Sophia´s Choices

An odd perspective

2012-01-07T00:34:00.000+01:00

There are a couple of things I take more or less for granted that I suppose I should spell out.
Essentially I see myself as different from the majority of transsexuals in two ways.
The first, and most obvious, is how I came to hormonal transition 'accidently'. It is relatively rare, though fairly sharp late life development of major gender issues does seem a relatively known phenomena. Generally it gets put down to suppression of TS traits, which I suppose helps the psychiatric industry but which I have absolutely no faith in. Having recently discovered the world of captioning and forced feminisation I can understand how stories like mine might seem contrived. Generally I look at myself as someone successfully containing an abnormal amount of female traits within a male shell. I certainly didn't switch from typical male to female, but on the other hand I do believe that I came a very long distance in one night. After all it did take nearly a year of changed hormones before that mental tipping point was reached. Altogether, though, I relate to it as having an odd rather than really distinct history.
Where I do see myself as very different is in regard to my attitude towards my process.I suddenly found myself in a state profoundly different than any I'd known before, whatever the curiously familiar aspects were.
The drive to understand just what these profound changes were and how they've continued to change me, has been paramount throughout. In this way I do see myself as rather different. It is something that arises very much from the concertina-like nature of the transition from non questioningly seeing myself as male to being completely sure of myself as female.
A good example might be my last post on memory. I think most of us in TS transition experience changes in memory performance. But clearly if one is firmly in a process of finally becoming the woman that one was meant to be,a fair part of that can be ascribed in general terms to the withering away of association with the previous male life and the new more vivid reality of life fully lived as a woman.
Or take conversation. Have read a number of times of people finding relief at laying down the burden of macho competitiveness when talking to guys. For me I had huge problems in starting transition and talking with guys because I'd start off in the same way as I had done for many years purely out of habit, and because the guys around me were initially only slowly learning not to treat me like the guy they'd known for years. But very soon in going for those sorts of conversation, I felt almost physically sick. Essentially the testosterone reward of greater alertness that had been a concomitant of those competitive based conversations for years had just gone. And the way I look at that isn't much in terms mainly of my personal journey but more in how certain underlying principles of differentiation that permeate the male day to day self are extremely dependent on neuro-hormonal variables.

Very early on I was talking to an old friend I'd known for about 30 years about my process. One thing I said seemed to resonate with him and has been something of a mantra for myself. It went 'Yay, I'm an experimental subject again'. Am happy to agree that the notion of 'real self' makes great sense in terms of individuals' separate journeys of self understanding. But understanding the ground of gender doesn't come from analysing the train wreck of the previous assigned sex and the vision of another one. It may come, and if one accepts that we're talking about neurology rather than psychiatry I'd say it must come, from the ways in which we journey and can chart our individual routes from the wreck to the new model. However much we know ourselves to be citizens of, say, the country of women we still need to journey to it, through changes that leave no part of us untouched. It's the most profoundly moving experience of our lives. We may never be the most knowledgable of citizens but in that one special journey whereby we view that land from it's borders we have our unique, and uniquely valuable perspective.
That we all do in our various ways but I really do feel that in my circumstances I should try and give as evidential a narrative to my transition as possible. Even though my general health seems surprisingly to have reached a point when it's just possible that GRS could happen, sudden catastrophe like liver cancer is always possible. And though it's altered now there was that other difference between me and others; that I wasn't transitioning to start a new life as much as hoping to be transitioned before I died.

Another year, another remembrance.

2012-01-01T17:07:00.000+01:00

A sort of interim post, some thoughts, probably mainly for post-HRT trans women, springing from some talks with women about memory changes.
There's a fair amount of material on ways in which male and female memory vary from each other. Several of these variables would seem likely to be affected by hormone change, (sensory cues,stress etc).This isn't simply psychological. Men and women use different areas of the brain when scanned during memory tasks.
Additionally it seems that changes in the hormone system also affect memory. Post menopausal women, for example, go through a diminution in memory abilities.
For myself I am aware of a few changes. An increase in TOTP,(tip of the tongue phenomena), occasional lapses in long term memory retrieval and memories from the last couple of years being rather more vivid than I'd expect. More changes in life experience memory than learned data. Not really major changes and if it hadn't come up in conversation with a trans woman and then a neurologist friend in the last couple of days I wouldn't have thought much about it.
But considering it in the light of my own model I got to speculating whether the changes might be an internal equivalent of an external capability. That's the reasonably well established idea that men and women seem to locate themselves in different ways. Ask directions from a guy and you're likely to be told them in mildly abstract terms, say, 'take the second on the left then head north on the b12 until...' compared with'go left at the church and then down the hill toward the river'. Basically men go more by abstract directions, women by concrete landmarks. Obviously there's variation but this is a fairly clear distinction. And it's one I'm aware of as an alteration in myself.
So the speculation runs that some life memory may operate according to the same paradigm.That whilst for a guy some memories are obviously more important than others, his memories are organised fairly independently and retrieval coming through initial search terms. Women, on the other hand, might tend to have memories more accessible through sensory cues and their placement within the personal life process. I'm not wholly sure, but when I think of times around men and women when memories are jogged by others, I seem to recall women giving context by relativity to other events and men more by some extra quality of the to-be-remembered event.
And then, to take that speculation to a possibly fanciful extreme, one might say that articulating our transitioning narratives is perhaps one way we go about a reinterpretation of the past into a restructured form of memory theatre. That in composing and telling the stories of our past we're rendering it more accessible to our changed selves. Additionally, perhaps, we may concentrate on a festive occasions more, because such events may also be more meaningful as structural elements of life memory, landmarks for our future selves to navigate by.
It was a full christmas for me this year, some good meetings, renewals of friendships and maybe some new ones made. I'll remember it well.
Many hopes that you've had the same.

An odd storytelling

2011-12-29T18:17:00.000+01:00

So the way I tend to describe myself, in trans terms, to people I meet, goes something like this.
That there tend to be two typical narratives for trans women. In the first they are very clear from an early age as to what they are and tend to transition fairly early in life. The second is of those who sat on that knowledge, or more probably weren't as sure or as desperate, who may have had to go through a variety of entanglements and typically transition later in life.
And that then there are the rest of us.
That I'm one that was born under the impact of accidental hormonal transition and started shedding my previous supposed gender with extreme speed.
And I'll tell them about the growing evidence for neurological explanations of transsexuality and how, in a small way, my own case is evidential. My normal model is that my brain was, with testosterone, just able to perform male, and then the change to estrogen rendered that impossible and meant it now runs as it really always should've done, not so much genderbending but more a straightening up.
And I'll talk to them about puberty and going through that again. Talking with several hundred people, mainly women, that's when acceptance of the nature of the transitioning process seems to get through : that it's not about presentation as much as travelling through an equivalent period of struggle that was difficult and formative in their lives when their hormonal balance changed in adolescence.
Maybe I go on to say that probably the best test for transsexuality is HRT because without the appropriate neurological structures it has little effect beyond bodily changes.
And I'll probably mention surgery in fairly functional terms.
At some point I'll talk about the suicides, the murders, the assaults, the social pressures, the reasons far too many of us lead lives of solitary desperation.
Answering the questions is an interesting process. I'm fairly adept at talking about before and after states, and only really encounter problems with the usual suspects - people who've had some personal or academic exploration of gender which leads them to believe they truly know all about it. Contrariwise there are some who are accepting to the point of jealousy. Most temper a mild envy with relief that it's someone else going through it.Can't count the number of times people have congratulated me on having lived two lives. I don't know how the acceptance I get with my narrative compares with the more standard one of always being the target sex, but my feeling is that I get a lot more understanding from those I meet than normally happens, simply because their potential modes of interraction with me are clearer.
I'll enter these conversations, obviously not with everyone and now only a couple of times a month, for all sorts of reasons. My professional situation gives rise to a lot more intimate discussions than would normally be the case and the separation between social and business blurs. My place does conventional business but it's also a club / salon type of thing with a constantly changing membership in which I'm fairly central. Being trans is a major part of my life, and it's one others find interesting, and given that I'm completely out here it's actually rather better to introduce the topic myself than have them find out from others or through reading me ambiguously. At present I pass perfectly well on the street or in casual meetings but my voice is still no thing of unalloyed beauty when my usual sinus problems crop up or simply when I'm tired.
On top of that I really do feel that if one is in a situation where it is possible to be out then it is a relatively good thing for the trans community as a whole. When I do the occasional interview I try to put some trans element in for the same reason. And for myself I think I'm not so much outting myself as trans as saying I'm someone in transition. When you're learning from all the women around you, I do believe it to be a more effective process when they're aware of it.
I wonder from time to time about how others of my kind tell their stories and structure their transitions. I know enough anecdotally to be able to say that I'm far from unique and that the numbers of those of us going through non-purposefully hormone induced neurological gender change are very understated, for obvious reasons. And standard trans narratives totally erase us. We're born like grey-eyed Athene, springing fully armed from the head of the god, or at least the pituitary thereof. And the beginning of our wisdom surely lies in seeking the best instructors at arms as we grow into our estate.
Now, after 3 years, the story telling gets less important. Most of the internal work is done, the queer world outside calls insistently, and I have no desire to hold myself back from it.Time to get active.

Past oddities

2011-11-26T21:09:00.000+01:00

I remember a time in my twenties when I was going up Fleet Street reading a book and walked straight into a lamppost. Actually this has not been the only time such a thing has happened to me by any means, but this was the time I thought to myself - 'Ah, that's the sort of person I am', accompanied by a vague mental image of professor branestawm. And that may have led me to not focus too much on whether elements in my lifestyle were evidential of underlying oddities since I've always seen myself as overbalanced toward a life of ideas. Additionally I was quite aware of having a lot of privileges - race, class, money, gender,etc - that I didn't mind using to make sure I was always working at something I've wanted to and to lead my life relatively free of a fair number of conventions. That something I justified to myself by trying to support communities I found myself in and to sabotage the roots of privilege as I saw them. How far that was true and how much a cover for simple self-indulgence, others can judge.
At this point perhaps I should give my relationship history. I have the feeling that most trans people lead relatively conventional relationship lives, excepting young transitioners, and presume that that comes from the trans condition being an overriding factor. Or people living other lives on the internet.
Myself I have not led a particularly conventional relationship life. It started off reasonably enough, a couple of brief girlfriends around 17 and then living together, marrying and being divorced by a woman, having helped produce my only child, all in a decade or so.But one or two odd things. It was an open marriage for the last few years, for one thing. And my emotional relationships with friends were more substantial than usual, in a non-sexual way. Through and after this I was also part of a sort of extended family scene with my best male friend at it's centre : a network of mutual friendship mediated by my friend, myself and 2 or 3 other people, including a small music circle, building people, esalen grads and others. That was a strong force in the next few years, though I had a number of short terms things. I've never really had or wanted some sort of one night stand. There is one real oddity I had in that I wasn't jealous ( as in not really knowing the emotion rather than simply not feeling too much of it). That always caused problems. I'd several times had a story from her that a girlfriend had slept with someone else,and responded normally with mild curiosity. Not a productive thing to do. And then there were the nights of endlessly discussing one girlfriends boyfriends sexual dysfunction and possible therapy which did get a bit boring, though he was a nice guy as I recall.
Anyway my 30's and early forties were taken up with brief and often very sexual things, friends close enough to verge on the romantic, a second marriage to a lovely woman who I still talk to, and another decade long relationship. The first few years of that were great, the last horrible and not really I think with any fault there. My best friend, who I'd been a major care giver for, suicided during a situation that was already highly stressful for me and my girlfriend who was also living with him and others in a shared house. She went back to europe, I followed going also to the foreign wing of the extended family.I hurt, I mourned and started to drink far too much as some sort of numbing. That's up to the same point of time as my last post.
A couple of further things. Since my 20's there'd also been a significant romantic thing with a woman who I tended to see at entirely the wrong times over a 20 year period - one or other of us being otherwise engaged. Don't think it ever destabilised anything, though can never be sure.
Hope none of this sounds like I saw myself as anything studlike. I've always tried to have a full measure of equality and sharing in relationships, be a general supporter of feminist issues within them etc, partly out of sheer distaste at striking a more primally male posture.
Friendships could often freight more emotionally than relationships and possibly I did always have somewhat more close female friends than male.
Does any of this really make for a secret trans history ? Really not sure because though I can see it as odd, it could be odd for all sorts of other reasons.
To end, another moment of self realisation, this time sans lamppost and sans the clarity of that other thought. It came during a time when I was socialising a lot in sf fandom and would go to the large monthly meetings. It came to me as I was sitting with a group of people who often spent these events at the same table with me. There was a woman who built large metal scuptures. Another who was going through her prime as a domina,( for some reason I've known a large number of dominas as friends) The third was a lesbian feminist taking a phd as part of her academic career, with whom I had a close relationship, emotionally,intellectually and stylistically (goth at the time). And it came to me that this was the kind of person I was, the sort to sit and talk and be comfortable in this kind of company.
Odd maybe.

Past secrets

2011-11-16T16:17:00.000+01:00

Perhaps the strangest change is how I look back on my life. The bare facts remain in memory but the meanings are now so elusive. What kind of a man was I to slip so smoothly from that chrysalis ? Can I lump my various discontents together and say that those were really gender constraints ? Do I have a secret history, one I was never aware of, that now becomes visible in retrospect ?
Anyway, to start with facts. I was born in London in the early '50s, brought up on the SE outskirts and then moved back in for about 20 years. My parents were prosperous middle class, my father an east end boy made good in business, my mother a teacher. I was a hot housed child ; the sort that had read most of Shakespeare and had a fair grasp of 19thC novels by secondary school. My mother had been precluded from going to university to read english by faulty timing,( entry scheduled in 1939 ), and was determined that I should vicariously fulfil her ambition. I attended a minor public school as a day pupil and, given that it didn't change from single sex before I left, am possibly now the oldest old girl extant.
I was an odd child in many ways. I rarely had a fixed group of friends and had no love for male competition. At about 11 I stopped putting much effort into school work because most was too simple. This was not an attitude which found favour with my parents, who promptly shipped me off to an educational psychologist who further perplexed them with an IQ test - generally I've been a lot closer to 200 than 100. I'd also worked out that school sports were really evolution in action, and devoted considerable efforts to avoid the most obviously homicidal ones,rugby,cricket etc. I did join the school cadet corps and on a camp at the age of 14 the sixties really opened up through the benevolent actions of a couple of members of the parachute regiment who were happy to sell some of their marijuana to a group of schoolboys.
And that helped usher in a lot of difference. In terms of the values and life style I had in later life, much came from '60s counter culture. Necessarily somewhat of a weekend freak, still remember Grosvenor Square, the concert in the park, etc etc.There was music - I had a friend whose father was an assistant bank manager. He got hold of the tickets his manager didn't want that were received automatically because of owning a box in the Albert Hall, so nearly every rock concert there... I helped groups involved in helping draft dodgers get to europe, read Oz and IT religiously, got clothes from Lord Kitcheners Valet and Biba and shared a dealer with the Pink Floyd. Academically I gave up literature after half a degree and then got a bsc phil / psych. Qualified as a teacher, did some further courses and work as a therapist and then ran my own business for the Thatcher years reading newspapers. I produced homemade newspapers from the nationals and internationals based on relatively complex briefs for multinationals and government. For a period Maggie would be reading my selection on waking, but I really do disclaim any responsibility for any consequencies. Lived opposite Di but would often hang out in Irish or Carribean neighbourhoods.
And then there were the other things. Always had some kind of property involvement from renovating my own places to helping out with a couple of family owned housing. My drug life was limited in quantity but high on quality and engagement. Mental exploration through psychedelics was a serious thing, and I mixed with a number of psychologists and magic chemists of similar persuasion. I don't particularly like to go into spiritual values, so simply I was buddhist by philosophy, an initiate within the western hermetic tradition by practice.
Relationships I came to late. Lived with and married one of my first girlfriends, divorced with one child. Never been anything but straight sexually, though experiencing the occasional threesomes and the odd group. Some of my very best friends have been dominas, but I never really made that scene. Never went for one night stands, never hugely into PIV sex, and my friends have been more female than male, and included a fair number of lesbians, though few gays.
When I think of trans precursors, there are a few things. I've always felt isolated from a lot of people around me, certainly never placed a value in being macho or on identifying as male whilst I did on having feminist attitudes, went for emotional rather than sexual connections.Conformist is a word never used about me, eccentric only too frequently - think you have to be English to understand just how insulting that is. One of the most fulfilling relationships of my 30s was with a lesbian separatist. Still and all, never crossed my mind that I wasn't male. Were times when I found it hard to think of myself as human, but then I'm a serious science fiction /fantasy fan/critic so....The only time I can actually remember ever wanting to be a woman was in order to attend Sara Lefanu's feminism in sf course from which my anatomical sex barred me.
Never had any desire at all to cross dress. But was one of the Kings Road exotics (just before punk hit the scene) and my clothes sense has always been different. A good friend, who's now a fashion blogger, once told me when I complained of people looking at me when I wasn't trying to make any sort of fashion statement that '****, you are a fashion statement'. Never had to wear anything for business more than a couple of times a year so it just...evolved that way. I'm rather more conservative now, and do not, for example, wear antique kimono jackets on the street.
I guess that goes up to the late 80s, early 90s, so to be continued...

While the iron is lukewarm

2011-11-08T16:46:00.000+01:00

Besides interpersonal dramas, the main reason I haven't posted anything recently is a succession of different mobility issues and being on and off pain killers, a state of mind that I find sabotages writing. And the days when I've had pain free walking capabilty, I've usually done just that. But it's about 6 outside and here I am with a quick roundup.
One thing I've been spending a lot of time on has been looking back on being a guy and the various cognitive differences. I've shied away from that in the past for a number of reasons. Chief, though, was the totally irrational fear of somehow slipping back. The sudden nature and relative involuntariness of my initial hormonal transition leaves me wary about such. Interesting process now, though, working out how all those pieces of armour laced themselves together.
Things get a lot more normal now. I celebrated my 14th birthday recently - it seemed about time, and hope to make 16 by next halloween. Physical changes still happening ; less and less body hair, boobs fitting nicely in a 42C, when I'm not dieting, and some mild redistribution of weight still. As to rather more desirable physical alterations, I'll be changing my liver specialist soon, for a number of reasons, and hopefully the next one will be slightly more amenable to surgical options.
Also actually trying using a bit more makeup. I've used eye shadow, occasionally mascara but normally dying lashes, and moisturiser on a constant basis, but rarely anything else. It might not really be age appropriate behaviour, but most of my friends are about 30 years younger than me and most are insistent that I don't buy into the cosmetics industry. But the occasional bit of variety is fun.
Clothes and I'm steadily moving to solids. Ocasionally browns but more usually black with red and or green. Always a bit of a surprise that I can wear those sorts of colours which I'd normally avoid as a guy. I wear skirts about 50 weeks a year. My place is only a courtyard walk from my flat so apart from odd forays to the local shops I dress for indoors and as flamboyantly as I choose, though I go extreme in that way far less often than when I was a guy. Still difficult to gauge who I'm really dressing for, in the way of sexual orientation. Really need to get out to a few queer places, or more preferably have the occasional queer trans night at my place.
And I suppose also considering the more spiritual aspects of transition. Rereading 'Splendor Solis' rather avidly and examining how my prime significator seems to have moved from Tammuz to Nuith, chariot to star.
Reading and, from a trans perspective I'd really recommend China Mieville's 'The city and the city'. Never very much liked the author. New Crobuzon was a nice creation but hardly 'Ambergris' and The iron council' has been on my shelf of evil books for ages. But this time with a less original idea and none of his usual bells and whistles he's written a really quite engaging novel with a metaphorical city of especial trans interest. And a warning for fantasy readers. People are saying R Scott Bakker has really improved with the first two of his second trilogy. He hasn't. Another warning for more conventional readers. The sun does not shine out of Miranda July's ... prose.
Hopefully a coming outish post next time and soon.

That awkward moment

2011-04-25T14:48:00.002+02:00

I knew I shouldn't have written anything about how I pass - it always seems that immediately after something contradicts it.
Actually this has happened to me 3 times in the last week and I'm really going to have to try and handle it better. The thing is that I don't put that much effort/importance into passing and kind of expect to be read, at least as somewhat odd, after a while, when I'm doing my usual thing of sitting in my place talking to people. And as part of meeting conversations I quite often bring up being trans. It doesn't normally affect negatively and I do like to show that trans people aren't weird sex freaks and put over some basic bits of education. Additionally it works for my own benefit with women, since I can place myself as an adolescent and occasionally get useful advice on coping with emotional turmoil etc.
Except it gets hard when I have that awkward moment, the one where I'm talking to someone across a desk for a couple of hours, raise the topic of being trans and they go whatttt?? And, inside, I go like WTF. It's obviously some sort of compliment that I do pass that well, but it is a bit awkward because I suppose I'm putting people in mind of the 'deception' meme which is broadly counter productive.
Oh well, I guess I can always put up some more 'god made me trans' stickers etc.

Transition at 2 years and coming out

2011-03-29T20:39:00.005+02:00

When I first started transition I thought about 4 - 5 years duration would be about right, and I'm still of that opinion.
Anyway, I'll be coming out to the wider blogosphere, to coincide with some fun publicity, in a couple of months time, so a general sort of post about the peculiarities of my transition process.
To reiterate. My process starts less than 3 years ago when I underwent a major hormonal change and, which is the really odd part, my neurology responded until I reached a violent tipping point.
After a first day of wonders and fears, I took 2 weeks to be sure it wasn't any sort of stroke but that I'd changed in a mix of ways and that it was definitely related to gender.
Then followed about 4 months of attempting to locate myself within or without the gender binary. To start I thought I'd have to be some sort of intergendered whatever, since I conceived that 50 odd years of male experience with nary a thought of anything else didn't exactly enable me to attain female gender. And it initially felt like having some weird sort of ability to go between gender gestalts, except for the way that 90% of the time I was overwhelmingly female, so I was rather concerned with underlying authenticity or whatever. But the process of identifying myself as having a female gender as the only active one was absolutely clear at the end of that time. So I set myself a further 3 months to see that nothing would change, saw a couple of counsellors and talked to a few non-specialist therapists and started changing my life to female presentation etc. I had an understanding employer (myself), and a supportive crowd around and approximately zero knowledge of things like makeup, clothes, voice and unable to have electro for about 6 months. It bid fair to be a long strange trip with no certainty of surviving it.
The way I thought, and still think about it, is as a process of growing up.When I first started I was about 9 or 10. Now I'm 13 and not so far off the jaded cynicism of a battle hardened 14 year old. In terms of measuring puberty, I've been having strong monthly cycles through the emotional mill for about 18 months and it's questionable whether I can really qualify as a suitable bait for unicorns.
I can't do drab anymore. Recently tried being andro for UK coming out visit and it simply didn't work. I pass reasonably on the streets but not long in conversation. Passing isn't a great deal for me, since I prefer to be reasonably out in terms of my history to the people I know and meet.
At the heart of my transition is a search for understanding how I now work. I prefer to view it in those terms because I want to avoid anything relating to gender performance having a primary role. I'm not sure how that matches with conventional trans narratives. I suppose because everything's been so concertina'd in my case it's bound to be different. I don't look out much for validation, though I'm really happy when I find it, in outside reactions. I'm a strangely immature woman to those who are my friends, in so far as I can tell, and an acceptable freak to many who aren't.But it's in understanding how this whole strange complex of female gestalt actually works, how things now fit together. It's the times of - oh that's what it's like to be a woman and that explains...- that I find the most exciting.Things like this...
A couple of months before starting transition, I was in a line at Tesco behind a woman who was in a really bad mood and taking it out on a hapless (female) cashier. Eventually she left and it was my turn. Passing the cashier I looked up and exchanged eye gestures with the cashier. Broadly it went ; (me) hard luck on getting one like that, (her)there's always one, (me) at least it's over with & sympathy, (her)getting to the end of the day soon anyway & thanks. I went into the mall outside, sat down on a bench and just rested and recovered for a quarter of an hour. It wasn't so much that it was rather more detailed than most normal gesture interchanges I'd had as much as being compressed to the point of happening 5-10 times faster than any similar experience I'd had.

I still remember the time I was sitting on an office chair, rocking a little in it whilst some music or other was on in the room, and suddenly realizing there was something totally new going on. It took about 30 seconds before the bamboo cane fell and enlightenment spewed forth. I was moving with the music. 50 odd years of music behind me and I'd never once moved WITH the music. Always as a counterpoint, an act of self definition through music, never just simply moving with it; never simply carried on the rhythms. And I had two thoughts about it. On the one hand I started seriously fantasizing about going for some sort of dancing because bump and grind theremin playing in a noise band didn't really do it for me. And on the other thinking how good an illustration it was of the effects of switching to an inductive cognitive paradigm and the consequences for abandoning the self-reinforcing differentiating paradigm typical of testosterone systems on agency in gender identity.
Or something.

A few months back I was in my place on a busy friday night when a woman came in I'd only met in passing a couple of times, and before transition started. She came in and was clearly relating to me as a guy in a dress. It happens and she wasn't the most perceptive of people. She was waiting for a couple of people she knew when a male friend sat down and started talking to me. Now he's a nice guy but the effects of alcohol and the lateness of the hour lent his words a quality of some considerable tedium. So I leaned forward with a light smile, concentrated expression and put that on automatic whilst I started thinking of other things entirely. The woman saw me doing it and totally changed in a flurry of eye signals.When the guy got up we went into an intense hour long talk with her apologising and overwhelmingly curious about the process of adolescence that I saw myself in. That was worth a lot more than barrel loads of pronouns or compliments to me. It's gone that way many times, before and since, but rarely so clear cut.

Again, I'm unsure why others' narratives so rarely include these sorts of things. Can understand that it might partly relate to feeling a necessity to be totally sure of their target gender and transition being at the end of a significant period of soul searching. Equally it may be that others also go through shifts but they're slow progressive processes rather than the violent one I had. But it leads to the odd feeling that I'm certain of being a woman, but not so certain of being trans, in terms of trans relating to individuals' more conventional narrative structures.
More reasonably soon on this....

Oh dear...a vogon moment

2011-03-08T22:50:00.007+01:00

Simply wanted to do an extended metaphor thing on trans women when it turned into this.

We are

We are the people of the river,
we are the waterborn,
we are those who have heard the sea's call.

We are the swimmers, washed downstream,
we are those caught in the pools along the oxbow way,
we are those that are wrecked, flung broken down the rapids,
we are those who arrive battered to the estuary,
we are those born by the coast,
we are those latecomers who finally follow our sisters into ocean.

We are those who have heard the songs of the river,
we are those new shaped, salt forged, in the fierce rush of waters,
we are those who have answered the call of the sea.

On becoming a woman (3)

2010-09-13T17:51:00.002+02:00

So first apologies.
Low energy, clearing up business stuff I've been unable to do for too long, family problems, getting to know my awesome husband and getting less asexual.
And being uncertain about how and where to get going.
So this time I'll say what I want to talk about, rather than come up with the full complexities of my present model.
I want to talk about figure and ground.
I want to talk about focus and frame.
I want to talk about different paradigms of perception/cognition based on association and differentiation.
I want to talk about the division of conscious and unconscious processing that reflect those paradigms.
I want to talk about the gendered difference in the engagement of awareness in the act of cognition.
I want to talk about the grid of hormonally differentiated arousal gestalts and the construction of meaning.
I want to talk about gendered difference in the contingency relations of construct and world and the reflexive consequences for personality formation.
I want to talk about gender identity as an interdependent system of cognitive structures and strategies based on coherent perceptual paradigms, (separating the two for convenience sake).
I want to talk about using this standpoint as a watchtower upon kyriarchy.
I mean, what else should a growing girl base herself on than radical essentialist feminism ? And where else can I look for a transfeminism that allots value to trans narratives as illuminations of gender ?

And of course I want to talk about stuff like how a relativistic spatial perception alters the
expressive content of communications and gender differentiates linguistic bases.
And why I feel that Judith Butler does not necessarily do less harm by being a wise fool than Germaine Greer has done as a, in the words of the ever delightful Angela Carter, clever one.
And stuff about my awesome husband, if she'll let me.
And maybe something about shoes.

on becoming a woman (2)

2010-06-10T12:33:00.003+02:00

One final quick caveat. There is an easier way to do this. Unfortunately if you're reading this it's probably too late to pursue, but I'd suggest reading the Bardo Thodol and watching out for that smoky red light next time around.

The day I was born, about 2 years ago from my present 12 year old perspective, ( which is a bit better than the 10 year old one last year when I was 56 ), I can remember a couple of things clearly.
The first was, in early afternoon, looking round the room I was in and thinking mf, mf, mf. As a diagnosis I quickly discarded it, after all it had been over a decade since I'd taken any drug of an equivalent strength to mescaline, and I never have flashbacks. I think the comparison was down to being aware of a kind of sensual vibrancy, especially centered on sight, and a kind of heightened awareness of energy flows. Then I started looking at people passing by and then things got REALLY interesting. Looking back, I tend to interpret it as being made aware of the death of my male self and the start of the female journey. At the time, though, it was first of all an intuitive understanding of male/ female ways of seeing each other and a bewilderment that I'd been on the planet for so long without working it out.
NOTE This was totally atypical for me in any drug state. I don't do realisation like that at all.
In effect this was seeing a difference in the focus of consciousness between genders, something that I initially saw as relating to mutual attraction but which gradually widened to embrace the totality of world views. That night I went to sleep in the knowledge that it was rather doubtful if I was male any more on the simple intuitive ground that if that were to still be the case then I'd have been unable to see men in the way that I now could.
Initially, however, the notion that something had happened to my sense of gender took second place to the notion of brain damage. In many ways this was my greatest fear with ESLD, the possible state of 'confusion' due to ammonia compounds penetrating the blood/ brain barrier and possibly leading to coma and death in a few months. I really hadn't worked out how to confront that. So a lot of the next couple of weeks were spent trying to come to grips with what was actually happening. I went into a whole set of activities trying to map any changes in cognition through a number of tests, puzzles and interactions. Within a week or so, the idea of liver induced mental confusion was demoted to the status of an extremely unlikely possibility. Basically virtually none of the normal symptoms applied, and no-one, doctor or other, since has proffered the possibility of any other form of neural damage. On the other hand something relating to gender and hormones became far more likely. Given that I'd had a lessened,spironolactonised sexuality for a few months and favoured tops that concealed my budding gynecomastia it wasn't the most far out hypothesis.
Anyway, initially testing myself in straight recall, concussion type stuff, no change really from normal that I could find. There was some disruption and change in higher level mathematical, verbal and strategic performance.
Reading and chess were interesting. In terms of reading speed my performance was down some 50%-65%, but that was partially due to concentration. The other part I put down to pattern recognition disruption, a view I've since partially altered. Bear in mind that my reading had been such as to be able to read 3 standard paperbacks a day of some reasonable standard. It's since partially recovered.
Chess, at my best, was good club standard in the UK and is an old friend in terms of being a cognitive performance measure. A mild overall improvement together with an enhanced tendency to find tactical nuances easily, was odd. Games in general were variable in performance, though word games were generally the same or better and maths puzzles often worse, though I feel that difference more task related than to do with the nature of the material.
Sadly I lacked the foresight to have recently preceding comparable results to hand under controlled conditions, but I exercise my mind in a number of standard such ways, and feel I'm a fair observer in this regard.
In the first couple of days of the process, though, in ways that relate both to psychology and art, and more sketchily to phenomenology, I was thinking of figure and ground as being core descriptive. And these particular questions became more and more important and central to the early development of the model that I was trying to construct. If the figure focus is determined by perceptions whose structure is gender dimorphic, what does that mean for individual cognition ? To what extent are there at least two systems of consciousness that spring from two radically different modes of information processing, on a level of perceptual quanta, that we can term gender ?
This was given added significance when, in the first few weeks I became aware of a truly surprising change in the ways that I was able to surprise myself. It concerned those things one says because one knows them, and only realize during or after the saying that this was knowledge that one had adduced by some set of unconscious processes. They started to vary in kind. Most of my life such utterances would be relating to delineating a frame, an overarching pattern, but now they were far more likely to comprise a direct linear analysis.
I wasted a lot of time trying to get a Jungian thing to work, with the vague notion of anima and animus exchanging places. I suppose it does have some explanatory power, but not really within cognitive psychology, which is where I was centering myself. So I didn't want to have to deal with much psychoanalytic baggage.

Am going through a period of intense lassitude at present, (it's a cyclic ESLD thing), so I'll pause here for a week or so.

On becoming a woman (1)

2010-06-09T16:12:00.006+02:00

The following is my introduction to an account of my transition. It comes with all sorts of caveats, and, hopefully, will not be an easy read. There are some difficult questions here that demand involvement.
As regards what credence can be placed on my story, I can assert that I am definitely a real person in a public place most of my time. When I've commented on significant sites I've generally given some references. For a variety of reasons relating to health issues, I don't want my name any more on the internet than I can help, but I was outed in the NYT and my trans status is fairly public, ie several thousand people directly.
As to medical diagnosis I'm still not professionally categorized, since I'm in a problematic situation re different types of care. But my physical changes are normal for ESLD and I have general doctors and counsellors that I've spoken with who all support a trans diagnosis. I don't fit elsewhere.
If I'm putting on some kind of act I must be very very good at it 24/7.
And in my present life situation, there frankly isn't much motivation to conceal.

I really don't know how well trans people can relate to the totality of this particular transition, since I seem to have had GID & dysphoria stuff happening concurrent with hormonal change and lacking much of a basis in my past life.
I never put on female clothes, except for a couple of drag parties in my youth and 1 more recent, and never had any interest in them, never had a thought that I can remember of not being male, had a fair number of straight relationships and was never particularly excited by, or intimate with, men in group sex situations.
That said, in many ways I've been 'gender lite' through most of my life, in terms of feminism and social relationships.

My rough picture is that, in terms of brain sex, I must have had some vestigial ambiguity which was never any major problem until a bucket load of hormones came along and activated it. Although such a case, with regard to my specific health issues, has so far evaded the medical literature, I can easily imagine it being an occasional phenomena covered up because it causes problems with gatekeepers. And it's always possible that it ties up with something like DES.

Let me be quite clear. I am talking about something best described as a gender change. I am talking about moving from the world of men to the world of women, with concomitant effects on gender identity. I am talking about basic perceptual and cognitive changes of an immediate character, in many ways. I am talking about a gender change, with gender identification lagging behind, that seemed to happen in a moment.
Though we're very different in many ways, I broke down crying for what seemed like hours when I read Zoe Brains account of something similarly sudden. It was the last piece that fell into place, the last time I could even fantasize about a get-out-of-trans-free card. She put it eloquently here :-
A.E.Brain

If you haven't read much of this blog before, the first post
Original post

and the second to last one
here

are particularly relevant.
Any good intro to cognitive psychology might also be worthwhile checking out. I'll be abstracting some stuff from gestalt psychology, as regards perceptual paradigms, bits from Kelly and Whorf,
something from Husserl, but hopefully nothing that needs to be too technical in language. And if you have expertise in contemporary studies of gender dimorphic neural structures, you're way ahead of me.
I hope the series of posts to follow will make for an interesting passage together. It is, in the end, just a personal account of a journey. But whilst it may cover some of the same ground as many others, it's been more like a voyage by air than slogging through the undergrowth. In that way, it may afford some interesting views that aren't usually touched on at all.

Tidying up - no more Mr Nice Guy

2010-06-03T22:46:00.003+02:00

So I've had my wake along with a few friends who knew, or had heard of, my man. I think its eased me somewhat, not that the evening was emotionally involving particularly or confirming of identity, but that I shouldn't take it quite so seriously.
It ties in with the way the last few months have gone, which has been very much internal understandings rather than effort into performance. Which has led to some rather fun things with people. I probably 'pass' worse now than before my leg was broken, but I've had a few times recently with women who start with the notion that I'm a guy in drag and then they get it. And then they smile and laugh a bit and start opening up their languages and a couple of times we talk about it and its usually because I've done some things that they'd never seen a man do. Sometimes there's a performative element, gesture reinforcement of speech, say, but generally a sort of natural indication of common female experience. Which is cool, but then I guess I don't see the negative responses in front of me. Still I'm easier in myself.
Again I fail to write on sisterhood which I guess is down to the fact that it is such a strong thing and something that would need me to talk about how I've explored all my changes.
So, a year after starting this blog, that's what I'm going to do.
My favourite copy editor said I should, so I've got a professional to blame. No, she doesn't edit me, and with the exception of a couple of posts, I just write , edit, publish.
Partly that's because I'd like people to understand where I might be biased, because I do rather want this to be examined as more than some persons fantasy. Its certainly been the most important thing that's ever happened to me, and I'd like it to be seen clearly.
I'm not sure how people will relate to it, how far it's generalisable in trans terms, how far it's a feminist critique of gender, how far it could help in informing a cognitive model of humanity as gender dimorphic infovores within the noosphere ; in short WTF it is.
So,this is a general request for a degree of indulgence. It would be good to know that people out there could join with me in the spirit of this simple song as a sentiment to inform the upcoming postings.

Two pictures

2010-05-19T18:33:00.002+02:00

Having come to the conclusion that I can't post meaningfully on sisterhood without making certain things about my process clear, two pictures, fairly new ones that I try and put over.
So imagine a place where all the inhabitants speak either french or german together with an inbetween slang dialect. The germans are mostly tall, blonde, blue eyed, and wear lederhosen ; the french smaller, dark-haired and wear strings of garlic over striped tops.
You're german, but a bit atypical. You've spent more than usual time talking with the french, and your slang forms reflect that.
Then one day you wake up and everything's changed. You understand french, and your german starts to fade. In ways you don't clearly understand, french makes sense. And germans...those pointless drills, those martial endeavors, that ridiculous allergy to wearing garlic...how could you ever have been locked up in all that germanness ?
And you wait for it to go away, and it doesn't.
And you know you have to be german still in some ways, so maybe you need a dual passport or something...but then you understand that you WERE german and german stuff just doesn't work anymore.
You read about born germans who could never really speak the language, but tried in various ways to speak french, thereby changing their nationality. And you read the stuff about how such germans go against the will of Wotan, and are nothing but secret garlic lovers. And you read how language is just a constructed social interface and that the roots of language, which are now part of everything you do and see, aren't really there. And you change inside, because german throats can't pronounce french. And you change outside, and try to change yourself more, because you know you can't live in a world where everyone speaks the wrong language to you.
And you start to learn to speak french, because whilst you understand it as your native tongue, speaking the forms still have to be learned. And the spirit of french gradually grows in you, altering you in ways that only a french child knows.
You know you'll always be a bit tall and blonde, but the clothes can maybe alter. And though its hard for germans to understand, really its the french and their recognition and support that are important.
And though a new passport will be useful, to go with the clothes, they're really not that important. It's the language and the way that changes you through use that's the thing, not 'identity' as in a passport, but to speak the world as it now is in the shapes that now have meaning for you.

Then there's a picture which goes somewhat further into the ground of gender. Try to imagine, as seems indeed to be the case, and is a striking perceptual change as far as I'm concerned, that women have a significantly finer discrimination as regards colour, compared to a male vision where the differentiations of shape are more foregrounded.
Confront these extremes with a jigsaw puzzle and the proto-woman might adopt strategies for initially sorting pieces by colour grouping, whilst the imaginary male might sort by lines. As time and puzzles presented, both learn the others strategies and in the end it may not be too easy for the outside observer to tell which way either is biased.What price gender then ? But for the participants and their journeys, it's totally different for each. The finished players may even have identical strategies in the end, but the foundations and building are anything but identical. There is not anything like the shared commonality that the finished articles suggest. And the lessons learned along the way, they too are separate and distinct.
My condition, and I believe the condition of most transexuals, relates to those basal layers, the heart and ground of gender rather than gender in the world.

I don't know how far these are representative purely of my own experience or not. I put them forward as that, and potentially as reasonable descriptions of processes and distinctions that might be common in certain ways to other trans people. Feedback on this specific aspect would be deeply appreciated.

Bits and bobs and slack and shame and sistren

2010-04-28T20:34:00.004+02:00

So according to statcounter I'm getting 4-600 a month at the moment. When I see repeats I tend to think that such people are sort of serious about gender, or else that they know me. So just to hope that those in difficult countries for questioning / trans people are finding that you can extract something of value here, and all good wishes.
Apart from that, there's this nerdy collection thing, like I've got 4 balkan states, Capetown, and a general scattering outside old Europe and N.America which are all solid. And Ho Chi Minh city and Ulan Bator ; yay Charlotte, you rock, keep on checking in while you travel.

I need to organize the blog somewhat, so I'm just down to definitely ruling out converting to wordpress before excuses run out for doing so.

Am somewhat more mobile personally and hope for better in the next month or so. I don't have to use crutches whilst cooking the friday meal and overall my health doesn't seem too impaired, no visible changes at least, though pain relief is problematic. I'm not looking forward to summer that much - skin deficiencies and limits on liquid intake.

I am thinking about a wedding dress, and how many charity/thrift places I'll need to haunt. I've got the rough notion to get something that's also performance gear, after some spray paint. A veil or mask, but I'm not sure about flowers in my hair.

Before the wedding , a wake. It'll make a good farewell to a male persona, and also it's about now when I should be dead, if my initial readings had persisted.
And maybe I should now apologise to the person at the trans group in London who I met when I was still fairly confused about gender identity. When they sympathized with me about what a difficult thing it must be for me, I rather unthinkingly responded by saying that no, being told you've got 3 years to live is hard and this was simply gravy. It definitely isn't gravy, but that comparison still helps me through.

Shame. Someone asked me ( in a positive context ), whether I felt any shame about being trans. I said not, but on reflection that wasn't quite right. Maybe it's a bit like the feeling you'd get when telling an unfriendly co-owner of a car that despite the fact that in some ways you've been an unconventional driver, this particular accident had absolutely nothing to do with you. It would be true, but maybe still somewhat embarrassing.

Sisterhood. Again, someone asked about how I find it, how accepting, how open, how different. So that's what I'll post on next.

And lastly, DO NOT VIEW THIS if extreme violence, especially in a form of state/victim nature gets to you. It's no longer on You Tube - really view with care...

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

It's politics...again

2010-04-20T14:01:00.002+02:00

This is an attempt to amalgamate the last 2 posts, due to lack of originality and not yet being ready to do a piece on fashion semiotics, amongst other things.
So my politics in the 60's and 70's were not entirely untypical of the epoch. Low level volunteer stuff for anti war projects,hanging around anarchist groups, getting thrown out of school for passing out stuff on racist exam marking,( the joys of an english public school education). But when the UK counter culture essentially split into straight left politics and the weird consciousness/ community crowd, I definitely went with the latter. For many years I've tried to put some money and energy into alternative community frameworks and ventures on the margins of conventionality.
So its somewhat strange to feel myself back in a sort of life where identity is a political statement, and what I am is so much a pawn in other's games.
When it comes to something like TOTWK, I really feel that I must have slept for most of the intervening period too. It is just so hard to understand much of the campaign against the film.
I truly don't either understand or particularly sympathise with debates on whether or not the word tranny is pejorative and I don't feel that attempts to get the film withdrawn from the festival, or finding educative moments for panel discussions are particularly worthwhile.
Because it's simply a piece about drag queens with 'trannies' as a fig leaf for it's lack of originality, an exploitative piece of sleaze which Tribeca should be deeply ashamed of promoting. The Mercado / Zapata references were just utterly disgusting, and the only piece of moderate decency shown by the director has been to let it's semi-literate 'star' spectacularly fail to excuse it, rather than burden the world with his own more culpable attempts at justification. I know that by most accounts it's a bad, trivial movie, but that simply compounds Tribeca's idiocy in selecting it. I know it's non-deliberate hate speech, and maybe one should applaud the fact that no halfway socio-politically aware student film maker would make the many evident mistakes that this self opinionated clown has done. And I know that there are a number of far more serious topics for activist energy.
But...it could have been a good point to organize around. It could have been a time to make the point as forcefully as possible that we're not all freaks*, or victims, or people who generally live up to the bigoted stereotypes retailed by such as Greer, Bindel or Luna.
It wasn't.
And because such moments come along rarely, maybe we should be questioning why the comparative failure. Overwhelmingly I see these as proceeding from a lack of a reasonably unified approach with clear objectives, of too much distraction in trying to get some amorphous T agreement on issues and, frankly, of too much holding back because the director is well known in gay / drag circles. It hasn't come from the zeal, intelligence and industry of trans activists, which has been exemplary, but there is an issue of planning. Just as Luna had a year to consider, after being called on his use of 'trannies' in the projected title, so there could have been a year of working out options for how to deal with the movie. (I'm leaving out GLAAD from consideration, because that's a whole other issue than getting our own activist shit together).
I understand that my approach to activism is somewhat antique, and maybe there's a rose-tinted 'back in the day ' thing , but I do fantasize about other possible actions like, for example, the seat slitting thing that happened with ' Cruising', or the more normal emptying of appropriately red liquid. Especially as it would be only too easy to draw support from de Niro's own statements about sacrosanctity of expression, ( my art is rage, to recoin a phrase). And instead of arguing the toss about whether anyone would promote a film titled 'ni**ers with knives', a small blackface demo handing out watermelon slices and stuff asking how would afro-americans feel about being portrayed in a comedy / revenge /lynching film by a white director using all the old racial stereotypes AT A TIME WHEN LYNCHINGS WERE STILL COMMONPLACE. You don't need to be a weatherman to know about the killings of the last weeks.
Now I realise that these sort of play power street theatre things don't work as well with a minority such as the trans community. But are reasonably sympathetic media voices so hard to find that these sorts of tactics are unworkable ?
Then there's something which I really do think needs discussion for the future, namely what price would we, the trans community, see as acceptable for distributing this community slandering rubbish. Getting any substantial modification in the film itself, or expecting a principled stand by Tribeca when they can garner cheap publicity around a controversy, were always non-starters, and getting some sort of panel discussion seems totally inadequate. And frankly if the real murder references hadn't been withdrawn,( after being an effective stalking horse ?),then no price at all would have been worth it.
I simply don't know the kind of things available. I've always loved the video at the end of this post, though, and, for myself, including a trans version of that as part of every showing of TOTWK would be something of a win. I'm sure there must be loads of other possibilities, but the time to examine them is now, rather than when another such massive fail occurs again.
*I realise that the above may be seen as confrontational and unwomanly. At times, though, I find myself with something in common with Kate Bornstein, though hopefully I'm considerably more media aware. I was always a freak. And , like her, I think freaks always know that . But that's in spite of being trans, not because of it.

A difference in timing

2010-04-03T16:12:00.003+02:00

So you've grown your hair out, put a bit of jewelery on and you're out on one of the major shopping streets of the city. One time you're wearing a silk/cotton shirt, powder blue velvet trouser suit and green leather 4 inch heeled boots. Another time you're wearing flat canvas shoes, denim skirt and beige silk sweater. A couple of nerdy guys pass you and one calls out asking if you're a man or woman. What do you do ?
In the second case, I simply answered transi,( the ethnic style here), which at least temporarily defused any possible escalation, in a way that answering 'yes' wouldn't quite.
The first case...well I managed that once to give the approved pc response, 'Why don't you suck my cock and find out?'.
The second case was here last year, though, and the first was in London's Kings Road in about 1970.
Plus ca change, plus ca something completely different...

DO NOT DO THIS with ticked off trannies

2010-03-30T18:32:00.002+02:00

So there's this ex-New York gay guy who helps out here, who's something of a film buff. And he comes in here today and poked some fun at the trans/GLAAD reaction to that movie. After I rather heatedly explained about the Angie Zapata thing, he backed off a bit.
But then he said something, totally joking of course, about not understanding why there wasn't a protest in, what for him was, a more traditional way. Namely slitting open part of the seats and inserting a paper giving the reason for the action.
Now I'm sure no-one would take such a suggestion seriously. After all, the cinema that shows the film has no responsibility for it. New Yorkers in general are known the world over for their general diffidence, courtesy and respect for the laws on criminal damage, and I'm sure the trans community is even more so. And the empowering message of the movie is truly an example to us all. Not only that, but its a (not serious) suggestion by a gay man for trans action, and no trans person could ever take that seriously.
And there's one final, overwhelming reason not to do this. If any one were misguided enough to take such actions they'd be...like...ticked off trannies with knives...

The nation of T ???????????????

2010-03-16T14:28:00.004+01:00

sometimes words are just...inadequate

A year of comments and femininity

2010-03-11T21:18:00.003+01:00

It would be pleasant to get more comments. At the moment I get, per post, about 6 or 7 verbal ones, a couple via other electronics, and 1 or 2 to here. From those latter, most have some more direct communication that means I don't publish, and finally there are those that get through to fertilize the blog.
Most writing so far I see as more of a self introductory thing, which isn't that much to dialogue on,but which will be moving on to gender theory material later. However any comments on impenetrability of writing style, for example, would be interesting. Its been many years since I last wrote anything much in prose.

The rest of this post is an answer to a comment received following a recent conversation, and an expansion on something of a theme for the year.
In the conversation I'd referred to the problems in dealing with residual male privilege, partly because I occupy the central role in my place and the complex authority that derives from that.
She wrote back a consideration of that point and talked of her strong feelings that femininity and authority don't conflict with each other. She wrote of her experience, as a lesbian, of femininity being denied her, both systemically by men and by a close relative with whom she talked about being feminine. Then, with the latter, the discovery that they were separated by different definitions of the feminine, and that hers was distinct in that it encompassed, along with the stereotypic female areas, competence, empowerment, authority, independence and rationality. Therefore she wouldn't say that being in authority was in any way unfeminine.
And in substance, I'd be perfectly in agreement. At the moment its still going through an evolution in that my non-male strategies aren't in some ways well enough practiced to fully utilise the potential roles, so I'm left less altered than I should wish to be. And the authority is not so much power as how I fill a position.
Actually though, it's a good heads up. I do slump back rather too much at the moment. And the confidence born of those wide open male spaces of unchanging emotional weather is now firmly 'back in the day'. I need some girl genius kick ass stuff to get me out.
So many thanks to Claire for her observations.
There is another issue here, which has caused me problems most of the last year, that's focused around the words feminine and femininity. It's simply that I find them inaccurate guides to self definition, and too easily formed into kyriarchic complicities.
So I struggle with using the butch / femme duality instead, at least in terms of the philosophical basis for my present gender identity. I think I'm naturally fairly femme, at least in so far of those areas of identity I associate myself most, and are absolutely the most fruitful for me to explore. And clothes and other preferred styles are that way inclined*.And its in that mode that I'm closest to being able to simply relax in being female. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with some future sexual orientation, but may be influenced by the fact that well over 90% of my serious social interaction is with women. It could be something of a phase in that naturally the most interesting areas of myself to explore are those now clearly distinctive female ones, but even as a man I had relatively femme style in, say, fashion semiotics.
But style, performance, isn't really the thing. Its more in the emotional sensitivity and intensity where I feel closest to myself as a woman, in a femme vision of female. This is , for me, anything but going along with dainty femininity or passive receptivity or any category of female that depends upon the contrasting male. It's agency is not that of subject but of definition, of world, rather than actor.It does mean, however,that I'm far away from feeling able to use male authority strategies, and everytime I fall back upon such there's a pain of inauthenticity.
Growing pains, I suppose.

*At the moment I'm wearing a reasonably tight thin grey sweater, black and white bead necklace, black cotton chinese jacket with gold embroidery and long sort of goth skirt, black with bits of lace,applique and grey crinkled streaks with a bright blue leg cast. That's conservative for daytime wear. Generally I'm thinking of going more steampunk, but I've still got a major kimono habit. These sort of looks tend to work well as detargeting strategies: I look less weird as a woman if instead of just my looks, all of me is enclosed in a weird space. It's a purple thing.

A life turned sepia

2010-02-25T16:36:00.002+01:00

This interrupts the yearly round up posts I still want to make.
I don't know if many other trans people feel this. I don't think that in any way its a consequent of having a narrative of changing gender, as opposed to always having been a woman, more the other way around. Oddly enough, I think that, in a small way, it might be more of a general cis phenomenon.
Its a memory thing, and how we colour recollection with emotion. The way that some childhood memories bloom in brightness through the sheer intensity of the feelings we had. Other times though it goes the other way, and memories are fainter because the emotional cues aren't there. But there's also another kind of fading that comes from no longer having an emotional repertoire that encompasses childhood.
An example might be remembering the early 'Dr Who' series as a young child. I can recall the action, and the fact that I found it new and exciting...but how was I excited or why or at what particularly, that's back somewhere in the mist. I saw 'The Prisoner' in my adolescence and that's totally different. I remember relating to the allegory, to the style, to the place it attained in the culture around me and all the feelings associated with these. It happens with recalling relationships too. It used to be that whilst earlier relationships were slightly less accessible in that I grew in experience to an expanded, more complex emotional repertoire, I could recall quite clearly how I felt during them, ( 2 relationships over 10 years, a couple of dozen shorter ones and virtually no 1 night stuff ).
I still see a couple of exes and get on better with them now, as friends, than I did before. I can still recall the events,the life styles, the changes they brought on. But in general, those parts of the past have turned alien. It's nothing to do with seeing things now from a female identity. It's got quite a lot to do with things that make me female, though. I can imagine myself falling in love again, but absolutely not in any way that I've been remotely familiar. The emotional conflation, the whole exogenous thing, the iconifying...Well, I suppose they could somehow spring up anew, but judging by their comparative absence from my emotional world it's not something I'd hold my breath waiting for. Most emotions are still recognisable, but as seen through a scanner darkly, and I inhabit a very changed set of emotional processes.
I don't have much motivation to distance myself from a male past. I suppose I was never that closely identifying with my gender, but certainly far more than identifying female, a thought that never entered my head. And I did, in the main, have quite a satisfying life as a man.
There's so many new and wonderful feelings and relationships now, and I'm so much luckier than the vast majority of trans people in having had no difficult struggle for self acceptance. But there are always prices.
I remember a friend telling the story of a bass player at a party who put his hand on a hot electric plate for 30 seconds. After that it hurt, and the guy pulled his hand away, looked at it, smooth and lacking calluses, and said 'that's 15 years gone'.
And just like that, I'm newly smoothed and sensitive with a past burned off. In that first rush of change, 40 years of memories have turned sepia.

A year more with feeling

2010-02-22T01:00:00.002+01:00

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.

a year in performance...

2010-02-17T19:41:00.001+01:00

So a year into transition and how does it go?
Although I've got pretty much an ideal situation for transition, (self-employed, extremely queer friendly neighbourhood, constant social life ), I've started with certain handicaps. After going from male to not-male in the proverbial moment, I spent around 4 months wondering whether I was brain-damaged or, giving weight to some notional male self, intergendered, androgyne or what, deciding that everything about my active identity was female spent 2 months deciding on transition, then 3 to be quite sure and then 1st january 2009 starting.
It didn't leave much time for planning.
I had a few friday parties to try wearing clothes and makeup, shaved off a 40 year old beard, and talked an awful lot to people. And I had had 9 months of conscious/unconscious learning of posture and gesture forms, simply through identification, along with some hormonal changes showing.
My relevant medication over the period, 100 spiro and maybe one soya isoflavin per day. Physically it isn't actually that remarkable that most of the bodywork is now in reasonably female condition, it's the mental/cognitive changes that seem so rare.
I remain...well homely is a word. I'm crowding 60, have no serious possibility of anything in the way of cosmetic surgery, no agenda for any sort of major relationship*, and a gently deteriorating state of health.
I spent the first 6 months strongly genderqueer trans, minimising make-up and always wearing a skirt or dress ( ok, not for electro or the islamic butchers ), which was survivable. With that confidence, I'm generally able to pass in most situations now. But I hardly ever go out, since the world more or less comes to me, and I tend to meander around a lot with voice. I'm pacing a lot of transitions around me.
Its all been very patchwork. But I believe thats helped in retaining friendships, and though there are certainly some still sceptical, the vast majority have been generally been supportive and the women I've been closest to have shown me such acceptance as I would not in my wildest dreams have felt possible. I stay very much in the company of women. Socially I've avoided any sort of trans scene, though there's a fair LGBT contingent around. Most people I talk to are around graduate level education, many nationalities, mainly white.
An increase in confidence in performance has led to joining a band, which has been interesting.**
So, I suppose now I'm at a stage where I can feel that I'm coming up to areas where I've got the task of choosing how trans I project. Thats not simply a measure of performance skills but of far greater security in my relationship to my gender.
Overall a B+
And I had my first bunch of flowers.
And I had a woman tell me welcome.

* But TOTALLY NOT INCLUDING the person that I fb married today. The wedding will probably take place soon locally, next to the templar's vaults and hopefully presided over by a qualified reverend of the church of the sub genius. I shall wear white.
** I'm only putting this in to demonstrate complete honesty. I play theremin in an art sex noise band that does some local bars, art openings etc. Its that thing with a metal rod and a red ball on the end that you can wave your hands around and make Dr Who type noises. My own bid for musical immortality involves playing it with a vicious little guitar amp, metal style. The precise technique I build up to, I call bump and grind. I believe I know what you might be thinking. I wear a medium length skirt. And a mask.

transfeminist, trans feminist, gender 1, 2, more than 2

2010-02-10T19:32:00.002+01:00

This is a makeshift post, because I've got all sorts of problems with a broken leg and medication at present. Maybe, I'll firm it up later, but in the meantime....
I was reading the excellent CLMinou and made the following comments on a post of hers.
Thinking about one relatively small point that I find reasonably important. Is there a difference for you between identifying as trans feminist or as transfeminist ?
Trans feminist for me is a trans identifying person who identifies as a feminist.
Transfeminist is by contrast someone who's feminism is centred to a significant degree on the trans experience.
Personally I'll identify as primarily a transfeminist in that my conceptualisation of gender identity through my experience has led me to a position rather distinct from most feminisms vis-a-vis gender essentialism, the nature of gender identity, etc.
I think this does make a difference in how one approaches the broad church of feminism. As a trans feminist issues of trans inclusion are paramount. As a transfeminist I'm obviously still majorly concerned with these, but equally I'm concerned that mainstream feminist theory should relate to my transfeminism in a mutually respectful and productive way.
Because she indicated she'd think about an answer, I tried to expand it into a post, but one I'd see now as necessary to preface with a brief statement as to my personal beliefs around the gender binary, as follows.
I totally and utterly support the gender binary in so far as I have known two gender states, centres of perception giving rise to stable functioning relationships vis a vis emotional and cognitive states. I believe these to correspond generally to male and female gender systems. There may be others. The number of ways gender can be learned, performed, read, erased, elected, selected, named and shamed ,roled and enroled, may be infinite but there appear to be far,far fewer 'genders' where stable functions between the elements of normal consciousness coexist.
So if I was to encounter one person who comes to the local cafes in summer and presents female apart from a well-trimmed bushy moustache, I'd have no difficulty identifying them as a woman, should they so wish. On the other hand, a sex goddess with typical male emotional make up, and I'd have to be concerned about how that person constituted their mental health.
So to the substance of the post, and a personal statement of what transfeminism, a set of places within feminism centering on the trans experience, constitutes for me...

From one of the more ridiculous rad fem sites, the following comment:-'Just what contributions do transwomen ever make to the feminist movement ? They could be making significant contributions by telling women how to overthrow male supremacy, how it works from the inside, but they don't'.
What makes this particularly frustrating, for me as a transfeminist, is not the sheer illiteracy, nor even the peculiarly kyriarchic blame shift and shame, but the fact that that is exactly what we do. That we do tell other women exactly that. When other women read me with knowing eyes, then its wonderful to know that I am telling, consciously or not, something I come to know well, in the deep grammar of gender the possibilities of its own subversion. And when they don't its horrid. A year into transition, and I feel like I can still do a metaphorical pigtail tug. There's such sadness if my narrative is taken as that of the changeling child returned from under the hill, grown old and sick on faery wine of privilege. And instead of the hearth space of refugee, if I'm marked by distancing eyes as spy not sister. And if my speech is heard as seelie babble, rather than offering up the few keys I have to help the great commensality of women gain access to the ways of men.
I'm only too happy to be part of any feminism that doesn't see gender as necessitating social roles, but one which denies gender entirely negates both my narrative and my value as a bearer of information. Because where else could any meaningful analysis of kyriarchy be locate itself than in the deep structure of humans, in the fragmented contracts of gender that comprise the recalcitrant sub-stratas of agreements with which we make sense of the world ? If we try to confront the problems of male violence, if its not possible to construe the gender contours that make different teaching techniques more or less effective through gendered mediation of learning, how is good strategy to be made ? How can we construct our own meta linguistic paradigms if we fail to take account of male gendered language and, for example, its typical necessitating of agency ? In showing what I can be as a woman without a girlhood, without so many of the forces which normally shape a woman's being having impinged on mine, if I can't be fully the woman that I'd love to be, then at least I can be a different light for our common identity, a strange, encumbered, halt Godiva, stripped to bare gender.
I was recently posting on a thread that mentioned transexuality and paleoanthropology. I put forward the notion that I still see as quite attractive as an idea, that there could be a genuine evolutionary role for transgenderism. Skill sets in primates tend often to be gender specific, because of adherence to gendered behaviour norms. Occasionally seeing whether this specificity is warranted by allowing for transgender communication of sex specific knowledge and skills to the opposite gender, would thus be a positive evolutionary function.With a gender power balance so overwhelmingly tilted, I'd see the role of the contemporary transfeminist as a very vital one within that context.
Hopefully it goes without saying that this isn't to be construed as an attempt to set up some separate feminist system or a trans only area. It just seems that this is one set of areas wherein transfeminists can be most productive within the general movement , and where we can and do show with our lives the weaponry and organization of the enemy, his dispositions and their distances, until kyriarchy falls...

People...

2010-02-08T17:56:00.002+01:00

Just got statcounter and find I have people reading through this.
Thank you, people.
Would be more effusive if more people would leave more comments.
Bank details and possibly even interesting sexual fantasies* might get an even better reaction.
But thanks anyway.
Lots more to come after the next status report, but first a word to a true anon.
Thanks a lot for writing, its genuinely touching that you feel you can trust me, but I don't think I'd be the best person to advise. I know nothing of who you are, your story and wasn't referencing you. Sadly its only too easy to get suspicious of the net trans universe; my last counsellor told me she never believed a word on the web. I'd think of trying to get advice from a straight LGBT person ; they could probably refer you to someone trustworthy, and they're very unlikely to be tied to anything problematic. If hugs help, all the hugs in the world for you.

*Interesting means to be rather imaginative and deeply not involving me in any way. And to enclose a copyright release.

Anonymous Fame

2010-01-25T22:46:00.001+01:00

So I’ve just been outed again.
One of the consequences of what I do, is that I have these odd sorts of fame.
There are the city magazine type articles.
There is being a small cultural community centre of reasonably high culture, and getting appropriate publicity. Both of these are less personal, more service reviews.
Odd interviews.
But then there’s also anonymous fame.
My place is scattered through a couple of dozen tv and film scenes.
I’m somewhere in at least half a dozen novels in some sort of character.
And word gets passed around about my place / me.
And I suppose I find this type of fame the more interesting frame to contemplate the complexities of identity.
So, again, I have a very mixed feeling about this particular way of being identified, ( the first time it went from anger at having my name and trans status out there, to rueful acknowledgement that at least not everyone gets outed in such an authoritative news source as that one ).
This time it’s by way of a story.
It’s in a similarly authoritative news media, but only mentions my place by name.
And it’s not entirely accurate.
The place has rarely been that sloppy, I never wear high heels, and if I was in evening dress then it must have been shortly before a Friday evening thing.
But it’s actually a good story, and by an sf author.
And it touches something of the spirit of the place.
And maybe, maybe, from the right angle, I can look a little like Patricia Highsmith.

A late Mary Daly post

2010-01-19T16:06:00.002+01:00

Mary Daly,
transphobic,racist, / perceptive, original, feminist thinker,
Rot / in peace

Bilerico...the law of the jungle

2010-01-10T22:10:00.002+01:00

I love my elephant.
Its big and its warm and it wards and it helps and I like to feed it buns and…
Well every t-grrrl needs her elephant.
I think of maybe the largest part of the body and its heart as gay, the exploration of masculinities.
Not much smaller is built up of the lesbian quest for female authenticities.
Then there’s that animating bi circulation, the intersex agony of tusks and the t in the deepest marrow of the bones and the surface of the skin.
And there’s the trunk, queerest of all traits.
In and through our intersecting lives, the elephant lives, breathes and moves.
Oh best beloved it is GOOD to be an elephant’s child.
When the world tells me that maybe I belong in a circus, I know I have an elephant that will trumpet it’s strength against all the jungle.
When the world sets me at nothing, there is my loving elephant to snuggle with.
When I am lost to pride in myself, I can still be surpassingly proud of my elephant.

Now sometimes people join us as elephants children and sometimes they leave, and
such are valid choices in so far as they are made with a knowledge of the elephant.
Sometimes people will talk of making the elephant seem larger or smaller or a different metaphorical shape: and so long as this acknowledges our intersectionality through the medium of the elephant, it’s a debate we can all take part in.
I call my elephant ‘gender’, but believe that it has as many names as it has children, and it is a joy to learn the million names of it.

And then there are those who don’t really believe in the elephant - who talk of the old jungle of gayrillas and leslions, of t-grrrls and bibexes, and the better ease of survival there.
But I think of the elephant, and I’m not convinced.
I think of wastepaper baskets and billiard balls, of trophies and stuffing, of determined poachers and I am not convinced.
And I think of our queer intertwined lives and do not want to feel them ripped apart.

So when the elephant is attacked this way, I do not want to share the attacker’s vision and defend a part of the elephant. I do not want to talk abstruse elephant anatomy. I want instead to show and learn of the coming outs, the outings, the confusion and the questionings and the closets and all of the myriad ways that bind us together as elephant’s children: in the place of that attack, to share our interwoven lives.
Because how can I love my elephant without wanting to know all the ways my elephant is seen and understood and experienced? Because only in that loving sharing can my elephant truly live.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

A short Christmas reading...

2009-12-25T22:15:00.001+01:00

So just before Christmas a guy walks into my place and starts talking about all the money I owe his organization. It’s a corrupt, venal group, loathed by over 90% of its own members, operating a de facto monopoly; in other words it’s the local performing rights society.
I’ve had problems with these guys over the years, with them wanting money for me having music equipment and me saying that’s for private use, (we’re a mixed use property). After years of threats from them, and no action, on that front, they recently have tried to take me to court re money for bands playing here. Because I make no money and because the events are more or less private in terms of most of the audience and the musicians being part of the community based around my place, I’ve objected to this.
So we talk. He puts his point of view, I put mine, he doesn’t acknowledge mine, and after about 5 minutes I start to get angry. Not angry, like male angry, but enough so my voice lowered in tone and my eyebrows came down a bit.
So the guy reads me.
You know the kind who’s eyes spring wide, breath speeds up and some indeterminate form of stammer begins? One of those.
So he fumbled in his case, took out a form and said ‘here-are-the-rates-if you-want-to-know-no-problem-bye’ fast, and started sidling toward the door.
I asked, ( a small self revelation of the wickedness of the female heart ), if he wanted to talk more so I’d know not to inadvertently cross their rules, but he just said ‘no worry’, as he half ran out the door.
And I sat and thought to myself why I was putting so much stress and effort into presentation and passing, rather than trusting to the wisdom of such providence as I’d just been party to.
Merry Christmas.

Bilerico...it's the politics

2009-12-14T21:49:00.002+01:00

( The story so far goes...The Bilerico Project, one of the largest and most inclusive of the US GLBT websites, published a truly ghastly piece of transphobia by a 90 year old ‘elder’ of the gay movement. After a bit of hesitancy and an overwhelmingly negative response, chiefly from trans people, it got taken down. Fulsome apologies and a surfeit of posts referencing trans sensibilities followed.)

Like many, I’m curious about the decision to publish this piece of dirt, but like, I suspect, most, I go along with the cock-up rather than conspiracy explanation.
The same absolutely does not go for Ron Gold’s reasons for writing it and for getting it published here. From previous ‘guest’ contributions he’s made, senility has been noticeably absent. The ‘common sense’ style, whilst intentionally hitting on trans people’s nerves, seems totally deliberate. It would seem incredible that a man so experienced in gay politics would be so ignorant as to the realities of trans issues. And Mr Gold has form. He is known as non-inclusivist, and perceived as belonging to a sizable number within the gay community who wish, amongst other things, to drop the T, as people found so evident in the HRC’s record on ENDA. And another ENDA debacle, as it approaches this critical time, could really make for a long term fracture in the GLBT grouping.
And so this gets written as Gold’s first ‘house’ posting on an inclusivist site, a work that it would be hard to imagine how edit so as to more greatly inflame tensions.
Isn’t coincidence wonderful !
So how goes Bilerico ? It was a clear mistake to publish this piece, and I do wonder whether Gold’s status was overly respected. The reaction was uneven, but getting rid of Gold , putting some reforms in place and a deluge of trans posts all may help stem the alienation of the trans site readers. For me, it’s a mistake.
And all those comments on all those posts ? Another mistake. I can understand the feelings involved, and indeed I commented on a couple myself, but there’s an overall problem that plays right along with Gold’s agenda.
The more ‘tranny sensibilities’ are on show, the more the overall effect is to alienate the gay community. They’ve all suffered sneers and insults, as well as outright violence. Our relative weakness to such, in the eyes of some number, is, as far as I’ve always found, a major source of misunderstandings. Bilerico, by catering to these sensitivities, also loses credibility amongst those with problems to check their cis-privilege. And it is partly on the reasonable good will of such that inclusive sentiment rests. Sadly.
That’s why I thought Tobi’s piece necessary and Dyss’s apposite, but would have preferred the latter as part of a series covering all in the GLBTQI spectrum. That’s why, though thoroughly enjoying the articles on the history of gay transphobia, I’d prefer them to have had a gay co-author, to own to trans homophobia, which exists, and/or to attempt to frame the gay/trans dialogue on gender in more mutually comprehensible terms. And that’s why I’d have preferred a general statement from Bilerico to their commitment to the whole gender rainbow rather than apologies to trans people.
Because that’s the way to get back at Gold and his agenda.
Because that’s the politics.

Resuming normal service

2009-11-25T16:23:00.000+01:00

As a normal thing, health isn’t something that causes many problems. I don’t drink, eat salt or have more than 1.8 litres of liquid a day. I can’t walk for more than about 40 minutes without bleeding and coagulation is bad, so sports and biking are out. At present though, I’m on the upper plateau of the, hopefully, long slope of declining liver function. Present medication consists of 2 diuretics, gall stone medication to counter the most horrible itching I’ve ever known, multi vitamin and calcium supplements, and avoidance of anything non-prescribed.
This has been difficult the past few weeks, because of flu and (maybe) gout attacks. Pain killers and anti-inflammatories are normally liver toxic, so I’ve been trying to get through on an absolute minimum, which has not been good for anything that requires some concentration, like writing.
And sometimes hibernation is just soooooooooo attractive.

The fun side of GID reform

2009-10-20T15:33:00.001+02:00

So, as nearly every trans person knows, to get hormone treatment, let alone surgery, its necessary to be diagnosed with GID, Gender Identity Disorder. Which is a problem, because it’s a diagnosis of mental illness, which most of us don’t see as particularly applicable. But without it, how to make treatment available through health-care systems ? And some kind of gatepost system would appear to be necessary in a small number of cases.
Personally, what I’d like to see would be a move towards classification by the effects of the condition : taking gender dysphoria as a specific form of clinical depression, amenable to therapy, hormone and surgical treatment in a similar way to , say, depression based on thyroid disorders that may not need treatment because they pose actual physical danger.
And then there’s the really fun part of what to call it, where I would suggest the term Gender Orientation Depression, since it would make answering questions such a joy:-
“Why do you want to change gender ?”. GOD is making me.
“Why do you need surgery ?” Otherwise GOD would be down on me like a ton of bricks.
“Are you really sure about doing this because…( a, b, c…etc.)”. I just trust in the path that GOD shows me…
Now some may say that this is just mocking religion, but there is a side to transexuality which is profoundly spiritual, that hardly any cis person really takes seriously, and turn and turn about is a fair game. Also, anything that messes up the religious right is alright in my book, and they really can’t credibly argue with GOD.

ANOTHER FRIDAY

2009-10-01T21:42:00.000+02:00

3 kilo chicken breasts, sliced with tomato and mozarella filling, grilled with a pepper sauce, surrounding a boned duck with coconut and fruit stuffing,
3 kilo steak stewed in red wine, with pears and blackcurrant with a couple of chopped apples and 2 handfuls of walnuts, cinammon,all spice, cloves to taste
8 trout, sauted, skinned and poached in white wine with sliced kiwi
baked potato skins with alternate pea and tomato cheese custards
Bubble and squeak – 1kilo white cabbage, 1 kilo mixed veg, apple and .5 kilo of ground hazelnut, bread, egg and lots of sage to bind..
Double baked potatoes mashed with chestnut and cream
Green beans
Mushrooms and onions duxelles
Ginger carrots
Mashed celeriac (maybe)
Salad.

It’s the first taste of winter outside, so time to do some winter standards…

The 10 best things about m2f transition

2009-09-24T17:24:00.001+02:00

Obviously all such lists are highly subjective. The order I’ve put these in isn’t set in stone even for me. A couple of them are a bit controversial, a couple have a down side as well, some may be harder to attain than others and one or two might cause complications with varying sexual orientations. There are also others which come some way towards making the final list but didn’t quite make it, so I wouldn’t put this forward as totally exhaustive.
1. Sisterhood.
2. Sisterhood
3. Sisterhood
4. Sisterhood
5. Sisterhood
6. Sisterhood
7. Sisterhood
8. Sisterhood
9. Sisterhood
10. Sisterhood
It’s also possible that this is somewhat overly influenced by the 10 year old grrl thing.

Intimate categories

2009-09-21T12:02:00.001+02:00

Gender. I regard myself as a genderqueer trans woman, in transition. Hopefully the term ‘trans woman in transition’, redolent with private meanings though it might be, is reasonably self-explanatory. Genderqueer is a general catch-all that I’m using in a number of specific ways.
Whilst I have no intention or desire to see myself as something other than female, having gone through such a massive gender shift, and undertaking, through transition, a melding of past and present personas, I want to keep the process as open as possible. Genderqueer self description ensures that. Then there’s the thing of seeing myself as a participant in the queer world. That is, for me, a natural concomitant of a gender shift, the queer perspectives that become normal in a world where gender has changed to a universal significator. And I suppose its also a general statement about support for the validity of all sorts of forms of the general gender diaspora.

Relationships. I regard myself as presently poly, pansexual and asexual. I have no particular desire for a mono life, nothing that would categorically prevent relationships with any gender, and no sexual desire.
To clarify this last point, think that if male sexuality is a laser, female sexuality is a torch, then mine is more of an overall glow. I am conscious of missing something, but I do have some truly amazing hugs.

Sexuality. Additional to the above, I view myself as the possessor of a prolapsed vagina. Correction of this might have implications for sexuality, though mainly its desirable for other reasons, like not wanting to throw up when I’m aware of that aspect of my anatomy. If you’ve got this far without understanding that none of this is about sex, go back to the beginning and start again.

MY PLACE

2009-09-13T21:58:00.001+02:00

Its been going for about 10 years now. It’s a cross between business, institution and meeting place. Its open 6 days and about 5 evenings a week, its basically where I live and work. There’s always a flow of students, teachers, artists, writers, musicians, academics, some tourists, some strange flotsam of the area. It’s a community hub and a last friendly house.
So I get to talk transition, gender, sisterhood, appearances, and the changing patterns of emotional and cognitive perceptions for up to a few hours a day with interesting, curious, and intelligent people who generally provide me with considerable support on so many levels.
One thing I’d very much like to do is to persuade a few of them to write something of their experiences here. It’s their transition as much as mine. It’s in the most seriously cool neighbourhood in Europe, and whilst I’d like to retain a degree of anonymity I’m happy to divulge information to potential visitors.
And I really, really, REALLY wish that this didn’t sound like some ridiculous fantasy. It isn’t.

periods and privileges

2009-08-24T19:30:00.001+02:00

So the following are two standard conversation / situations I’ve lucked out on, in terms of finding suitable responses. These strategies are, however, fairly idiosyncratic and not to be universally recommended.
The first occurred in one of those tedious conversations with a cis agenda that runs along the lines that you can’t be a real/full woman because you don’t share such near universal female experiences like periods. After granting the point, I asked the last speaker about how she assessed different slip liners in terms of absorbency. Receiving a puzzled look, I explained that blood coagulation problems meant that I had haemorrhoidal bleeding every day and therefore always wore always. I don’t really know how this came across, but the ensuing silence was satisfying.
The second is more to do with male conversation privilege. Whilst I’ve usually got no problems in modifying my conversational role to normal female, it’s a little different if you’re running your own sort of salon. And I am something of a femme queen ( in terms of strength and style, definitely not looks ). So one evening when I was being particularly marginalized I made a point of loudly thanking one longstanding friend for his growing acceptance of me as a woman. At his nonplussed look, I explained that by talking past me and ignoring my efforts to join the conversation he’d helped me a bit more in understanding how a true woman should be. Things got easier after that.

2009-08-14T17:52:00.001+02:00

15 books that had some sort of effect on me

with thanks to stephanie’s pillowbook.

‘The Thackery T. Lambshead pocket guide to eccentric and discredited diseases’( complete with illuminating illustrations )
Jeff VanderMeer’s delightful anthology details such illnesses as the malady of ghostly cities. More important, it’s a book that excites real envy in those permitted to glimpse its pages.The ultimate in loo books.

‘The Good Soldier’ by Ford Madox Ford is the saddest story ever told, and one of the great transatlantic novels.

‘Independent People’ by Halldor Laxness because sheep matter, and because here the nobel went to a deserving author.

‘Empire of the senseless’, by Kathy Acker. I am a member of the facebook group that wants to be Kathy Acker’s incestuous lovechild. Please do not make mock of a t-grrl’s innocent desires.

‘Dhalgren’ by Samuel R. Delany because it’s the best description of the real nature of the catastrophe.

‘Levana’ is de Quincey’s prose Xanadu.

‘Mirror to the sky’ by Mark Geston as an antidote to the shallow optimism of Dostoevsky.

‘Lud-in-the-mist’ by Hope Mirrlees is the finest fantasy ever to come out of the Bloomsbury group.

‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann and the rush of the accelerating fall of the illusions of post 1848 Europe.

‘Queen of the states’ by Josephine Saxton for her intelligence, empathy, feminism and abundant merriment.

‘Engine Summer’ by John Crowley and a well of feeling before he got lost in the intricacies of Little Big.

’60 stories’ by Donald Barthelme, if only for ‘the great hug’. America’s premier fabulist.

‘Oliver Twist’ by Charles Dickens. Before reading this as a child I was lucky enough to have read most of Jane Austen, some Thackeray, Kipling, Trollope et al, so I was not permanently put off the 19th century novel by this vomit inducing mix of offensive caricature and sentimental verbiage. Both as child and teacher, I have found nothing to match it for the destruction of the desire to read.

‘Alice through the looking glass’ by Lewis Carroll in memory of mirrors unsuccessfully attempted.

‘The devils of Loudun’ by Aldous Huxley for an enlightening historical work, whether thesis or novel.

I calculated recently that, since birth, I’ve averaged about 1.75 books and 2.5 newpapers, or magazines, every day. I have a library with over 20,000 books and far too much time on my hands. Maybe next time 15 non-fiction.

Friday

2009-07-31T21:58:00.001+02:00

So its Friday again.
My week revolves quite a bit around Fridays.
However this is the fourth Friday in sequence, so its an easy standard one.
Grilled lamb patties. ( 3k of mixed lamb and beef mince, 500g of fresh apricots, ground almonds,4 eggs, 6 slices of bread soaked in red wine, a leek and a handful of mint chopped, combined, seasoned and wrapped around pieces of camembert and grilled).
Roast chicken legs (10k dusted with coriander and mixed spices with an orange sauce)
Harlequin omelette ( 18 egg layered omelette with a variety of vegetable and cheese admixtures )
Smoked fish or maybe pan fried trout
Sliced potatoes, boiled and roast with garlic butter ( 6k )
Hollowed tomatoes ( inners used in omelette ) stuffed with cheese and spinach
Stir fry peppers and sweet and sour pumpkin
Onions and mushrooms ( maybe 300g of chanterelles to 1k of champignons ) duxelles
Carrots finished in orange juice, 3k glazed
Salad ( not, thankfully my responsibility )
Seasonal vegetables
A small meat / cheese / breads cold table
5 euros per head, ( might go up to 6 soon ) and 1.50 per drink
At the moment I tend to predict about 30 to 40 people turning up
I cook the meal for around 9.15, go on the front desk for conversation and money, and get to bed about 5 on Saturday morning, the event breaking up approximately a half hour before on a cloud of over inebriated farewells
It’s a long day

me 101

2009-07-24T15:08:00.000+02:00

Hi, I'm Sophia , and this is a blog about the things my world has, by and large, imposed on me, and the choices I have to make in consequence.

I maintain a certain anonymity simply because I’d like not to unduly upset family by being as open as I can about my health. I’ve already been written about – without consent – by, arguably, the world’s most widely read paper, so I’m not that difficult to find, should you wish to visit.

In terms of the themes that I’ll be blogging about, many concern events going back to 2006. In those far off times, I sought, as a reasonably eccentric, heterosexual male, for a serious relationship. There had been one woman whom I'd meet up with every few years, to encounter a wonderful promise, but always a prior commitment or obstacle in the way. But finally, after more than 20 years, we were both free, both still in love with each other and we could go for it. Life was pure romance, even unto the sickly sweet Hollywood variety.

This later altered into a different kind of Hollywood-type genre in early 2007 when, whilst checking marriage venues, I fell ill, went to hospital, was diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and essentially given about 3 years to live, though with some chance of a transplant, perhaps longer. I wanted to stop the relationship there. She wanted it to carry on, but in un-Hollywood style, it dwindled, and in early 2008 she didn't reply to my calls for a month, and then told me that she wouldn't be coming to my normal country of residence.

I accepted this change in the scenario -- to one of Hollywood post-modern irony -- and didn't tell her that I'd been trying to contact her so as to tell her of my new status as the blue eyed boy in the liver unit, my blood values going back from second to first stage Childs Pugh, essentially giving me the possibility of something like 5 years longer, before hitting the 50% mortality mark.

So there I was, still on a huge high a month or two later, as I woke up one morning with the strong feeling that something was missing. When I hit the streets, everything changed in the way I seemed to see and feel people around me. I was only too clearly NOT in Kansas. In the following weeks and months, I’d come to view it as essentially a process of acclimatising to being female, but at that time, after about a day I could work out that if I had to put a name on this thing that I'd lost, that name was gender.

And I started reading, and encountered lots of descriptions about how my condition might be disturbing my hormone levels, in conjunction with spirolactone, a common component of hormone treatment for feminisation that I take as a long term diuretic. This is, though, very unlikely to be a full explanation and it now seems (through bureaucratic health care problems) that there’s also a strong possibility of some additional factor -- DES, for example -- coming into play. (If anyone has any knowledge of the effects of these medical factors and their possible impact on my hoped-for course of orchiectomy and low-level transdermal estrogen, I would be overjoyed to hear from you, since I’ll be trying to coordinate separate specialists from two countries and it gets strange and wearisome). I have been presenting as a woman since December, my voice changing slowly, and electrolysis only just starting, but otherwise (social language and gestures) I think I am proceeding extremely well. Physically, I’m heading for a c-cup and my hair and skin are significantly altered. Perceptually, cognitively and emotionally, I’m now very differently constituted.

Given that I’m a qualified psychologist with some experience of inter-personal and drug-based therapy work, it’s these changes that I find particularly interesting, rather than those changes that spring more from an overwhelming sense of self-identification as female.

In terms of my approach to gender, as a man, I used to incorporate a significant number

of second-wave feminist attitudes into my life. That’s changed. Whilst I still wouldn’t see any predeterminacy of gender roles as anything but phallocentric crap, I now adopt a far more essentialist view of gender identity.

As an attempt to locate myself more in theory, I hope to start a group soon on gender in science fiction, something I have some experience of doing in previous years. If anyone is interested, it could have some internet dimension, perhaps a podcast. I’m thinking of focussing on the Tiptree Award anthologies, with excursions through Josephine Saxton, Octavia Butler and a host of others, hopefully attracting some people from the local women’s / gender / queer studies courses.

Because I have a relatively cool situation, in one of the most trans-friendly districts of one of the most trans-friendly cities in the world. It doesn’t mean that I can travel far alone, or by taxi, or not be laughed at in the street, or challenged by 16-year-old boys. Because my physical condition is such that a couple of hard blows to my stomach could quite easily kill me, it certainly justifies a bit of paranoia. But I rarely go out, since the world comes through my door. I am hopeful I can induce some of the usual suspects to post about aspects of our environment and the rest of their city lives. I am profoundly grateful to many people here for the love and support they’ve shown me in this difficult time.

The main subjects I’m going to try and write about, besides personal vagaries, are the processes of this transition, my own as well as those affected by me. The picture that occurs to me most frequently to illumine my transition is that of a 10 year old T-grrl in the changing body of a mid-fifties male, in declining health, with above-average cognitive abilities, but with a load of useless attitudes, habits and perceptions to be junked or recycled, all in the service of becoming the best woman I can be. And T-grrls grow up fast.

I’ve never before felt such fulfilment or been in such a place of healing, and surrounded by such wonderful sisters from whom I derive so much strength. I hope my future choices will all embrace the joy that I have experienced. I can’t promise that that it’ll make for interesting reading, but it gives me hope.

Hugs,

Sophia