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Monday, February 22, 2010

A year more with feeling

Some pictures...
I often think of my present state as comparable to a small girl looking through the furniture and the devices of a 50 something year old man, accepting and rejecting and reshaping through a t-grrrl's touch and gaze, and in the process growing into some kind of woman. In those terms I'm averaging about 11-12 years old, proud of my adult pieces of knowledge and aware of a long adolescence ahead. Socially I sometimes characterise this as my first year of learning playground lessons.
And feelings are far stronger and have a more central role in how I perceive the world. Because thats how it is when you're growing up amongst all these new hormonal influences. Thats how it is when you try and navigate through unfamiliar territory and need to rely on simple senses before cognitive understanding takes over. Thats how it is when you lose your cis status.
And those are the things you write when bullshit overcomes brains. Because I don't see those explanations as being remotely adequate.
Another picture.
Dealing with emotions as a man is like driving a car, as a woman more like riding a horse. Gaining a better understanding and control of emotions requires a different paradigm of development now as a woman. Recapitulating male adolescence doesn't work for the good reason that emotional discrimination is finer and more discrete now, and simply works better in areas where formerly I'd seek to discriminate by distanced differentiating judgements. Its more efficiently rational. The difference is, for me, that I can get far more information and understanding out of emotions as a perceptual system than I could before, because now they're operating within a partially changed sensorium in respect of mode of self reference.
Is this part of a theory involving a gender dimorphism in the act of cognition as mediated by sensoria, I hear no-one in particular ask. Yes.
Apart from that, I'm mostly feeling good.
Worries about keeping my place going through health problems, and sorting out better medical resources, a certain amount of blocking considering problems of health outlook and care relationships, and a refusal to consider yet what my ultimate operative status might be.
The more I grow to access the female world, to understand female languages and to express myself more in femme transfeminist terms, the more happy and fulfilled I can be. And it is a brave new world that hath such people in it as now surround me. Its a fairly queer one too.
A last picture.
A year ago I felt as a shipwrecked sailor on a makeshift raft, a long way out at sea from the lands of cis. Now I'm on a small but solid boat, learning control of direction by sailing through the winds and waves of emotions through gender shoals.
And lets face it. If I can throw around pictures constituted by such shopworn tropes, I must be reasonably ok.

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