weeks sleeping at Katie's house, or at Paul's house. I also remember waking up with chickenpox at my grandparents' and missing the church Christmas Pageant. I was supposed to be Joseph. I guess both memories are true.

I don't know what grade I was in, probably the first because my brothers were staying with my grandparents, and I couldn't miss school. My dad stood with Katie's parents in the hallway talking. I watched them from the kitchen, but didn't hear what they said. It was a small kitchen: smaller, anyway, than the kitchen back at home, but it was newer, and more stylish. The floor was dark brown linoleum, and the cabinets were stained to match. It was open, no wall stood between the kitchen and the hallway. It was actually one large room with the kitchen taking up the corner, only distinguished by its hard floor and an island that stood between me and my father. After a few minutes he came over to me and kneeled down so we were face to face.

“Your Mommy,” he said, “is really sick. She has to stay in the hospital, but she'll get better. It's just going to take a little while.”

“Okay.” I said.

“You didn't do anything wrong. Mommy has a mental illness. Do you know what that means?”

I nodded. “Kinda,” I said. I'd heard the grown-ups talking about it earlier.

“It means her mind is sick. She isn't thinking rationally right now. She believes things that aren't true. Everyone else knows that they're not true but she doesn't. We didn't notice at first, and she didn't know. When someone is mentally ill they don't always know. It's made her really sick and she has to stay in a special hospital until she gets better. Okay?”

I nodded.

Dad continued, “Her hospital is in Norfolk. I'm going to visit her in the afternoons when I finish teaching and I need to work more at the Boathouse. I will be getting home really late every night and I can't watch you. Will you be okay spending the night here during the week until I can bring her home?”

I nodded.

“Okay,” he said and hugged me, “You be good. I'll see you as much as I can. I'll be back for you on Friday when I get home from work.” He hugged me for a little longer. “I need you to be strong. Your Mom and I love you.” He stood up and left. It was a Monday night.

I stood by myself in the kitchen. It was a scary thought that I could be really sick and not even know it, that I could believe something that everyone else knew was wrong. I vowed never to let myself believe something that I couldn't prove was true.

I examined my thoughts. I knew that girls have vaginas and boys have penises. There was nothing to justify my belief that I should be a girl. It was time to learn how to be a boy.

At Katie's house I slept on a fold-out sleeper sofa in a room her parents called the den. It was a small room with light blue carpeting. A large television stood at the foot of my bed. It had a VCR, and one night Katie and I watched American Tail. One of my teeth became loose and I wiggled it for a couple days until it fell out. I asked Katie's mother if the tooth fairy would know I wasn't sleeping at home, and held my palm open to show her the tooth.

“She'll know,” she said, “put it under your pillow when you sleep tonight.”

The next morning I woke with my dad asleep beside me. It was Saturday and he was still wearing his uniform from the night before. He still smelled like a bartender. I got out of bed and ran into the kitchen where Katie's mom was cooking breakfast. “My daddy's here!” I said. “The tooth fairy brought my daddy! See.” I took her arm and led her back to the den. My father met us halfway and picked me up. He gave me a hug.

“Did the tooth fairy leave you anything last night?” he asked. I pushed myself back so I could look at him. “Did you check under your pillow?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. “She brought you.”

“I came after I got off work. I think you should check under your pillow, she might have brought you something else.” He set me down on the floor, and I ran back to the bed and lifted up the pillow. A dollar bill was resting where my tooth had been.

Late that night my father picked me up from Katie's house when he finished working at the bar and I slept in my own bed. Our house felt strange, empty, and dark without my mother or younger brothers. It felt different. I don't know if it was ever the same again.

On Christmas I woke up at my grandparents' house by the Yeocomico. We ate cinnamon rolls that my Dad's father made and waited for my parents. Dad was picking my mom up from the hospital in Norfolk. She was was well enough to come home for the day, but she was still sick, and wouldn't stay at home yet. We had finished eating when my parents arrived. Alex and I hugged Mom's legs, and Grandma handed her my brother Jack. She sat in a folding chair in the middle of the finished porch and held him. Alex and I opened our Christmas presents at her feet. I don't remember what I was given that year. Alex got a toy truck, and Jack, Duplos, the giant, toddler-safe version of Legos. He got two identical sets. Mom forgot she had already bought one when she told my father what to buy and where to hide them. He found the first set when he hid the second. She wouldn't let him return it.

For years I've remembered her nervous breakdown as I've described it, one event. I've learned since that she was hospitalized different times. This explains many of the conflicting memories I have. For example, my kindergarten teacher and my mother were close friends before her nervous breakdown. My brother Alex, who started school the same year I started the second grade was placed in her class at my mother's insistence, but their friendship didn't survive the illness, and by the time Mom was released from the hospital for good they were no longer on speaking terms. My parents' relationships with their other friends changed as well. When I started the third grade I rarely saw Katie, John, or Paul anymore.

It is difficult for me to explain my emotions in the years following my mother's nervous breakdown. I knew that her mental illness was not her fault, but I was resentful of her as I never was before. My father also had a strained relationship with her at that time. They fought frequently and I'd hear them yelling through the air vent in the floor of my bedroom. For a while my father was unpredictable and I didn't always know what would set him off. If I cried he would yell and accuse me of being manipulative. I learned to hold back tears. He was also very defensive of my mother. If I spoke back to her, he would go into a rage and smack me with the back of his hand. He wore a class ring and the stone hurt when it hit the side of my head. I asked him to take it off before hitting me. He mostly obliged.

When my mother returned home, she began seeing a psychiatrist. My brothers and I saw the psychiatrist also, though not regularly. I only remember seeing her once, at a session my father sat in on as well. My brothers stayed in the lobby under the supervision of the receptionist and played with toys while my parents and I talked. The therapist wanted to know why I hated my father. I said his temper, and I said his rules weren't fair. He'd asked me to be strong when I spent weeks away from home and I was. I wasn't the same as my younger brothers and didn't want to be treated the same.

I believed that my mother became mentally ill because she allowed herself to believe things that couldn't be true. She needed her psychiatrist to help her distinguish reality from delusion. I decided I was never going to have a nervous breakdown. I would examine and analyze all my thoughts and only believe what I could prove to be true, and only want things I could actually have. I still wanted to be a girl. That night I was determined to find out why so I could dismiss it.

I went to bed an hour after my brothers, part of the deal my parents and I made with my mother's therapist. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. I thought about all the girls who’d been my friends. I liked girls. I really liked girls. That was “normal.” I was “normal.” I just really liked girls. In fact, I reasoned, I was probably in love, just scared to admit it. I decided that being in love, however embarrassing, was much more realistic than wanting to be a girl. Falling in love was something that was actually supposed to happen. I tried to figure out who I was in love with. I finally settled on a pretty blonde girl in my class who was “art talented” also. I slept peacefully until morning.

That fall, my mother returned to school to work on her Master's degree in music composition. She partially blamed her illness on not having worked as a musician, or continuing her education. She used the spare bedroom as a music studio and taught private lessons. She spent a couple days a week in Richmond taking classes and collaborating on projects with other grad students at VCU. Her favorite professor was an old woman named Nika with a hunched back and dark, unnaturally dyed, hair. Nika was also certifiably a genius who earned her PhD at age twelve. She also played guitar in a death metal band called Capital Punishment, collected shot glasses, and lived with four cats. We took her to The Boathouse one evening for drinks and dinner. She ate half a crab-cake and drank six beers, then spent the night on our couch. We drove her home the next day.

When I was eleven I learned that my uncle whose drawings I'd flipped through as a child was gay. “He falls in love with other men instead of women,” my mother explained, “but that doesn’t mean that he wants to be a girl.” My heart skipped a beat, and my mother continued. “You might grow up and find out that you’re gay, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I don’t want to be a girl,” I told myself, “I thought I did once, but I don’t. I just really like girls, and that’s normal. God, I hope I don’t find out I’m gay.”

A major ice-storm hit the east coast that year. My father had quit teaching middle school English to sell insurance, then went six months with little to no income, and took a job selling beef door to door. Selling insurance, he'd had an office, wore a nice suit that wasn't made of corduroy, and carried a laptop we could plug a telephone line into and get on the internet. It was more glamorous than selling wholesale meat. Now he wore jeans and rode around in a refrigerated truck. “You like steak?” he'd ask whenever someone answered their door. “Well I have a deal for you!” Ideally the customer would buy months' worth of steak and my father would make a profit. He worked from early in the morning until late at night driving the back roads of Virginia from Charlottesville to the Northern Neck.

It was dark when the ice storm hit. Dad was miles from anything and had run out of gas. He kept his flashers on until they drained his battery, but no one had passed by for hours. He didn't want to risk walking to a gas-station in the dark without a flashlight in the freezing rain. As he lay across the bench seat and prepared himself for a long cold night, an Amway salesman knocked on his window, and asked if he could help.

“I'm out of gas and money,” Dad said, “and I'm trying to get home to my wife and children.”

The Amway salesman took my father to his home, fed him dinner, and let him shower. Then he bought gas and jump-started the meat truck. I was in already in bed by the time Dad came home. When he told us later about the Amway salesman he said it reminded him of the parable of the good Samaritan. “An Amway salesman,” he said. “The only person who stopped was an Amway salesman.”

The next morning everything was covered with ice and our mile long driveway was impassible. It would be several weeks before we had power again, so we flushed the toilets with water from the creek and cooked over a campfire. At night Dad read to us from the Unabridged Works of Edgar Allen Poe by gas lantern. We ate steak for dinner to the sound of melting ice.

The day before my brothers and I finally returned to school we bathed outside in icy water from a hose that we had to pump out of the ground by hand. “Okay,” Dad said when he sprayed us off. “You gotta learn to be tough. This is going to be cold.” We scrubbed ourselves with soap as quickly as we could then he sprayed us with the icy water again and wrapped us in a towel. It felt good to be clean.

Chapter 3

“I can always tell when someone is gay” my friend Tom told me. We were biking to the elementary school a few miles away. It was the school we had both attended. Now we were in the sixth grade and went to middle school. Instead of hallways the elementary school had sidewalks. In the evenings, after all the teachers had gone home, we rode our bikes through the school and jumped off ramps.

“No you can’t,” I said. “How can you tell?”

“They’re just…different,” he said. “I saw one in McDonald's one time. He was wearing pink tights and a purple shirt. 'Don't knock it till you try it' he told me, disgusting! He was carrying a purse!”

“I don’t believe you. My uncle’s gay. Could you tell? He's not like that.”

“Yeah,” he said, “he wasn’t as obvious as most, but I could still tell.”

“How?” I asked

“He blinged on my gaydar.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s how you tell if someone is gay or not. Everyone has one…except gay people I guess.”

“I don’t think I have one. I didn’t notice anything and I’m not gay.”

“Maybe you get your gaydar in puberty. I don’t think I could tell if someone was gay a few years ago, but now I can. You’ll get one soon I’m sure.”

I looked at Tom. He was a little more muscular than I was but my voice was lower and he almost a year younger than me. “Are you sure?” I asked.

“Yeah, I mean unless you’re gay. I mean maybe when I first met you, you blinged a little on my gaydar, but then I got to know you.”

“I blinged on your gaydar?”

“A little but not much, and now you don’t. It might have been a mistake. They aren’t perfect. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

I learned about all the things that no one really talked about during school from Tom, or on the school bus. The school bus was where kids would exchange cigarettes, and occasionally condoms, with whispers. We felt grown up. It was nothing like riding the bus to elementary school. In the mornings, my dad would wait with me in his pick-up truck for the bus to arrive. He now managed a shop that made expansion joints for industrial duct work. He still wore jeans and t-shirts to work, but his truck wasn't refrigerated. Inside it smelled like silicone and pipe tobacco.

Only a handful of kids caught the bus as early in the morning as I did. It was mostly empty for the first forty-five minutes in the morning and the last forty-five minutes in the afternoon. Those of us who did catch the bus early formed a breakfast club of sorts. Tom lived a couple of miles away from me and was picked up right after me. We'd first met in the third grade, when he was a new kid. He'd just moved to the Northern Neck from New Jersey, and, unlike most of the other boys my age, he liked girls too. Frequently I got off at his house (or he at mine) and we'd spend the afternoon together riding bikes, talking about girls, and devising schemes to make ourselves popular.

He lived with his mother and grandparents in a one bedroom house. It smelled of southern cooking, cigarettes, and canned cat food. Surprisingly, it wasn't an entirely unpleasant smell. He slept in a semi-finished attic. It had dry wall and carpeting, but it could only be entered through a trap door. We could use the pull-down ladder to climb into his room, but that involved folding up the sleeper sofa in the living room where his mom slept, so we usually stood on an end table and jumped. We didn't spend a lot of time in his room. Most of the time, unless it was either too cold or too hot, we'd hang out behind an old chicken coop in his yard, or with his aunt, who lived in a double wide trailer next door.

Also riding the bus with us was a girl named Annie. She lived next door to the bus driver and rode alone with her for about half an hour before I got on. She called me “J Dogg,” and sat beside me, and sometimes on my lap. She wore cut-off shorts that violated the school dress code, and t-shirts that rode up and exposed her belly. When her breasts grew over the summer between sixth and seventh grade, she cut the collar with a pair of scissors to give herself more room. I thought she was trashy and smelled bad. I didn't like her sitting beside me, but there wasn't much I could do about it, especially on days Tom stayed after school for soccer or some other sport that I didn't play.

“Hey,” she said one afternoon, and grabbed my hand, “take your middle finger and push it as far as you can towards your wrist.” She measured the difference between where my finger touched the bottom of my palm and its tip. “Oh,” she said, “you have a really little penis.” She said it like she knew what she was talking about, and I didn't doubt that she did.

“How would you know?” I asked.

“Because I just measured,” she said.

“From my middle finger? I'm bigger than that.”

She reached her hand into my pants, grabbed me, and sat closer. “I bet you masturbate a lot,” she said.

According to the boys on the bus, masturbation was something that involved Vaseline or lotion, and stroking and jerking the shaft of my penis. It was something I did not do. I suspected that maybe a couple of the boys on the bus did. They seemed to know an awful lot about it. It wasn’t something I wanted to think about. It was better to keep my mouth shut when people said I masturbated, and let them whisper behind my back. I saw what happened to people who tried to argue their way out rumors. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me, and anyway, I didn’t masturbate. Someone asked me if I did once. He explained what masturbation was. It didn't sound like something I'd enjoy. My face turned red and I told him that I didn't. He looked back at me obviously disbelieving. “Then what do you do?’ he asked.

I didn't know what to say. I was sure what I did was far worse, not something I wanted people to know. “I don’t do anything,” I said. “I’m not a pervert.” He looked at me visibly hurt, and didn't pressure me anymore.

The horrible thing that I did, which I had just decided I needed to stop doing, was something I did in private, I tucked. The goal of tucking was to secure my penis between my legs well enough so that when I put a pair of panties on, my pubescent body looked female. I had devoted hours of time devising different methods to keep it as secure as possible. The ultimate end would have been to make it look like a vagina without having to cover myself with anything, but so far I'd only made homemade gaffs and discovered that once everything was tucked securely in place and covered with padding, it felt good to apply pressure where I imagined my vagina to be. This was not masturbation by the definition I knew, but I was sure it was probably much worse. When people asked me about masturbating this was the first thing I thought of.

Annie looked at me, waiting for a reply. “No, I don't,” I said.

“Yeah you do,” she responded. “I'm psychic. I know. Look, you're getting all red.” She yelled so everyone could hear, “Jonathan said he masturbates!”

“No I don't!” I said.

“Look at him,” she yelled, “he's all red.”

“Yeah, you do,” someone said. “Don't lie, we can tell you're lying”

I moved away from Annie and looked out the window.

“J dog,” she said, and moved closer. I didn't answer. “J dog,” she repeated, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to tell everyone.”

“Why are you even sitting next to me?” I asked. “I don't like you.”

“Why?” she asked. When I didn't respond she asked again, “Why?”

“You're mean, you're ugly, and you smell like ammonia and fish.” She punched me, moved to a different seat and looked out a window herself. After a while I started to feel guilty and tried to apologize, but she wouldn't talk to me.

“Good,” I thought, but I stared out the window thinking about how much of a freak I was. When I got home I had the house to myself. My mother was at her studio, an office she rented, and my brothers were still at school. When Mom moved her instruments into her new studio, I'd taken her room. It had a full length mirror and a latch on the door. I went into my room and sat on the floor with a Swiss Army knife that I kept sharp as a razor. I ran it up and down the vein in my wrist and thought about cutting. “No,” I decided, “it might hurt.”

The next morning Annie sat by me. “Do you still think I smell bad?” she asked. Her hair was wet and she smelled like shampoo. She'd painted her nails and gotten polish all over her fingers.

“No,” I said, “I didn't mean to say you smelled bad.”

“You like this color?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you want to wear some?” I looked into her face to make sure it wasn't some sort of trap to start another rumor about me being gay. “I won't put makeup on you or anything. It's not a really feminine color. No one will make fun of you. I promise. Cross my heart. I'll hurt them if they do.”

“Are you going to get it all over my hands?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “I'll do a good job. It'll look good.”

“Okay,” I said and rolled my eyes, “Whatever.” Secretly, however, I was a little excited about wearing nail polish. Annie was nice to me the rest of the way to school and we talked while she painted my nails.

When I got to school I scraped the nail polish off using my teeth, careful to remove every last remnant of color. My nails were clean when I rode home. “You took your nail polish off,” Annie said. “How'd you get it off?”

I told her, and didn't let her put any more on. “I don't want my parents to see.” I said, “I don't think they'd be mad, but I just don't want them to see me with nail polish on. It would be embarrassing. You can paint them again some other time.”

“Okay,” she said, and smiled.

Kindle Edition US

Kindle Edition UK (on sale until October 29, 2014)

Rejected by a love interest, body issues, a link to the blog my interview will appear in

2014-10-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

So I have to write something because I can't keep anything in. As quiet and reserved as I am, I'm actually a shy extrovert. If I'm thinking something I just have to get it out. Sometimes I manage to hold it in for a while, but not for too long.

So, I just got rejected by a girl I liked. I got the same line I've always gotten: "I love you as a friend, but I'm not interested in a relationship with you." Actually, I'm not that upset about it this time. She didn't lead me on like the last person, and there were other things that made me think a relationship with her would never work. Actually, I never would have said anything to her (despite what I wrote above, which is true) except without telling her I was in love with her I seemed like a crazy person.

Here's the other thing: She texted me last night to tell me we needed to have a talk: never good. It occurred to me that possibly my body is the reason why she would never want to date me, so I texted her back. I asked her not to tell me that. I told her I hate my body more than I could ever describe, and that I can't do anything about it but wait and hope I get my surgery before I can't stand it anymore. I said I understood if that is how she felt, that I have the same holdups about dating trans* women, but that I couldn't stand to hear it, and that I never would have come on to her anyway because I could never bear to be rejected because of that.

Actually, I wasn't being over dramatic. If you aren't trans* you probably can't understand, but it's why Gender Confirmation Surgery is life or death. When I say I have body issues I'm not kidding.

As far as my surgery goes. I don't know how much chance I have of actually getting the funds for it. But I'm running out of time. I absolutely, truly believe that untreated gender dysphoria is fatal.

So I'm very thankful that if my body is the reason she isn't interested in a relationship with me she didn't tell me. Honestly, I live by trying to think of anything other than what is between my legs.

But, I tried that before. Before I transitioned I tried to think of anything other than my need to transition. I tried everything I could not to be trans* but eventually it just became so consuming that I couldn't think of anything else. And then I came out of the closet and transitioned. I don't have that option with surgery, and it scares me. Everyday I think about it just a little more than the day before, everyday it's just a little harder not to think about, and everyday is just one day closer to the day when having the wrong body just hurts to much.

I'm going to make an impact before I go down though. And god I hope I get my surgery before that day comes.

Also, I really need someone to come along who really appreciates what I do have. And I'm not talking a tranny chaser or someone who is attracted to me because I am trans*. Having someone want me because of that thing between my legs is almost as bad as being rejected because of it. The difference is that usually tranny chasers are just creepy people who don't know me at all. Me, I have a really hard time being attracted to someone until I get to know them at least a little, so being rejected because of it would be worse.

Honestly, it isn't something I chance anymore. It happened to me once. A girl came up to me at Barcode and bought me a drink. We talked for a while. She seemed nice. I brought her home with me. We talked for a little more. I brought up something about being trans just to make sure she knew and she bolted. I'd made dinner, she didn't even finish it.

Oh well. At least she wasn't a friend. And if I knew that's what a friend thought of me could I ever look at her the same way again?

So I was let down easy, from something I never had much hope of working anyway. So I don't feel that bad about it.

I still need space and time.

Our friendship has been different than most of my other friendships. It's felt closer. I don't do close friendships, not really. I have a very small inner circle of people I trust, who have been there for me when I needed them. I really care about them, but I think appreciate is probably a more descriptive word about what I feel friendship is not love. I hate phrasing it that way because it sounds so cold, but I think that friends are people who aren't obligated to be there when it gets rough...fair weather friends, but I think that is what friendship is. It's the people who are there when it gets rough who comprise my inner circle... IDK, weirdly I'm much more selective about my inner circle than who I fall in love with. I fall in love with people because of a combination of looks, intelligence, and how much I enjoy being around someone. My inner circle are people I know will always be there and that takes a long time to figure out. Of course, when I do fall in love I usually let that person (sort of) in my inner circle (for a while).

IDK. It's all complicated.

I've dated more people as a girl than I did as a guy, and I've been in love with more people as a girl than as a guy. I've never dated someone I was in love with, or fallen in love with anyone I've dated. My last girlfriend (I strongly suspect) was interested in me as something exciting and different, when she found out I wasn't it ended quickly. The last time we slept together was closer to what I wanted, but I don't think she was interested in that.

I keep my friends kinda distant. I'm not comfortable being really close to more than one person. You know? There's a side of me that I really need to share with someone, but it's more intimate, less guarded, less aloof, and more affectionate. But I'm not comfortable sharing it with friends, I share it to small degrees with people I think I might be more than friends someday. Or to be honest...I once had a girlfriend who told me repeatedly she could never love me...a little sad, but I respect her for it, and for a while I was able to share a part of me I can't share with other people.

Or hell, for that matter, beyond just this part of my personality, I have amazing boobs that I really really love, my skin is smooth, and I'm soft in all the right places.

My penis...well that's not a part of me. I'm supposed to learn to think of it as a clit. But I just can't wrap my head around that.

And...whatever they say about testosterone being the hormone that makes us horny, I think a lot more about sex now that I've blocked all that and take estrogen. OH MY GOD! Do I think a lot more about sex. I don't think I ever really thought about it much before transitioning. I mean, not the same way, in a much more detached way. Like having sex with my girlfriend was all about her body, I tried not to think about mine as much as possible, or it was about fantasies of having a female body. I now, for the most part, have that body...talk about sexual frustration. It was easier not to think about sex when I hated my entire body not just one part between my legs.

Of course here I am being super fucking open. Especially when today I was interviewed by Monika Kowalska for her blog The Heroines of My Life, and I'm already seeing increased traffic.You should definitely check out that interview. I think it went well. Oh well, this wasn't nearly as open as the last post I wrote, which I'm very thankful I had a friend read over and tell me not to publish it. Also I was pretty fucking open in my book Straight Boy/ Queer Girl: a memoir.

Virginia TIES, Our need for a trans*feminist movement

2014-10-07T13:49:00.001-07:00

I went to the Equality Virginia sponsored transgender conference, Virginia TIES. So I guess I should write about that a little bit.

Okay, since you probably want to know what TIES stands for: Transgender Information and Empowerment Summit.

I have to say I enjoyed it. Registration was at 9 in the morning and I work late so that was rough. I went saw the opening remarks, talked to a lady about Affordable Care Act insurance, and then went home and took a nap. The morning seminars were about surgical techniques, and passing.

Let me just say that I find it a little offensive that there were seminars on passing. I'm not faulting Equality Virginia on this though, I went to a seminar they held this summer asking trans people to create videos (here's mine: I AM: Transgender Virginia Speaks) and they talked to us about the upcoming TIES. Apparently an awful lot of trans people in Virginia gave them feedback that they really wanted a seminar on passing.

So the one for women was called The ABCs of Passing: Appearing More Feminine. (This is where I have to take a break to say that I have passing privilege. I think it's sexist and demeaning to have a seminar devoted to teaching how to act and appear more feminine, but I'm saying that from the perspective of someone who passes very well. Regardless) I think we as trans people really need a trans*feminist movement.

Here's what I mean by that: We, particularly trans women need to stand up and say that it doesn't matter how we express our gender--whether or not we know how to wear makeup, how often or even if we do our nails, whether we can walk in heels, pick out a feminine outfit, wear skirts, pantyhose, dresses, do our hair right, or bat our eyes. We need to stop policing gender--I did not transition to be "a woman." I transitioned to be myself--We, as trans women, need to have our own feminist movement, as in there is no right or wrong way to be a trans*woman. Having, insisting on having, seminars on passing is only reinforcing the idea that some of us are doing a better job at being women than others.

There's a support group in Richmond that I don't care for. I think it's because I come from reading the writings of Kate Bornstein, and other radical trans theory, and that group is almost more about just dealing with being "new women."

This trans feminist movement that we need, needs to be almost post gender. I know that for those of us who are trans it is hard not to think about gender, but really: I identify as a woman let's get beyond that and really start thinking about things.

We need trans equality, and we're not going to get there through classes on passing. As long as passing is our focus we'll always (and somewhat rightly) be seen as trying to reinforce a sexist system that we have in place.

And I'm saying this as a femme, who likes wearing dresses and makeup (sometimes).

I didn't attend the ABCs of Passing. I did thoroughly enjoy the afternoon seminars of gender queer. I'll talk about that a little more in another entry. Actually, I'm thinking of blogging for the Huffington Post (or submitting a proposal).

To change the subject: I don't think that I have no chance with this girl I like. I think there's a chance. I'm just writing that because I really believe that writing something down sends a message to the universe and creates reality. So I'm putting it out there. I'm also going to say this: I had a close friendship with another girl I really loved once and I never appreciated it because I always wanted more. And then she left and we rarely talk anymore. I'm not going to let that happen a second time. It's really rare that I find someone I feel like I connect with on so many levels, that even if friendship is all we'll ever have, I'm not going to give that up. So regardless of how hard it might be for me, I'm going to be a friend.

Oh and another change of subject. I'm going to be interviewed for a blog, The Heroines of my Life. She's going to be asking about my book and other things. I'm rather excited about it actually. And of course I hope it drives up sales for Straight Boy/Queer Girl: a memoir.

Pride weekend in Virginia, an interesting memory from childhood, doing writer stuff, Stuffing at the Golden Corral, and relieved to be done with my book

2014-09-25T13:00:00.001-07:00

My book Straight Boy/Queer Girl: a memoir. It's actually #13 in the kindle category Biographies and Memoirs>Specific Groups>Gay & Lesbian! so that's something to be proud of. The sales are still coming in slow.

Honestly, I think it's an important book to get out there. I think the story needed to be told. So please everyone check it out.

Also, check out my author page on amazon: Natalie Gates. It has links to my blog posts, my biography, and a link to my twitter account. Yes, I sold out and finally have a twitter.

Other things going on in my life right now:

1. It's pride weekend in Virginia. That means I'm going to be super super busy at work, and no I am not going to Pride again this year. I don't really know many of the performers, so I can't say with certainty that none of them are particularly of interest to me as a trans person.

Okay, so I'm also a lesbian.

The thing is, growing up the fact that I was attracted to women was not what made people whisper about me behind my back, and it isn't something I've fought, and eventually come to accept. I like women and I always have and I think also after having come out as a transsexual it kind of trumps anything about my sexuality anyway.

You know what I mean? I'm the queer one in a group of queer people. Who honestly gives a shit whether I like men or women.

But I guess that's it. I guess that's why I really think more effort should be given to include trans people in Virginia Pride, (which maybe they have and I just don't know the performers, and there is a reading group for trans children--a small token). But oh well.

2. Just a small thing, but interesting. I was talking to this trans guy friend of mine and he told me how in kindergarten he lined up in the boys' line and had to be corrected by the teacher. I remember doing the same thing (in the girls' line, of course). I didn't even think about it.

It's weird though (and I think it comes across in my book) for me anyway, it wasn't that I didn't know I was a boy but it's that I really just didn't understand gender (not the same as my classmates). I was going to grow up to be a woman because, well, why wouldn't I. It was just a bunch of little things:

"You can't be pretty, you can be handsome. You can't be a princess but you can be a prince."

Who the hell wants to be a handsome prince! Talk about boring. Jeez!

3. I'm going to hang out with my friend Nikki and do writer stuff this afternoon. You should remember her name. We're going to be famous authors together; she had a dream about it.

She has a blog also. (I think that's one of the things we talked about when we first met.) anyway you should check it out: Hummuscidalmaniac.

She's really funny, and writes a lot of good vegan recipes.

4. I was craving stuffing, and roast poultry this morning (afternoon). So I went to the Golden Corral on Midlothian.

I don't know if I wrote about the time a waitress refused to serve me at the one on Gaskins. She totally ignored me, talked to every table seated near me and refused to even look at me. I complained to the corporate office and got a phone call from the manager. I described myself as "LGBT" which he had to look up because he'd never heard of it.

Kinda makes you think doesn't it. It hadn't occurred to me that there were still people who didn't know what LGBT was.

Also, you know, I didn't describe myself as trans when I complained. And I'm not sure why, except more and more I just don't want strangers to know.

5. About the book again, Straight Boy/Queer Girl (and I know I'm shamelessy plugging it): I am so glad I'm finished with it. Especially the past couple months working on it basically full-time, as in eight (plus) hours a day five days a week, it really affected my mood. My mood just lifted when I published it and didn't have to think about it anymore, or not so intensely.

I think I have PTSD related to my life before transition. I seriously do. And really, talk about a traumatic event: living in the wrong gender. But I feel like my old self again, or rather my new self, or I don't know.

Prior to transitioning I was depressed and irritable all the time, but since transitioning I'm basically a happy person. No, I was never Eeyore. I did my best to smile and laugh and tell jokes, but sincere happiness...I don't think I knew that before I transitioned. And this book really put me back in that place, at least partially anyway. Like I even had a couple dreams that I hadn't transitioned, and OMG! I just can't imagine.

Anyway, it's over and done and I'm glad it is and I deserve to make a lot of money with it. I'm back to waking up in the morning seeing my breasts and feeling my fleshy thighs and ass and soft skin and just everything the past four years taking estrogen has done and just before I can even really stop myself, saying; "Oh, thank God! Thank God! It's over! Thank God!"

If you haven't lived it, having your body develop all wrong is one of the most horrible things to ever have to experience.

Finally finished my memoir! Updates of what's been happening

2014-09-22T10:47:00.001-07:00

Well, I haven't written an entry in a long time. Since April I've been working full time on my memoir. I've actually been writing it since July Fourth weekend 2012. Anyway, I've finished it and the kindle version is on sale here http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NMXL3OE. Sales haven't been great so far, but I have high hopes. It's really the book I wanted to write, and I think I wrote it well.

Actually, it was interesting reading it for the first time on my kindle app on my phone. I was able to read it as a book not as a manuscript and it really is a page turner. I lived it and I still found it hard to put down because I wanted to know what happened next.

Writing it, I thought of it as the story of a very tumultuous lesbian friendship/romance, and I think at it's core that's what it is, but it's also the story of how someone finally comes to the realization that they need to transition, and all the factors that influence that realization.

It also is to a certain extent my answer to the TERFs who consider me (and always will consider me) to be a delusional straight man.

Okay, if I'm a straight man I have to be the most fabulous straight guy ever.

So I called the book Straight Boy/Queer Girl and I think it's going to go over really well if I can just get people to read it.

Can you tell I'm excited about it? Sorry for the sales pitch, but seriously you should go out and buy it for your kindle, smartphone, tablet, or computer.

Anyway, in other news:

That trans guy I was crushing on a couple years ago and wrote about a bit was in Babe's the other night. We're still friends. It's weird though how much body chemistry and sexual attraction really influence my opinion of someone. The first time I saw him after he started T, I really just wasn't attracted to him anymore.

And this comes from someone trans, who always thought of him as a guy and who really had some serious questions about her own sexuality because I was so attracted to him.

Anyway, I'm not anymore, so I guess my second puberty ended like my first. I'm not into dudes, even though it all got really confusing for a while.

It's interesting to know that about myself. I mean really who else can be like "well I'm a lesbian but when I'm in puberty I'm a little more bisexual." Which is also really weird to think, because since my identity has kinda leveled out again (post-second adolescence) I really really find male bodies gross.

I see these shirtless men on facebook (especially if they have muscles or hair) and I'm just like "Ewwww no one wants to see that."

But anyway, I'm digressing a little. There is someone I've been interested in. Quite a bit actually, but I don't think I have much of a chance and I think I'm ready to move on.

It's a shame though. She's this girl I was so attracted to when I used to see her and then all of a sudden last fall we became good friends. Like really good friends, and I'm like Holy Shit! This person I'm really attracted to is really awesome and fun to hang out with and likes spending time with me.

Well she's basically dating her roommate/ex, and she's never in town, and I get the impression that if I ever had any chance with her at all I don't anymore.

But here's the thing, I already destroyed one really good friendship because I couldn't appreciate what I already had (wrote a book about that).

Which is pretty much what always happens.

I'm not in a terrible mood though. I rewrote my OkayCupid profile essay, and here's something I know you'll find interesting, my hormone levels have been increased. I'm starting to bust out of my D cups...ehhh.

Ohhhh! and what did I call him? Jayson the flamer? Well he showed up at Babe's a couple of weeks also. Apparently he's married. What!? Him!? That flaky piece of shit can find someone willing to marry him and I can't find anyone willing to date me? Anyway he tried to talk to me like he always does, and I ignored him like I always do, but at least he wasn't as pushy. And from what the bartender told me, he says he's clean.

Well sorry this isn't my best entry ever, but now that I'm done with my first book, I'll pay more attention to this blog. I'll have another entry to write soon.

Gender Dysphoria Blues

2014-04-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted an update. I know. I have about 60 pages left in my second draft of my first novel, though I've put that down for the past few weeks. I'm in a really difficult section to write but a very important section to the overall story.

Not difficult as in emotionally draining, (as you would expect with a novel that is basically a memoir of my life before transitioning) but difficult as in not much actually happened in this section that I'm writing about right now, but it's very important to the process that allowed me to transition.

I've also held a TG Prom at the Gay Community Center, which was a huge success and a great thing for a lot of people but didn't raise the revenue I had hoped for. That was one week ago now, and I've been digging myself out of the worst depressions I've had since transitioning.

Okay, I realistically didn't expect that much more revenue than I brought in. Or at least not towards the end. I had a pretty good idea of how many people were showing up. I started planning this prom almost immediately after I found out I wasn't selected for the Jim Collins Foundation grant for the second year in a row because quite honestly the thought of one more year without my surgery is rather undbearable.

It still is.

Actually it's the thought that day after day year after year I am going to have to live with the anatomy that I have. It's knowing that every day this gender dysphoria becomes more intense. It's knowing that I am quickly approaching a time when it is just flat out too intense for me to bear any longer.

I'm pulling though though. And this is my attitude. I may very well reach a point where without having had the surgery I'm just going to have to end it, but I'm not going to get there without a fight and if I do get there I will have made one hell of an impact.

I thought I'd write today about Gender Dysphoria, not so much definitions for cis people, or an argument that I really am the gender I say I am, just the experience.

I don't know how to explain it. I don't have a “why?” Why do I “want” to be female? I have no idea. Honestly the only thing I can think of to explain it is that I want to be female because I am female. I hate this thing that is between my legs because it is not supposed to be there.

There's this attitude that these surgeries that many of us trans people need are optional. That's why I can't get health insurance that will cover this surgery. And how do I really explain myself.

I say “I am female” and so many people just can't understand. They say be paitient you'll get your surgery, or they say how courageous I am. And all of this is valid, but at the same time, for me it is this driving urge. Like there is no way to ignore it and I just feel it louder and louder.

Like before I transitioned I thought that maybe there was someway to live around it, to somehow carve out an identity for myself without transitioning but this urge to transition was so intense and became so much more intense that not satisfying it basically caused me to cease functioning.

I mean here I am. I've come a long way. I was able to experience life in my twenties as a woman. To say I live as a woman is inaccurate because I think I can truly say that I am a woman. There are the Kathy Brennens of the world who insist that I am and can never be anything other than a man, but understand that for me it is impossible for me to experience myself as anything other than female. I just am not capable that.

I cannot experience myself as cis-gendered. I can understand the concept that most people accept and are satisfied with the sex they were assigned at birth but I do not know what that feels like. I cannot imagine being male and being satisfied with it. I can't imagine why anyone would want to be male. It is something that is absolutely beyond my experience.

I guess to compare it to something else, I cannot imagine myself in a relationship with someone male. I'm not going to say that there haven't been times when I've been attracted to certain men, because I have, but try as I might I cannot know what it is like to sexually prefer men. I've never experienced it. It's something that I contemplate sometimes. I'll be out somewhere and see a group of straight girls and I just wonder to myself “what is that like?” It is just something completely foreign to me. Just something I can understand on an intellectual level and accept as a state of being but it just isn't something I can relate to.

This gender dysphoria thing...hurts. That's the only way I can really describe it. I have no more ability to imagine myself as man than any other woman. Even when I lived it I couldn't imagine it. It is a state of being that is beyond what I have experienced. It isn't desire. I need to be female. I don't know how to explain it except that it has to be biologically driven because there is nothing I can do or that can be done that has ever “cured” a transsexual other than gender confirmation.

And of course people who haven't experienced it don't know. I've gotten “well it isn't like you have a tumor or something, it isn't life threatening.” And I don't know how to respond. Gender dysphoria is this ever increasing discord that just builds and builds until it becomes intollerable. I mean, it's this discord that I have to stop, and that drove me to transition and drives me to have this Gender Confirmation Surgery.

Not my best entry I think, but it'll do.All

Who I am...in a nutshell

2014-02-23T20:04:00.001-08:00

Well recently I've really been thinking about how I really want a relationship. I haven't seemed to have much luck in this regard in the past so I think I'm actually going to write an entry about who I am and put it out there in the Universe...I'll see what comes back at me.

Okay, I am a femme, transsexual lesbian.

I get the impression sometimes that other lesbians don't really consider me to be one...even though in some ways (that I don't brag about) I'm almost comically a stereotype...like wearing out my Indigo Girls 10,000 Curfews cassette tape in one summer by listening to it on repeat so much.

I'm also a child of the 80's and 90's. Can you tell from my sentence above.

Of course I also don't play or watch sports, and I don't do drama, and I don't really watch a lot of lesbian movies.

I'm an Eagle Scout, and I am very proud of that, even if when I talk about it it really firmly establishes my non-female past.

I'm easy to become friends with but very difficult to get close to. I have been easily hurt in the past, and I very very cautious about being hurt again.

I genuinely love an awful lot of things, music, art, literature, TV shows, food, the changing seasons, road trips.....It isn't easy for me to share all that I love.

I am really, really conscious of other people's space. It isn't easy for me to make the first move...actually I have only ever been kissed, I've never kissed anyone...I can but I need clear permission.

I am not ashamed of my pre-op body, and I'll pose nude for paintings or photos or what not, and I do recognize the artistic beauty of a trans female body...but I don't like my penis. I don't want it to be touched and I don't want someone to see it who I'm intimate with, which makes physical intimacy a really hard thing for me.

Sex, isn't and never has been the most important thing to me. I'm more interested in cuddling, and waking up next to someone and sitting around watching TV on a week night, and sharing something private and intimate with someone than I am interested in sex. But I also really want someone to make me feel desirable and attractive.

I'm really, really sweet, and even if I don't have a whole lot of close friends I genuinely care about an awful lot of people. It's hard for me to cry at funerals, or keep in touch with someone who lives out of town, but I don't ever forget people who have touched me, and never stop missing the people whom I've lost.

I can be a little aloof, but if you're willing to be patient with me you'll find that I'm actually very affectionate.

It doesn't take me weeks, or sometimes even months to tell someone that I love them, it usually takes me a lot longer. I used to be able to do this more quickly but I've gotten a lot of very negative reactions in my past...

I'm strong, I am one of the strongest people you will ever meet, I bore one hell of an emotional burden for a awful long time because I thought I had to. I expected to lose everyone I loved if I ever came out of the closet and I tried to teach myself not to get to close, and truth be told, I did lose quite a few people when I did.

I'm also a very genuinely happy person. I'm even happier because I have lost people I deeply cared about and I really appreciate the people I have now, even if it's not a really easy thing to show.

I'm extremely confident, more so than most people you'll ever meet, though when it comes to asking someone out, telling someone that I like them, or showing that I'm jealous (even when I have a right to be) I'm extremely shy about it.

I have very little patience for stupidity and incompetence.

When it comes to work, or projects, I'm a perfectionist. Most of the jobs I've quit, I've quit because I didn't think the work I was asked to do met my standards.

I also hate wasting time... this might have gotten in my way in the past and maybe still. I drop jobs when I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere, sometimes even when I need the pay. I drop people who get in my way, bring me down, or waste my time, though I think this has mostly caused me to have really high quality friendships.

I am complicated. I am both very open and closed. I'll talk about a whole bunch of things with people when I first met them, and I'll answer a whole bunch of personal questions, and I'll be totally open about things most people really consider private, but I still keep an awful lot to myself. I am both an introvert and an extrovert. Sometimes, it's hard for me to ask how someone else is doing and I'll go on and on about my projects and what's going on with me, but I'll also be the most quiet person in a group and I'll keep my thoughts to myself.

If I host a party I'll talk to everyone, if I'm a guest, sometime I'll meet no one. And I don't like loud noises or big crowds...usually, except for when I do.

When I really like someone, I try to spend as much time with them as I can, and give up my independent streak a little. I have a tendency to do things and go places I want regardless on whether I do it alone or not.

Sometimes I just don't have anything to say, and I really appreciate people I can share silence with.

I also really appreciate people who are punctual, relatively speaking. I like people who show up when a party is starting not fashionably late, or who meet me somewhere when they say they will, or are ready when they say they will be. It's really attractive.

So it being straight forward with me, and not playing games.

In the past I've tended to fall in love with people who had not romantic interest in me, and maybe I'm still that person, but I really hope not.

Let's see, the little things. I'm a painter, a writer, a great cook, I throw great parties, I'm really good with people, I'm not shy about public speaking, I absolutely love dogs more than any other animal, I like looking pretty and wearing nice clothes, I like going to nice restaurants, and if I have money I like spending it on good beer, wine, and food.

I also drink PBR out of the can and thoroughly love it, and tell a lot of the same stories over and over again. But I think I have some pretty good stories.

I write because I have to. It's kind of like breathing for me. I can't explain it.

I like to eat, and right now I feel hungry.

Big week

2014-02-20T11:24:00.001-08:00

Big week for me. I quit my restaurant job and I am now working full time selling insurance.

I'm really nervous about that...I have to make money. I have rent to pay, a car payment, auto insurance, food and what not and I'm about a grand in on a really really bad loan that I've been taking out to get started selling insurance.

Well one thing I learned transitioning was that you have to set your priorities. When I transitioned male to female I didn't let anything become more important to me...not friends, not family, not food.

Well I'm not going to succeed at insurance at the cost of family or friends I have to make the same thing apply.

Also I have no room in my life for negativity. It just flat out doesn't help. Even if I don't get the results I desire by being positive I at least won't be hindering myself.

On top of that I was interviewed by the local news about a VHSL ruling to allow trans kids to play on their respective sports teams. I think it's great and I'm on TV saying that. And a whole hell of a lot of comments, if not most of them below the story show that far too many people are not supportive.

I'm sorry if anyone says that I'm a man they obviously haven't ever spent any time with me.

All this ignorance that surrounds trans people is really infuriating sometimes.

I wrote this as a comment.

"A friend of mine put it best when she said “when it comes to identity, there is no compromising.” I think this is a very good step in the right direction. Gender Dysphoria is a medical condition; trans girls are girls, but even so, when it comes to averages males and females are much more similar than we are different, particularly as teens. Even when I was in high school before I ever took Estrogen there were girls my age who were taller than me, heavier than me and stronger than me. While testosterone does seem to make it slightly easier to build muscle than estrogen, and I have most certainly lost a great deal of my physical strength after having hormonally transitioned from male to female there wasn't such a huge difference to begin with. It saddens me that so many people who have never fought this battle with gender identity that I have are so quick to judge."

Cathy Brennan, Gay marriage in Virginia, and Facebook offering trans options for gender

2014-02-13T20:35:00.000-08:00

It's nasty outside and I've spent most of the day inside, with a brief interlude to buy a day planner and can opener at Target, and later a couple of beers because I just needed to be around people for a bit.

Anyway, I've been inside all day. First thing that I came across on Facebook was Cathy Brennan's blog which is really sad to me.

It's sad that to her I, and every woman the same as I, are just men with some sort of delusion or kink or whatever. It's sad that she doesn't recognize the legitimacy of my lived experience, and that she is totally unopen to the experiences and insights of anyone with an experience similar to mine. It's sad that she is so adamant about her views on this matter, something which cisgender people cannot really understand, that she has to be extremely outspoken about it and use all her skills as a writer and lawyer to "prove" to everyone else that we don't exist.

I can't imagine that anyone who takes the time to get to know me can possibly think of me as anything other than a woman. I just can't imagine it.

But there's no point in arguing with someone who is so set in their belief.

I read one entry where she argued against points made by a trans woman, about the legitimacy of the trans experience. I didn't read a whole lot more.

I wish I could share with her, and everyone else my experience with this but I can't. It's just something so out of the realms of cis experience.

Basically what I took from her argument is that her opinion is that trans women are men who want to be or think they are women and that we do everything we can to fit into some mold we have in our head of what a woman is.

It isn't that at all.

It's almost like my identity as female is secondary to my experience of it.

Like, the reason I was taking estrogen nearly a decade before I finally transitioned. I've always wanted a female body since the moment I was born, hell, probably since I was conceived, but it wasn't about wanting to be female. For a lot of my life that was just a vague sense, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. It wasn't that I wanted to look like a "woman," it's that my waist waist always seemed too thick in proportion to the rest of my body, my chest always felt too flat, my skin always felt too course, my frame too muscular. I don't want a vagina to "be" a woman, I want a vagina because I don't have any clue how to relate to my penis, because when I think about sex, in my mind I already have one and I have never known otherwise. I wear skirts and make-up and my hair long and my nails painted because I like it. I feel comfortable like that. I feel authentic. When I'm out in public, or at home I'm not trying to pass, I just am.

In my mind I've always been female, even when I was unaware of it. It's why prior to transitioning I very often preferred to be alone, so I didn't have to play a role.

She thinks I'm trying to be something...I'm not.

I'm not trying to be anything.

What dawned on me, when I was struggling with prejudices of my own which were very similar to Brennan's was. If I look the way I feel most comfortable looking, if I act the way feels most natural to me, if I have the body that feels most comfortable and right to me, I fall into that category of woman.

I don't look, act, feel the way I do because I want to be a woman. I look, act, and feel the way I do because this is just who I am. If I am authentic to myself, I come across as a woman, I look like a woman, I act like a woman, I have the physical features of a woman, most rational people are going to agree that I am a woman.

At the very least, it is very rare that anyone thinks of me as a man. I most certainly am not a man...not in any sense that anyone experiences a person as being a man. And as people generally assume that my genitals match their perception of me, or rather, their perception of me is more similar to how they perceive a female with female genitals than to how they perceive a male with male genitals, I would say that makes me pretty legitimately female.

But I'm not going to base this argument on how people perceive me, because I have been perceived many different ways.

I am everything you would expect a female to be had she been reassigned male against her will at birth.

But she'd never understand that, nor accept that, nor acknowledge my experience, nor value my opinion. So there it is.

Then of course Facebook now has more options for people to choose for gender, which is great! and I'm really excited about it, and a judge in Virginia has just ruled that the state wide ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional!

We've really been coming a long way really fast. When you think of how far we've come in 10 years it's really amazing.

Likening trans rights to gay rights, there was a time when people didn't view gay people as actually existing. I mean existing as in "this is who I am", not "this is something that I do."

Back when I was a closeted trans person I used to refuse to fill in a gender when it was asked for.

People tend to think of transgender and transsexual as verbs. I "transgendered," or I decided to "transgender" but if reality I didn't it just is. I am a trans-female, and ultimately, though I did choose to seek treatment for a condition that I had, I didn't choose the condition.

On Facebook I'm going to keep my gender as female because that is how I identify. Boring and binary I agree but that's how I identify. I identify with other female bodied and feminine people, and "trans" isn't so much a part of my identity now but a part of my past and a part of my experience.

I sought treatment for a medically recognized condition that I had and it has been very successful.

Basically though I do still require surgical intervention, that isn't the biggest part of my life.

It's all too complicated to really explain anyway.

life before and after transitioning

2014-02-05T08:57:00.001-08:00

Well, I have something to write about!

Okay, so it's been kind of hard to update as regularly as I would like. I mean, the further and further in the past it is the less and less I really have to say about transition. It's really surreal for me that I wasn't always as I am...or rather, because I've realized that transitioning didn't really change me, that I'm no longer living a life that felt wrong.

Actually, I've had two conversations this week that are kind of the inspiration for this entry, and it's something that I really have been wanting to write for a long time, and I probably have attempted to a couple of times but haven't ever seemed to really get down to the truth of it.

So the first conversation was on Friday night. I was asked how it felt to transition, did it feel like a huge relief? Yes. The other conversation was yesterday via texting, and I'm trying to describe what it was like to have a serious gender identity issue and what helped me work through it and I ended up, albeit lamely, just saying something along the lines of, "gender is a really difficult thing to struggle with."

To which the reply was, "I can't imagine." I'd like to clarify the "yes" and share my response to the second conversation

But first I think I kind of need to say some things about my previous life. I read a blog entry recently that really summed up gender dysphoria rather well “That was dysphoria?” 8 signs and symptoms of indirect gender dysphoria. I particularly identified with the part about counting down the days til it would be all be over. That was life. I stayed in bed as long as I possibly could every morning, got drunk as soon as I could and passed out as early as I was able in the hopes that I could drown out all the feelings of gender dysphoria. Or sleep as long as I could hoping that i would wake up one morning and find that it had all been just one really horrendous dream.

In a non-crazy way, life as a guy just didn't seem real. There wasn't really anything to work towards because...why? I did my best to continue and do what I needed to do and hope that someday everything would be all right. An awful lot of my hopes rested with the idea that someday I would marry the right woman and live my life for her and everything would be alright.

Also, I wasn't suicidal, and only intermittently depressed. Actually when my I came out to my mother as trans she told me I was bipolar and the trans thing was all just some illusion. But there are ups and downs with gender dysphoria. It was always intense and present, but there were the times when I'd psych myself up into believing that I could do something about it, ie: transition and I'd feel pretty good, there were the times when I didn't think I could do anything about it at all, the "I'm really just a boy, a really fucked up boy with really perverse thoughts that I need to get out of my head and I'd feel pretty shitty, and then there were the times I was taking estrogen and felt...normal.

Gender dysphoria seems to increase in the intensity that you feel it also. At twelve, for me it was kind of a big deal and I used to stay home sick from school so I could dress up as a girl. I thought it was curiosity first but then it kind of didn't go away, but my need to dress did. By high school I learned to suppress it a little bit, I still read about transitioning, and still thought about it all the time, and had a small box of clothes that I kept hidden in the back of my closet mostly, but I had kind of created some sort of an identity as a guy.

The feelings don't go away, and my opinion is that if you struggle with gender, like really struggle with gender, you might not need to transition but you are trans.

But there is no magic diagnosis. There was nothing, other than myself and my own feelings that I could point to and say definitively that "yes, I should be female and I need to transition." I firmly believe that my brain is hard wired, so to speak, to have a female body. I'll take it further than belief, I know that my brain is meant to have a female body. I know this only because of how transition has affected me.

Like, I finally realized, before the third and final time I started taking estrogen that the reason estrogen made me feel normal was because it was a chemical that I needed in order to function the way I was supposed to.

But...I started taking hormones the third and final time with an openness to maybe not having such a straight forward trans identity. Also, I had a prescription of my own, and I had basically already socially transitioned.

That worked for me. The relief of socially transitioning was pretty intense also. It felt like taking off a costume and laying down a script.

My life prior to transitioning was very scripted. Everything I did or said or to a certain extent thought was intentional so as not to be read as non-male/ not masculine. And the better I got at it the worse I felt.

But it was the ticking away days. I was raised in a Christian tradition and had always been taught to believe that life after death awaited me, that I could hope to spend eternity in paradise....and you know, no matter how much in denial I was about being trans, I could never bring myself to believe that an eternity stuck with (what I thought to be) myself could possibly be anything other than hell.

Life, pre-transition, was, in a sense, tolerable only because I knew it wouldn't last forever.

So I finally decided to transition. Or, actually what I could commit to was more like this."Okay I am going to go out as a woman and meet people and see how that feels and see if I really want to take it further, if I do I'll see what living outside of work as a woman feels like and I'll give myself a year to adjust to it before I take it further if I still want to...then....."

It happened much more quickly than that, because I found that for me living as a woman was immensely easier and much less hassle than keeping up the appearance of being a man. I barely lasted two months living part time as a woman before it just flat out became too difficult for me to present as a man.

Not in a physical sense. I started hormones one month after starting to live full time as a woman.

Hormones, as anyone who has transitioned can tell you go excruciatingly slow, and incredibly fast at the same time. I knew right away that I wasn't making a mistake in taking them. I started to notice my skin getting softer with like a week, and you know ever since then my life is a life of just being really really thankful.

Struggling with gender is really really tough, and my life prior to transition was rather hellish in a lot of regards, but I wake up every morning, or if I wake up in the middle of the night, and I just thank God. I mean, I love my breasts, and my body, and will even more so after I have my surgery, so much despite everything I feel is imperfect about it.

I'm not going to spout off that I don't have the same self doubt about my body, if not more so, than other women, but the thing I have because I am not cis, because I know what it is like not to have a female body, is just such an appreciation for what I do have.

I mean, it's waking up and feeling my breasts, looking in the mirror after taking a shower, catching a glimpse of my reflection while walking the dog, noticing how no one thinks it is at all odd if I choose to wear a skirt and leggings to the office, or that I have a bright pink overcoat, or for that matter wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt and still looking female. It's not having women put me in a separate category from themselves, and not having guys assume that I think the way they do. All these moments just constantly where I pause and just thank God, because this is what I always wanted, because I'm not looking enviously at some other girl because I want what she has; I have it. It's just so many things that I can't even describe.

And the thing about it is, I wouldn't wish being transsexual on anyone, and there are times when I really wish I wasn't, with so many people who don't consider me real, or who would be uncomfortable dating me, or who (ignorantly) put me in the same category as cross-dressers and drag queens, but then again I'm actually kind of thankful.

I mean, all this stuff that cis women don't even think about that I just appreciate so much.

And also the sense that I am a place in my life that for the longest time I didn't even think was possible.

I've lived the impossible. I mean, it really might be just a medical issue, and I do believe that it is, but it's also a miracle, and there is a lot that I have as a person that I wouldn't have had I not gone through the life I've had to live.

I think, overall, it's more of a blessing than a curse.

Goals for 2014

2014-01-24T15:59:00.001-08:00

Well I have internet at home again, and I do mean to update this blog more often.

Okay, here's the thing, a lot of what is going on in my life involves people who may or may not read this blog, and for the most part I try to avoid talking about people who read this blog.

Okay, I don't always do that. The Doctor, aka the trans guy I was crushing on for a while before he started T, I did talk about him, but other than that.

So my prom that I'm planning is coming along well. I think I am going to get my surgery within this year or the beginning of next year. I deserve it.

I mean,

I am a woman.

In every aspect of my life I have transitioned, and it was easy. Yes, I went through all the shit that trans people go through when they transition, and yes there are some outfits I wore and some things I did in transition that are a little embarrassing, but there isn't really any way around puberty. So I was a 13 year old girl at 28, oh well. But really it was easy. As a woman I don't have to think about how to act, how to talk, what to think in order to pass. As a woman I can just act naturally and I generally come across as pretty normal, I think, please don't tell me otherwise.

Transition is a thing in my past. It's like: Yes, I am trans, but that isn't really much of a thing, it is just kind of something about me. Then of course there is that one thing remaining.

I'm tired of, and this is really rude, by the way, "Oh but you're still in transition," or "How long have you been in transition." It's like in people's minds I'm not there yet, or with some people I swear it's I'll never be there.

It's ignorant and it sucks but how do you fight it. I mean it's the hanging out with a bunch of lesbians and it's almost a shock that I'm into women....okay, maybe I come across as a little straight, I mean, I am really femme. I can't fault anyone, and I'm not upset, and people totally equate gender with sexuality, gays and lesbians alike.

What was I trying to get at in that above paragraph? Oh yeah, you know, maybe it's them. Maybe it's "Oh you like women?! You're not just hanging out with a bunch of gay women because you're trans, you're actually into women?!" or maybe it's something in me. Maybe it's this awareness that I have that I'm different.Not different like I used to feel around guys, not different like we're not the same, but different in that there are a whole hell of a lot things that I can't experience, or not even that, but rather this thought in the back of my head saying "even if you found me attractive my body would probably make you uncomfortable."

It sure as hell makes me uncomfortable. I mean, flat out, I have body issues. Body issues that are pretty fucking incomparable. Even if all the lights were out I would never feel comfortable getting sexual with anyone else using the equipment I have between my legs.

It would be "What do they think of it?"

Arghhhh!!! I don't want this to be another entry about needing my surgery. I deserve it, that's enough to say.

So many of the things that I want to write about are about people in my life. They're all good things, but....

Okay, so without being specific, which I really try to avoid in this blog, I can't write what I would like to without risking being misunderstood by the people involved. Not that anyone would be offended but I wouldn't want anyone to think I was talking about someone else when I was really talking about them.

So... My goals for 2014 (this is going to be a really good year for me :)

1: Throw my prom, raise the money for my surgery, schedule my surgery, have it if possible, and start a non-profit specifically to help trans people in RVA pay for their Gender Confirmation Surgeries. I seriously think that the difficulty in paying for GCS is a very important social issue that I would like to help address.

2: Make money. I deserve to make a decent living. I'm really smart, I'm a hard worker, I'm a good leader/organizer, and I deserve to get paid.

3: Not work in food service any more. Along the same lines as above. I don't love cooking enough to be interested in making it a career and I am far too talented to work in an industry that doesn't pay well, isn't rewarding, and doesn't have much of a future.

4: Work for myself.

5: Be more open to close friendships and relationships, and more trusting.

First update in three weeks

2014-01-16T18:27:00.001-08:00

Well, It's been a few weeks since I posted...and I meant to post every Tuesday.

I found an ABC sponsor for my prom, which I'm having to raise money for my surgery.

Which, though it is going to be a hell of a lot of work, I'm totally going to raise enough money for my surgery this year. YAY!!!!!

OMG I am so excited. Actually It's more surreal than anything else, and granted I still don't have the money for the surgery this is all depending on me being able to get a thousand people to come out for my TG prom, and getting them all to buy beer and wine and put in on the 50/50 raffle, and everything else, but...I think my lack of fundraising is the final key to me getting that Jim Collins Foundation grant, which I will definitely be applying for if I don't raise all the money myself this April.

You know though, being that I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel as far as my surgery goes, it does have me contemplating what it means to me.

I mean, not so much like I've talked about it before, but like in looking at before and after pictures on surgeon's websites and actually being like "That's what I'm going to have between my legs," and then looking down at what I have right now...

I don't know. I hope that none of you who read this are fetishistic about trans women because well I'm not a fetish, and having a penis sucks. It really really sucks.

I really want to date someone (and I'm not giving up on that) but....

It takes a lot for me to trust someone. Not just with physical contact, though that is a large part of it.

Here's the thing;

One, I hate what I have between my legs. I hate it. I don't want anyone touching it, looking at it, thinking about it, anything. I don't like to touch it myself...That's the sexual relationship with myself that I know. That's kind of all I've ever experienced.

Then, of course, I am sexual, and honestly estrogen has only brought that out in me. I mean it makes sense. I am female, and prior to having the proper balance of female hormones in my system well I just didn't think about sex very much. It isn't like I think about it all the time now, probably comparable to any other woman, but compared to before it's a lot more.

And I've always wanted intimacy with another person. Which is really the kicker because right now I have this dilemma of. She is attracted to me...why? Does she know I'm trans? If she does is that what she is attracted to? because I'm not really that. I can't really do that in between thing. Does she think I'm cis? Is she going to be comfortable with finding out what I have between my legs? and then if all of that clears there's still the question of "Is she going to be comfortable with my boundaries, where I won't go?

Of course I think I've written about all that before.

Now of course I'm looking at before and after pictures, and quite possibly, I'll be in recovery from surgery with in a year.

This is what I imagine.

I'll wake up all groggy, and my hand will reach down, and it won't be there, and I'll smile, and I will be so so happy, and I'll go back to sleep.

I was thinking about it, and basically it's kind of like I'll be perfect. I mean, I won't be, I'll probably have a little bit of weight I want to lose, and everything else, but basically everything will be as it should be.

I don't know, I joke about wanting to really slut it up after my surgery, but I kind of doubt I will. I kind of think I'll still find it really really hard to date, I'll still be this person that everyone wants to be friends with but no one is interested in dating, I'll still be awkward about it. It'll still be really really hard for me to be close to anyone. But at least there won't be that.

Month of kidney stones, not so attracted to that trans guy anymore...pheromones?

2013-12-17T09:22:00.003-08:00

Well it is Tuesday and time to post.

First I got to say this month of December has been really shitty for me. I've been sick with kidney stones pretty much the whole month. I just had my second one on Saturday and I'm still sore as shit. I called out on Sunday and I should have called out last night but...

I don't make enough money to afford to, plus I had to take out a payday loan to cover the cost of prescriptions and it is going to be a little while before I catch up.

In other news, I have an interview with Aflac tomorrow, and I think I'm going to give insurance sales another go.

I HATE foodservice. I hate wearing nasty sticky work clothes. I hate looking all butch. I hate low wages. I hate the lack of respect I get as a cook.

I mean I feel like a 31 year old educated person should not be worrying whether she's cleaned the flat top or wiped out the sink well enough.

Anyway, yesterday I almost put in two weeks, but then I remembered it was probably a combination of feeling like shit and the painkillers so I suffered it out and bought a six pack on the way home.

Actually Monday night is my night for karaoke, but when I stopped by it was just a little too loud for me. I wanted a really quiet bar.

Second thing is that my car is at the shop, the car I just bought not even a month ago, yeah. Anyway, it's something with the electronics and I tend to have an effect on electronics. I have a rental which just isn't a cute, I mean, it's blue; I will never wear blue lipstick. Also it isn't European, and it doesn't have heated seats. What do they think I am, a savage?

Anyway, and seriously, I did want to mention that that trans guy I've been somewhat infatuated with for over a year now finally started T. He also asked me not to write about him because he doesn't like how he comes across in my writing.

Well I haven't mentioned him by name.

But anyway the only reason I mention him is that now I'm just not as attracted to him as I have been. Maybe this whole time it's been pheromones

And, I'm looking elsewhere. Or rather I have been. I don't date much, which I'd really like to change, but I don't know if I can. For one I have dangly bits in places where I shouldn't, and that kind of robs me of quiet a bit of confidence. I don't like them...actually, I don't find peni (really think the plural of penis should be peni) attractive on anyone. And yeah, especially when I'm interested in someone who isn't trans I'm perhaps overly cautious.

Oh well.

I can see myself as a successful insurance agent.

So anyway, I don't have a lot to write about today.

And I really am not so girly as to pick a car color to match my lipstick.

Though I have to admit, I kind of like that my normal car does.

Kidney Stones, Geeking out at a Christmas party, more about trans stigma, and interviews

2013-12-11T13:34:00.002-08:00

I went to my first Christmas party of the season Saturday night. I didn't really know anyone there except for my date...

Actually it wasn't that awkward. I was quiet and didn't really open up too much to anyone. I drank beer and said excuse me a lot.

Basically I can't say that I came across as all that outgoing, but oh well. Anyway stuff like that doesn't bother me anymore, and I was recovering from a kidney stone, which, by the way, is a rather hellish experience.

Actually I'll start with that, and I'll try to be brief.

Last week after writing an entry in this blog I went out to happy hour at Babe's and had several beers. I was actually in the mood to party, and go out to Karaoke, and stay out late. Sad to say I don't do that all that often anymore. I'm too much of an adult. But anyway, I was sitting at the Bar in Babe's thinking about those dollar tacos that Weezie's sells and about how hungry I was when all of sudden my back started hurting.

It felt like I pulled a muscle.

And it got worse, and worse, and I had to excuse myself and go home.

When I got home I took off my clothes and lay down in bed. The pain got worse and soon I had to get up every so often to vomit.

I called my friend who is a nurse and told her I thought whatever was wrong with my back was actually kind of serious, and got her to come over with pain medicine and a heating pad.

Well six pills of Ibuprofin worked for a while but by 530 in the morning I was in so much pain that I finally called an ambulance. I don't have money for medical bills, which is why I held off for so long, but by 530 in the morning I was in so much pain that I didn't feel like I really had a choice.

I threw on a t-shirt and jeans, grabbed my purse and jacket and met the EMTs outside without any shoes on. They put an IV in and drove me to MCV.

At MCV I was finally diagnosed with Kidney stones, and after a long forty five minutes with a dose of painkiller that only dulled the pain slightly, a cat scan, and the official diagnosis I was given something good, and spent the next several hours high as a kite.

I actually had a job interview over the telephone scheduled for that afternoon, which I was home for but I guess I was still a little out of it because I answered the phone with "Hi :) I actually just got out of the hospital for kidney stones."

The lady on the phone told me to email HR and reschedule which I did, but they never emailed me back.

Oh well....

Anyway, I called out of work Thursday, Friday I should have, but working at barely above poverty wages I couldn't afford to, and Saturday night I wasn't completely myself.

So I didn't have much to say...but I'm also the type who really listens to people and gets to know what they're like a little bit before I start talking a lot.

Anyway...

Of course there was this moment when the TARDIS was mentioned by someone who said she was a Doctor Who fan. She said it was red. I had to say something.

The TARDIS is blue and it always has been. We had a discussion for a while which ended up with a quick check on the internet and she conceding to me. At which point she called the Delorean from Back to the Future black.

"No," I said, "the Delorean is silver. Or actually, stainless steel. The stainless steel construction does something to help the flux capacitor" While I'm saying this, I'm actually really glad that couldn't remember the exact Doc Brown quote talking about the stainless steel construction, and I was really hoping she wouldn't bring up Lord of the Rings, because I was really geeking out.

I like Doctor Who, Back to the Future, and Lord of the Rings. Those are my three really geeky things that I really like.

Anyway...So much for keeping my composure as a not geeky person.

Then we went to Babe's.

And despite my date pressuring me to drive faster and "gun it" past people. I followed drove very cautiously. I was fine to drive but knew I was legally intoxicated....that only takes two beers.

And then I had no money to get into Babe's and I guess I missed the part where the bartender told the person I was with that she could put the cover on her card. She motioned me in and I stood back until the door person told me it was okay.

Arghhh...totally came across as this uptight person who follows all the rules and gets upset if the TARDIS or the Delorean are called the wrong color.

I'm really not that nerdy.

Okay well after I got into Babe's I ended up in this conversation with someone who was drunkenly confiding in me that she thinks she'd like to date someone who is in between sexes. Neither male nor female.

I asked her if she meant intersexed. She said she did but then started talking about two of her relatives who transitioned and I kind of think she was really talking about transsexuals.

One had been a gay guy who is now a lesbian, and another had been a lesbian who is now a gay guy.

Well I was a "straight guy" who is now a lesbian. I didn't bring that up. I told her that I didn't think it was fucked up to be attracted to people like that when she asked me if I thought it was.

We've met before, and she recognized me, and it's hard for me to believe that she didn't know that I transitioned, but at the same time telling someone who is trans that you think it is fucked up to want to specifically date someone who is trans...I don't know. I seems like a bit of a social faux pas.

Of course she also started talking about how her family just accepts her relatives who did transition and how she thinks it's great that they knew who they wanted to be and became it, and how people shouldn't be ashamed or try to hide who they are.

Which may or may not have been trying to nudge me into "coming out" to her as someone who has transitioned.

I didn't.

And it isn't that I'm ashamed of it; I'm very much not stealth, but at the same time, for practical reasons, I feel like it is better for me not to be so open about it.

It's the whole, I actually would like to meet and have a relationship with someone. I already have to face the discomfort a lot of cisgendered people feel at being attracted to someone physically different like I am, but then on top of that there is the social stigma of being trans.

By not being stealth I hope to combat that a little, but there's the thing that's happened to me, where this girl is really attracted to me, we might even be making out, and she gets pulled aside by her friends who say something to her, which I imagine is along the lines of "you're drunk, do you know what you're doing with her? You know what she is, right?" and then she isn't interested in me anymore.

Or, the people who are into me because of a fetish.

I'm uncomfortable with my body, and I am never going to get over that without surgery. I still would really like to have a relationship with someone, and I think I would be an awesome girl to date, but I would never be interested in being with someone who was into parts of me that I don't identify with, and with people who seem like they might be able to get past my abnormal anatomy, there's the whole social stigma that I think limits my options.

It's be nice to say that if they can't get past the social stigma of dating a pre-op trans woman than they aren't worth dating, but the truth is that's a big fucking stigma and it took me a long time from when I figured out that I was trans to when I willing, and strong enough to accept the stigma that comes with it. I can't judge someone for that.

It really is depressing sometimes. I know why a lot of trans people end up committing suicide.

If I had a choice, I would never choose this.

It's frustrating how with all the medical knowledge out there, trans people are in so many respects second class citizens.

We're faulted for going stealth because people think we're trying to pass ourselves off for something we're not. I am as legitimately lesbian and female and any other woman. We're faulted for not passing well enough. I mean if I try to butch it up a little people don't see that as me expressing a more masculine version of femininity they see it as me not doing a good job at being a woman.

It's a fucking catch 22.

And finally, I just want to say, I've been going on job interviews trying to get a more professional job that pays better and would be in an environment I feel like I'd fit in a little better. Just a weird little observation I had before going into a job interview at an office in Glen Allen. I was wearing heels, a skirt, pantyhose, and full on makeup, what would had me accused of "doing drag" (by ignorant people who aren't really familiar with drag) four years ago and I was so much more confident than I ever was in a suit and tie. It's weird how on job interviews now I'm not really thinking about what I'm wearing while at the actual interview whereas in a suit and tie I was constantly thinking about it.

When I interviewed for a position as an insurance agent, before I transitioned the one thing about how I was dressed that wasn't on my mind during the interview was the fact that I was wearing make-up.

LOL

Here's a link that I thought was a good read:

Myths About Gender Confirmation Surgery

A really short post; no time to blog today. Check back tomorrow

2013-12-10T14:31:00.001-08:00

This is going to be really short.

I said last week that I was going to blog every Tuesday. I only have 15 more minutes in the library so I won't be able to write a full post.

But :)

Sometime tomorrow I'm going to write a post about job interviews and a drunken conversations.

Anyway :)

For once I didn't lie when I said it was going to be a short post

Thoughts about a blog I meant to write last week and on being "straight"

2013-12-03T14:23:00.001-08:00

So I have this goal of trying to write an entry every Tuesday. Let's see how long I can keep that up :)

Anyway...

Last week I wanted to write a little bit about how I think our society affects our sexualities and I didn't. I ended up writing about some doubts that I deal with rather frequently.

I've had a week to think about it now, plus a comment that was brought to my attention. This trans guy who I'm very attracted to, who tends to send me mixed signals, who isn't on T yet (or he just started), who I don't think is mature enough for me to date anyway, but if the situation were to arise I'd probably say fuck it and date him anyway....

Actually, I don't know.

In the past three to four years I have been growing up really quickly, kind of catching up so to speak, but now post transition I really feel like a normal 31 year old woman. And I really don't want to go back to being 26, and I don't want to date someone who is going through all that stuff, especially someone who is just starting the process of transitioning.

Transition was wonderful and a whole lot of fun, but I'm kind of glad that it is over and I'm ready to move past it.

I mean, I'm probably not the type of person to go stealth, and I really do want to be a supportive of the people in my life who are transitioning. I also think that trans issues and theories are always going to be important to me. I just don't think I'd want to be dating someone going through that process.

Not that I think I'd have to relive to much of my own transition or carry too much of the person's transition.

But,

Basically it was this comment I was told about that really got me thinking and really put things into perspective for me:

"Some straight girls (Natalie) want me to end up being a straight guy"

or it was something to that affect anyway.

First, I found it kind of funny. However you define me I'm not straight. (That is actually a physical impossibility for me, LOL)

Anyway,

I was going to write a blog entry about how I'd never feel comfortable dating a man, how I find men attractive sometimes but I wouldn't feel comfortable actually having sex with them, how I thought that maybe that had something to do with having been raised male in a homophobic society and how maybe despite having transitioned there is still some learned attitudes towards me being with a man that I can't overcome.

Then, I realized that whole line of argument is kind of bull shit.

I don't find muscles, or body hair, or penises to be at all attractive. Actually I find them to be kind of repulsive.

I am attracted to boyish looking females. A lot of boyish looking "females" end up turning out to actually be trans men pre-transition, but when I am attracted to them that isn't what I'm responding to.

I do find masculinity to be attractive (in the type of people I am attracted to) and the whole thing becomes really confusing to me because a lot of the time I don't see someone's sex so much as I do their gender. But that doesn't change the fact that the type of body I am attracted to is female, very androgynous female.

Something so basic that I almost feel shallow for putting it this way but a person's body plays a very big part in whether or not I find that person attractive.

I am not attracted to physically male people enough to want to date them. I'm 31. I'm post transition. This isn't likely to change.

"Some straight girls (Natalie) want me to end up being a straight guy" The thing about this is...by the time that happened I seriously don't know that I'd still find him attractive.

And that might be a real relief. Nothing complicates a friendship like sexual attraction.

Also, as weird as it sounds. The argument I was going to make had something to do with having at points in my life identified as a heterosexual male and not wanting to let go of the last remaining part of that identity. But then again, when I was 13 thinking about transitioning I assumed I would end up being a heterosexual female. I thought that it wasn't so much the type of person I was attracted to but the type of relationship. I mean had I ended up being het female I would have ended up being the girl in a familiar type of relationship, whereas this whole lesbian thing is something I need to figure out. In a very real way by staying the same I have changed, and no experience I had ever had prior to transitioning could have let me know what it would feel like right now.

I mean when it comes down to it, sexuality is so complicated and hormones are so powerful that I think it is a mistake to approach transition with the attitude that "I am going to be such and such..." just relax and let the ride take you where it is going to take you.

I think the right attitude to take when transitioning is an attitude where you question everything. I knew myself at 13 but I didn't have any idea who I would be at 27, just like at 27 I had no idea who I would be post transition, just like right now I don't know who I will be when I am old.

I have to say that it's weird that before transitioning holding onto the idea of being "straight" was comforting whereas now being "straight" is a little disconcerting.

I'm going to keep an open mind. Maybe there is some guy out there who I'll totally fall in love with (even when he has hair and muscles and all that gross stuff) but I doubt it.

Transpanic? after all this time?

2013-11-26T08:57:00.000-08:00

Well I financed a car.

That's a story in and of its self, but I'm not going to go into it here.

Just. you should have seen the piece of shit that I almost bought with the money I used for my down payment.

Anyway, I feel like a woman.

Not in the gendered sense, I mean.

It's been a long time that I've walked to work, and or bought crappy cars that I could pay for out of pocket, and/or were given to me by my parents. Actually, I've never financed a car before....and now I have no spending money.

It makes me think back on my life prior to transitioning and how I really have grown up a lot since transitioning. It's kind of the only argument I can really make to say that this is something I really needed to do.

I'm a grown up...YAY!

Other than that...I guess I've been kinda thinking about my transition and my gender and everything recently. Yeah, I know, gender is something that I think about all the time. Anyway, I have a lot of masculine traits (or traits that I consider masculine). My friends, co-workers, and people who know me might disagree with that, but what I guess I mean to say is that now that all the turmoil of a second adolescence has quieted and I'm really just getting on with my life, I'm realizing more and more that the only way I've really changed is that I've grown up more.

Well, there are other things, I'm more confident, I dress differently, I'm generally in a better mood, I take better care of myself, I'm more openly feminine.

That person I am when I'm falling asleep, or when I'm thinking, or praying, or talking to friends, or working, or doing any of the other things that I do is still the same.

And it makes me wonder whether this transition was something I needed to do.

I mean, I know it is something I needed to do but hypothetically...

It makes me wonder whether maybe I am really just a super super extreme cross-dresser. It makes me wonder whether all this gender presentation of mine is at the core all basically fake.

And when I'm wondering about that and I look at my reflection in the mirror I feel really self-loathing.Which is a feeling I am unfortunately very familiar with.

When I think about being trans, there is a tendency that I have to think of my life as having a time before I was trans, a time when I was normal, so to speak, happy about having been born physically male. But if I actually try to pinpoint that time I realize that it doesn't really exist.

Even when I couldn't really pinpoint what it was, I always felt wrong. I always felt awkward, out of place. I always felt a bit of self loathing and discomfort and feeling that somehow I wasn't what I was supposed to be.

Was I really supposed to be a boy, a man?

I'm writing all of this because: one, I want to be honest. I want people to know that three and a half years after coming out to my parents, very nearly three years on hormones, and a very successful transition, I still have these feelings sometimes. Two, I also want people to know that transitioning isn't such a straight forward thing. I know I needed to transition. I know that I fit more closely into that box that says female than I do male, but those definitions don't fit me any better than anyone else. I mean, I can honestly say that if I told anyone who knows me now that I wonder whether I am really feminine enough they wouldn't really see any justification in it. I am really femme. More femme than most cisgendered women. this whole thing is something that I really had to think about, and I really had to struggle with. And three, I am as influenced by societal standards as anyone else.

All these doubts that I have (which really aren't that major) I know don't come from within. It's just a mild re-occurrence of "transpanic," getting all panicky because of being trans.

I don't know if gay people experienced something similar back in a time and place where being gay wasn't thought to be natural.

You know I go through life with the simple fact that if I'm honest about my past it nullifies my present in the minds of a lot of people. Or even when I keep my past more to myself, someone sees something in a mannerism of mine, or a tone of my voice, or maybe a combination of factors like me being tall and broad shouldered, and they read me as a trans women, and they make assumptions about me that they would never make about any other woman.

Like, I am a lesbian...basically, that isn't so black and white for me either. I was hanging out in a lesbian bar, which I hang out at because I know people, and I like to meet girls, and hopefully meet girls I actually have a chance at dating. This one lady was sitting beside me being really annoying. She asked me how long I'd been out. First I had to ask her to clarify, because I wasn't sure whether she meant "out of the closet" or "out for the evening." She meant out of the closet. I gave her an honest answer. I left out the trans part, because I'm tired of explaining of trying to explain something that I don't really understand. Then she asked me if I had a boyfriend.

Okay she read me as trans, then made a whole bunch of assumptions about me because of that that she wouldn't have made about any other woman dressed like I was, hanging out where I was.

Why does the fact that I am a trans woman make it any more acceptable (in anyone's mind) to assume anything about my sexuality. When people assume I'm straight when I'm sitting in a straight bar or grocery shopping, or whatever...okay. I don't look like a lesbian. (I don't look like a trans woman for that matter either).

It's also, why did she read me? My voice, the fact that I was wearing jeans and a hoodie, the fact that I wasn't being overtly feminine, combined with other little things that all added up?

Why is it that as a trans woman if I'm not wearing a skirt or dress with my hair, nails, and makeup looking perfectly I get read? or rather, I don't mind getting read. Why is it in the people who read mes' minds trans is somehow something different. Me dressing a bit more masculinely for a woman (which by the way isn't very masculine) is somehow less valid than any other lesbian dressing masculinely.

How in the hell does a trans woman use clothing and appearance to indicate that she is not (generally speaking) into men without saying something about her gender that she doesn't want to say?

So then of course that whole transpanic that I talked about earlier.

Was I really supposed to be a boy/man? really?!

Honestly, ultimately, like I'm sure I've written about before, is I resolved those doubts after years of struggling with myself and my gender when I asked myself the question of how am I different? How would any other basically healthy female person have reacted in my situation? Isn't it perfectly natural for a female to want to be female?

...
I wanted to write a little today also about how show society influences our sexuality, but I don't have time.
I hope you enjoyed this little rant.

...
Oh and whatever transpanic I was feeling. I'm not really feeling it anymore.

About the TG Prom that I am planning

2013-11-11T07:56:00.000-08:00

Okay this is going to be a quick entry.

I'm still plugging away at my book. I'm at just over 45,000 words right now, which is a long way from being finished but is also a lot more than I've ever written on any one piece of writing, so I'm already proud of it.

One thing that I'm really excited about is the fundraiser I'm planning to pay for my gender confirmation surgery. I'm planning a TG Prom for trans people and trans allies in Richmond VA, and the Gay Community Center is going to donate the space for me to hold it!!!

Right now all I need to do is raise the funds for a security deposit!

Yeah, I know. This is a shameless plug, asking for donations.

The thing about it is, Gender Confirmation Surgery is really expensive. For someone like me who makes next to nothing it is almost out of reach. I mean to have surgery in the United States, which is very preferable, will cost me more than my entire years salary.

I've actually been thinking about organizing a TG Prom for a while. For one, though I did in fact go to my actual prom, I really wish I could go back in time and go to Prom as I am now, and wear something that makes me feel good about myself, instead of the tux that I wore that I felt a little ridiculous in. And I also want there to be a trans centered event within the LGBT community. I really feel like the "T" is really misunderstood and too often ignored.

I also think as far as fundraisers go the TG prom is a great fundraiser.

And it will be a whole lot of fun for the community.

And it is a positive way to bring the entire LGBT community together and bring a little more visibility to trans issues.

And what I would like to see is for this event to become an annual thing in Richmond. Something that gives people a chance to show their support for trans issues, and something that gives trans people an opportunity to go to an event and feel proud about being trans.

What I would like to see happen is for this to happen every year and become a really big thing. Every year it can help a different trans person pay for a surgery that they wouldn't be able to pay for otherwise. Not only that but the person who the prom benefits can be a major person involved in organizing it. So it also will give that person a chance to earn money for their surgery.

I'm actually really excited about it. As I'm sure you can tell.

I mean, I actually get to have my very own prom, with my very own theme, and decoration ideas and everything, and it will help pay for my gender confirmation surgery.

I know I've written in the past what this surgery means to me, so I won't re-write it in this entry.

Anyway, I hope this thing is every bit as fun and raises all the money I hope.

So please donate and help me throw this event!

New cup size, a bit about really needing SRS, and actually being thankful to be trans.

2013-10-30T15:58:00.001-07:00

Well I had to buy new bras.

Over the last month or so all my bras straps have been snapping. I mean I go to pull my breasts into the cups and pop there goes another strap. Well the last one finally gave way late Monday night when I took it off. Actually it had broken like a week earlier but I sewed it back together.

I'll go without a bra sometimes when I go out. I mean my girls are pretty amazing looking. I have like the breasts of a teenager and I can legally drink :)

But I always wear a bra to work. For one thing I have to wear these baggy unisex (which means guy) kitchen shirts at work and I want my girls to have the lift to be visible under the shirt especially when I get stuck in a shirt a size to big. Also, I have a very physically demanding job and well there is a big difference between having my tits bounce around when I'm drinking at a bar and having them bounce around at work.

So yeah, I had to go bra shopping yesterday. Fun.

Anyway I just went to Ross. I was fitted last year and I think I made a pretty good assumption that I had just gone up a cup size. So I went to the bras and picked out some D cups and then went to try them on.

Guess what. They fit! Yay D cups.

Actually weirdly, or not, I was pretty happy with C's. I'm starting to wonder when they're going to stop growing.

Oh and guess what. Still no cleavage. I mean the breasts touching and a nice beautiful sexy line forming.Yeah I don't get that. I have push up bras and everything.

But I guess I am a D cup now. The bras definitely fit.

I mean I don't have the "ploop" sound when I take it off at the end of the night. You know the sound of a breast being shoved into a cup too small and sweating, and then when you take it out at the end of the night it's almost stuck for a little while?

I'm exaggerating a bit here for effect.

That only happened a couple of times, when it was hot outside.

...and in other news it's looking like I'm not getting the Jim Collins grant this year. Maybe I'll publish my essay. It's a lot more personal than it was last year.

The thing about surgery for me is...I've so transitioned. I mean in every aspect of my life I am a woman. Except that one little thing.

It's hard to explain without making it sound like a sex thing. Yes I would really love to be able to take a partner home and not have to stop at heavy petting. Or even just having the confidence in myself that I don't have to hold back until I really trust that whoever I'm dating or might be dating respects that I have a part of my body that I don't like, that I really don't like.

I mean even without sex I definitely am stand-offish when it comes to a close relationship. I mean I can't be fully myself when there is a part of me that isn't really a part of me.

It's just so many assumptions people have about people because of what they have between their legs.

It's "Oh well you're still part guy right?"

Or "You must really like it up the ass."

I'm not a gay dude and never have been. I don't know it's this pressure to play a role that isn't who I am or a role I'm comfortable playing that really gets to me.

Then there's the changing my sex with social security, and not having doctors and dentists insist on calling me by pronouns that aren't appropriate. Or co-workers (actually only one in particular who I never should have let know that I'm trans) have the most difficult time believing that I am who I say I am.

FYI. Your sex is in your head not in between your legs.

I was thinking about it this morning lying in bed. I really want someone who'll spoon behind me, pressing her breasts into my shoulders with her arm around me and her hand on my breasts. I don't know where I was going with this...

Anyway, I'm really ready for this transition thing to be over, to move on with my life. To only be reminded that I'm trans when I take my medicine.

I don't know. It's hard not to be envious of cis-sexual people who are able to take their gender for granted. I mean when I was told as a small child that I had a penis because I was a little boy it didn't make sense to me. It wasn't "Oh of course! That seems right!" It was "Oh?!"

You know though. Even though I was born trans I am still really glad to be girl. I think the only thing worse for me than having been born trans-female would be had I actually been male.

Ewwwwww!

Bad grammar/spelling is not attractive, and other rants and raves

2013-10-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

Well that guy I wrote about last time...I had to text him that I didn't think I was interested.

On Tuesday last week when we met I was going to give him a chance with a date. He actually seemed to be interested in me as a person not just a "chick with a dick." I mean, so many people, cis-gendered guys in particular don't really see me as a real person just an exotic sex object. having someone attracted to me as a woman and not as a trans-woman is really attractive.

On the other hand...

Don't leave out apostrophes it really is not attractive, nor is spelling "you're" as "your," and "when" as "ween." Also drop the "e" before adding "ing." Reading shit like "I like it ween we talked. I hop your haveing a good day" is really, really, really unattractive.

Also if we only met one time and had a rather awkward conversation and I decide to give you a chance. It doesn't mean that I want to go out the very next day, or that I want to have long conversations with you via badly spelled/punctuated/grammatically incorrect texts.

And if we'd been dating for a while asking me how my day is going would be sweet, if we've just met it's just a little too much.

Finally, although I am making an effort not to hold someone's sex against them as a criteria for dating them, if you are male you really need to proceed slowly. Although I don't like/believe in sexual categories, and you could call me "bisexual," I am now and always have been slightly more attracted to female bodied people than I am to male bodied people. Keep that in mind and don't try to move things too quickly.

I wanted to write an update to my last entry. I don't know why I care that people know who and what type of people I am attracted to sexually. It doesn't really matter.

Then again, if I try to rationalize why I need people to see me as female, there isn't really a rational reason for it.

Gender identity and sexuality has to be biological just for that reason.

In other news I contacted a professor in VCU counseling psychology. I'm looking into being a therapist/researcher for trans people. I briefly outline some of my viewpoints on the whole gender spectrum thing and asked for advice as to what I should do to get into the program.

She hasn't responded back. Perhaps I shouldn't have written so much about what I think. I'm not sure. It wasn't a long email but perhaps I should have just been more to the point and just asked what I wanted to know, not explain where I'm coming from.

Also, I have written 142 pages of my rough draft for my first novel which is basically a memoir. Writing a book is a lot harder and more time consuming than I thought.

When I was in college I took a class in stone carving. The first day we chipped away at our granite rocks with chisels the way that Michelangelo would have. The second day we were able to use the modern pneumatic chisels. I decided that were I to carve David it wouldn't be worth chipping away at stone by hand for as long as it would take.

Writing this book is kind of reminding me of that.

142 pages in I'm really beginning to see the finished book, but it is a long way away, and I'm going to have to reorganize and rewrite so much of what I've written.

Of course, I'm at the point where I have to finish this book, and I have to get it published, and it has to be fucking phenomenal because I've put to much work into it already not to finish it.

And I really hope it makes money.

Also, I am going to figure out a way to go back to school.
I am so burnt out on cooking as a profession that I just want to escape.
Give me an office and decent income. I'm so sick of being broke.

And I haven't heard back from the Jim Collins Foundation yet. In all seriousness I don't know how much longer I can go without my operation. I'm actually really starting to get depressed about it.