Categotry Archives: adventures in transition

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A Farewell to…Stealth

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, adventures in transition, all about me, i get around, omphalos gazing, tv (not trans), tv (trans)

Okay, so this has gone out to a couple of places. First, the big news:

Jeopardy!, the famous international quiz show, is having a 30th anniversary tournament. They are bringing back former champions to play, broken up (initially) by decade. All very good.

As a gimmick, they are asking the fans to vote for the last player in each decade from five former champions.

One of the champs from the 1990s…is trans.

Great! Visibility! Barriers broken! I hope she gets on!

Especially since she managed to also out herself…as me.

Aw, raspberries.

That was somewhat of a mistake. Stuff happens, I dropped a reference to my work for the Guardian and so that the producers could check, left in my nom-de-plume. And they ran it unchanged.

Oh well. There are lots of blogging aliases out there. Have I introduced you to my new blogging partner, D M Mignon?

Anyway.

Most likely, the only thing that will come from this is that I will have permanently wrecked my life. For sure, stealth is gone, done, dead; I’ve left a paper trail that you could make an origami mansion out of.

Eh bien? Non. But hey, I walked into this propeller of me own free will.

So, vote, if you like, and you want to see a trans person get a lot of visibility. More than she’s comfortable with! Much, much more!

And if you wanna pass it along, please do. If I gotta go up in a blaze of glory, let’s make it a doozy.

Meantime, I might as well write a few things. Tomorrow is no good, I’m gaming, but I’ll try to write up something on Jacques Demy (the Film Forum is currently doing a festival of all his movies) and feminism.

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Negotiations and Love Songs

Categories: adventures in transition, bitterness, the tiniest violin in the world

I met my old lover
On the street last night
She seemed so glad to see me
I just smiled
And we talked about some old times
And we drank ourselves some beers
Still crazy after all these years

So it seems that The Second Awakening, that is when I get around to posting on it, which is approximately never right now (New Job! Ongoing Tiger Beatdown Commitment! Did We Mention A Little Footy Match Between Deutschland and England Today?), is going to be my Whine Blog. Which is okay, I guess, although I seem to have done a lot of work just to make a MySpace page.

So today, I’m going to talk about love. Yes, love.

Well, okay, and sex.

I’m not the kind of man
Who tends to socialize
I seem to lean on
Old familiar ways
And I ain’t no fool for love songs
That whisper in my ears
Still crazy after all these years

See, the thing is, for a long time I’ve been good at being alone. I made an art of it: I could sing the libretto of loneliness with the best of them, ’tis true. And you know, it’s mostly good; I have my cats, my writing, some good friends, a decent job, the occasional trip to other corners of the map. I’m not complaining much.

Sure, there was a time after my marriage imploded, then exploded, then imploded twice more before exploding a few more times, when I wasn’t so good anymore at being alone. I’d been in relationships, long-term relationships, for a decade, and I didn’t really remember how to deal with being alone again, especially not suddenly. Don’t fret, ducks; it worked out, and it gave me the space to figure out what it was that I needed to do with my life.

And part of what I was going to do to myself, I realized, carried the very real risk of being alone. Permanently. As long-vanished as my fertility.

Now, I was okay with it then, and I’m okay with it now. It was a price I was willing to pay, and in any case back then me and my Ex-Significant Other of Variable and Often Fabulous Gender were still an item, still going strong. So I’d beaten the odds, right? Had cake, ate it too, went back for more cake.

But there wasn’t any more cake, it seems. Me and SOOVAOFG broke up (it was a long-distance relationship in any case), and I was back where I started, although with several problems in my life fixed. All well and good.

Except…

Except…

Except, sometimes, you meet people. People you like, and people you’re even attracted to. People you wouldn’t mind knowing, as the kids today don’t say anymore, a little better, if that’s how it was going to work out. Not like major lust or even burning infatuation; just finding somebody that you think there might be a spark of something, a little glimmer of possibility.

And when that happens, then the long hours alone are harder to distract yourself through, and you don’t feel like staying home, but you don’t feel like going out either, because you’re too depressed to be with other people, even if that was what you needed to do, really. But it’s just too hard.

Four in the morning
Crapped out, yawning
Longing my life away
I’ll never worry
Why should I?
It’s all gonna fade

It’s hard because, once again, you can’t run from who you were, not really, not forever. Oh sure, you go around and live your life as if it never was any different. And you don’t make a big deal of things. You, don’t, really, even when you are a blogger known pretty much for only this one topic.

But then, like I said, you meet somebody. And now what to do? Do you talk about who you were, the you that you never wanted to be? Do you just go on as if that you never was, like you wanted?

There are people who can handle things that way, because to them, it’s true. I don’t mean that in the sense of “to them, the sky is green”; I really mean that there’s no prevarication because they never felt themselves to be what other people said they were.

I envy those folks, sometimes. Maybe a lot.

Because for me, it’s harder, because I was always a bit of a borderline case, because I had a reasonably long and fairly successful life before transition, because I’ve hardly cut any ties with my old life, and because, damnit, it took me over three decades to finally be honest with myself about being a woman and it’s hard for me to to just automatically assume that habit. Oh, sure, I’ll defend trans women as women until my face Doppler shifts from blue to red; and I believe it about myself with a firm conviction.

But. But it’s hard for me to also not include the “trans” part in there.

That’s a weakness, maybe. A flaw. The more-trans-than-thou crowd will pin it on me being a poseur, a “late transitioner”, a cross-dresser, a man in a dress. Whatever.

But it’s hard, I guess, for me–just me, mind you; I’m making no claims on anyone else–to be open and honest enough to pursue a relationship with somebody and hold…that…fact…back.

Now I sit by my window
And I watch the cars
I fear I’ll do some damage
One fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers
Still crazy after all these years

So what do you do, when you’ve met somebody you like, maybe even have a crush on, when the way their eyes light up when they smile can make you smile just remembering it, and yet you think that maybe knowing about who you were would be the deal-breaker, that you’d be friends, of course, but that’s all? Especially what do you do on the weekend where your Dilation Drama Theater screening was an episode of “Law and Order: Special Dead Lady Unit” about Teh Tranz, about a girl who hadn’t told her boyfriend, because she was afraid of losing him? And he was filled with rage and more-or-less killed himself? And the character in question had been beaten repeatedly and ends up gang-raped in prison at the end? Besides cry in the shower for a while, that is.

I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out. Especially after they, the subject of your little crush, has already been fairly open with you, has made their own revelations and was worried on their end about losing you. Me. Your mixed-up correspondent.

I mean, “Gift of the Magi” anyone? To tell, or not to tell? Either way risks losing, either now or later. No good choices here.

How can it be, that when you’re finally fixing your life, really emerging as the person you wanted to be, the person who could finally really give, that you realize that maybe nobody will ever want to get?

I don’t know. I wish I could tell you. I wish I had my normal moral authority, ducks, and could fill you with some wrath and rage and well-turned oratory. I wish I could do it for you, so you could do it for me.

It’s just that even when you’re a past master at the art of loneliness, sometimes the long years before you weigh a lot more than they usually do, and the realization that there’s a very good chance you won’t be with anyone becomes a steeper price than you thought.

Oh, still crazy
Still crazy
Still crazy after all these years

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Speaking of Posts…

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, i get around, tiger beatdown rocks

Have I mentioned that I’ll be doing a regular Tuesday column at Tiger Beatdown?

Have you noticed today is Tuesday?

Have you noticed…I have a post on Tiger Beatdown?

Once, a long time ago (in Internet terms; for non-digitally based life forms, it was about twelve months ago),someone paid me a compliment about something I’d written. You have a great voice, she said. It was a very nice thing to say,  and even more so to hear it from someone who is an amazing writer, because voice is something writers tend to worry about. Mostly because nobody is sure exactly what it is that makes a voice, but everyone agrees it’s a good thing to have.

Voice is more than just style. It’s not that hard to imitate a style, as anyone who has read my Raymond Chandler–J. R. R. Tolkien crossover will have seen. Even the really out-there stylists can be imitated–you could, for example, mix a World War II engineering text with random pages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to come up with a fairly good imitation of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. You would not, however, have Pynchon’s voice, the thing that can make a forty page digression on an obscure meteorological phenomenon in Central Asia seem gripping, goofy, and lord help us even a bit profound. (If you like that sort of thing; I do, or at least I know I did once.)

Voice is a lot of things: but if I had to define it for myself, it means using all your quirks, knowledge, style, tics, vocabulary, word choice, hell, even your spell check and thesaurus, to create an effect that not only communicates what you want to say, but does it in a way that is uniquely you. Maybe once we’d have called it wit, but this is America and the twenty-first century, and we don’t have time for anything that can’t be barked out at a personal improvement seminar.

On a number of levels, I’ve had to learn a lot about voice.

On y va, mes cheries!

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The Rest Is Silence

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, double bound, failings, how to tell if you've transitioned, the tiniest violin in the world

So, hi, ducks.

I’ve been away a bit. Not completely away, I’ve written a thing or two here and there. But I haven’t written much of late.

I have an excuse, for what it’s worth.

The excuse is that I was depressed to the point of…well, of taking rather irrevocable action to solve my depression.

Now, that would be kind of hasty, I think. But I was down so far that I couldn’t really see up anymore.

The thing is, I got laid off at the end of March. The job sucked, so I didn’t miss it, but I sure as heck missed the money. Because coupled with my previous client’s habit of not paying my invoices until I screamed and turned blue, and then being out of work for two months, my savings were pretty thin. And I’d been using my paychecks from the last gig to reduce some of my debt, so that I could live cheaper than I do, in case this kind of thing happened again. Which is a great plan, but it blew up in my face when I got laid off after only ten weeks.

I don’t have to tell you it’s hard out there. It’s hard, even if your day job is a fairly skilled position, and in one of the few segments of the economy that’s making a come back. Even so, it’s hard out there. I would send out resumes and work the phones but only a trickle would come back. I had one or two interviews but no second interviews.

At some point I realized that I was between six and ten weeks from being bankrupt, and losing everything I’ve spent the last fifteen years building.

I have to stop myself there. What I am complaining about is still incredibly privileged. I’d lose my home, but I wouldn’t be homeless–my family can easily put me up, and a friend of mine would do the same. That’s one thing.

Another is…that I’m complaining about the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to live in my expensive (now–it wasn’t when I moved in) neighborhood in Manhattan. I mean, boo fucking hoo, yeah? That would only be something I’d share with all but 1.8 million people in the world. This is not a tragedy.

But all the same, it felt like one. This apartment has been my home for over eight years; it’s where I lived with someone for the first time, where I got my first pets as an adult, the place where I’d come home to a person I loved, the place where I decided to transition and the place where I made that happen. And the neighborhood feels the same to me; I’ve lived within three blocks of this apartment for the last fifteen years.

And too this is the only place I’ve ever wanted to live, and I’ve sacrificed (some) to get here.

And also…it was shocking how quickly it could all get swept away. Three months could do it. That seemed shocking.

There was other stuff too. Between the fall and the last two months, this is the longest I’ve been out of work as an adult. I’ve had a job of some kind since I was seventeen. I’ve always found a way to get some work in the door.

So all that, plus our threadbare economy, had me down. But there was some other stuff. And I think I need to talk about this, because it is a feminist issue, because it is something I can comment on maybe more than other people.

That was the two strikes (at least) I had against me: that I was a woman trying to get a job in technology, and that I was a trans woman trying to get a job in technology.

All that stuff you may have heard about how much harder it is for women just to look professional is true. A stupid example: getting an interview would cost me at least ten bucks, because I’d go and get my nails done, because I can’t put a sheer color on myself and have it look good, and because where I was looking for work, women at my professional level don’t wear colored nail polish.

Okay, that’s a privilege thing, and maybe just my own prejudices. But when you have big hands (and you worry about what people might conclude about that), you do your best to not draw attention to them either from lack of care or for flamboyance.

Anyway. I had other stupid image issues. I haven’t been able to afford a decent hair cut in a while now–and a bad haircut would be held against me far more than it would a man–so I had to either try to blow it out and go long, or pin it up and hope I didn’t look too masculine. I’ll talk more about that in a bit, but: this is an issue for every professional woman, and it’s one of the cruelest of the catch-22s of patriarchy. To wit: professionalism is defined by men’s dress codes. So they tend to make women look more masculine. But you can’t look too masculine! But you don’t want to look too feminine either! It’s the same dynamic as the pointless manicures: don’t get your nails done, and you look too butch and like you can’t be bothered to be professional. But have red nails and you might be too feminine. And so it goes.

These are of course my prejudices. People can and do make either end of the spectrum work. But it’s a much tougher, much more individual struggle than it is for most men. That you’re getting straight from the horse.

Of course the other part of butch vs femme, masculine vs feminine for me was worrying about being read as trans. If my hair is up, I don’t have to worry about it looking too bad, but will it make my face look too masculine? My pumps are my most neutral dress shoes, but do they make me too tall? Will my voice hold up for an entire interview? Will they know? Will they care? It doesn’t really matter that I live in a place where there are workplace protections for trans people. I’d never be able to prove anything.

I’m not really making that up, not that you would think I am. There was this study by Make the Road New York which is pretty depressing in just how blatant the discrimination is. And yeah, I know, it was retail, right CL? I mean customers public face corporate image! Surely it’s different in other jobs.

Surely you jest. You think if people aren’t comfortable buying jeans from a trans lady that having one be your CTO is going to make people more comfortable?

Or to put it more simply: everywhere I went I hoped they didn’t make me fill out a formal job application. Because then I’d have to give my social security number and Ghu knows what they’d be able to find out; sure, I fixed that and my driver’s license, but even with letters to my credit bureaus, that stuff just lasts forever.

This story has a happy ending. I finally found a small place where I was able to meet with the guys doing the hiring right away and I hit it off with them. And two days later they offered me a job that will pay my bills and even get me out of debt. Which again makes me one privileged cat, one lucky ducky: and I’m very thankful.

But for a long time there I was really scared. And you want to know what one of my signs that I’ve transitioned is? I no longer am confident I’ll always pull things out anymore, not like I used to be. And that’s part of the reality of being a woman and being trans in the world today.

So hey: where have I been in the meantime? Well, Below the Belt is on hiatus, but I’m now a blogger at Change.org! You can read the two pieces I have up so far–about a trans woman and the crappy treatment the DC police gave her, and more about our favorite douchebags, Roman Polanski and Bernard Henri-Lévi!

And over on Tiger Beatdown, where I am somehow now the Senior (non)Contributor, I have this trifle about “The Tudors.” Enjoy!

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Me and My Vagina, Special Anniversary Edition: Part II of an Infinitely Reductive Series

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, me and my vagina, my pussy my self, teh tranz, travels with CL

Today is the anniversary of my surgery. In fact, as I type this now, I am about a year removed from my first full day of having a vagina–Thailand being twelve hours ahead of my local time, and the six or more hours of my surgery having started at noon Bangkok time. (I don’t remember how long the surgery lasted, as I slept through it and for a long time afterwards, only waking up for a brief moment to say goodnight to my significant other of variable and often fabulous gender.)

In fact, there’s almost a week of time that I have very little recollection of–the five days I had to stay immobile in bed, according to my surgeon’s regimen. Not everyone does this; had I gone to the Canadian surgeon I first considered, I’d have been up and walking around after about a day or so. Everybody does things differently. But I’m somewhat glad for being immobile; during that five days I only moved once, and that was because I’d thrown up on myself the first day after my surgery–juice boxes and opiates don’t agree all that well. The only way to get me clean sheets was to move me to an entirely new bed. Which meant I had to crab walk over to it. Now, even under normal circumstances, that would be both uncomfortable and ungraceful; but I had to not only contend with the pain from my brand-new down there, with the attendant catheter and surgical drains, but since I’d also opted to have my boobs done at the same time, I could barely move my arms; the surgeon went in under my armpits, and to be honest that pain was more omnipresent and inconveniencing than the other.

But other than that, and my SOOVAOFG saying goodbye to me to fly home–we’d spent ten days together bumping around India and Cambodia prior to my surgery, and vacation time is precious nowadays–I really don’t remember much. I slept a lot; I was too out of it to even watch TV. Every so often, they’d bring me a thick creamy soup and some juice boxes to eat and drink. I rarely ate the soup, but I drank the juice. (As an aside, Thai sweets of all kinds tend to be sweeter than American sweets–probably because they use real sugar.) I’ve come to realize that it wasn’t so much that I was drugged out of my head–Thais don’t practice American pain management, and I didn’t even have a morphine drip–but because nothing changed. There was me; my bed; my room with the blinds drawn; and the occasional ministrations of kind Thai nurses who spoke little English. (My Thai was suspect at its best and no match for my pain and grogginess.)

But eventually they packed me up and sent me home, after giving me a huge, cumbersome, old-fashioned bra. It was trimmed with lace and looked like something from the “18-hour bra” commercials I’d seen as a kid. And then I was dumped back in my hotel room, just me and my catheter bag–they didn’t take the catheter out until the next day, which was a little scary and gross. On the other hand, it was pretty convenient for lying in bed and drinking stuff, which was about all I was up for.

But it’s surprising how quickly you can heal. I was moving around the hotel room that, night, had enough energy to make breakfast the next day, and even hosted a pizza party for some of the other patients of my surgeon a day or so after that. (We had a couple of these affairs. They were interesting; we’d have a great time for about an hour, and then everyone would be in too much pain to continue. But they were fun while they lasted.)

That was all a year ago.

Things have changed. For one thing, I now only have to dilate once a day for about 30 minutes. That will mean I can actually get up at the same time but still get to work earlier, which will help me have more time and energy to write in the evening. I’ve had sex, by which I mean–this being America and all–PIV sex, so now I know how much I’ve been missing. My recovery has been remarkably hassle free, even with the UTI I developed a month after getting home.

There’s more, of course, much more. But how can I put it all in words? There are days when I forget that I never had a vagina, and there are days when I forget for a second that I do. There are many days when I am astonished by the miracle of it all, and many more days when I simply take it for granted. And most of all, I feel like what I am supposed to be. I feel like a woman.

And I felt that way before. I am not going to play pussy politics with you and engage in zero-sum games about the proper anatomy a woman needs. It’s reductive, and cruel, and ignores the economic reality of far too many trans women.

But there’s no question that I like myself better this way, that I feel a peace with my body I never felt before. That I had to wound myself to heal.

Not that I’m completely healed. None of us, I suppose, ever really can be–and I’m not just talking about trans people. If we measure lives by ideals, then we’re all a little broken, all in need of some kind of healing. And I’ve come so very far.

But there are still times when I resent that passage; when I resent all the things that were taken from me, all the things that I never had–even the bad things, even the things that in a sense I was fortunate enough to miss: if I feel the omnipresent judgment of every damn TV commercial on how I should look, act, think, and feel simply because of my gender, can I really long to have had that drummed into my head from the moment it poked into our world? Do I really feel sorry for myself for not having spent three and a half decades as a victim of sexism?

No. Not really. But I do regret the necessity of it all, the long slow struggle to find out who I am, the summoning up of awful reserves of energy just to survive each day, and then the ultimate effort to make myself into the person I desperately needed to be. And so I regret that passage; but I am grateful, oh so very grateful, to have survived it.

And you could say, maybe, that my vagina is a symbol of that: a physical manifestation of not just my womanhood, but my struggle to achieve that womanhood, a signpost showing how far I’ve come and how much I had to undergo to reach it. I suppose that would be fine; I’d hardly be the first woman to eulogize my vagina, and I doubt I’ll be the last, cis or trans.

But I don’t really do that much. Because most of the time it’s just a vagina. And believe me, that is more than enough. In fact, it’s perfect.

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Adventures in Transition: Inadequacy Edition

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, the tiniest violin in the world

Hola, ducks! Did you know that I’m currently between positions? Yes, tis true that I work as a consultant when not writing pithy internet ramblings. But while I was out in California, I lost my main client in a move of wonderful class upon their part. Wev. Anyway, did you know we are in a recession, despite what the economic gurus tell us? I sure do–I’m reminded of it daily as I watch my bank balances dwindle! And also, have I mentioned that I seem to be getting depression for Christmas! And now you are too, if you’ve read this far?

This is all preamble.

So, okay. I had an interview on Friday. Which didn’t go so well…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start again.

So I had an interview on Friday. It was my third interview with these people, but the first one that would be face-to-face; I had survived two phone interviews prior to this, and passed the little “mess around with this database” test they’d sent me with flying colors.

That in itself is an accomplishment of sorts–not the application thing, I do that for a living after all; the phone interview bit. Now, you may not know this, but there’s only one kind of transsexual whose voice is helped by transitioning, and I am not that kind of a transsexual! Or to put it more bluntly, estrogen doesn’t do anything to your voice. (Testosterone will, so FTMs get a break there, but–as I well know–the effects are permanent.)

So back when I was transitioning–actually, just before I was sure I was going to transition–I began to work with an actress who gave voice lessons on finding a less obviously masculine way for me to talk. Not that I have anything against deep voices in women! Just, um, it was a way to make sure I would get outed. I didn’t have a James Earl Jones bass or anything, but my voice pretty clearly marked me as trans.

The best part of the experience was that I was her first trans client, so we sort of assembled our own course in how to do this out of things on the internet, a DVD I had, and whatever seemed to work for us. After a while, we just spent half the class talking to each other, which was a great way to get comfortable using my new voice.

Thus, passing two phone interviews was not a small accomplishment.

Anyway. The face to face interview, which was not only face to face but a state away. And potentially guarded my economic future! After being so confident on the phone interviews, I suddenly found myself…inadequate. Because:

–I needed a new suit, since I’d gained some weight.

–Jeez, skirt or slacks? What was more appropriate?

–It turns out I needed a new suit that was two sizes larger than I normally wear, because I’ve gained so much weight. Sigh.

–I began to worry: would I come on too aggressive?

–I began to worry: would I not be aggressive enough?

–Or too feminine?

–Or not feminine enough?

–Or for that matter, would they immediately think I was trans?

–Or pull a credit bureau on me and know I was trans (I’ve been lazy about getting every account I own fixed.)

–Even if they hired me, would they hit me with the “female discount”?

–Do they want a woman in their IT department?

–Was I just the “diversity interview”?

Now, ducks, I know a lot of my female readers are somewhere between bemusement and rage at going over that list. I know it sounds whiny. It is whiny. But let me just say: I knew all this stuff going in, and I decided to transition anyway. I don’t have any regrets about that, and I’m not saying I should have any special treatment.

But. This was the first time a lot of these things hit home for me all at once. And it was definitely a different experience for me to think of this stuff before an interview. (Also, I should note that I hadn’t been on a serious interview in over six years–advantage to consulting–so there was that factor as well.) And the inadequacy I felt…was pretty massive. There was so much to be afraid of, so many traps I felt like I could blunder into just based on how I looked.

And you, my beloved female ducks, are more than welcome to chorus “Duh!” in my general direction right now. And I deserve it.

Anyway, as far as all that stuff went, I think things went fine–I looked professional, I don’t think anyone read me, and I think I struck the right amount of aggression/femininity/whatever. It was the tech questions I whiffed on that probably sunk me! So there you have it.

But at least it was beautiful out in the snow today–the sky a hazy pastel blue at sunset, the air clear and all edges sharp-edged, the snow that light twilit blue you get at sunset. That helps. Even if it won’t pay the rent.

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Cahiers Parisiens: Tout le monde parle à moi

Categories: adventures in transition, paris notebook, travels with CL

Bon jour, mes canards! Paris may be a fading memory, but I will try and catch you up on the last few days of the Cahiers Parisiens.

Maybe it didn’t come through, but I didn’t talk much with people while I was in Paris. This is not that unusual. I work either from home or at a desk marooned at the other end of the floor from everyone else; I don’t often go out to bars either home or in Europe; and in general, I am a misanthropic sour puss. This helps out in the writing game, but isn’t so much use in other places.

But…well, the last few days in Paris I actually had some interactions with people.

The first couple happened on Sunday last. I went up to the Canal St. Martin, which is a hip spot to hang out nowadays. The canal is indeed quite lovely, and they close off motor traffic along it on the weekends. I stopped at a little cafe (amusingly, when I asked for the menu, the waitress brought an enormous blackboard with the specials written on it out to my table.) While I roasted in the sun I wrote the first draft of my long screed below. (I had what amounted to a mess of egg over good country ham with some sort of vinegar sauce–it was fabulous.)

After brunch I walked over towards Buttes Chaumont park, one of the gems of non-tourist Paris, a magnificent landscape of hills, crags, and a lovely lake. Here’s a picture of the grotto in the center of the park:However, on the way over to the park, I had my first experience with…Latin lovers.

I was crossing the street when a young Tunisian guy (as he told me) came up to me to tell me how pretty I was. Which was nice of him, but I kept walking. He followed me, and we struck up a bit of a conversation in French. Admittedly, I was a bit lonely, which let me fall into the trap of talking with this guy, something I wouldn’t have done in English. And of course, he got a bit grabby as the conversation progressed. I did finally manage to extricate myself (after a bunch of “arretes” and “ma relationship est grave!”) but it left me slightly shaken. And of course this all flows into my background as a trans woman: should I be worried because I don’t have the experience that would have helped me learn the skills to deflect guys like this, or relieved because I haven’t spent my whole life deflecting guys like this?

Later that day, as I was walking home (baguette in hand, of course), another guy came up to me and began to talk rapidly in French to me. I couldn’t really follow him, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what he was after. I let him down firmly but gently: “S’il vous plait lassez-moi suele.” (Please leave me alone.)

And oh! On Monday, I went to pay my respects at the Louvre (you have to see the Mona Lisa while you’re in Paris…you just do.) And as I was walking to the Metro, another guy wanted to “make my acquaintance.” This time I just said I didn’t speak French.

But the best story has to be when I was walking home from the Louvre on Monday. I passed a store I had previously seen, and just had to snap a pic, because…well, because the sign is a rather weak joke:

The name of the store is Les Bonnes Compines which in French means something approximately like “The Good Girlfriends.” Fair enough…but it’s written with out the space between Les and Bonnes, making it look a bit like…something else in English.

As I said, a weak joke. I’m not proud

Like most of the stores in that region of Paris, it’s a wholesaler–I had basically landed in the Parisian garment district, with “Ne vente pas au detail” (wholesale only) in almost every window. And for some reason, when I took the pic, a woman in a telephone booth (yes, they still have them there) started to scream at me.

I couldn’t follow everything she said, but it was mostly about how I shouldn’t take a pic. I tried to explain, but only got as far as Parce que…(“because…”) before she started to scream again. She even spit on the ground. Eventually I just walked away…I guess she thought I was some sort of corporate spy or something.

Shows what you get for acting like a tourist; I should know better.

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Adventures in Transition: Édition française

Categories: adventures in transition, travels with CL

Bon jour, mes canards! I’m spending the next two weeks here in Paris, doing the apartment exchange thing (there’s some value to living in the Great American Metropolis–people want your place!) I hope to report on le feminisme and transness here in France, and also make some of you green with envy.

More later–I splurged on a traditional dinner (vegetable soup, confit de canard, crème caramel and 50 bloody cl of wine) and need to sleep it off.

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How to Tell You’ve Transitioned, Part I

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, how to tell if you've transitioned, privilege stories

How can you tell you’ve transitioned?

…because shopping for clothes becomes a tedious chore rather than a fun excursion.

OK. Not fair, I get that–I know plenty of women of all stripes and origins who enjoy clothes shopping, including me, on occasion. But still…as compared to the times when I constructed myself as a crossdresser, shopping for clothes doesn’t have the same kick.

On the face of it, this seems strange. I mean, I no longer have to use the exasperating and even sometime ridiculous accoutrements to round out my figure, give me the appearance of having breasts, add to my hips so that my skirts wouldn’t fall down. I’ve got a body that actually fits the mold women’s clothing is intended for…and that is a relief and a pleasure, often.

On the other hand, maybe my body’s part of the issue–I’ve gained about 25 pounds in the last six months, and while that’s not an earth-shattering, cry myself to sleep issue, I am a little unhappy about how I look in my clothes lately.

Which got hammered home yesterday when I went out to buy some clothes for the first time in months (business has been slow and I haven’t had the cash to spend on clothes–though maybe I’d kill both my issues there if I stopped ordering out all the time.) But I’m travelling tomorrow and wanted to have some new clothes for the trip, especially some casual dresses, which would be light to pack. I didn’t find any that I liked, although I did get some new jeans that will actually fit.

I hate shopping for jeans. There are times I just can’t even work up the energy to go try them on, even though I think I look good in a lot of different styles of jeans. But I just hate doing it.

Maybe that’s another sign I’ve transitioned.

My relationship with my clothing has always been…interesting. I’m not like a lot of trans women–I don’t deny having had a long period of time identifying as a crossdresser; I think I was a crossdresser, albeit one with a greater interest in transitioning than I let on, even to myself. Back in those days, clothes held an allure, a mystique, an air of the forbidden about them. To crossdress was to engage all my hidden desires and frailities at once; the feeling of being at home while crossdressed was exhilerating and terrifying, and my clothes were fraught with a lot of meaning.

Which isn’t to say that clothes aren’t fraught with meaning for anyone–compare the different uniforms we wear every day, from bike messenger with one pants leg rolled to corporate honcho in a bespoke suit. Clothes are shorthand for our identities, they send out messages about us–sometimes ones that we don’t want to send.

For example, when I was in India, I bought two saris. I bought them because I loved India and the culture and the people, because I wanted to bring home a souvenir, because I think saris are beautiful dresses. I even asked a friend of mine (not Indian) if I could wear one of them to her wedding, and she enthusiastically agreed.

All this was before my “second awakening,” though. After I began to engage identity politics further, I saw that my wearing a sari just couldn’t be an isolated action–that I couldn’t avoid all the centuries of past interactions between Western and Indian people, and that ultimately I wouldn’t be able to get past the fact that if I wore a sari, I’d be a cool multiculti chick–whereas an Indian woman who wore a sari in America would seem to be “fresh off the boat,” unassimilated, perhaps ingnorant of American culture or even English. And that while some Indian people wouldn’t have a problem with me wearing a sari, others would, and it wouldn’t be easy to just discount their opinion simply because it was a beautiful dress and I liked it a lot.

I did end up wearing the sari, because my friend insisted, and she was the bride. I was fortunate; the only couple I met at the wedding who were from the region didn’t mind at all. Still I changed out of the sari and into a dress after the ceremony. And I’m not upset that I felt I had to do it, and certainly not upset at any Indian people who might take offense at me wearing a sari. I’m upset at the four centuries of Westerners who plundered India, who exoticized it, who used and abused the people there. They’re the ones who’ve “ruined” it for me–not their victims.

So yeah, clothes mean a lot more than just something to keep the wind out.

But you knew that already, didn’t you? Any woman who has been verbally (or all too often, physically) assaulted because her neckline or hemline had crossed the invisible threshold between “prude” and “slut,” who’s been told she’s “asking for it” because of what she’s wearing, who’s been told that her outfit was part of the reason she was attacked (as if women in pants and long sleeves are never raped) knows this. Hell, even I knew that back when I was a crossdresser, although sadly like many of the CDs I knew, I don’t think I really fully engaged with all the implications of what that meant. (There are things that being full-time does to you.)

Wearing clothes has a context for me now that it didn’t have back when I kept mostly to safe spaces–it has the context any woman has to deal with, from issues of personal safety to the whole construct of female beauty and its impossible-to-attain ideals. So yeah, some of the fun has leached out of it. And that’s how I can tell I’ve transitioned.

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Adventures in Transition: Faster, Evil Space Pussycat, Kill, Kill, Kill!

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, stuff i like, teh tranz, This Was My Life

I am a child of the video game era.

Like most white, middle-class kids of my era, we owned an Atari 2600 (the real thing, not the cheesy Sears version.) And while we enjoyed the hell out of the system, we also knew…it sucked.


Plate 1: This was once considered cool!


Like I said, we lived in the golden age of video games, and arcade games–with their superior graphics and gameplay–were all around us. Things weren’t helped by how poorly most arcade games were ported over to the 2600–the infamous Pac-Man port is widely credited as causing the North American video game market crash of 1983.

Plate 2: You’ve heard the legends, but I actually played it–and it was really that horrible.

I didn’t care that much for video games.

You probably think that it was because I was some high-falutin’ intellectual, with my nose in a book all the time and too much of a nerd to be any good at sports. But that wasn’t the reason…well, it wasn’t the only reason.

The reason was that I generally stank at them. I have a rather low eye-hand coordination, so most of that generation of video games were full of FAIL for me–I didn’t have the reflexes to be any good at them, or rather, I just got too frustrated to actually learn how to play through my difficulties.

So I watched a lot of other people play video games–hell, I just hung out for weeks while a buddy of mine played Ultima IV, which is about as interesting as watching people play D&D…in a language you don’t speak.

Once I got to college and had a computer of my very own, however, I got interested in games again. There were actual genres that didn’t require me to have the fast-twitch reflexes of a chihuahua who’d drunk too much coffee, and I played those–SimCity, Civilization (I racked up insane hours conquering various planets), baseball games where you only had to “manage,” and even less-athletic, more strategic games like Sid Meier’s Pirates.

So when I was finally out of college, and got a “real” computer (well, a Packard-Bell–26% new parts!), I made sure to pick up a few games to go with it. One was Doom, which I had played in multi-player mode and enjoyed. (I didn’t get too far in that one: have I mentioned my reflexes?) The other was Wing Commander IV. And that one hooked me.

I’d heard about the Wing Commander series for years, but never owned a machine powerful enough to run them–the closest I’d come was playing on a friend’s Nintendo once. But the third and fourth versions of the game were really different–they used movies to forward a plot line between missions, and you could actually make choices in how to respond during some of the movie sequences. It was like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book! (Yes, I am a child of the ’80s.)

It certainly didn’t hurt that Mark Effin’ Hamill played your character.


Plate 3: Hey, isn’t that the guy from Star Wars?

While I understand while this kind of video game (usually called Full-Motion Video or FMV) didn’t catch on (costs were high, graphics got good enough to do all the stuff inside the game itself), it was extraordinarily compelling for the time–they really managed to come close to the state objective of making it an interactive movie. I ploughed through WCIV in about a month, and for my birthday my girlfriend gave me a boxed set with the first three games. Which I slogged through as well, even though the first two were more standard video games–no movies, but there was an overarching storyline for both. I started playing WCIII, the climax of the series…and stopped.

I was changing computers, I had a girlfriend, I was taking aikido–I had a bunch of reasons. So I never finished the third game, never got past the third mission. And I mostly stopped playing anything resembling shoot-em-ups; I had the occasional game of Civ going on, but for the most part I didn’t have any time to play videogames. I did reload Wing Commander I on my machine a few months after my wife and I separated, played it all the way through again, but didn’t bother to play the next game.

And then I transitioned.

Now, obviously, video games are a huge minefield of misogynistic crap. (Just check out the ongoing saga of Fat Princess over at Shakesville.) Most games are marketed for men, often in the crudest, most sexist way possible–and then you play the game, and it just gets worse when you see how women are depicted inside the games themselves. Plus so many video games are filled with non-stop, wall-to-wall violence, domination, and macho posturing.

So it makes sense for me to avoid video games, and for the most part I’ve had no interest–not even in my beloved Civ. Until recently.

Because on a whim I dug out my copy of Wing Commander III, and after wrestling with Windows for a few days, have been flying missions again. And loving it.

This is full of irony for me. First, aren’t I the person railing on about kyriarchy and how we need a culture freed from the evils of domination? Aren’t I generally opposed to violence of almost any kind? And don’t I love cats? Hell, don’t people call me Cat?

So why in the hell am I zipping around space blowing up evil space cats and following a plotline that ultimately ends with a shocking act of genocide?


Plate 4: I’m sure with a big enough lap to cuddle up in, he’d stop trying to DESTROY ALL HUMANS.


I have no idea. I’m sucked in, again, by the storyline, and the gameplay remains challenging but not impossible even for a slow-fingered person like myself. There are even female characters in the game, and they’re not decoration–two are highly competent fighter pilots, and one is the ship’s chief mechanic. (Of course, one set of choices leads you to have a relationship with one of them, which is a bit squicky, but on the other hand it is remarkable to have a video game that was a combat sim even mention the word love.)

I’ve noticed a few things different this time around. I’m not any better or worse a pilot than I used to be–I always played the game the way I thought my character really would fly, so I don’t try to run up my score if the mission can be finished otherwise. My adrenaline reactions are…different nowadays, though. After a long session at the game, I can get a bit twitchy, and somewhat spatially disoriented, like I keep expecting the constant motion the 3D sim provides. I don’t recall that stuff happening the first time around, and I wonder how much my current endocrinology has to do with that.

Of course, playing a video game–playing a violent, combat-oriented video game–brings up all sorts of gender crap for me. (But then, getting the paper in the morning has the potential to do that.) Mostly it’s societal stuff that I, of all people, should know better than to listen too–women aren’t violent, women don’t play video games, women should sit down and watch the damn Lifetime Movie Network and keep careful notes of the cleaning products they must buy next trip to the store. Like I said, mostly crap.

But on the other hand, I haven’t talked much about this with other women I know. Maybe because I fear that the women who know about my history will view this as one more way I’m not like them–and the women who don’t know about my history might get ideas.

Silly. But there you have it.

In any case, I’m close to the end, and I’ll drop The Big Bomb on Kilrah and win the game pretty soon now. Maybe with more qualms than the designers might have expected their players to have–they may be evil space kitties, but that doesn’t make me happy to blow up their home planet, for goodness sake. And then maybe I’ll head over to Women Gamers; I’ll be needing a new fix soon.

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