schrödinger's cut

At present am involved in finding out whether or not the outlook for surgery might have changed. Essentially that means whether I can go for anything more than an orchiectomy. It's difficult because what I'm likely to be faced with is either a direct 'no', or a 'not at the moment',or a yes but the odds, re serious complications, are x.
Living with cirrhosis means that you're automatically put in a 'no unnecessary surgery' category. When I broke my leg a couple of years back I was told that there was a high risk of not being able to walk too far without a lot of pain, in a few years time, if they didn't operate. They impressed on me that they still really didn't want to operate and were very relieved when I went along with them. Bad coagulation,and the fact that most pain killers are liver toxic in some degree are the minor problems.  The possibility of infection is one of the potentially fatal ones. On the other hand my readings have been better than previously, though the underlying condition persists, so from what I've heard there might be a small chance of being able to have GRS.
So questions as to whether I want / need surgery and how much of a risk I'm prepared to take are hovering about my consciousness at present
Insofar as I had thought about it before transition it was with an automatic 'of course' answer to the former. It felt dissappointing to realise that my body morphing didn't somehow just include that detail. But the problems of getting it seemed insurmountable at the time, so I've tried to block myself from thinking about it at all until now. Haven't had total success with this. It goes with the mixed up thing of not having had body dysphoria until after starting transition.
To be clear, if the normal risks and expense and pain were what I could expect from a somewhat below  average healthy person of my age, then there'd be no problem at all and I'd happily sail off into a post op sunset. There are the obvious practical advantages - I really do miss saunas,swimming etc. Sexually it would be likely to be a significant  improvement, though at the moment having moved to more full body orgasms is quite...entrancing. Certainly I'd be more relaxed in any sexual situation if post op. Being bi with a main focus on women it's maybe not quite as important than if I was straight, but it would ease interactions.
Then there's the validation. Because I can always look back at that sudden shift of being, that seems to affect me less than most ts people, but it still is annoyingly there. There's the thing one can occasionally still glimpse, that shadow lurking at back of the mind, the one that whispers that maybe none of this is wholly real, that you're perhaps being indulged in some foolish play of presentation. To look down and always see a constant reminder that you're not as fully a woman as you could be does suck in that context. The one good thing about putting on weight is that that view tends to be mercifully truncated, as it were, and shrinkage obviously helps.
On top of that there seems to be something else : a body image confounded, or a neural map with strategically placed fuzzy zones, maybe. Or perhaps something that comes with a posture, the normal cultural specific ways a woman holds her body, which accentuate the de trop nature of a penis. Or maybe it is true, that feeling as your body changes in it's sensitivities, that surgical change simply allows for that process to complete.Telling the difference between these, however, is something I often find difficult to accomplish.
And then there are the motivations I don't have. I don't seek my validation as a woman in surgery. I don't see it as anything other than a climactic moment in presentational change. I believe that attempts to view it as anything different in kind to simpler forms of presentation are fundamentally nonsensical.That's not to say that many can't find it a climactic moment, but don't believe that that springs from the surgery itself as much as from it's place in the individual's narrative.
( For a variety of reasons I do think it's a worthwhile enterprise to establish correlatives, that are more than simple assertions of identity, as to elements that constitute male and female. I certainly don't see those as related to anatomy but rather to cognition. Because I'm neurologically intersex, something that embraces much of my consciousness, rather than wholly desperate for a superficial change in body form, for whatever motives.)
I don't see surgery as a personal completion and nor, thanks to geography, is not having it any bar to official changes. Certainly no-one who knows me more than casually is going to alter towards me through believing I'm somehow more authentic. Whenever I talk to cis women about the attitude that surgery should be a qualification of sorts, the reactions are simply disgust at the genital essentialism behind it. And joining in status games played by the older casualties of the transitioning process has zero appeal.
I think that not having GRS would be unlikely to lead to anything as dramatic as breakdown or suicide in my case. Older surgical essentialists of the most rabid kind will still have lived with the knowledge that they were mismatched with their body for a couple of decades before surgery. I've only done about 4 years so far. Depression, yes, I can see that as likely but in envisaging that I'm leaving out a key factor : whether or not there are reasonable spaces where accommodations can be made, positive possibilities. There, I do have a certain amount of room : it's hardly as if I've spent my life looking to transition and all it's ramifications. Not being bound to an emotionally highly invested image of myself as a woman does help.
On the other hand I do still feel that my present body shape constitutes a handicap of sorts. Internally, socially, in relationships, every which way I'm a developing woman with this single anatomical exception. If the situation does persist, I'm not sure how exactly that might impact on identification. Not so much in terms of gender but more in terms of relationships. From the viewpoint of a bi oriented woman, it would probably accentuate the attraction towards other bi oriented women.Anyway, whilst technically bi really don't see myself wanting a relationship with a guy. Within that sort of possible spectra of gendered relationship, ambiguous anatomy would certainly trend to being something relatively innocuous. The practical aspect of being non op as regards sex actually isn't particularly problematic for me. I always used to get more pleasure from my partners pleasure than the norm and that's now satisfyingly far greater still.
There's also the age thing. Anecdotally, at least, there does seem to be a growing percentage of younger transitioners who are happy in at least postponing GRS. Despite celebrating my 15th birthday this May, body age sadly trumps mind's second adolescence as a factor : and the possibilities of getting some degree of use out of this particular body mod, slim though they may be, are in rather too rapid decline.
When it does come to making any sort of decision will any of these ruminations make any real difference to how I feel ? Not sure...
On a more general level,I'm sure there are many who share problematic health issues relative to GRS. There's the fairly stupid myth put out by some HBSers and the like that there are only a very few conditions which automatically preclude surgery. And in a way they're correct, in terms of abstract conditions per se. In the real world though, there are many conditions which, if present in a more severe than average form, negate the possibility of surgery, not to mention  the situation of people at the intersection of various such problems. As a group, because of  the frequency of problematic and stressful lives and the frequent occurrence of IS type physical abnormalities, trans women are significantly more prone than the average to these sorts of surgical dilemmas. Minimising this group, or simply jeering at peoples 'excuses' for not having GRS is one of the most unpleasant aspects of voices in the trans blogosphere.
And finally, I wouldn't like to feel that I'm in any way supporting a specific standard narrative. I went into transition because I was clearly female, in terms of neuro-hormonal realities. From the initial self realisation I've sought to go from that primitive girlhood state to becoming a woman. I've encountered many changes both internal and external and I've tried to keep growing as well as I can. Because that process for me involves an attraction to GRS does not, and should not, in the slightest way invalidate the narrative of someone trying for similar processes who doesn't share that attraction. 
If a sister leaves for a desired trip to Thailand, I'm happy for her. If a sister is happy exploring life sans Thailand then I'm happy for her too.
Simple stuff.

Postscript. The above was written a couple of months ago. Initial indications are that my health surprises both myself and doctors in terms of readings. That means something like an orchiectomy or penectomy wouldn't be a problem. GRS might be different but still quite possible. Won't be sure for a while exactly how it works out, but for hours - make that days - make that weeks -  my first thoughts were about this subject rather than it being good health news generally.
And I think this will be my last post on operative status for a fair while. Never particularly fond of using those aspects of transition as material .With my specific uncertainty of status it's been rather difficult to read about others surgical journeys and consummations so I don't think I want to join in that myself.                         

Clarifications, honesties and fictions

I think I speak for many when I say that this post by little light was one of the most inspiring things I read last year. Fundamentally I do believe that honesty is a prime defining characteristic of trans people : that at least once amidst scepticism and hostility from others, allied with our own wished for doubts, we have been honest with ourselves about what we truly are. And, in whatever ways the world allows, we have acted upon that honesty.
Some clarifications then.
For myself, I have no doubts that I'm a woman.
I have some doubts about surgery which spring simply from the fact that I might not be able to have it, and consequent necessary ambiguities as to evading confrontation with that desire.
I have no doubts about transition. The thought of going back isn't anything that I concern myself with because it's simply too ludicrous to even contemplate.
Thinking further on my last post I'd say that a main area that perhaps I find most challenging is to find a personal formulation of how to iterate myself as a trans woman in a world grown strange through that knowledge of myself.
By trans woman I do not mean anything related to surgical status or to any doubts about being a 'real' woman. Rather, I take it as a term relating to history. On the one hand there might be the case of someone who was out at age three, got family, medical and general social support so that no real transition apart from a mildly delayed puberty and probable surgery ever happened. In such an instance I wouldn't see the term trans woman as having much relevance and certainly wouldn't see it as in any way dishonest to avoid it.
On the other hand there are those who have, to a greater or lesser extent, navigated through their own doubts and the male world to the congruence of transition. With such the importance to their lives of being trans as well as the importance of transition mean that they are more easily described as trans women. Of course the 'trans' is secondary, as with black woman, disabled woman, autistic woman, immigrant woman, mother, daughter etc etc etc. And equally if anyone wishes to simplistically call being trans a birth defect and permanently ditch that description, it's hardly an indictable dishonesty given the social enforcement of the gender binary. Like stealth, it generally has some fear component, and possibly a well justified one, given the figures for assault and murder, that can't really be condemned. Obviously it would be nice if such wouldn't universalise their experience and elevate it to sole authenticity, but, as one trans friend recently speculated to me, a high degree of narcissism may be a significant survival factor in transition.
Anyway, this is more of a personal post than a general one about labels, and the point is that besides these general considerations my particular narrative adds it's own spin on being trans. It's 4 years and a couple of weeks since I woke up different to the rather off beat male I'd always considered myself. Whilst social transition is important it's that transition, that tipping point and it's unravelling of male to emergent female circuitry, that is my significant trans identifier. In that way I'm transgressive not only of the gender binary but of the normal bounds of the trans narrative itself. And it's in confronting that, that the application of honesty becomes difficult. As transition goes, there's the negative side, the sloughing off of the male. I daresay that I'm reasonably typical in that sans hormonal reinforcement most of that vanishes away. But much of my intellectual life springs from more recalcitrant male bases and does need continuing critical analysis. My body language presently moves a little to be generally congruent with my socio-sexual identity - a somewhat butch area which is not so easy to navigate. (Can I be in any sense butch and experiment with wearing petticoats ? Questions, questions). More importantly, though, there's the question of knowledge gained through my (real) transitioning process. It's not a female or a male thing but something distinctly other. How to confront that knowledge, how to transfigure it in my life, these are the main questions that I'm still grappling with. It's not about presentation or being any given sex/gender and indeed I'm not sure if it really needs an iterative resolution at all. But it does seem to need some sort of resolution.
Sometimes I wonder whether all trans people are thusly caught in that bright moment where we learned our doom. Because that aha moment that we grasp and confront honestly isn't purely about our own identity but the world's. That our own reality shines hard and bright enough to cast the world as a shadowland around us, a trap of simulacra created through our lived knowledge.
A practical example might be this. I am someone who lives much of her life in a world of ideas. I can appreciate the changes in that mental life in some respects and be frustrated in others. It's really great to just sit back and think without needing stimulation of some sort to raise arousal levels.On the other hand the accessibility of certain categories of knowledge processes is lessened. In Nietzsche's terms, I'm less intellectually light-footed though hopefully not more german because of that. Basically I view that as a relatively normal consequence of new hormone / neurology congruence and a natural concomitant of the relegation of systematised weltanschauung from being closely tied to the day to day self and more part of reflective experience. But there's a dilemma here. A normal cis woman simply lives this experience and doesn't seek out cognitive habits to mitigate the occasional lessening of what could never be a part of her life. Am I undermining my own feelings of authenticity of gender if I do seek in those directions ? Of course there isn't theoretically any problem since the choices I make in this regard are a woman's choices. Practically though, that it also relates to the trans imperative to junk the rags of male life is part of the attempt to create a cis-like authenticity of unselfquestioned female being. But is it honest and authentic in itself ?
Putting it differently. As we wind our ways through the process of second adolescence that lies at the centre of every meaningful transition,we face the same issues as every growing girl.We explore our estrogenized capacities, we seek to find out what it really means to be a woman and the full capabilities we possess. If we shy away from this enterprise, if we simply say that it's really only some sort of passing intoxication,we run the risk of a life spent busy dying. But if we do enter into it how is it possible to avoid using the parameters gained through our first adolescence ? And if we try and ignore this factor completely through some artifice of innocence, what price authenticity ? 

I suspect that I won't be able to make this significantly more clear to myself until further advanced in process.

And then there are the fictions of the moment. Am presently reading through the 60 short stories, sadly not Barthelmic, that were submitted for the competition and confronting my fictive self in various guises. And then there's my rat of an ex husband who wants to use me for a version of the story that's her major project. Which of course I'll be doing. She may be a rat but her project is amazing, a retelling through different cultural matrices of a fairy tale through words art and performance. Take a look here for something awesome.

second thoughts

So I'm having second thoughts about my transition.
Not about my engagement with the process as much as whether the direction is as clear as I'd like. Perhaps it's in some way down to lacking presently for a surgical marker, and partly it's going through those initial weeks and months for a documentary at the moment and remembering how those first few months of confusion clarified and directions were set.And then there was this excellent article in(unapologetic) Bilerico . That hit home especially  for the coincidence of having just had 'Simulacra' as my U-bahn book.  Whatever, really just thinking over how I resolved identity and whether that resolution still holds.
After the first couple of weeks I was clear that something quite drastic and very related to gender were happening with me. My main aim was to try and ascertain just what exactly I was. It seemed axiomatic at the time that I couldn't just lose male history and identity, that whatever I was would come under the genderqueer rubric. There were a couple of months of going backward and forward and through genders, or so it seemed before the habits started to fade and the essentials of the male vanished softly and silently away.
More, though, there was an emerging picture of the process. I was a young girl in the antique surroundings of her deceased uncle's overstuffed mansion. And my process was to go through that place and change, keep, add or subtract through viewing his accumulation of objects, of habits, of pasts. And thereby try and define my capabilities and autonomy as a woman. Or at least that was the main one of a small number of analogies that I used.
And at that point of time, when that process was inexorably starting, thinking to myself about exactly where that transition might lead and what I might be at the end of it. That, in turn, led to how I saw transsexuality and genderqueerness as operating.
After about three or four months I couldn't really think of myself as anything but female and transsexual, it was only too obvious a conclusion. But there were still three ways I could see myself as being potentially genderqueer.
The first was simply by adopting 'genderqueer' as a more descriptive term than transgender or transsexual.
The second is a superficial performative thing. That we can never totally eliminate every last habit of movement, every quirk of that previously assigned gender. Being 'read' that way messages genderqueerness.
The third was more about what I might grow into. Maybe the male material would prove recalcitrant in some ways or the maleness of the experience might somehow contaminate. Maybe the very extent of transition allots a transgressive gaze on the world, a genderqueerness born out of too much knowledge.
In trying to resolve things on this third level, I came to the thought that whatever would eventuate I'd simply engage in the process as a female and nothing more insofar as I could help it. And even if I were to come to a place of genderqueerness in myself then the only way to do that was through being myself, a woman, and not by harbouring any theoretical reservations about that to hamper me.
Lately though, there is an undercurrent of ennui. It sometimes comes when I'm walking around and viewing the same patterns of the gendered world playing themselves out again and again. It's not any real feeling of alienated identity and any genderqueer identity remains inactive, excepting inevitable performance trivialities. And some iterative ones, if my present butch trending appearance is anything to go by. But thinking that this is part of the transness that makes me a trans woman - that vision of the binary in all it's multiple permutations, that hard won literacy of behaviour and understandings.Because to be simply a normal cis woman I'd have to give up not only much of my past but what I've learned through transition. I do see it as one thing unites us as trans women in that as we go through our transition processes, our transitioning eyes see the world in ways that no cis woman ever does.
It doesn't make me genderqueer. What it does do, though, is challenge my articulation of womanhood to reflect something of that, without needing any special social milieu to practice it in.
Something to live up to.
Fifteen year olds ( I've just had that particular birthday party ) think things like that.

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.