Trans eye for a queer guy

    Enough people to fill a medium sized football stadium, packed into a park in Brighton. A parade of buses, lots of stalls selling "interesting" merchandise, huge disco tents, and bands. The Human League reduced to sounding like a Human League cover band, and Fatboy Slim looking very much as he was at his peak. Two more names ticked off the "Yes, seen them" list.

    Yes, it's Brighton Pride. I was there with my friends yet again to hand out trade union stickers and wave (literally) the flag for workplace representation.

    I've been to a few Prides in my time. Most recently when I've been working the event, either for the union or for the Dawn Skinner Fund. This one though was the biggest by far. It's one of the biggest in Europe, and about the only thing it shared with last weekend's stay at Cobham Services was that all of human life was on show. Sometimes rather too much of it at once, but it was a gay Pride event.

    Aside from Brighton's Clare Project, not much trans representation. Gay and lesbian subcultures were very much in evidence. Drag queens, looking as over the top wonderful as always. Given my recent post on drag and the trans community, very welcome as far as I was concerned. And lots of comically bad crossdressing from our gay friends too. Not drag, nor aimed at us, just young gay men having a good time and sticking two fingers up at convention.

    I was reminded of the TV show from a few years ago, Queer eye for a straight guy, in which a team of gay men sorted out the style disasters of hapless straight men. Perhaps the trans community should provide style makeovers to novice gay crossdressers as a public service. Such gems as "It helps if you find a dress on which the zip will do up", or "£10 novelty flight attendant outfits don't even look good on 20 year old girls, put it back".

    I think we could be onto a winner, don't you?

The Vault

    A couple of years ago, shortly after my mum's friend M died, the gravediggers were at work in our village churchyard. Unexpectedly, they hit concrete a few inches underground. Moving over a burial plot, yet more concrete. Three more plots across before they found earth again.
    They were mystified. This was the first burial in the churchyard for a couple of decades and the first in a new plot for much longer, it's not a village with a high death rate. The vicar had no idea, she's only been in the job for a few years. It seems the records were a little badly kept.
    My dad knew what it was straight away when they asked him, they'd found the Vault. A bit of a local legend, that one.
    I can remember people talking about it when I was very young, it was the kind of local gossip that hung around. Some time in the decade before I was born an elderly female relative of a local man died. She was quite wealthy, so the story went, and the man - let's say he had a reputation for being a little sharp - made it his business to work his way into her affections while she was in her dotage. With some success, as he secured the inheritance of her money.
    The old lady had nominated a close friend as her executor. She saw through the man pretty quickly, though she couldn't prevent her friend changing her will in his favour. So when the old lady died she could only watch as the heir awaited probate so he could collect his cheque.
    The executor had a job to do though, she had to arrange  the old lady's funeral and burial. For which the estate of the deceased would of course pay. She proceeded to perform that task for her friend by arranging the most lavish funeral and burial that money could buy in the 1960s, which is why hidden under the turf of a quiet country churchyard there lies - so I'm told, I've never seen it - a full-sized millionaire-spec walk-in vault containing a single extremely expensive coffin. The story repeated when I was young with many a smirk at the expense of the heir was that there wasn't even any money left over for grass seed when the vault was covered over, still less for an inheritance.
    I've often wondered what an archaeologist will make of it in a few hundred years time.

Careful with the gym skirts...

    A few weeks ago I accompanied a friend to East London to a well-known shop serving our community. She seeded to replace her breastforms and they are one of the better places to get them in the UK, having a good range at not exorbitant prices, and crucially the opportunity to see the product at close hand.
    It's a useful shop for many different strands of our community. My friend is long-ago transitioned for example, and I have found some of the few decent ladies shoes that fit me there. However it is also known for catering for the more flamboyant end of our spectrum. I guess that's where the money is. So alongside the more normal ladies clothing you'll see PVC dresses, little girl dresses, crazy high heels and sexy schoolgirl outfits.
    A notice in front of the counter caught my eye. I guess it must be aimed at East London's more light-fingered youth rather than the clientele, but in the context of the shop in question it amused me. A lot.

    "No more than two schoolgirls are allowed in the shop at any one time."

    I felt it would have been rude to laugh out loud in the shop, so I had to contain myself.

Parallel universe

    Bloke in front of me driving a tractor. A big Deere, at least big by UK standards. No implement or trailer, nothing on the foreloader so at least he's not too slow. I'd judge he's a Rustic Son of the Soil in training. Probably a bit younger than me, green overalls and the uniform tweed cap of the British farmer.

    All that outdoor life, I bet he's fairly well-endowed, if you see what I mean.

    I'm driving to the supermarket on a weekend morning. There's an impatient horsey woman in a Discovery behind me. Middle-aged, hair like Princess Anne, white blouse and one of those green puffy waistcoats. Can't see her crotch of course from where I'm sitting, but I'm guessing she's wearing jodhpurs and Hunter wellies to complete the ensemble.

    We reach the village. My turning. I speed off down the side road, leaving Horsey Woman cursing at Tractor Man. It's a wet day today in Southern England, so great plumes of spray are being thrown up as the Rollerskate passes through the puddles. Rather fun as it happens.

    A cyclist in brightly coloured Lycra hoves into view. I slow right down to avoid splashing him. Not much left to the imagination in that outfit, you can hardly see his package at all. Must be the cold I suppose.

    The supermarket car park has plenty of spaces, which is good. Sports Car Lady, a regular at this store, is just pulling in at the same time as me. Unusual to see a natal woman owning a succession of very track-oriented sports cars over the years, I am in awe of her. And naturally, of her vagina too.

   The usual spotty youths are wheeling a great snaking line of trolleys past the cars. All wrapped up against the wet. Probably up and down like the Assyrian Empire like most teens, but they have that teen weediness about them that implies they have a little more growth to go in the trouser department.

    I collect my trolley and go inside to start picking up my groceries. I need to find some oysters, for one thing.

   And so I traverse the store, row by row. The other shoppers, each little more than a set of genitalia on legs when you come down to it, all doing the same. The checkout lady is friendly, can you blame me as a gynephile for thinking about her private parts a little longer than normal?

    As I walk out of the store I pass a tall slim young woman coming in. I'm pretty sure she's trans, like me. We smile at each other. She has lovely hair, lucky thing.

    I load my shopping into the Rollerskate, and drive home.

Trans Conversation Bingo!

    So there we were. Last night, in a Chinese restaurant. My wife and I, our friend B, and about twenty varying trans people of all hues. A local gathering, nothing special.
    The conversation at various points in the evening was sadly predictable. Cars. Bikes. Aircraft. You know, Girly stuff. I'm sure as the owner of a Wreck I've been just as guilty as anyone on that front at times, but this was getting out of hand.
    B and I started playing Trans Conversation Bingo. Collect the set of predictable conversation topics and win!
    At some point, someone suggested it would make a neat mobile phone application, and on that thought I sat down this morning and set to work with the ever-flexible jQuery Mobile.
    You can try the result below. Follow the link in your browser, or scan the QR code into the browser on your internet connected mobile phone. And score the next trans get-together you attend, after all it could be your turn to triumphantly shout "Bingo!".

    It should work on most modern smartphone platforms as well as desktop browsers. You'll need Javascript, and server-side rendering browsers such as Opera Mini might make a meal of it, but give it a go and see how you get on. Just remember one thing though: this is a joke application, don't take it too seriously.

    Try the application at this link: http://goo.gl/uhxYp or scan the QR code on the left.

The Boy, the Girl, and the Babe Magnet

    My friend C has a sports car, a mid-engined MG TF, of which he is inordinately proud. It's a fun little two seater, far too cramped for me but if small sports cars are your thing it's the business.
    He was very disappointed then when he took his then girlfriend to the seaside in it and she demanded that he drive it at no more than 40 miles per hour. It seems he hadn't considered that the slipstream of a small convertible car would ruin her hairstyle.
    Funny, the idea that the 'right' car can be the mythical 'babe magnet'. Even funnier that it once worked for me, a young lady of my acquaintance years ago was very anxious to be taken out by me in the Wreck because it's got lots of chrome and looks rather cute, but dropped me like a hot potato when she saw my daily at the time, a Leyland Sherpa van. And I thought she was captivated by my charm!
    Since I started venturing out into the world presenting as female, I have started to appreciate some of the finer points of female affinity for cars. When your clothes aren't suited to motor oil and your hair and makeup took an age to get just right, of course you want a comfortable, safe, reliable and above all clean environment to travel in.
    Maybe all blokes should try their hand at going out in girl mode, as part of their 'Babe Magnet 101' course.

( Daihatsu HiJet advert image courtesy of http://9gag.com/gag/101704 )

Another coming out story

    I had cause to come out to my boss today. My new boss, that is, my old boss who I came out to last September sadly having moved on to pastures new.
    My new boss is at a higher level in the organisation, an extremely efficient and fearsomely intelligent lady who runs our entire product division. And since I have a pile of absences in my calendar for medical appointments, my counselor, the GIC, and my gender psychiatrist I needed to explain them to her. Fortunately she's someone who has a reputation for standing up for her employees and I am happy to be quietly open about my gender issues so coming out to her didn't present a problem for me.
    Unfortunately when I asked for an extra chat as part of our first weekly meeting she expected something completely different. It seems I've made something of an impression over the last few months, I've delivered the goods in doing my little niche job and she's rather pleased with the results. I've also made no secret of my past in the dotcom-era so she expected me to say I'd found another job and was about to move on.
    So I think my telling her I was gender dysphoric came as something of a relief to her.

    Damn, I should have asked her for a raise while I was at it.

A question for the blokes

    I have never heard of any explosions within the FtM community, of transsexual versus transgender. Y'know, the nival calligraphers versus the stick-on-beard part-timers about who uses which loo, that kind of thing.
    It's probably saying the Great Unsayable, but could it just be that the blokes are, y'know, just a little more sensible about that kind of thing? 

Perceptive postman

    My wife and I have just returned from an extended weekend spent with Lisa. We went shopping, we ate fine food, we hung out in student pubs, drank Aussie rosé and felt a little old compared to the other clientèle.
    Lisa is well on her way, every inch the successful and confident woman. She sweet-talked us into a table at one of her town's more hard-to-get-into restaurants, something I know would have been completely beyond me.
    On Saturday morning Lisa and my wife went off to the gym together leaving me curled up on the sofa watching DVDs. The postman called, bearing a couple of parcels our host had ordered from Amazon.
    A middle-aged midlander, he gave me a quizzical look when I answered the door. Oversized scruffy bloke in a Weebl and Bob t-shirt and shorts. I hope he didn't notice my red OPI-painted toenails.
    "Well you can't be Lisa, unless you've had the op!" he said.
    Trying not to laugh, I accepted Lisa's parcels. Very perceptive, our posties.

Black on white

    I have discovered a striking new manicure technique. It's very eye-catching, if a little dark.

   You should all be familiar with a French manicure. Two-tone white and colour paint for your nails. Most impressive when done well.

    But what about black instead of white? A little Goth, perhaps?

    Simple to do though. Take one Rusty Old Wreck, and fit it with a new clutch. The accumulated oily grime of five decades of motoring accumulates under your nails, and like all the best quality cosmetics it has impressive sticking power.

    Damn, I'm out with my wife tomorrow evening and I don't want to be sporting black lines on my fingernails!

Which way?

    On Sunday I found myself somewhere unexpected: my local United Reformed Church LGBT service.
    Unexpected because being at a loose end with my wife being at her mother's place I'd seen myself spending an evening in front of the telly watching CSI, but I ended up giving a disabled friend a lift into town.
    There is something deliciously naughty about parking on a double yellow line, even if you have a blue disabled badge in the window. I could imagine the judge looking skeptical when told that I was running a disabled pensioner friend into her church service, but that was the truth and anyway no traffic warden wrote me a ticket.
    As I've probably mentioned before, I was raised as an Anglican in a rural community. Growing up an Anglican is easy, there's God and Jesus, then the Queen, and the vicar comes round to primary school in his Morris Minor to tell you all the bible stories and everything's so frightfully nice about it all. You sing rousing hymns about saints and seasons to the soft refrain of a church organ, you pick blackberries in the churchyard and there is always honey still for tea.
    If Jesus' message was of a higher authority than the Emperor of His day then British rural Anglicanism is there to remind you of the contrary: a cosy certainty that His message on Earth is safely coincident with being British, and that the Queen is a much more benevolent figure than Herod or the Pharaoh. Belief is optional, it's all about taking part. If you've never read the Terry Pratchett novel Small Gods, I suggest you do so, I see in it a biting satire of British Anglicanism.
    Blimey, being a five-year-old was so easy!
    Of course, when you grow up and become a rebellious depressive teenager you realise that the church is a creaky old building with holes in its roof, and that the Church it represents is run by stupid old men whose minds are in another era.
    With respect to Church attendance, I'm definitely a Harvest Festival Anglican. But I know all the moves and more importantly for last Sunday I know all the back story as told to me by our vicar back in the sunny 1970s.
    So there I was, sitting in my first Bible discussion for thirty years, and finding it interesting to look upon it with the eyes of an adult. And unexpectedly not finding it embarrassing, thank you Vicar, I know this stuff!
    Sadly for my more faith-led readers though, this was no Damascene moment. I still count myself the same small-c christian I did before and there was no blinding moment of renewed faith. I envy those with Belief, but I'm still not one of them.
    The service performs a vital role for its regulars, ministering to Christians who may have been excluded from their own congregations. The minister, a very down-to-earth American lady, was very welcoming to the extent that I almost felt guilty, as though there on false pretences. The other people present came from a variety of backgrounds within the LGBT alphabet soup, among them several transgender people, but there was one in particular who stuck in my mind. Though she was presenting female she like me spends most of her time as a bloke, but there our similarities end. She had only come out of her closet in the last few months, and just at that most vulnerable point her (AFAICT some kind of Baptist) church had ousted her and persuaded her wife to leave her. She wasn't even certain that transitioning was for her, but unlike me she'd been denied the chance to even try to hang in there for her wife.
    I'm sure her church could go on for hours and hours about the sanctity of marriage. Her minister probably has a great sermon on the subject, about sin and fornication and all sorts of other temptingly forbidden stuff. But just at the point when one of their own really needs their help and support, all that sanctity of marriage stuff goes out of the window and it's all get lost and don't come back. [Village in Austria] [village in Worcestershire]s!
    My apologies. Living in a largely secular bubble, you forget that this kind of stuff can happen here, too.
    On a lighter note, afterwards we found ourselves in one of my town's gay pubs. As a new attendee I was naturally asked a few questions. I don't think they expected a giant sized scruffy bloke to be transgender, I was asked something that made me laugh. "Which way?". I suppose I should take heart, if my questioner believed from looking at me that I might once have been female then all is not lost for me on the passing front!

It's like a rite of passage or something

    Every now and then in this game you have a 'first', a new experience in the crazy world of living with a foot in both genders. I had one yesterday, and a rather silly one at that. Well, you have to laugh.
    Yesterday was a beautiful if a little hazy day in Southern England. I spent most of it outside fettling the Rusty Old Wreck. If you have ever reassembled the interior of a car you will understand just how many parts need to be fitted, and if you've ever done it to a car that's had its interior our for a few years you'll know that all the parts will have mysteriously changed size so they no longer fit, and that all the screws and fastenings will have departed.
    So now I have a Wreck that is visibly closer to the road. It needs a bit of metalwork, some brake adjustment and a small amount of cosmetic tidying and then it can be sent for an MOT test. This is exciting stuff, given that the car's sorry state has weighed heavily on me for several years now.
    The 'first' made me laugh. I broke a fingernail. And cared about it. I must be turning into a girl or something! I didn't have a handy nail file to repair it and the angle grinder looked a little harsh, but I did have a metalwork file with which to remove the annoying spiky bit at the end of the nail. Never a dull moment in stealth t-girl car nut land!

Will the Real Girl please stand up?

    Since I began following the world of gender variance I have found myself tuning into the language we use to describe ourselves as a community. Subtle nuances such as where the disctinction exists between a transvestite and a crossdresser, or explosive battlegrounds such as who or what is defined as trangender. My job involves the manipulation of large amounts of language so I find these matters of great interest even when I don't take sides in them.
    One in particular that has caught my eye recently is this: how, when making the distinction among ourselves, do we describe a natural-born woman as opposed to a transwoman? Someone like my wife: born female-bodied and perfectly content with her female gender identity. It all used to be so simple, I remember reading a well written article on the work of the Beaumont Society a few years ago that introduced me to the term "real girl". My wife is a real girl, I'm a fake girl. I have no problems with that, job done, you'd think
    But then it seems there are those among us who dislike the implication that their womanhood might be less than real. I can see that, for someone who has fought very hard to achieve it to have their assumed gender denied could be very galling. So out of nowhere came the two terms FaB, for "Female at birth" and "Genetic girl". No problems with those if they don't wind anyone up, you'll have found me using both of them here on this blog from time to time.
    All very well then. Harmony in the world of transgender language for once. Well, until someone realised that transmen are also FaB and genetic female, just as we're MaB and genetic male. Oops, nobody wants to inadvertently deny anyone their gender so it's back to the drawing board.
    I am concerned that something has been lost along the way here. When you are describing a group do not make up terms for them, ask them how they wish to be described. It's not rocket science, after all that's why we refer to the indigenous people of the northern polar regions as Inuit rather than Eskimo, for example.  As someone whose outings in the trans sphere have all been accompanied by my wife I am guessing I have met more spouses and partners of trans people both male and female than most people as the partners tend to gravitate towards each other. It has been my observation that to a woman they all refer to themselves in this context as real girls. Deny them their self-identity? Heavens no!

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!

A funny thing happened on the way to the loo yesterday

    Yesterday afternoon found me at my local Tesco store, picking up some supplies. Needing a quick toilet break, I diverted myself in that direction.
    The loos at this store are at the end of a short hallway. Facing you are two doors, ladies on the left, gents on the right. As I approached them a middle aged lady emerged from the left hand door, and politely held it open for me. I smiled apologetically and made my way into the gents. Blimey, I must be getting good at this girl thing, she could tell even though I had three days worth of stubble on my face in preparation for a really smooth shave for the support group meeting!
    Poor thing, she was probably mortified at her unconscious mistake. It did make me laugh, but not at her. I would like to think that she would have been tolerant enough to have held the door open for me had I been presenting female.
 

Lethargy

    There is sure to be a joke lurking somewhere in opening a blog post entitled "Lethargy" and then staring at a blank edit screen for several minutes, unable to write anything. But that's the position I have just found myself in. Yes, the mid-winter blues have set in, I've had a week of more than unusually noisy girl and this time the physical manifestation is lethargy. Doing anything is an effort, I'd prefer to go back to bed. As an insomniac you might imagine I'd find that to be a welcome change, but I have more than a slight suspicion that I'm experiencing the adverse effects of my medication. I've thus booked a couple of appointments to try and sort it out.
    One slight surprise, my psychiatrist is retiring. I can't say I'm looking forward to his replacement, whoever they may be, because I don't know what ideas or even what baggage they will bring to the role. One would hope for someone clued-up, but from my discussions with others in similar positions to myself I'm aware that this is not always the case. I don't fancy having to battle someone's pet theories about the relationship between gender and sexuality, for example.
    I'll leave you with a quote that made me laugh from an acquaintance of mine. She's talking about the stria terminalis, the brain region identified by Zhou et al as being female-proportioned in male-at-birth transsexuals.

"I'll laugh the day it is established what that bit of brain really does. It will turn out it's where the gag reflex is located."

Velma was far cooler

    Everyone must by now have seen the tale of the youngster who wanted to be Scooby Doo's Daphne for Halloween. Well done to the kid's mother for letting it happen!
    I have however to admit to being disappointed in the youth. Given a choice between Daphne and Velma, somewhat inexplicably he chose the former. I must have been alone in spending the 1970s in awe of the girl in the orange jumper.

Unanswerable question

      Today's missive: a big envelope from the GIC, a sort of induction pack for the new girls and boys. All the Useful Stuff you Need to Know, and a questionnaire. On it, a question that made me laugh.

Gender (Please tick the appropriate box):
Male
Female

    Y'what?

Male
Female

    Um... this is the Gender Identity clinic, right? You do know the level of debate that's going to cause?
So, do I do this?

Male
Female

This?

Male
Female

Or this?

Male
Female

Or even this?

Male
Female

    You will excuse me if I laugh at my personal version of a moment that is no doubt of extreme seriousness to some others faced with the same form. The alternative is to take it too seriously and be sent into another GD day and I'm sorry, I just can't help finding the question funny.
    In the end I ticked "Male". I wouldn't want to confuse the poor doctor when the very large scruffy bloke sits down opposite him. Or her?

Stuck transsexual

    I had an appointment with my local gender specialist psychiatrist yesterday. Nothing special and it went very well, just talking about my referral to the GIC.
    He had a colleague with him who he was training. I had no objection to her presence, so the first ten minutes or so of the appointment was dedicated to his filling her in on my background and situation. His summation of my position for her amused me, it seems I am a "Stuck transsexual".
    It must be a medical term and all, but for some reason I can't help thinking of pigs.

Tudor horror

    Last week we spent several days in Turbocharged Rollerskate meandering the byways where England meets Wales.
    Opposite us at a traffic lights, a shop. "Bride of Ledbury". Must be like Bride of Dracula, only half-timbered with diamond paned windows.
    Well, it made us laugh, anyway.