Categotry Archives: This Was My Life

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Reruns

Categories: all about me, This Was My Life

One of those days, yesterday, though not as bad as the following will make it seem–just didn’t feel much like doing anything, so sorry no post.

Thought I’d rerun this bit…from a long time ago, before The Second Awakening, both the blog and my own personal sense of it. More original stuff later on, I promise.

Ma Saison en Enfer

1. Un nuit en enfer/A night in Hell

The night your wife finally moves out of the apartment, at your request, turns out to be surprisingly shitty. You knew this day would come, probably suddenly, and you’ve wanted it, but now that it’s here you find yourself gripped with a slow-spreading, vastly deepening sense of loss.

You try to keep busy. You’ve already left work early, giving up billable hours just when you need them the most, to run home to make sure that the things you really want to keep have been clearly separated. As it turns out, you have a surprising number of purses, more than you thought.

You go to your therapy session and remain calm, and then head out to go to a gig at CBGB’s gallery with your best friend, who has been your rock through the whole thing. The singer starts launching old songs–“You belong to me” is the one that hits you the worst–and you end up in the bathroom trying to cry. As it turns out, you can sob but there are no tears, not now, not even at the end, not even for you.

2. Mavais Sang/Bad Blood

Maybe it was your fault all along; maybe it was how you were made, all the issues you never confronted. Maybe it was too much in your nature to compromise, to sacrifice. Maybe you thought that somehow, bizarrely, that made you more of who you thought you were, even as the compromises took you further and further away from that idealized, non-existant person.

Maybe it was that never in your life have you felt the need to ravish. Maybe it was that you lay fallow waiting for ravishment.

Maybe that was some taint of the genes. Of the blood, the blood of your father and your funny uncle.

But there came a day when your wife began to take potshots at you for not noticing her, and then your bad blood roared through your tortured veins, poisoning your vision, painting the landscape with loss.

3. Nuit de l’enfer/Hellish Night

There comes a night, as it must, when your wife and alcohol and your medication mix together to perfect a cocktail of hell.

A night when your wife will yell at you, when you will feel everything slipping away from you as she tells you how you are not a man, or not the man she needs, and those words will cut you apart and pare away your illusions of your own happiness.

And the ground of your hell is fertile, and her words take root and bear fruit.

In this night, she will tell you that after the next morning she is no longer sure if you will be together.

Dawn will come without sleep and you will waken to the realization that your marriage is over. You will feel nothing at first. Nothing is left to feel.

Nothing will matter.

4. Délieres/Delerium I

You waken to a wedding, and it saves you. On the dance floor she will beg forgiveness and claim forgetfulness, and you will hold her and feel relieved. You will resolve not to throw away your second chance, because you have stared into the abyss and it nearly ate you.

You will resolve all these things, though you don’t mean them. It is not in either of your natures to change course now.

5. Délieres/Delerium II

And for a while you both belive in the lie, because the lie has worked for so long. She will forget that you are not what you seem, not what anybody, even her, wants. And you will forget that she is a flesh and blood woman, not one of your fantasies that you try and shoehorn yourself into, to take the shape of your airy dreams. You will forget her impatience and her impulsiveness and your own propensity for inertia. You will forget all these things in the delerium of the most seductive drug, nostalgia.

You will forget all these things. But you will suspect.

6. L’impossible/The Impossible

She will tell you that she cannot deal with seeing you dressed as a woman anymore, and suggest that she spend the night with her girlfriends outside the city. You will be touched by her sacrifice and seduced by the thought of transgressing, for a while, the narrow boundaries of custom and biology. So you agree, though you grudge it, and hope for a day where the separation won’t be necessary.

And yet, and yet, like a canker the suspicion grows that there is more here than you suspect, more being said than you have heard. And yet, and yet, you think that what you suspect, the hair of shadow that now hovers like a flaw in your sight, cannot, must not be true.

Your plans are both disrupted for your birthday. You come home to change, still made up, in your new jeans and pedicured toes, and you sense her anger and hurt. You think it is just that she is home, alone, and confronted even briefly by your own perverted self, and you are sad, you grieve inside yourself for the you that never was and never could be.

You grieve, not knowing yet what you grieve for, not knowing that grief is going to be your lot.

7. L’Eclair/Lightning

When you finally learn the truth, discover the betrayal, it leaves you physically ill. You stumble out of the house on an excuse, and wander downtown. You sit in anger with your best friend and she has nothing to say, nothing to give but an embrace.

Later will come the confrontation, the flash of brilliance that has lit up the dark corners of your marriage, of your soul, and you know as the bolt cleaves the sky so your life has been cloven in two, and you have been put asunder.

And in that flash you see the empty plain of new possibilities, even as your future dies upon the vine and with it all that you were, all that you were trying to be for five years, all that you thought was worth having and sacrificing for. The sacrifice is returned, you look at it as a feast, but your hunger makes you sick and you don’t know how to begin, or even if you should.

8. Matin/Morning

You stay up late, far into the morning most days. Sleep is something you find only in the pills you bought at the drugstore. Even strong drink, which you avoid, does not bring it.

You find that you shared so many things. You replace a manicure set and several purses. You agree to give up the chairs in the living room, and her sister’s bed that you slept on for two years. You keep the cats but lose the rug and the toothbrush. You lose a bookcase but gain several shelves on your new built-ins, the ones she insisted on.

You find your arms aching for her at night even as your heart shrieks its anger and drowns in its own blood.

The morning after she leaves, this very morning, you come home to the apartment, the empty spaces like fading ghosts. You want to collapse and sleep, but the bed is gone and you are too tired to inflate the air mattress. You take a shower and go to work. You want to cry as you walk to the subway, but you can’t, because you are a man and there is no place to go and hide while you weep.

And you know that you will pass almost directly from this morning to another long, empty morning, despite not sleeping since the day before.

9. Adieu/Goodbye

And though she is gone, it cannot, will not be goodbye, though sometimes you scream in your soul to just be left alone, to lick your wounds alone in silence.

You know there will come a day when you can see her again without seeing him in your mind as well. You know there will come a day when you forgive each other for what you did, what you did not do, and all the myriad days that should have come but now will never arrive.

And you know this won’t be the end of everything. You know it is the beginning for both of you, and the dammed stream of frustrated posibilities is already pushing you strongly from behind.

But you still want to weep, even though you cannot. You still want your tears, so you can say farewell to them. You still want her with you, and you can never say goodbye to that.

After Arthur Rimbaud
Translations of titles by Bertrand Mathieu

February 23, 2006

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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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Adventures in Transition: Definitely not Fast as Lightening Edition

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, This Was My Life

Last night I took an aikido class for the first time in three years.

I first started doing aikido about ten years ago, during the summer when I finally started to treat my depression. I stayed for about two years at a very, very tough dojo, then quit for a variety of reasons (including my desire to quit my lousy job and go freelance.) About three years ago I found another dojo in my nabe and was there for maybe seven months, before the instructor moved to California.

The points being a) I’m not a complete beginner and b) all of this took place before my transition.

These are relavant because last night, for the first time ever, I had to leave the mat while class was in session. Twice.

Now, there are some decent reasons for that: it was hot and muggy yesterday. I didn’t eat a big lunch (my usual onsite gourmet meal of yogurt and a buttered roll, with a peanut butter granola bar thrown in for good measure.) I’ve gained a lot of weight recently. And of course, I did have major surgery five months ago.

I think there was more to it than all that. The fact of the matter is, I’m not the same person I used to be.

One of the things that shocked me about starting hormones was just how much muscle mass I lost in a relatively short time. I never needed to worry about binding my breasts (Not that there was a lot to bind. Then, I mean.) because my suits and dress shirts suddenly got huge on me. And I also stopped doing a lot of physical activity after a few months on HRT, so I wasn’t really keeping track of how much I was changing. (I dropped my gym membership after about six months because I couldn’t stand using the men’s locker room anymore, which meant that I stopped biking into work–about a 6.5 mile ride each way; in any case, I wasn’t pushing myself anywhere close to what I had done before hormones.)

So I think that a lot of what I learned once before I’m going to have to unlearn, because the strength (and endurance, until I get my wind back) just isn’t there anymore; a big part of my “failures” yesterday was trying to do things as if nothing had changed. But it has.

This isn’t really a bad thing, because one of the reasons I decided to go back to aikido is that it is the only martial art I know of with a philosophy against domination–and as you may have gleaned, my current project is to find ways to live without dominating other human beings. My first dojo had a definite macho air about it, and I learned to use my strength–not that I was Conan or something–in ways that let me blow past a lot of the deeper philosophical lessons of aikido, like blending with your partner or using her energy against her instead of using your own.

So like everything else related to my transition, this is a learning moment. And I hope I can really learn from it–maybe I’ll even be able to survive the whole class tomorrow.

I hope so–I have a peanut butter Twix bar waiting for me when I do.

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Blog note: I had wanted to start another new weekly feature, “Evil Willow’s Weekly Web Round Up,” which will have some snark–er, witty–commentary on the dreck that Google Reader finds for me, but for once there’s a paucity of teh stoopid on the nets right now–and a surfeit of actual, horrifying evil. So it can wait til next week.

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Adventures in Transition: Everybody Cut Footloose Edition

Categories: all about me, teh tranz, This Was My Life

Greetings, ducks! Yesterday I decided to drag myself out of the cave also known as my apartment and force myself to have some of that dreaded “social interaction” people are always on about–specifically, I decided to jerk myself around to a syncopated rhythm while obeying patriarchal orders and occasionally crashing into people.

Yes, I went dancing.

Here in the Metropolis, there is a series of Sunday dances down on a pier during the summer. I used to go to these things long ago, long before my transition–hell, long before my brief metrosexual days. I enjoyed going–I had been one of those people who never thought she could dance, until my then-girlfriend convinced me to take some lessons, and I discovered I could do it, after a fashion. And that I liked to do it.

This time, however, would be different.

This time I was going to be there as a woman.

I managed to miss the free lesson they give before the dance, which was a shame, because not only was I rusty, I haven’t danced that much swing as the follower, and I had to sort out which leg went where. That was one worry.

The other worry was whether or not anyone would actually want to dance with me.

As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to get anxious around highly gendered spaces–and you don’t get more highly gendered than a partnered dance. (To be fair, I did see some women dancing together, but I have no idea if they were queer or just straight people without partners; I know for a fact I didn’t see any men dancing with each other.) So I had my usual uncomfortable thoughts: what if people read me? am I too tall for anyone to want to dance with? am I not pretty enough for people to want to dance with me? will I suck? (that last one wasn’t all that gendered, but an anxiety is an anxiety.)

Fortunately for me, plenty of people did end up dancing with me, some good, some bad. It was interesting to see the various styles of leading–having been a leader, I know how hard it can be to do well. One guy I danced with was maybe the best lead I’ve ever danced with–I always knew exactly what he wanted me to do–but the experience left me a little cold because I felt like I never got to do anything creative; I like to do some of my own moves when in open position, for example.

It was an interesting counterpoint to when I had first started to go out to dances as a man, and had to overcome decades of painful shyness and ask people to dance with me. I’m not sure which is easier, to be honest, to ask or wait to be asked.

I also ran into my ex-wife and her fiance. Which was a little weird; we’re on good terms, but it was definitely an odd interaction. Even weirder is that we met at this very same dance all those years ago (we met movie-cute.) I suppose I cold have upped the ante and danced with her, but I think we both felt that would have pushed the awkwardness skyward.

My anxieties then were mostly for naught. More than that: at one point I stood watching the sunset behind the bandstand, listening to the music and feeling the breezes blow on me, and I was just so damn happy–because this is how I wanted it to go, to finally feel at peace with myself and my body and who I wanted to be, to bask in the same beautiful weather I had enjoyed all those years ago when I went to my first dance, except this time it was so much better, so much deeper, so much more right.

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Adventures in Transition, Special North Dallas Forty Edition: Face the Pain

Categories: all about me, beauty mythology, teh tranz, This Was My Life

Greetings, ducks, from Dallas, where today it didn’t crack 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That actually made the news. Today, we continue our unintentional Trans Week (good week for it, though) with yet more about body modifications:

In the 26 months since I decided to transition, I’ve made a number of physical alterations to my body, both to make me feel better about myself, and to make it easier for me to blend in the world as a woman. The vaginoplasty you already know about; I’ve made oblique mention to the fact that I had breast implants done at the same time. (The rumors are true about that: the augmentation hurt more than the GRS; it’s one thing to not be able to sit up for several weeks, and quite another to not be able to move your arms for four days.) And seventeen months ago, right when I went fulltime, I had plastic surgery to trim down my jaw and chin, which were quite heavy once upon a time.

None of these visible surgeries were to make me more conventionally beautiful, not even the breast implants–it was always about just trying to have something resembling the female body I feel I should have had, if things had only turned out differently. (Seriously, Scout’s honor, and you know, I was a Boy Scout once.)

But my longest investment in time and money has been electrolysis, to remove what’s left of my beard.

Getting rid of my facial hair was actually a project I began long before I began to seriously consider transition; I started laser treatments about a month after I separated from my wife. Even though I wasn’t really thinking of it as a step towards transition, I still had a lot of trepidation about it–after all, ti was the first thing I had ever tried to permanently feminize my appearance, and as such it became a mental Rubicon of sorts; if I crossed that barrier, would I inevitably start on a transition path? (Er–yes, but not because of the laser.)

Unfortunately, I have light hair and light skin, which is only one half (the light skin) part of the ideal candidate profile for laser treatments. While it definitely helped somewhat (I was fairly quickly able to stop wearing heavy foundation and switch to tinted moisturizer), laser was never going to be the final answer for me. So two years ago, after I had started hormones, I began getting electrolysis.

Ducks, you need to know this: I am a wimp about pain. Sure, I can take it when I need to, but in general I try to minimize it as much as possible. And since I also had the disposable income, I decided to go to Electrology 3000, in Dallas. I chose them not only because they are really good at hair removal, but because uniquely amongst electolyisists in North America, they use anesthetic during the sessions. That is, they inject your face with lidocaine.

This has a lot of advantages–since you have to let your hairs grow (so they can tell which ones are active) for several days, there’s an advantage to having your whole face cleared in a single day, something not really possible without anesthetic. (I’ve felt electrolysis without the lidocaine–not something you’d want to sit through for a couple of hours.)

The problem is, the lidocaine hurts: it gets injected at a shallow angle, multiple times, and it burns like acid under the skin. Sure, it’s just for a few minutes, but those few minutes are pretty hellish–I cried the first time.

I still think it’s worth it. Not because I couldn’t be a woman with some facial hair; I’ve known plenty of women like that. No, it’s worth it because of what it does for me–because shaving was the most masculine thing I did every day; because the things I had to do to cover up my beard were so frustrating and annoying, and such a reminder of who I wasn’t; and because stubble is one of the things that remind me most of who I was.

So I keep coming. After a while, the lidocaine gets hurts less. And so does my past.

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The Second Awakening: Special Retro-Mobile Edition!

Categories: all about me, posting at the speed of Amtrak, silly blather, teh tranz, This Was My Life

Sgniteerg Skcud! I mean, greetings, ducks! I’m on my way home again and blogging at 50 mph, after spending a weekend teaching myself to play the theme from Love Story, listening to my niece read to me, and finally catching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Hulu. Which, along with my return homewards, has me in a retrospective mood.

I didn’t watch Buffy back when it was on TV–oddly enough, I had seen (and even liked) the movie, and maybe that kept me away at first; I remembered the film as harmless fluff. By the time I heard that Joss Whedon had taken it in a very different, darker, and (as usual) beautifully-characterized direction, it was too late to catch up on things and I didn’t want to try to come in late. So I missed it, until now.

I’m not one of those trans peeps who regrets not having a girlhood, per se; I know how lousy my adolescence was, and I really don’t think having been female would have helped much. (Or would it? I’ve become such a different–and better–person since I transitioned, maybe it would have worked out…) But that doesn’t keep me from occasionally getting blue about–about the tremendous waste involved with my early life, the years of being strangled with doubt and confusion, the horrific amount of mental baggage I carried around. And then too there is the consciousness of not having had a girlhood, of not having had to deal with being a teen ager, of all the ways my history separates me from other women.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t compensations; I was raised to believe that all things were possible for me, whereas sadly far too many women I know were raised to believe that they could be only those things that were proper. I might have been drowning in dysphoria, but I was never stifled by sexism, never silenced by society. I might have struggled with my assigned role, but it was a lot easier role to deal with than being an adolescent female.

On the other hand, though, try being the boy in sixth grade with a stuffed animal collection that covers his bed. That hill ain’t so fun to climb either.

I adore Buffy so far. I love how the show manages to have empowered female characters, to show the human side of everyone, all without denying the ordinary pressures of adolescent society: Buffy might be a superhuman being with an awesome responsibility, but she worries about being popular; Xander’s sly self-deprecation reminds me of someone I used to know (Ahem. It was one way to deal with always being picked on.) And I love Willow, even if she hasn’t become a witch yet.

Plus, Joss Whedon’s pitch statement–“high school as a horror movie”–pretty much sums up my recollection of those days.

Even so, watching it can’t but help stir the pot of my memories–if part of my tranisition has been learning about how unhappy I used to be (without even knowing it), then high school was me at my most miserable–tormented by my strangeness, my awkwardness, and the horrible feelings I had that I feared were at the root of everything. Watching Buffy can lead me to those “if only” moments–if only I knew that I could be a woman, if only I knew how happy it would make me–if only I could have just been born female and avoided all of this pain.

I can’t change that. I’m not even sure I would if I could; the person I am today was forged on the anvil of my transness, and I would be a very different person indeed without it. And I like that person, more and more every day.

So I shouldn’t regret the past. If only I could.

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Sandcastle Virtues

Categories: all about me, teh tranz, This Was My Life, tv (trans)

Once I knew a crossdresser named Monica. This was several years ago, when I was a regular in the transgender demimonde–the curious collection of repurposed-for-a-night bars and “safe” restaurants we frequented on the weekends. Given that most people in this world were closeted, or like me, semi-closeted–I was out to all the important people in my life, but the idea of going out in public during the day was still too frightening–and this was their one chance to “go out” (that’s how we said it, too: “I’m going out this weekend” meant going somewhere crossdressed), after a while you got to know the regulars, the ones that were there every week: that girl who always wore pleather fetish outfits; the married couple that dropped in so the husband could dance and flirt with guys while the wife got wrecked at the bar; the very pretty, I-can’t-believe-she’s-forty crossdresser who had once run her own trans themed party but now was limited to a few nights out a month because she had a young kid.

Over time, Monica and I became close friends; I even saw her male self a few times, and later on she got to see mine when I invited her to my birthday. We both agreed that these “parties” were nothing more than an extension of the closet; we deplored together the awful dance music the hostesses played (not that it would have mattered much: it is a curious fact that most of the white, middle-aged CDs I knew didn’t like to dance); we longed for something more than the desultory anomie of these Saturday nights, but neither of us was ready yet to try to do anything more.

Not everyone who came to these parties was a crossdresser. Some wives and girlfriends came, whose expressions ran the gamut from pie-eyed terror to exhilarated joy. We always looked at these women with curiousity, scarcely allowing ourselves to believe that it was possible to find a woman who could deal with–with all this. There were also the trannie chasers. They were a hard crew to figure out–perhaps because most of them were having a hard time figuring out their own attraction. Some wanted to crossdress but couldn’t face their own fears; some wanted to suck a dick attached to something feminine, to mitigate their attraction to male genitalia; and a few just seemed to be turned on by trans bodies. The greater part of them were very shy, standing with their backs to the wall or the bar, always looking just slightly uncomfortable.

We all looked down on the chasers.

There was one group that we looked up to, though: the transsexuals. Relatively few ever came out to these nights, which somehow made us respect them more–they had done it, they had transitioned and they didn’t need an extended closet to be women in. A few did come by, though, out of nostalgia, or maladjustment to their new lives; out of friendship for other transgendered people who hadn’t transitioned, or out of a need for a safe space as they first began their transitions; out of curiosity or empathy or condescension. They fascinated us. These were people that were more than just women for the weekend; they were women period now, and their stories haunted and attracted us.

For a lot of crossdressers, the idea of transition is something that you never really ever let go of. I think this may be because as a transgendered person, you want to be the opposite sex, even if it is only for a little while; so to deny that you would want to transition is to deny that you want to be a woman, which is what you really do want to do. It’s all highly confusing, and I think that was one of the reasons we sought out transsexuals: to find our boundaries, to compare stories and see where they were different, to listen to the struggles they had undergone in order to transition and silently do a secret accounting of our own lives and wonder if the price we’d pay would actually be worth it in the end.

But we were told–or at least we had heard–that there were real differences between crossdressers and transsexuals; that crossdressers never transitioned, that transsexuals were in such pain from their gender inconsonance that they had no other choice but to transition. And we believed those stories, crossdressers and transsexuals alike; we crossdressers told our wives and girlfriends that we weren’t destined to transition, and transsexuals told the world that they weren’t just men who liked to wear women’s clothing.

There was one transsexual who was a regular. I didn’t really know why Ingrid kept coming (and after a while, she just didn’t), but I guess she fit into the category of people who were starting transition and needed a place to get their bearings. We were friendly, and used to talk politics and Japanese martial arts and the American songbook–she had a lovely voice and sometimes would sing a few bars of Cole Porter.

One thing about Ingrid did bother me, though: she didn’t like Monica. Or rather, she thought she was a mess, directionless, and misguided. Now, truth be told, Monica’s hairstyle was out of the Marilyn Quayle school of immobility, her clothing choices were pretty drab and uninspired, and her shoes–well, it’s best not to talk about them. I had myself recently graduated from my evening-wear phase, when I would wear gowns and formal dresses out to bars and had started to dress in a fashion that I thought a woman of my age might dress. So that gave me license to be a bit of a snob, and I am ashamed to say that sometimes I snarked right along with Ingrid.

In the trans community, people tend to be judged on a scale that I will call–borrowing it from the world of drag–realness. This isn’t surprising, given that the very drive that defines us as transgendered is to be the opposite sex. Realness is a troubling term, though. It’s not that it’s inaccurate–it very accurately describes the attitudes I usually encountered. But we made “realness” mean the same thing as “authenticity”–we based our perceptions of you as a person on how close you were to this ideal of “womanhood.” Thus, people who wore everyday clothes were superior to people who wear fetishistic clothes; people who lived as women were better than people who only crossdressed on the weekend; people who had had the surgery were better than people who hadn’t, or didn’t want to.

Wearing pants was even somehow better than wearing a skirt–because real women didn’t wear skirts all the time. (Neither do crossdressers in their everyday lives, but making that point hardly helped their case.) In fact, it was a bitter joke amongst us that if you started to show up wearing pants, it meant you were bound to eventually transition.

If I would sometimes put Monica down, I also defended her; I would point out that she was one of the sweetest, kindest people I knew, and that went a lot further with me than her fashion sense; and in any case, the more she came out, the better she looked. But no matter; Ingrid thought she was a hopeless case, and Ingrid was a woman of firmly-held convictions.

Besides, Monica and I were both crossdressers, and so clearly didn’t know what we were talking about.

It’s been a long time since I was a regular in that world, and I’ve learned quite a bit since then. One thing that I learned is that I wanted to transition, that the bright lines I had drawn were a lie; crossdressers really did transition. That led me to question other things, to wonder if being a transsexual actually made you more real; or was it that, crossdressers were perfectly real crossdressers? And that somehow, that wasn’t wrong or something to put people down about? On one of my last trips out to one of these parties, I was sitting at the bar, silently smirking at this or that poorly-done outfit, when an elderly crossdresser came in. Her dress looked terrible on her, her lipstick was as crooked as a Vermont dirt road, and her wig was haphazardly clinging to the top of her head. But when I looked more closely, I could see the pure joy in her eyes, the incredible relief at being able to finally express this part of herself. And my smirk died a cold death on my face and I–I in my careful makeup and fashionable clothes–I was ashamed.

Since then I’ve learned much more about feminism and power structures; I see now that what we saw as realness was nothing else than judging people on their looks; that people have the right to define their own gender/personality/womanhood however they want to, and that makes it as real as anyone else’s. I learned, too, how often it is in underprivileged communities that heirarchies arise, tiny parodies of the larger, oppressive order. I learned that trans people were hardly alone in equating realness with authenticity; everywhere I looked among the various underprivileged communities I encountered–female, feminist, people of color–I saw the same pattern of holding other members of your group up to your own personal ideal, and then calling them out on how far they fell short of it. People complained about it; long and bitter struggles took place with each faction trying to prove their authenticity to each other. And yet the patterns persisted, over and over and over again.

I last saw Monica four years ago, on my birthday. She wore a tasteful leather suit, a short wig, and perfect makeup–she looked, in short, the very model of a still-rockin’ suburban woman in her 40s. She had begun to play electric guitar–she was a huge Kiss fan–and had even done her own drag act in Las Vegas. She was still one of the sweetest people I have ever met. And she seemed very happy.

I ran into Ingrid about a year later at a Julia Serrano reading. By that point I was well into my own transition; in fact, outside of onsite visits to my clients, I presented as female all the time. Ingrid, on the other hand, seemed to be much as I had last known her; she was presenting as male that day, which surprised me–it had been five years since I’d seen her last, I thought she’d have gone fulltime by then.

I wondered if she still though Monica was a mess. If she, and me, were still wedded to our fantasy heirarchies, our own petite power trips. I still wonder that about myself.

Despite our internecine conflicts, we still manage to gain a victory and then all of us move forward: sissies can get married just the same as the straightest-acting modern Mattachinist; the woman who clutched her pearls until her hands bled got to vote the same as a bloomers-wearing suffragist; and maybe, just maybe, one day crossdressers and transsexuals will both be able to pee in peace.

We are like children on the beach, building little sandcastles, while above us the guns of a real fort threaten our lives. And yet, rather than march together on that fort, we bicker over how grand our sandcastles are, how much better they arethan other people’s, how beautiful, how necessary, how safe. And so we will stay until these sandcastle virtues are all swept away.

by

The Second Awakening: A Moral History

Categories: let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz, This Was My Life, tiger beatdown rocks, vive le feminisme, why i blog

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”

–George Orwell, “Why I Write”

I want to thank everyone who dropped by in the last day or so–it is a remarkable experience to see your page views jump 9,500%, even if it is humbling to consider how few visits you got beforehand. (Especial thanks, of course, to Sady of Tiger Beatdown who gave this blog a rave review.)

I am still figuring out not only what this blog’s subject matter will be but also how to live a feminist life. I’ve talked before about how I slowly awakened into a feminist consciousness, and then found myself roused a second time as a result of my transition. But I don’t think I’ve conveyed the profoundness of the changes I’ve experienced in the last–can it be so short?–16 months.

I think I was always some sort of weak-valence feminist. My mother may not have used the term for herself, for some reason, but she definitely believed women should have all the rights of men. She’s told me over the years how she prefers the conversation of men of her generation, because she dislikes the domestic subjects most women of her age engage in–perhaps an over broad generalization on her part, but there is no question that she felt she had the right to engage in the traditionally male spheres of politics, religion, social policy, etc. Certainly my father was like-minded; neither of them gave their children any hogwash about “proper” gender roles.

So I grew up about as gender-blind as a boy in the 1970s could be, or at least a boy in the 1970s who was conscious of wanting to be a girl, or at least wearing girls’ clothing–I wasn’t always sure of the difference, early on. (When I was maybe four or five, I sometimes would run up to the mirror in my bedroom in the morning hoping I’d been changed into a girl overnight. Sometimes–sometimes I would delay getting out of bed, hiding under the covers in order to hold myself in some sort of Schrödingian state of not-maleness, trying to hold on to the desperate possibility of transformation. That there was a way to collapse the waveform without using a mirror never occurred to me; so you can see that the distinction between being a girl and dressing like one wasn’t particularly clear to me yet. And that I was a very weird little boy. But you’d probably gathered that already.)

I think by the time I knew what a feminist was I had no problem describing myself as one–at least as far as my understanding of what a “feminist” was anyway; I had heard it meant that you believed in women’s rights–I was ignorant of the larger controversies. Perhaps that was a good thing; I was generally incredulous of people who didn’t call themselves feminists–it seemed ludicrous to deny that women were people just as good as men, as outdated as racial prejudice, which my parents had strenuously sanitized from our upbringing.

That is not to say that I was some Kwisatz Haderach of gender-studies, the result of some cabalistic breeding program perhaps founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Dr. Blackwell. Like most men of my position–and I’ll call myself that for the purposes of this post, even though there are some issues in applying without qualification the label of “man” for what I was–I was largely unconscious of my privilege, and I picked up the usual assortment of stereotypes, falsities, foolishnesses and outright idiocies. Some were survival tactics–if you walk amidst the world of men without the courage to show your real self, you learn how to camoflouge yourself–some were simple artifacts of my time and gender, and some were just stupid blindspots. I didn’t believe in any of the idiocies I sometimes mouthed–the occasional misogynistic/homophobic/even, god help me, racist joke–but neither did I believe particularly strongly in the opposite positions, at least not strongly enough to protest very loud. I had no courage of my convictions; being all-in was terrifying to me; I was, in short, your garden-variety fauxgressive.

I am deeply ashamed of all that today.

The first signs of any changes happened during my marriage, which I know I have not talked about before. My wife and I had suffered through a few years of tearful impasse about my transness–this was back when I still identified as a crossdresser–only to come to a fairly reasonable accomodation. She sometimes would come with me to dinners and social events with other trans people, and in turn I was experimenting with metrosexuality and ways to enjoy my masculinity. During this time I met helen boyd and began to learn about feminism beyond my lukewarm “women’s rights” position.

It was the beginning of the 21st century, Bush was in office, political oppression was in the air, and I was reading Backlash and The Beauty Myth and for the first time really waking up to the misogyny all around me. Yet my motivation was complex…part of it was the realization that as a crossdresser, a person who sympathized with women, who saw myself at least in part as a woman, I needed to go beyond the trappings of feminity and learn about the real experiences of women; part of it was meeting bold, feminist women and listening to their stories; and part of it was the progressiveness and liberalism that I found myself taking up now that they were threatened. Even so, while my passion for feminism grew to a white-hot passion, it was still an intellectual passion–at root, I could always take solace in my disconnection from it on an everyday level.

A young trans woman of my acquaintance once asked me about life as a woman. She had been reading my diatribes against transphobia and misogyny on a message board we both belonged to, and wanted to know, was it really so bad? Was she really going to feel constantly oppressed?

No, I said, it wasn’t so bad–but the thing is, once I had transitioned, I never had to seek out misogyny again. Before transition, I could ignore it, I needed people to point it out to me–but after transition, I see it constantly. And that changed everything; I was shorn of my detatchment; the political became truly personal, and awoke my outrage.

And that is the essence of the second awakening. I cannot claim to know, to feel what it is like to have been the target of misogyny my whole life; I’m not sure I can even claim to know what it’s like to feel transphobia my whole life–it is difficult to make evaluations like that when you’re in the closet. I have no doubt that I will make a lot of mistakes in the future as I continue my mission to discover what a feminist life will look like for me. Which is why I am so glad for the women I’ve found in the feminist blogosphere, for Liss and her Shakers, for Pam and her Blenders, and especially for Sady and her Beatdowns–because it was Sady who gave me the template for the kind of blog I wanted to write, one that was mostly impersonal (I am anonymous, after all) but still came from a deeply personal place of passion and outrage, to create something that wasn’t just reportage or even opinion, but my own work of art, a monument to my implacable fury.

I’m still learning. But I’m thankful to have you along for the ride.

by

On Why the Cat Is Mad

Categories: Outrage, teh tranz, This Was My Life, vive le feminisme

For most of my life I’ve been folded safely in the arms of privilege.

I grew up in the suburbs of a Great American Metropolis. My parents were both college-educated professionals. I’m white, and at the time I was male. In America, it doesn’t really get too much better than that–we were the norm you were supposed to aspire to you. (Even people whose income put them in the upper classes describe themselves as “middle class.”)

In my case, though, there was one flaw in the picture: I was trans. As early as three or four I knew I wanted to be a girl, though it took a long time for me to put that plan into action. So much of my mental energy went into managing that problem, especially once I started to crossdress in secret during junior high. I got good at lying, dissembling, concealing; my social life was a disaster; I probably hated myself.

Nothing special there, though–any number of trans people could tell that story.

No, what I want to get to is that despite my transness and its conflicts and encumbrances, I still could retreat into the safety of my white, (apparently) cis, (apparently) straight, middle class privilege. Even after I moved to Metropolis and became a regular in the trans subculture, I still had the refuge of putting myself out to the world as a white man.

Now, even before I began to transition, I was becoming aware of my privilege. I encountered the work of helen boyd, who challenged me to become a feminist. In the summer of 2005, the last happy year of my marriage, I embarked on a reading binge that changed my personal feminist convictions from lukewarm to white-hot.

That didn’t change through the early days of my transition. As I became essentially fulltime, my convictions were nothing if not reinforced. How could they not be? Misogyny began to be something I had to deal with at street level.

All that said, there was still a–detachment, call it–from these things. After all, I still had plenty of privilege stockpiled–still white, still (apparently) cis, still (apparently) straight. The Great American Metropolis has liberal attitudes, and misogyny was something no longer overt. I could still blithely glide over things, if I chose.

Being able to ignore things is the essential definition of privilege.

What changed, was: I had surgery. And since then, my feminist convictions have changed from an intellectual pursuit to something I feel in my gut; they have become a viewpoint, the criterion I use to make sense of the world.

And you know what? It sucks that it took my surgery to do that. It sucks that even living and identifying as a woman I was still able to traipse lightly over inconvenient truths. I’m not proud of the fact that I needed the surgery to reach this point.

But I did. The major change I’ve noticed since the operation is that I no longer have reservations or doubts about being a woman. Not that I wasn’t before: my womanhood is not transactional, and can’t be limited or reduced.

Before, though, that was an intellectual conviction; today, it’s something I feel in my soul.

And now, when I see misogyny, when I see stupid shit directed at women simply because they are women, I get pissed: “Hey! They’re talking about me!” Again, it completely sucks that I took so long to reach this place. I am humbled by the women I know and admire who had to endure this from birth.

That didn’t, couldn’t happen to me. And maybe that’s why I’ve become so engaged: that having seen, firsthand, how privilege can invisibly change your life, it’s left me a bitter foe of it in all its manifestations. Not so much to lift my boat–this isn’t an attempt for me to reclaim my lost male privilege. You can stuff male privilege.

No, it’s more this: having had privilege, lost privilege, gained others (many would privilege me over other trans people because I am transsexual, have had the surgery, look female, etc.), I no longer want privilege to exist at all.

Maybe that’s a radical position. Call me a Marxist, a bomb-thrower, a lunatic. Tell me that I only feel this way because I hurt so much and regret losing my former advantages.

I won’t care. Because it doesn’t matter how I got here; what matters is that I’m here now, and ready to start to pitch in.

And thus I dedicate this blog: to be a record of my implacable, boundless outrage; my mouthpiece to the world; my voice crying in the wilderness, adding itself to the chorus of other women everywhere.

I wasn’t born to the fight; but I’ll fight now forever.