Privileged

    It was encouraging the other day to read something from a natal female feminist outraged that her feminist group was debating whether to allow trans people to attend. Lots of talk about male privilege it seems, usual thinly disguised man-hater stuff. The group had settled on inaction, they'd cross that bridge when a trans woman came along. Presumably meaning at that point they'd decide to boot out a trans woman.  One wonders what they think a trans person looks like, and whether they understand that they could have trans women among them without their realising it. They Walk Among Us y'know!
    This touches on a difference I've observed between male culture and female culture. Women's groups are often exclusive, groups patronised by men aren't. Feminists and other womens groups exclude men without question, in four decades as a bloke I've never seen the reverse outside dinosaurs such as men-only golf clubs that I have nothing to do with anyway. In the real world the only bloke-only space I've patronised has been the men's loo. Even QwesT FtM, a support group for trans men and a very sound organisation, have FtM-only meetings. I've *never* encountered an MtF support space that has MtF-only events and would not be extremely pleased to see any FtMs who might attend so I was rather shocked to see that. Then again if exclusivity is a female thing perhaps we could learn from them...
    (Edit) Nutty radical feminists are all too ready to bang on about male privilege. My wicked sense of humour finds it funny that they do so in the same breath as voicing the self-evident right-on opinion that nobody should be targeted for abuse over anything they are born with and can't help. It is interesting though to think what it means from a detached on-the-fence insider's perspective. I can only see it from my own position after all.
    As someone who's spent decades as a scruffy bloke, I have had male privilege in bucket loads. It's true, especially as a large scruffy bloke I can swagger if I choose to. The world is my oyster. But do the man-haters honestly believe that people like me don't understand that? And that someone able to reap the apparent benefits of all that might willingly give it up? Does that not make them stop and think for a minute?
    Of course not. At the root of the man-haters hate is envy, for something they could never have.

    Shame, I'd give 'em the whole bloody lot if I could. It really ain't all it's cracked up to be.

A year in her shoes

    Just from curiosity, I took a look back at what I was writing here a year ago. Nothing much changes, I was fettling the Wreck, I'd just been out with some local t-girls and I was periodically plagued by the noisy girl. Amusingly I thought I might have the Wreck on the road within a month, only a year later am I about to send it for an MOT test.
    One personal anniversary is in the offing though. A year ago, give or take a few days, I finally took delivery of my wig. It had taken a while because I'd taken pains to get the right wig - I've paid less for Wrecks in the past - and I'd had to have it altered for my oversize head.
    But for the first time I could stand in front of a mirror and see something more of the girl than the scruffy bloke wearing her clothes. Straight away I gave myself a shock when I saw something of my sister looking back at me.
    I've come a long way in the last twelve months. I've come to terms with some of my demons, not least  my height. Going out as girl has become less scary and a little more routine, though I've not pushed my wife's comfort zone by doing it too close to home. I'm in the queue for the GIC for whatever help they can offer someone in my position, I'm in a much better job and some of last year's worries for the future have receded. Looking forward I'm slowly growing my hair out and in due course I'll no doubt be savouring the joys of having my facial hair lasered.
    So I have a lot to be thankful for. Unfortunately though I'm still as far away as ever from being at peace with all this. I can't quite escape the nagging fear that eventually it'll all go pear-shaped anyway and I'm just stringing my wife along. She says not to worry as we'll deal with everything as it arrives, but I can't help it. I am incredibly lucky to have married someone who has been able to come to terms with having a gender dysphoric husband to the extent she has, but I have no wish to push her beyond her limit.
     I can't put this back in the box. I tried that for years, and it nearly killed me. If I am to successfully pursue my aim of hanging in there for my wife I must face up to the crushing gloom of a lifetime of this stretching away before me. However at this point I feel I can take hope from something a friend pointed out to me: that dealing with this is not a process that starts at the point of going full-time female, at GRS or any other milestone, instead it starts at the point at which you come to terms with your female gender identity and thereafter all steps you take represent progress along a path that is never fully completed. Within that scope I feel I have more room for manoeuvre, and that at least is something to be happy about.

Misleading yourself for fun and profit

    A web site came my way yesterday that captivated my interest for a while: http://www.genderanalyzer.com/. A nod to Kev of Paper Wilderness fame for that one.
    It attempts to detect whether the text at a URL you give it was written by a man or a woman, and its approach of classification by comparison with a large body of known samples should be quite a sound one. This is not a million miles from what I do for a living, so I find it to be a very interesting site.
    Give it this blog, and it says that it is likely to have been written by a woman. Phew, validation, I'm a girl!
    Unfortunately though it's never quite that easy. Just from curiosity I gave it some other text I write in another field, as bloke. The analysis returned:  it was likely to have been written by a bloke. Damn, I'm a bloke after all!
    I'm not writing in a special voice in either place. This is me, this is what you get. Kev expressed disappointment that Paper Wilderness returned a probability of being written by a woman, based on my experience I'd suggest he needn't worry.
    It's tempting to seek validation in software like this. Most of us will probably have encountered the COGIATI test, a questionnaire that is designed to give you an assessment of the level of your transsexuality. When I do that test honestly, it tells me I'm mostly female. No surprises there (It's a while since I did it co I can't remember my exact score). But I'm afraid I can't trust it because with a little conscious effort I can make it tell me I'm completely female, or that I'm barely transsexual at all. In short, I can make it tell me what I want it to, or to put it another way, it tells me what I want to hear. Not good enough, I want something that tells me the truth even if it disappoints me.
    There is another test, one that doesn't involve software. What's your digit ratio? The ratio of the lengths of your index finger to your ring finger is gender dimorphic, if you are male you are more likely to have shorter index finger than ring finger. My digit ratio is 1:1, which of course states that I should be female. Yay, I'm a girl! I mean, that indicates the hormonal balance in the womb, so it can't lie, can it? I asked my wife, after all she's a girl, what would her digit ratio be? Shorter index finger than ring finger. Well clearly she's no bloke, so that serves me right for putting too much store in finger lenghs. The key is in the phrase "More likely" above, it is still quite possible for a woman to have a male digit ratio and vice versa.
     It is always a bit of fun to try these tests, but I think it is dangerous to put too much store by their results. I hope I've demonstrated above that they can not always be trusted, and all the validation we should need should start between our ears.
     There is one more test. It's a traditional British test, and it's guaranteed 100% accurate. Simply answer the following question for an instant result.

Do you understand the offside rule? 

    I'll leave it to you to decide which answer validates your gender identity.

Girl 101

    It's always interesting to read one's way round our corner of the blogosphere. This morning I was reading several different viewpoints on the position in our world that possession of an intact penis confers on its owner. Close to home for me, someone who is despite the facade I maintain here, very much a scruffy bloke in day to day life.
    I was struck by the incompatibility of the central message we all promote on one side of acceptance of the gender dysphoric: that the genetalia we are born with do not dictate our gender identities, and on the other side the position that one can not truly be transsexual, or indeed transition to become a woman or man, without having had GRS. Something does not compute.
    That said, there is a common thread I have observed on my rare outings in the real world presenting as female. Thus far I have always been accompanied by other t-girls of all hues from flamboyant part-time TVs through people like me and pre-op TSs to post-ops. If I may make an observation based on this experience, it is that possessing the equipment required to be a dab hand at nival auto-calligraphy does not allow you to leave the seat up in the ladies'. I mean, c'mon people, it's like, girl 101!

Exasperated sigh from a lucky t-girl

    It's my own fault. I shouldn't respond to forum trolls. But sometimes my annoyance with the finer points of language gets the better of me and I can't help myself. I've mused on the definition of a transsexual before, so when I encountered someone who insisted not only that they were no longer a transsexual but had never really been a man despite marrying a woman and fathering children, my irritation boiled over. Their issue was that admitting to transsexuality amounted to denying womanhood, to which I pointed out that transsexuality is a medical definition while being a woman or man is an identity and the two need not be mutually exclusive. I'm a professional pedant when it comes to definitions in this sphere, and sadly as someone who recognises that they are and will forever be medically defined as transsexual no matter what their passport says when they eventually die, that pedant in me couldn't let that one pass.
    So as these things always do when it comes to forums it descended into a dismal spiral of postings. I was denying them their womanhood, I was jealous of them for being women, I couldn't possibly understand having never been through any of the hardship, yadda yadda. I politely responded that they were simply reading what they wanted to read into my original statement rather than reading what I'd written. I wish I could have been more forthright, but I recognise that within our sphere there are some really screwed-up and angry people and simply poking them with sticks for the fun of it is neither productive nor humane.
    Of course I'm jealous of any woman. I'm also jealous of people with smaller feet, so what? Some people are jealous of trans people with accepting spouses too, nobody's perfect. As to hardship, very true. I have no idea on that one. But I'd invite anyone to walk a mile in my shoes, if they'd fit. I wanted to deliver a "You stupid woman!" to counter the accusation of denying womanhood, but I judged that one might have been just slightly inflammatory.
    Yeah, I know. I should avoid forums. Sigh.
    I've had an annoying week on the sleep and medication roller-coaster, my focus on hanging in there for work. Earlier in the year I expressed a wish for a ring to go with my wedding ring, if you're going to present as female with a wedding ring then an engagement ring is a subtle gender cue as well as being an attractive piece of jewelery in its own right. I would have been happy with cubic zirconia but sadly we had to abandon the search, ladies' rings are hard to come by in a size Z.
    Monday was Valentine's Day, in case you missed it. My wife presented me with a beautiful diamond engagement ring. She'd had it sized for my finger, at some considerable effort.
    I am the luckiest t-girl on the planet, and I am madly in love.

Confusion in clarity

    This afternoon, sometime after three o'clock, I was sitting at my desk feeling pretty good about the world. I'd just had a meeting with a couple of female colleagues at which we'd explored some really interesting stuff in the context of our work over some really nice coffee, and I had one of my more fun work projects back from my boss for a few tweaks. I was sitting there and I thought "Y'know what? You're not troubled at all by gender dysphoria right now!". And it's true, I wasn't, I had clarity of thought, momentarily I was in complete command of the task in front of me. And it all felt so silly for a moment, that I could lose control of myself to that extent.
    If only I could hang on to the moment. I could have used that at five o'clock this morning when I was lying there awake having been dragged awake from a girl dream that got a little too upsetting, and trying not to wake my wife. I could use it now as well, sitting on the sofa with the laptop, alone in the flat while she's off at her gym class.
    This is going to sound rather crazy, but I rather dread those rare moments of clarity like this afternoon's one. Because they sow momentary doubt, and doubt is dangerous. GD is a royal pain in the arse, but at least I know what it is. I certainly wouldn't have chosen my girl's brain had I been given the choice, but a moment considering what might be were I to not be so reveals something far worse, for then the only explanation would be insanity. At my most depressive a few years ago that's a destination I've been uncomfortably close to. At least the thought I have a normal brain, albeit one from the Other Side, is reassuring in that context.
    On a completely separate note, I scored a couple of very small victories for the greater understanding of transgender issues in the last week. One of my employer's products featured something slightly misleading relating to us, and with the aid of my two colleagues to whom I'm out I was able to ensure that it was corrected. Pretty minor, but because the product reaches far and wide it's something I'd like to hope will help someone indirectly in the future.

The day I learned something about being a bloke

    It may be something on which I have commented before, and it's certainly something I find I share with some others in my position, the difference between my attitude to my appearance depending in which gender I am presenting. Simply put: as a bloke I am scruffy, as a girl I am obsessive. I hate dressing smartly as a bloke but live to dress smartly as a girl. Of course I understand that variety in a wardrobe is essential and were I to go full-time it would be difficult to imagine myself pruning apple trees in anything significantly different from the scruffy clothes I wear for that task at the moment, for example, but my point is that I never have the slightest desire to be smart as a bloke and the opposite is the case for my female presentation.
    You will never catch me wearing a suit to work. You wouldn't even catch me wearing a suit to work were I presenting female as it happens, in further reinforcement of my point above they do not work well on a girl of my size, forming a huge block of dark colouring that does little to flatter or divert the emphasis from my height. Plus Tim Gunn says they are dowdy, and who am I to argue with that, however much the 1980s might have inserted themselves into my mind as a teenaged closet t-girl!
    I had always considered my aversion to smart clothing to be simply part of being a bloke. You know, the slob stereotype. But if I don't fit in with the rest of being a bloke or the rest of that particular stereotype, why should I fit in with that facet? So a few weeks ago I decided to satisfy my curiosity, and asked a few of my male friends how much they cared about their appearances as blokes. My sample was limited as there are not many blokes who know about Jenny, but the answers I got surprised me. They are far more obsessive about their appearances than I realised. Sure, they might sometimes pay lip-service to a scruffy bloke idyl, but in reality they care about what they wear and about their personal grooming in a way that as a bloke I never have. C in particular was insistent about suit-wearing, he believes he does not give the right impression without one.  Particularly interesting though was this quote from K, who's a transman.

 I hated the girl I was seen as, so never took care in my appearance at all, was scruffy, was unkempt and didn't care what others thought...as male I am definitely somewhat different, I like to take pride in what I wear and what I'm seen as.

    And the moment I read that from K was the moment at which I realised that although I have spent many decades learning to be a bloke, there are aspects of it that I have just never "got".
    Will I make more of an effort with my appearance as a bloke? I can't say it enthuses me but I have to try. It is unfair on my wife to pair her with an oversized slob. Fortunately in exploring my female presentation over the last few years I have improved my general demeanour significantly and some of this has rubbed off on my day-to-day existence.
    But you still aren't going to see me in a suit.

Gender as a text field

    A delightfully geeky link for you this morning, Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora. If you are not a web developer, it's an explanation from a programmer of her decision to replace the binary "bit" field that stores gender in her application with a "text" field, thus allowing more options than "Male" and "female".
   The usual array of idiots in the comments: "People either have a penis or they don’t. Their sexual preference/life philosophy doesn’t alter their gender" Sigh. But well done Sarah Mei!

Nobody in their right mind...

    It's not often I'm labeled as a transvestite. Shame really, I'd rather like to be one. If I could only replace my girl's brain with a blokey one the only thing I might hang on to from all this mess would be crossdressing, and I'd probably be gleefully exploring every avenue. Be afraid.
    This morning though a commenter on my "Why I'm out" post from a few days ago did just that. Mainly because in her view I couldn't possibly be anything else, I'm doing my best to avoid having surgery and my chances of living in stealth are not high. Fair enough, I answered her as best I could. But I've obviously not managed to get across my situation in 230 posts, so perhaps another way of putting it is in order.
    It's a phrase that trips easily off the tongue, "I want to be a woman". In my case as a basic desire, it's very true. I ache to be a woman. Yet in the terms that matter, I don't want to be a woman, I'm running as hard as I can in the other direction. I want to be a woman only when all possible alternatives have been exhausted and I have no other choices except suicide or insanity. If you've read this blog you'll know why, if you haven't then do some reading.
    I may be stepping out on a limb here, but if "I want to be a woman" is a patient's sole reason for wishing to embark on a course to transition then I'd hope a competent doctor would turn them away or refer them for alternative treatment.
    You don't just want to be a woman in this game. You have to be left with no possible alternatives having gone through hell on the way. I think I qualify on the final point but I'm not quite ready to concede on the first one.
    After all, nobody in their right mind born male would want to be a woman, isn't that what they say?

So just what makes a transsexual anyway?

    Confused by differing views on labels I've seen over the past few days, I went and looked up "Transsexual" in the Oxford Dictionary of English. They're authoritative, in writing an entry such as this one the lexicographer will have consulted with members of the medical profession as well as examined the way the word is used within the language.
    Two senses, primary first, then secondary:

• a person who emotionally and psychologically feels that they belong to the opposite sex
• a person who has undergone treatment in order to acquire the physical characteristics of the opposite sex

    Personally I have always taken the word to mean the second of the two senses, therefore I don't generally describe myself as transsexual. I'm in the queue for the place where you can get the treatment so I would describe myself as transsexual if I wasn't going to ask them to help me to avoid being transsexual, but somehow it doesn't fit.
    I was rather surprised earlier this year when I finally got my diagnosis to find that the medical profession follow the primary sense. Thus my psychiatrist, a doctor of some repute with way more letters after his name than I have and who has seen many hundreds of transsexuals over the years, described me as a transsexual. In his book it's a medical condition you can be treated for but you don't lose, the only way you can become a former transsexual once diagnosed is to be laid out cold on the slab in the mortuary. For him you can become a former gender dysphoria sufferer after treatment, but not a former transsexual.
    So now outside the context of my psychiatrist, I don't describe myself as transsexual. I could come over all trans-fundamentalist and do so, but somehow I don't feel even after forty years a loner battling gender dysphoria that I've earned it. It's a personal choice, so by the same metric if someone who has earned it and has conquered their gender dysphoria describes themselves as a former transsexual then that's their personal choice too.
     A happily transitioned trans friend of mine who attends my local support group, an archetypal granny in her mid sixties, is very relaxed about her chosen label. She once looked at me with a wicked grin on her face and stage-whispered in her most masculine voice: "I'm really a bloke you know!". She also has diabetes, for which she takes pills and has injections to keep it under control. I guess they're not unlike hormone tablets or injections in appearance, though I wouldn't know. I've never heard her describe herself as a former diabetic because of them though.

Being me

    There's a turn of phrase that appears quite often in this sphere: Being me. It's normally used to refer to precious time spent by a part-time or closeted t-girl dressing female rather than being a boring everyday bloke.
    It's a phrase I have to admit to having some discomfort using in that context. One of the defining moments in making sense of all this came for me some years ago when I realised that I'm the same me whatever I'm wearing. I may be happier, more relaxed and less prone to depression with regular access to both wardrobes, but nothing else has changed. Still the same person, still me. And in a world in which people get hung up on the clothing issue the minute a transgendered angle enters the fray, that's important. If all this was simply about clothing I suspect it wouldn't be such a pain in the arse.
    I have found a use for the phrase though since I started coming out to people earlier this year. Being me means not having to put up a front of blokeishness. If the person I'm talking to already knows, I can be me without having to live up to my appearance. It's funny, I have encountered t-girls for whom the whole thing involves affecting an exaggerated pastiche of stereotypical femininity. I may even have sinned myself at times in that direction too, though not I hope too badly. Yet I find I've constructed an entire life with a defence mechanism based on acting a part of slightly exaggerated stereotypical masculinity. It's too easy, because when you look the part, it works.
    As you might imagine, after that I appreciate being me.

Do trans men struggle to be arseholes, and other musings on gender identity

    A couple of things have set me thinking in the blogosphere of late. Melissa posted a self-described rant about her personal statement of gender identity the other day and I had a "frank exchange of views" with Anne on the same subject in a comment stream over on Halle's blog.
    I can legitimately describe myself here in the virtual world as female because my brain has an unfortunate habit of asserting a female gender identity. But looking in the mirror on an average day, I'm a bloke. Let's get that straight right at the start. Beard stubble? Check. Bits? Check. Brow ridges? Check. Not ecstatic about it and never really have been, but that's the way the cookie crumbles for the gender dysphoric.
    I could fix that if I had the right conversations with the right doctors and embarked on the rocky road of transition, then I could describe myself as a woman. But even with all the chemistry and anatomy fixed I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I'd never be quite the same as a female at birth woman. No, this isn't about chromosomes, prostates and ovaries, it's about upbringing.  The one thing that unites all of us who are or have been blokes with brains from the girl parts bin is this: no matter how long ago we transitioned if we have, how well we pass, whether we choose to sleep with blokes, women, both or nobody, we all of us never had the chance to grow up as girls or young women. We're graduates of bloke school while they have degrees from girl academy. If you've ever met a girl who's XY androgen insensitive you'll understand what I'm trying to say, she's got similar internal anatomy and girl brain, same chromosomes as an MtF TS, but because she had the girl upbringing she doesn't have any of the baggage. From the very few I've met (completely outside this sphere), the chances are she's someone I can look in the eye too. Sigh.
     Bloke school teaches you that you can be an arsehole if you want to. It's quite socially acceptable to be a violent aggressive rude philandering misogynist bastard if you want to when you're a bloke. If you do it with aplomb, you're even respected for it, admired as some kind of Jack-the-lad. I'll never know at first hand what girl academy teaches you but its bloke equivalent is the school of which I am a summa cum laude graduate. I hope I've not committed any of my list of socially acceptable bloke sins that it equipped me for, but six years at an all-boys school means I sure am going equipped. I hated that school!
    We can't lose that bloke upbringing, however hard we might like to. It shapes who we are, and it's why so many of us get it slightly wrong so easily when we first stray into attempted womanhood. And in our character we've all got that bastard training sitting there too. Some of us never use it, some of us let it slip out occasionally and others never put it away. Tell me you've never met a trans woman in the real world with just that little too much of the bloke in her character, I know I have.
     I've often wondered whether trans men have the opposite problem, whether as they assume the male role they have problems learning to be the arsehole that blokes are sometimes expected to be. Their support networks rarely seem to intersect with ours so I've met so few trans blokes face-to-face I've never had the chance to ask. I know with a brain like mine I'm hardly placed to be an arbiter of masculinity, but from where I'm sitting if they don't manage to master that facet then they'll be all the better blokes for it.
    What am I trying to say? Really assuming a gender is not as simple as proclaiming yourself as such. I sure as hell wouldn't deny anyone the right to do so but  anyone who does so has to be able to back it up with more than just the assertion, whether they've seen the doctor or not.

What makes you think you're really a girl?

    I read a piece from Hollie a couple of days ago. she was responding to an awkward but incisive innocent-sounding question in a comment: "What makes you think you're really a girl?".
    Such a simple question. yet one that strikes at the heart of our insecurities. When your whole edifice is one that would be readily attacked by so many people, to hear it from closer to home is something of a shock. Hollie wrote that she considered it might be an attack before realising that it was a fair question and answering it.
    Having read her piece I think it's a question all of us should ask ourselves at some point. Because in doing so we make ourselves stronger when someone else asks the same question.
    So then Jenny, what makes you think you're really a girl?

Old friend, new acquaintance

    A few months ago I described  the moment at which I discovered a mate of mine from one of my distinctly blokeish circles of friends was experiencing similar gender issues to my own. Last night A and I finally encountered each other in girl form, rather than the usual grubby outdoor blokes we normally see each other as.
    Nothing special, just an evening at a friend's house eating Italian food and watching films, but after several months it was good to see her out in the open. I think she makes a better job of it than I do, but isn't that always the way. She's a little more closeted than I am here in our home town so had taken a little persuading, I hope she enjoyed herself.
    I've heard it said before that transgendered people seem to share a surprising number of interests.  I read a piece recently from April about how a lot of us have obsessive interests in common as an attempt to divert ourselves from our gender issues, and A and I are no exception. We share a couple of the stereotypical interests for British t-girls, and each independently have a couple of the others.
    I can't help casting a speculative eye around the rest of the techies, geeks, adrenaline junkies and petrolheads with whom I spend the occasional weekend day of little interest to my wife, and thinking "OK then, who else of you do I have this in common with?". I'm sure A and I aren't the only ones. Time will tell I guess, as I edge more out into the open.

The gender of machinery

    It was the trainspotter that started it. Early morning on the platform at Didcot Parkway waiting for a train heading west I'd wandered the length of the platform, looked at the power station and just for the sake of some exercise retraced my steps past the waiting room and continued towards the London end.
    An EWS freight locomotive was heading north round the curve with a container train, its exhaust note oddly flatulent for a weekend morning. Mitsui OSK lines, with the cute alligator logo. I distinctly heard the middle-aged trainspotter say to his mate: "She's giving it some!". That's right, they were looking at the locomotive.
    Never having been one for attributing personalities to my  machines I've always found it ever-so-slightly creepy. Mainly because in the circles I move in the people who do it are often those who should perhaps get out more. When you park your bike or car up and the otherwise similar one next to it is polished to within an inch of its life in contrast to your own machine's squashed bugs, minor oil leaks and enthusiastically used tyres, you just know that you're about to be accosted by a character in a WWII-style leather flying jacket who's only too anxious to tell you what a right little goer his girlfriend motor is. It's always the sports car owners (present company excepted, naturally!), recognising an owner of what they consider a lesser example of the marque and wishing to assert their superiority. Faced with that, "it" becomes the automotive pronoun of choice.
    I guess there must be machines that deserve a gender. Boats, for example. But why are machines always "she"? Where are... No, don't answer that.
    To me a machine is always a thing. A clever assemblage of components designed to do something. I may will it to perform its task, for example I once willed a Volkswagen Polo with all my heart to make it to the other side of a flood (Note to self: NEVER drive under a flooded railway bridge again!), but in doing so I am not assigning personality and least of all gender. Why is it that some people feel the need to do that?

A friend with no notion of gender

    My wife's friend R is Hungarian. She's a lovely girl who's a lot of fun to be around, and we see her quite regularly. I won't be coming out to her any time soon for cultural reasons, but we count her as a member of our closer circle. Having lived in the UK for several years now she speaks excellent English, but for one charming oddity. For her, "He" and "She" are interchangeable because it turns out that the Hungarian language does not have gender specific pronouns and it has been difficult to lose the habit of a lifetime.
    It's rather nice to have one of your female friends refer to you spontaneously as "She".

Doubt

    Earlier today I read a piece form Sophie Jean entitled "When I First Knew", in which she describes coming to terms with her gender issues from a young age. It set me thinking, not about coming to terms with yourself but about coming to terms with that realisation afterwards. In simple terms, occasional doubt. "Can this really be true, might I just be an especially deluded transvestite after all?".
    I'm sure I'm not alone in this, that having reached the point of bringing all my gender problems together in my mind relatively late in life I've occasionally had moments over the last year or so when I still can't quite believe it. After all, so the line of thought goes, "I'm the same as I was before I figured it out, why haven't I er... changed somehow?" Well, the simple answer to that is this: Hell yes I've changed, it has to be something pretty damn fundamental to turn off two decades of clinical depression like a damn light switch!
    But it touches on something a bit more basic to do with gender identity. Just as you don't magically change from boy to girl between your ears by swapping your trousers for a skirt, you don't magically get a girl brain just because you figure out you should have one, it has to be there first to be discovered. And I'm pretty damn certain you don't spend your childhood delving through the girly side of the dressing-up box or spend a lifetime in which your gender-identifialble dreams are female without having something of a girl brain installed. So why on earth should I expect anything to have changed!
    Maybe it's not so much doubt at my conclusion but doubt at my cognitive ability, "If you're supposed to be so damn clever why on earth did it take you so damn long to figure out the bleedin' obvious!". It's easy, I'll just blame it on my male side. Isn't that what women do? :)

Life as a male impersonator

Useless at passing, me. Yet I'm better than awesome at passing. Huh?
    My "girl" always feels to me like a character from the 1980s BBC sit-com 'Allo 'Allo. No doubt one of the British airmen involved in yet another hilarious rescue plan involving dressing as a nanny and wheeling a pram containing the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies by Van Klomp, all the while pursued by a comedy SS officer dressed as a nun. (if you have no idea, Google it, if you think the show is in bad taste/not very funny, then yes and yes.) I've accepted this, though not without occasional heartache, and moved on.
    Meanwhile, my "boy" is an Oscar winning performance. Blimey I do the passing as bloke thing well! I don't mean the day to day living, being there for my wife, drying the dishes or throwing out the trash, I mean the "one of the boys" thing, the harmless and non-threatening loud ribaldry and general tomfoolery of everyday bloke-dom in a world of other blokes. Damn it, I can swagger as a bloke! I'm not really like that though, it's a strategy that's evolved through a combination of exhibitionism and self-defence. Sometimes a voice inside me will say "Did I really say that?". If I'm so good at it and I'm transgendered, I have to ask, are all the other ribalds also TG underneath and busily hamming it up for the outside world? That would be a turn-up for the books!
    Being good at something can feel rewarding. I haven't always been good at life, but as I've grown up I've slipped into this slightly larger-than-life bloke character when I'm with other blokes. Yes, it's camouflage, but it can be mighty comfortable camouflage at times.
    A transgendered female hamming it up passing as the bloke she looks like is all a little Victor Victoria, but since I'm stuck with the role and I'm kinda good at it, I think I can run with it when I need to. The unfortunate feature of being born transgendered is that just as I'll never know what it is like to grow up with a female body I'll also never know what it is to be completely at home with what I've grown up with. Such a waste in a way that the physical ability to be so effectively a bloke should be given to someone in that situation.

Non transitioning

Two words, sometimes my defence against the world, at other times my jail.

My visit to the doctor for a particularly viscious bout of insomnia crystallised the problem facing all MtF transgendered people who seek help even if they don't see it as a problem, all he had to offer me was a path to transition. For a brief moment I stood transfixed like a five-year-old, eyes fixed on the sweeties being dangled above me, beginning to salivate. Then the mental slap, "You're a damn giant ferchrissakes, you look like a badgers arse even with makeup on, you can't even find decent girl shoes in your size and you're married to a total babe! You'd throw all that away for what infinitesimally small hope you've got of making it a success? Don't be a [village on Orkney]!".

On the web I sometimes feel as if we see only the success stories of transition. A lovely group of beautiful girls skipping together hand in hand through the sunlit pastures into their new lives. And the best of luck to them for being able to do it, they damn well deserve it! Envious I may be but it's not a poisoned envy.

No, we never see the failures. I know from a lifetime of reading and digesting all the info that has come my way on the subject that there are people who've fallen hard in the transition process and I'm smart enough to know the chances of my becoming one of them are extremely high. I've referred in the past to begeting a twisted giantess, well I think I'd do well to hold onto her bogwood club just to remind me of her before I do anything stupid. I've beaten clinical depression once before and I'm not going back.

So here I am in my groundhog day moment of perpetual girl envy, occasional transition temptation, periodic insomnia and casual cross-dressing. It chose me, nobody would be crazy enough to pick this condition for themselves. At least I have fun at it, who knows by the time I perfect my cross-dressing skills to the extent that I look like women my age, I might not yet be at the age at which the wrinkles lessen the differences. Maybe I should spend time in chav (Translation for non-Brits: trailer trash) country, a few shell-suited blobs hoving into view might cure the girl envy pretty quickly. Shame my town's full of stylish and beautiful twenty-something students.<sigh/>

If I have learned one thing though it is that I am not alone. There are others like me who for whatever reason acknowledge themselves as transgendered yet choose not to take the path towards transition. None of us wish to force our path on others and we're all envious of the girls who make a success of transitioning, we just realise it's not our chosen way forward. Some of us may in the future even change our minds and go for it anyway, but that's our decision alone. If we can do anything for our transgendered sisters meanwhile though it is to make the world aware of ourselves, in case there's a bogwood club waiting to be avoided in someone else's path.

Angry (TG) kid

A week or so ago, Emma-Claire posted a piece about her schooldays. She described her experience of being picked upon once because one of her schoolmates in her words "decided i needed Toughening up". Well done to her for later punching the kid's lights out!
I've found myself brooding somewhat on her piece in the darkness of a snow-bound commute. I hope she won't mind me using the word she mentioned in her piece, "soft", her path was different from mine at school in that she was the soft kid at her school while I was the aggressive kid at mine. The aggressive unpopular kid, I should add, there were plenty of other aggressive kids at my school but kids hunt in packs and are ruthless when they spot anyone who's a bit different so I was never part of any crowd.
I am pretty sure now that I was responding to my gender by being aggressive. It's the easy way out, especially when you're larger-than-average. The school I went to was very traditional in its outlook for the 1980s so there would not have been any support from that quarter.
Did I take a wrong turn by not being a soft kid at school? I'll never know. I played the angry kid, and I did it well. Rather too well, as it happens. I have no sympathy for the other aggressive kids I went up against, to a man they were racist, homophobic little turds and no doubt transphobic too, had they known.
At least I don't have picking on the soft kids on my conscience.