voice and a first trans interview

I haven't exactly followed classical models in structuring the elements of my transition, and voice is no exception. Given the choice of going into some perfectly organised transition which I wouldn't necessarily live to get far into, or launching into it with little research a couple of months after deciding it was silly to think of any alternative, I went for the latter.
Haven't had voice lessons or practiced much, and it shows. In terms of passing it's fairly poor. I do have a problem in having perpetually blocked sinusses and hence female voice resonance is a problem. What I have concentrated on, reasonably successfully, is narrative emphasis as opposed to pitch. Women tell stories rather than compete for primacy of opinion; the reason for our use of rhythmic emphasis rather than volume seems to me to spring from that. I think I now tell stories better and if strangers initially find my voice overly low...well, I know women who are lower. And at least I've avoided coming over as totally empty-headed, the phase several trans women seem to go through by getting pitch and some basic rhythm right but not actually doing anything with it.
Also it seems to improve. Did one interview about a couple of years ago and hated it with a vengeance. This latest one I could actually bear to listen to without utterly cringing. Is it better for having evolved rather than sprung from artifice ? Goddess knows...
Usually interviews don't concentrate on or even mention me being trans. This one, just a podcast, went into it in some depth. Listening to it, or at least the edited version, and I could kick myself for things said badly or points going awry. Given that I might be doing rather more on the trans theme, any feedback from people able to listen through it would be very welcome.
With thanks to Ian...

How to take Berlin

Just a post about where I live and why Berlin is still a good place to live and visit. Of course there's all the stuff about the 3 opera houses, the jewish museum, and the general arts and architecture of the city and its historical sites, but this is more of a neighbourhood view.
I live in Kreuzberg and, since my flat is just behind my shop, work there as well.It's fairly equidistant from the old west centre and the new eastern one. Before the wall fell this was the main alternative district, next to Schöneberg which is / was the main LGBT district. Whilst Berlin was a small island surrounded by the Russian army and the potential flashpoint for world war 3, it wasn't exactly the most popular of places so various incentives were set in place to keep the west german population up. High subsidies for artists and the waiving of national service were the two that underwrote Kreuzberg. Sadly it's getting more and more gentrified but some spots remain...like my place.
The main road where I go shopping every day is here. When I first started transition I couldn't get electrolysis for a while and I did, and do, detest plastering myself with makeup. That meant walking up and down the street as a fairly obvious guy in a dress, past any number of places with their quota of tourists sitting outside, drinking and looking around . I thought at the time that getting through that would be a useful baptism of fire and in many ways it was. Problem was that it also pushed me into staying very very close to home for a year or so. In general Berlin is a tolerant city : rude, intrusive, and in your face, but tolerant. In the centre anyway.There were at least three other early m2f transitioners that I'd see regularly, on the streets or in shops, and slightly more variant types - the guy with the handlebar moustache and mini skirt is the one that sticks in the mind. And there was the slight advantage of having a swingers club around the corner. That's because some of its male patrons wear skirts, for more immediate access to their personal assets, and therefore a guy-in-a-dress could be viewed ...differently.
Within say 10 minutes stroll there are a couple of BDSM places, though friends in that scene tend to go more to schwelle 7. Then 3 or 4 lesbian hangouts, maybe 8 - 10 gay bars and queer trans nights at many of them. And there's a major sex club about 15 minutes away where poly's hang out. I really should get around to going to some. Also to the allegedly awesome friday salon afternoons in fürbringerstrasse  around the corner, which annoyingly coincide with my cooking time. It's not a significant commercial sex district, the nearest brothel is about 20 minutes walk away and there's no street trade. Overall it is more LGBT friendly than many areas in Berlin, but it is a city with a very out gay mayor and probably over 15% of the population, at least, are LGBT.Make that 1 in 5 in Kreuzberg. Partly that's down to the more fringe elements in german society pouring in here to shelter from the aforesaid german society, when the wall was still up. Partly it's just Berlin being Berlin. There's still some sort of nod to Weimar. When I came out to my neighbour, a reasonably conventionally cultured civil servant, she did express disappointment that I wasn't going to be being more performance art inclined.
I sometimes manage to take evening walks in the local park here.When I first started coming here, there were the places in it where you could sunbathe naked, others where you could engage in sexual activity and places for major drug use. That's mostly gone now - though nude sunbathing and smoking dope are generally still acceptable there. The hill gives it's name to the district - it's where the templar's church stood - and gets popular with the lesbian covens at halloween.
Berlin has it's evenings. It's still very affordable to go out to a bar, another bar, a meal, a music bar( LOTS of live music here), dancing bars, karaoke bars and then breakfast bars. ( It's very much of a green bottle economy here. For example, some churches have bars that they open when they put on, say, music gigs. Think cultural sacrament = beer.) Fridays in the shop slot in as early to midnightish for the active crowd. Normally we get about 30 - 35, with most of those eating whatever I've cooked. It's a good place for english speakers to meet and talk. ( My own german is not exactly fluent. It comes from hardly ever speaking anything but english). Apart from students, most have some competence at speaking german, but it's not exactly a comfortable language to use. That means that the place is a sort of conversational dinner party with a lot of people far more open to meetings than if they were in their own country. The occasional tourist, a sprinkling of students, would be students, assorted types of artist, writers editors film people etc. That's the general makeup on a friday and the normal daytime people are similar but with more tourists and academics. The average age is about 32, and my own personal friendship circle is about 5 years older, on average.
I'm very much part of my neighbourhood. One thing that means I that I have some sort of place in the overall street, kiez / neighbourhood soap opera gossip scene. In that way it's a very german thing. The image of the berlin woman sitting at her open window with a pillow in front of her so as not to halt her observation and talk with other women by their windows in the block, is still sometimes to be seen actualised. It's often intrusive and mildly malicious but helps, with many other factors, to give a social cohesiveness. If I'm out for 5 - 10 minutes or so, I'll normally meet someone I know, say hello in passing or chat. Rather think it goes with the standard phrase New Yorkers use about Kreuzberg that it's like the lower east side was 30 years ago.
In Kreuzberg nearly everyone has two jobs, their art one and their survival one.
Kreuzberg has had a riot on may 1st every year since '87. Still. That may say something about the place.
If you want to come for more than a long stop on the grand tour then don't count on easily finding work, even with reasonable german. 4 years back I'd get maybe a dozen or so people a year asking about work. Now it's more like a couple each week. Rent regs have been relaxed and flats are actually sold as well, which has impacted hard on an economy geared around discretionary consumer spending. If you are a budding artist of any kind, you'll surely find a lot of company here - the last 2 years have been big on wannabe novelists - and art / performance spaces are plentiful . If you want to have a long summer hanging out in the middle of europe on a not too extortionate budget, it's still an ideal place, but... WARNING be very, very wary of doing this in winter. That's another world entirely.
Berlin : in the words of our dear mayor, poor but sexy.

A stealthy moment

Yesterday I finally did something I've wanted to do for a while and gone momentarily stealth.
In the last few months, 3 years after starting transition, I must have had about a dozen people, who'd known me before, coming into the shop. Berlin tends to be a lasting magnet once you've spent some time here.
Sometimes it gets a little awkward when they ask directly where I've gone to. In this case it happened like that, and they also queried the whereabouts of other people who are / were fixtures here.
So this time I answered only about those others, and they went off saying they'd be in one friday soon, when no doubt someone will enlighten them.
It's not, after so many hundreds of meetings , that I'm exactly shy about being out. It's just that I am so weary of the comments afterwards about how they thought I was me but didn't like to ask to confirm. In some cases it may be true, and I'm sure it's not meant as a variant of the 'deceiver' meme.
But equally I'm sure that several really had no idea at all and simply want not to feel as if they've failed a recognition test.
Thinking about it afterwards and actually I can only remember one time when someone came in, didn't react like that and weren't shy of expressing astonishment. They were a trans couple. Figures.
Of course I do have a particular reason why people don't recognise me readily.
Because this was how I looked before...

such stuff...

Thinking about acceptance a lot recently.
For such an ordinary thing, especially if one puts the focus on acceptance of one's gender, it does seem to get remarkably complicated. It's easy enough to say that everyone who stays with you are accepting and those who fall away not. But really that extreme a binary doesn't exist in nature.
I've got one friend of about 10 years standing. She comes by a lot, we talk, we plan some small things together, we have our ups and downs but we're good friends. But, no, I wouldn't say she accepts my gender. She had a problematic thing with her own endocrine system years back and that ties in to an absolute belief in second wave principles, which don't readily allow for trans realities.
I had only one good friend who broke off contact. She's got a phd in gender studies and mostly was a committed cyberfeminist. Her reactions to me now, if we happen to meet somewhere, are extreme and utterly phobic. I think, though, that she actually is accepting of my gender, just extremely scared of it.
And then there's the question of how great a substance there is in a meeting, how deep it's possible to make a relationship. Selling books, or rather being an active librarian which is far more what I do during the day, there's a strange sort of meeting. Talking to a relative stranger about themselves, in terms of what they get from books, makes for an odd kind of initial intimacy. Being an oasis of english in a desert of german adds to that, it's an encouragement to relaxed communication.So I'm quite used to that pattern, an initial artificiality that one can build greater intimacy on.
Being out does make for the same preliminary artificial intimacy. I don't make any sort of song and dance about it but most people start the 'how long have you been in Berlin ?' conversation themselves and an exchange of histories that goes beyond the superficial is often a route to referring to being trans,assuming the person seems relatively receptive. Maybe I get a good set of people through, or maybe I've got some reasonable judgement about them, but most do regard it as an act of intimacy and respond on that basis.Certainly the depth of friendship that can spring from such sharing is something of a blessing and the acceptance being not of me the trans woman, or simply the woman, but just me.
And then there's the acceptance of girlhood. Whatever the history, we all enter transition as girls and not as women. We haven't been through the hormonal changes or experienced the social realities that are such an enormous part of the reality of being a woman. Frankly I find the attempts to write off such aspects of transition as only of trivial importance in the action of 'putting right one's birth defect' or similar, both dangerous and misleading. To have people, which for me translates to cis female friends, around me to share and help through one's second adolescence is of enormous personal benefit as well as a process that they find of interest in the light that it sheds on their own gendered history.
Then there's also the problems of self acceptance. That's something that operates on many levels. Acceptance of my changed gender identity was relatively swift in terms of knowing sufficiently that I simply had to transition rather than live in the absurd world that male presentation created around me. That didn't mean that I could put aside all doubts, though any based on still being a guy were history in a month or so. But even if I had, putting doubts aside doesn't necessarily mean positive self acceptance. And the extent to which conscious and unconscious processes were aligned in female self identification has been a process that has only slowly grown from an imperfect base.
Maybe this is excessively backward of me compared to most trans people, who may start off with this, but I was particularly pleased at something that happened last month. For the first time I woke up knowing definitely, sans sexuality, I'd also been a woman in my dreams.

An embarrassing coming out and a call for writers

So finally a coming out post to the blogosphere.
Going back to my biographical stuff, about '94 after my closest friends suicide I became rather more geographically diffuse. A couple of years later I started the enterprise which has been my principal focus to the present. It didn't start particularly well : my long term partner went in to clinical depression, which really screwed up both of us. But, partly with the help of the business involvement, I got through the consequent breakup and slowly but surely managed to get myself back together for some years before the events described in this blog.
The place I'd set up has always been something of a strange partner in itself. From the initial few weeks, about 14 years ago now, it was clear that it was actually more of an institution than a business. It's never made much money, because I've never really pushed that until recently. It's a community thing, though the community is very international. It's a cultural thing, though when I hear the word generally I reach for my....It's an english language zone in a city where that's perhaps needed more than most. It's a meeting place for strangers, a travellers rest, a standard stop on the grand tour, and my own living room. And, less grandiloquently, it's a second hand shop of sorts,that does weekly meals, has different groups meeting in it and puts on music, readings etc etc
In itself, that's not so embarrassing. It's more that if you run something that's sometimes a sort of a salon, there really is only one place to do it if you're trans. A place where the LGBT population is about 1 in 5. The city where trans history centres itself. And to do it and suddenly turn trans, that's embarrassing.
There are a couple of links below. They're not entirely accurate,but close enough. There's also a short fiction competition being run by someone else, but that's linked to here, which any reasonably unpublished writers out there might be interested in.
We, meaning my expanded corporate self, are 'utterly strange and utterly charming', a place where 'you can relax, sit and share your life with Sophie'. For BBC / Lonely Planet we're the worlds sixth greatest bookshop and allegedly number 600 and something on the 1,000 places in the world you should visit. We're 'Another Country' in Kreuzberg, Berlin.
Here's my last interview and this is an NPR story that has absolutely no detail right but actually has a good perspective on the spirit of the place ( and we actually are the largest physical s/hand sf&f bookshop in europe, along with our general stock ).
And for relatively unpublished writers, here's the competition.
The website and blog are in process of change now that my family are all aware of my situation. If you're an avid viewer of 'before' photos there's plenty there. And if you'd like to see more of the place, this is a music video shot here a few weeks ago.
Hopefully people can see now that one of the most embarrassing things is that if I'd been a cross dresser, a gender performer, or a genderqueer artist, I'd have actually been rather more accepted and probably significantly better off than I am...

An odd perspective

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.

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.