The Camera Never Lies

I bought a new phone a few weeks ago, for my business. Its main purpose will be to provide a work email terminal and a wireless hotspot, fitted as it is with a SIM carrying a generous data allowance.
It's a Chinese phone, not simply made there but from one of the well-known Chinese domestic brands, and it's a high quality piece of kit.

As you'd expect these days it's a reasonably vanilla Android, without the cumbersome overlays that dogged phones a few years ago. It has a decent enough camera, and it is this that has provided a surprise. It has a "Beauty" mode. For selfies, and it makes a few tweaks in its software. Evening out skin tones and blemishes, enlarging the eyes very slightly, placing a highlight in the hair, and reducing the chin a bit. It lies, in other words.

So I've been playing with it, and even though I know it's lying, it's a rather useful aid to someone with a nagging feeling that they still look, you know, a little bit blokey. It takes a decade or more from my age, and manages to make me look acceptably enough feminine in my presentation to warm the old cockles of the heart, or something. I know HRT has filled out my face and given me lips because I can see it when comparing with past photos, but as we all know, only we know what the bloke looked like in the mirror and we can all see him sometimes looking back at us.

We trans people have a complex relationship with our own image, and a lot of us never manage to quite come to terms with it. I've had friends who've opted for FFS when they looked fine and returned looking frightful, just to lose his shadow, but my reaction has never been that extreme. It is however nice to see something of the girl in the mirror without the aid of the phone, and then to barely see him at all in the beauty-mode-enhanced version. I am no looker and I am not fishing for compliments, this is merely to express my pleasure at reaching a milestone of the mind. If the camera is supposed to lie, then I'm happy to have found one that does.

No Woman would do that!

    "No Woman would do that!"

    They mean well, they really do.
    Natal women, that is. Or more accurately,  some natal women, when faced with a trans woman friend, family member or acquaintance.
    They think they're helping you escape some unimaginable faux pas of either clothing or appearance. Sometimes they're right in that a little of the bloke has shone through, mostly though it's simply a shorthand for "I wouldn't do that!".
    'Cos here's the thing: women are not an army of clones, they dress and behave in a huge diversity of ways. So the chances are that whatever the behaviour or look, many women do it.
    It's indicative of an acceptance crisis in the mind of the originator, by saying that no woman would do what you are doing they are in effect saying that you are not a woman. Fair enough, it they've known the scruffy bloke for a decade that's a tough ask for some people. Give it time. And I don't need to be told I'll never be a natal woman, I have the lived experience to prove it. But the upsetting thing isn't that. Instead it's the suspension of the normal rules of commenting on female appearance.
    Consider this, your friend asks whether her bum looks big in that skirt. Do you say "It's nice, but maybe the other one has the edge", or do you tell the truth and say "Your bum looks like a continental shelf and your legs look like tree trunks, make it go away!". Of course you say the former. Gently passing comment on appearance disasters is something all women have hard-coded, the latter is definitely something no woman would say to another.
    Perhaps "No Woman would say that!" is an appropriate response.

Real

    Pink fog. It's a worry that persists as you navigate the shifting sands of gender ambiguity, that you might be caught in it. Wanting to spend more time as girl, wanting more, is it real or is it the pink fog talking?
    We have all no doubt heard cautionary tales of those whose pink fog took them a little further than it should have, so the idea it might happen to me has been of some concern. Time to test myself for pink fog with several days as normal girl, doing normal girl stuff as far as possible and sticking to the kind of wardrobe choices any woman my age might make doing the same things. If the novelty fades and it isn't fun any more, then that's the pink fog talking.
    So, a few days after coming back to being a scruffy bloke again I have a moment to reflect on the experience. I spent about three days in the real world as female. I'm used to driving, shopping, eating out and a host of other normal things as female, but until now they have all been individual events snatched as evenings out or similar, or else in the company of others. I've always had either my companions or the scruffy bloke to fall back on, so part of my aim was to leave those props completely behind and face the world in its entirety as female. I am much indebted in this endeavour to Dru for my couple of days in Bristol and Nikki for my day in Wiltshire.
    It would be tempting to write a diary piece, but the minutiae of such outings soon becomes irksome. Suffice to say I entered a whole lot of new territories and came through unscathed.The rite of passage afforded by a first solo trip to a shopping mall for instance seems something of a cliché, but it is no less daunting a challenge for that.
    Highlights of it all were my parents seeing me as girl for the first time because I changed at their house (My mother said I looked very nice, probably being diplomatic), being shown the graffiti artwork of Stokes Croft by Dru and an early morning trip out on Bristol Downs without makeup to hide behind.
    Driving home I was struck by not having been troubled by gender issues during the time. It worried me for a moment, then I realised that this had simply been me feeling unencumbered by them. In the real world. Pink fog not an issue. Real.
    I'm not used to that. Definitely entering new territory here.

FFS? FFS!

    Every time a friend or acquaintance of mine goes in for facial feminisation surgery I worry for her far more than I would if she had gone in for GRS or any other procedure. Because not only is it a painful and risky experience, I'm worried that she'll come out of the hospital and the swelling will slowly go away to reveal her new look as at best an obvious recipient of plastic surgery or at worst a hideous freak. Sometimes as with a friend of mine who went to the USA for hers earlier this year she'll return looking as I might imagine her natal sister to look and I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief, but all too often you're in that awkward situation in which the world and dog can see something went disastrously wrong but you have to tell her how wonderful she looks because to tell the truth would be to crush her forever.
    I sometimes wonder whether there should be a no-holds-barred gallery of real FFS recipients. Because it seems from where I'm sitting that the only pictures that get passed around are those of the lucky girls, the ones who look radiant and pretty. Come to me, the surgeon says, and you'll look like her.
   What people considering FFS should be seeing are the not-so-lucky girls. The ones with the face-stretched-tight look perhaps, the Cruella De Vil grimace smiles, or the Michael Jackson noses. The implants that have gone south. One cheek higher than the other, nice. Or how about that cookie-cutter far-too-small-and-pointy out-of-proportion chin that just screams "I used to be a bloke, you know"?
    So why am I holding forth on such a sensitive issue? I know that there are going to be people who read this who will be upset by it, so what gives?
   On Friday, I saw some pictures of a friend of mine taken about four years ago. Back then she'd been full-time for about a year. In the intervening time she's had extensive FFS and while it wasn't a disaster, it shows pretty clearly.
    In those pictures from four years ago, my friend looks gorgeous. I still have testosterone in my system, and I am a gynephile. I am programmed to notice pretty women. She looked good, and then some. I'd always assumed she must have needed the surgery, maybe she had a chin like David Coulthard or something, but no. She did it, I'm told, because she still imagined the bloke in the mirror.
    Now believe me, I know all about seeing the bloke in the mirror. I see him every morning, stubble and all. I don't avoid mirrors, but let's just say when I'm at my scruffiest they aren't my favourite. I know I will still see his ghost looking back at me if I ever become the full-time girl. But I also learned something very important from my art teacher mother. I learned to analyse faces as an artist might, to strip away the window dressing and look at the proportions, the underlying components.
    And guess what? As I sit and people-watch, I see natal female faces of all conceivable proportions. I see heavy eyebrows and I see square chins. And I don't see men in those faces.
    If you were to plot the facial femininty of the male population on a frequency graph, you would end up with a bell curve. On the left, a few with very feminine features, in the middle the majority on the male side of androgyny and on the right a few like David Coulthard with very obviously male facial structures.
    So the majority of us have pretty androgynous features, once you remove the gender cues such as facial hair and bushy eyebrows. It was something of a shock to me to see an echo of my sister in the mirror when I first donned a wig, so I rate myself in this group. Given a course of estrogen to round off the corners, my face won't be my undoing.
    Something I have to remember, every time I see something of the bloke in the mirror.
    I'm sure I'll bite my tongue next time a friend flies to Thailand or Belgium for FFS. I'll avoid asking her whether waiting for the estrogen to do its job wouldn't help, or finishing the hair removal. And if she comes back looking a little false, well I'll concentrate on the good bits. But inside I'll be wanting to scream at her that she's the only one who still sees the bloke.
    Nobody wants to rain on a parade, least of all me. But I can't help a feeling of guilt for it.

Baptism of fire

    Yesterday was a good day. A day of firsts, for yesterday I spent the day as girl in Manchester with my sister.
    The premise for my trip was Sparkle, the UK's transgender pride celebration, but the real value of the day went far beyond that because I spent far more time in town with my sister than I did in the park holding the festivities. Don't get me wrong, there was plenty going on and I saw a load of friends, but the event made me acutely aware that Sackville Gardens and Canal Street were simply a giant safe space and the main event for me was being a girl at large, shopping with her sister in the wider city.
    An early start to catch the train north. My wife was working so I was alone. Early morning over the countryside, then the suburbia and endless industrial dereliction, the urban explorer's playground of the Black Country. Waste ground reverting to urban forest, punctuated by the waterways of the Birmingham Canal Navigation. More canals than Venice in Birmingham y'know, as they say around there. Then a progression of stops as the train passed through the Potteries and the Manchester satellite towns. One station had a sign proudly proclaiming it to be Cheshire's best kept, looking at it I shudder for Cheshire's worst kept.
    Manchester Piccadilly's airy train shed, and there's my sister waiting for me. A quick walk round the corner to meet J and her wife at their hotel, and I disappeared into the bathroom to leave the scruffy bloke behind.
    My sister had never seen me in girl mode. I don't think she was disappointed. Her first critique was of my colour choices, it seems I'd not done too badly.
    So off we went. Straight out into Manchester City Centre. Yes, a crowded city centre on a Saturday morning, a baptism of fire. Shopping in the Arndale Centre, not finding anything in the sales, lunch at Yo! Sushi. Very cosmpolitan. And very normal. Two sisters spending the day in town. Amazingly my experience in Swindon was repeated, I didn't see anyone noticing me. What's wrong people, a  nearly seven foot woman has just walked past you and you didn't notice? In all honesty though I'm sure I didn't pass unnoticed because I don't rate my passing skills highly. Where I did succeed though was not in passing but in blending. I was wearing fairly normal summer clothes for going shopping in, not wildly different from any number of other women shopping that day. If someone looked closely they could see who I was, but in the mass of people I was not remarkable enough to stand out.
    Off to Sackville Gardens, and the party was in full swing. The Equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, gave us a speech about how the government was anxious to do stuff for us, and a lone Labour heckler tried to disrupt her. Any Government politician talking to us is a good thing IMHO, I can't imagine a member of John Major's Cabinet doing the same thing.
     All of trans life was on display in front of us. Yes, all of it. With frilly bits. A load of friends to say hi to, time to sit and people-watch some of the more flamboyant people. It's like a Godwin's Law for trans people, the longer you people-watch at a trans gathering the more the probability of seeing someone in a red dress with white polka-dots approaches one. Being able to go shopping in town made me appreciate this much more, hanging out in the park was fun but being almost just another woman in town was much more feeding the beast.
    So off into town again with my sister. A stop at LTS to buy some jeans in the sale. Nowhere else does 'em in my length. Another first, first solo over-the-counter trying-on and purchase of women's clothing. Then a coffee and a long chat about family stuff, more shopping and a return to the park for a while. I experienced that female thing of being looked up and down for the first time, outfit analysis. From both trans and natal women. Wow.
    All good things come to an end. Back to J's hotel, the scruffy bloke emerges. Say goodbye to my sister and I'm on the train, back through the Midlands as the sun went down. Back home, present my wife with some of her preferred fragranced stuff from my Manchester shopping as an apology for leaving her at home, then collapse into bed, exhausted.
    All in all a good day. And a massive thank-you is in order for both J and my sister. There will be the inevitable let-down, but feeding the beast is sometimes necessary. Knowing you can do it though is a dangerous thing, it satisfies the need but that's a need that keeps coming back.
    As I've said before, it doesn't get any easier, does it.

Orange seagulls

    Getting out of a car without flashing the world is not easy when you have very long legs and have decided that it's warm enough to break out the floaty number. Oh the tribulations of the oversized!
    Last night brought an unexpected chance for an evening out presenting female, as my wife was at a friend's place the same evening as a regular t-girl gathering at a very nice restaurant pub near Reading. So a quick phone call to my friend Dawn, and we piled into the Rollerskate for a blast down the motorway.
    There is something I still find incongruous about doing something like going to a pub that is normal for me as a scruffy bloke, yet as a woman. It makes me laugh as well as the satisfaction of presenting the way I feel, to look down and see this girl, where there used to be this bloke. And when I pass unnoticed in broad daylight it just gets funnier. I'm glad it works that way for me, knowing other people in my situation who to my mind look a million times better than me yet who are gripped by terror at the thought of venturing beyond a safe space, my just seizing the moment and going with it is infinitely preferable.
     Last night's gathering was a chance to dress up a little. Or more to the point, dress up, but not a lot. One of the fortunate things about our community is that you can almost never be overdressed, but it pays not to overdo it. As always my outfit had to pass the "would a natal woman like me wear this" test, and I hope with a knee-length summer dress, smart LTS jacket and no heels I didn't draw attention to myself. There was another "These people must be really unobservant!" moment on the way into the pub, but I guess the blokes with their eyes on a cool pint of Stella Artois just didn't give us - a tall woman and her old lady friend - a second look on their way to the bar.
     It is always something of a smack in the face to remove the trappings of femininity after such an outing. I needed last night badly having spent the last week or two in something of a state, but every time going out as girl becomes a little easier to do and putting it away afterwards becomes that little bit more of a wrench.
     Driving back home through town the car was surrounded by wheeling seagulls in the orange sodium light. The tourists and revelers leave discarded food everywhere and our feathered friends turn up after hours and clean it all up most efficiently. To be honest I was glad of them, they took my mind off more annoying matters. Gulls are not birds you want to get on the wrong side of, but close-to in flight, especially on an atmospheric evening in a near-empty town centre, they are quite a sight. I wish I could call them up to banish the girl blues at other times.
   

Going solo

    Last night my wife and I joined a couple of friends for a meal at an Italian restaurant in a nearby town. Four friends out on a weekday evening. Why was this worthy of a blog post? The evening was arranged at my wife's instigation, and I was there not as my usual scruffy bloke but as my best shot at a stylish-yet-casual Jenny in LTS jeans and a Desigual top under my grey LTS trench coat.
    That's right, my wife was extending her comfort zone by arranging an outing with me as Jenny. Previously any such outings have been in the company of our local support group and she has not always been at ease even then. That she voluntarily made such an effort I find to be demonstration enough of why she is worth whatever efforts I can make to hang in there for her.
    All things considered, the evening went very well. I was severely spooked though when on drawing to a halt in the car park a slightly dodgy looking bloke appeared at the car window. It turned out he was completely harmless, he merely wished to share his frustration at the ticket machine being out of order.
    So for the first time I was out in public in Jenny mode, almost solo. Just the two of us meeting our friends, no support group for protection. Passing through a familiar space, past other couples, even a group of teenagers. No darkness to hide in, it was about twenty minutes before sunset. The big surprise was that I didn't notice anyone spot me. Not even the bloke in the car park. Were they suddenly smitten with blindness or something? I flatter myself I don't do a bad job, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't still have something of the bloke about me. And with my size I'm certainly difficult to miss.
    I think I managed it not through a feat of passing but one of not standing out. My efforts not to deliver any unexpected cues had paid off, and for those passers-by engrossed in their own concerns I simply didn't feature on their radar. My outfit passed the "Could I imagine my sister or my cousin wearing this?" test so I succeeded in looking just enough like a tall natal girl as they are that nobody made the effort to look any further.
    Yes, we had plenty of nerves. I've been ready for this for a long time, waiting for my wife to feel strong enough to be comfortable with it. However ready you might be for this moment, it's always going to be a challenge. But as is the only way to proceed with these things we just went for it and had an enjoyable evening. I am hugely indebted to my wife for feeling able to come this far, and to our two friends for their company and support.
    It is going to be increasingly difficult to keep this in the box, but I know the alternative of not doing so would have eventually been far worse.

Cultivating a style

    Until now, clothing has not emerged as a topic on this blog. You see, because we're all serious about this business, we can't be caught talking about frivolous things like clothing. That would make us all sound like a bunch of transvestites, and we couldn't be having that, oh no.
    So apart from the occasional rant about socks, I've kept schtumm on the subject. But a few weeks ago Lucy revealed "It ain't about the clothes" to be a deplorable cliché, and that opened the floodgates, at last I can hold forth on matters of fashion.
     I suspect it must be something we who are born male bodied but aspire to be female all suffer from at some time or another, an obsession with passing. (Do FtMs share this, or do they lapse into comfortable blokedom and not have a care how they look?) Some girls never seem to lose it and no matter how far into stealth they run or how much painful and expensive FFS they endure they still see the bloke looking back at them in the mirror when nobody else can detect a trace of him. Others take a diametrically opposite tack and flaunt their impassability, shaking off adverse comments with boundless self-confidence. I admire this last group of ladies immensely, they seize life and just go with it in a way I simply would not have the courage to do.
    My obsession with passing has largely er... passed. It took the form not of an obsession with making myself passable but a crushing depression that as an oversized bloke I'd never make it or fit in as an extreme oversized woman. The experience of going out presenting as female has taught me that the whole experience has a lot more to it than simply how you look, and that a face that betrays your origins or physical size that makes you the first person people look at in a group are only components of a much wider mosaic of female presentation.
    In short, to be accepted as female you don't need to pass as such, but to mount a credible picture, to present to the world with style. And it is acquiring that style that has replaced passing for me as a consuming interest in this line, particularly at this time of year when the sales can place so much temptation before you.
    Compared to some in my position, I am fortunate in my history. I was never a closet crossdresser. As I spent my early adulthood suppressing all this, I never had a stash of clothes, I never had awkward visits to charity shops, there was no cache of lingerie for my wife to discover and I never purged. So I never evolved an inappropriate look or wardrobe and I never found myself tempted into any of the multiple "scenes" that hover round the edges of our grouping. As my friend Dawn puts it, "It all looks like a lot of fun, but you wouldn't wear it to Tesco now, would you!".
    Instead, as I began to explore cross-dressing as an adult I did so in the company of my wife. I was able to tap into her enviable sense of style as well as to expand on my own tastes and in doing so I hope I managed to avoid the more grievous faux pas that so many women, both FaB and otherwise fall in to. I might only have had the mirror and my wife as critics at the time but I avoided the "Mutton dressed as lamb", the "Mother-of-the-bride", the "Bet Lynch", and worst of all for a tall girl, the "Short fat girl on stilts"¹. So at least when I stumbled from the closet, I knew I didn't have to worry whether my clothes were age or occasion appropriate, my wife's training through many hours of sitting together drinking coffee and people-watching had seen to that.
    It comes down to why you decide to crossdress. My simple desire in all this is to be accepted as female in my everyday life. For reasons I've covered in depth, that isn't about to happen, but part of keeping the girl quiet involves dressing as though that were the case. So when making my choices the consideration is: If I were full-time, would I wear that to work, or would I wear it to Tesco? Thinking about the outfits some of my female colleagues choose to wear to work, that's a rather wide target.
    One of my biggest surprises in all this is that I have become a label victim. No, I don't flash my wad by wearing designer logos in an attempt to prove to the cognoscenti that I too have no taste, instead I've found myself becoming very picky about the brands I buy. It was inevitable that I would not look at brands aimed at different groups such as teenage girls or petite women, but I've found the brands that have the style I want, and have become a devotee of their products. Hardly surprising when you think about it, it's one of those Duh! moments, I'm just doing exactly what I've observed all the women around me doing for years.
    My sister made an observation to me a few months ago, that I have never cared for my clothes as a bloke. In fact what she said as someone who was five years old when I was born, was that when I was a very young child I didn't like wearing my little boy clothes and couldn't wait to take them off. Now she knows all about Jenny she said, so many things about me made sense to her.
    So I've cultivated a style. I'm not flattering myself that it brings passing in itself, but that's not the point. My wardrobe contains outfits in which I feel confident because I feel they flatter my ungainly shape, fit in with the environments I wear them in (Or would wear them in, in some cases) and do not draw attention to me in themselves. And if there's one thing that all those years of people-watching have taught me, it is that if I've achieved those three things then I'm ahead of the game compared to a significant number of the people who pass our coffee shop window. And none of them ever think for an instant about passing.

Good luck to you all in the sales!

¹A lot of female clothing in larger sizes is designed to flatter short fat women. If a girl with legs up to here wears those kind of clothes that's what she looks like.

A rare outing

    On Saturday I had another of my very rare excursions in the real world presenting as female. This time my wife was with me for the first time. Nothing too challenging,  just our usual post-support-group restaurant visit.
    The thing that most struck me was how natural it all felt. When I last did this back in May I had a lot of fun, but as you might expect I was rather nervous. This time it just felt right, no worries standing in a queue for a parking ticket, just enjoying the moment. Walking along the street, laughing at the incongruity of it all.
    Our party included a group of regulars and someone on her first time out. Unfortunately for her, her presentation was significantly less than ideal, she was very nervous and her presence drew some attention to our party in the restaurant. This made my wife rather nervous too, but she made it and I'm proud of her.
    I'm sure some of you who read this will have also have had encounters with similarly presenting members of our sisterhood. Hell, I'm pretty sure there are people who'd put me in that category because I'm under no illusions as to my passing ability, the best I can do is convey an impression of having made an effort. Sadly I'm afraid our companion had not achieved that.
    So I felt guilty for judging her on her appearnace. My wife was my primary concern that evening and her comfort zone was definitely being eroded. But this is a support group and we are all there to give support no matter what.
    Two regular attendees in Swindon are older trans women who adopt a "mother hen" role with people on their first time out. I have no idea if either of them read this blog so I hope they won't mind me describing them thus, but I am much indebted to them for helping me in this way back in May. They performed a similar role on Saturday with our newcomer. That's the real support in a support group, so much more than just a bunch of people sitting around drinking tea and talking shop.
    So, a Saturday evening well spent, a big step for my wife and an ample demonstration of a support group in action. I have no idea how long it'll be before I get out again but there's no hurry. Better to get it right than to have a bad experience.

My life in Hobbiton

    On my mobile phone there is a picture of me. One of very few showing me presenting as female. I'm not one for posting pictures of myself online so I won't be sharing it with you, but it's a picture of me taken on our return from Saturday evening's support group meeting just before I disappeared upstairs to revert to scruffy bloke mode.
    I'm standing in the sitting room of an ordinary British house, my wife is sitting in an armchair on the other side of the room taking the photograph. I'm wearing a tan pencil skirt and a colourful Desigual top, I feel great and looking at the photo I surprise myself by how good I look. Sure I'm no oil painting, but for once I see myself and don't see the bloke straight away. A bit of a shock really.
    So the picture shows a woman standing in a room. But there's something wrong. She's wandered into the abode of a hobbit. The doorway and fireplace, the sofa, even the picture on the wall are out of scale, it's like seeing a doll's house with a Barbie that's a tiny bit too big for it.
     For the first time I am seeing myself in girl mode as others see me. I'm used to tall women, I come from a family of them, but not even in my cousin who's only a couple of inches shorter than me have I seen this look of being out of scale to the surroundings. I always knew that for me there could be no stealth, but I'm now really beginning to appreciate what that would look like.
    It's not really put me off, but it's a slightly bitter-sweet moment. To look so relatively good in a picture and to simultaneously look slightly wrong. Still, I should take heart. Only a year ago I never thought I could ever look as I do in this picture, I've come a long way since then. And if I walk amongst hobbits there's something else to be happy about. They have hairy feet, and I don't!
    Good night!

Busy in a good way

    It feels strange to be sitting down in front of the Blogger writing screen after such a gap. Only a few days in reality, it seems like forever. It's not that I've had nothing to say, it's just that I've not had the time to say it. It's been a busy week.
    The job's turning out well. A lot of my colleagues are female so the contrast could not be greater with my previous employer. And without the stress from an annoying commute and the office atmosphere I'm feeling a lot better too. I looked in the mirror the other day and saw the whites of my eyes. Not bloodshot, for the first time in nearly a year.
     Last weekend brought little opportunity to sit down either. The support group meeting on Saturday was followed by a motorcycle rideout on Sunday. Saturday evening saw a new frontier for me, I drove home in girl mode with my wife. Though I got changed at my friend Dawn's house, her comfort zone has not previously been relaxed enough for us to do this. In reality driving a car for an hour in the dark is just as unexciting in girl mode as it is in bloke mode, but that's not the point, it was a step removed from our usual safe space. If anyone noticed the extra-large girl who parked up in Dawn's road that evening I hope they'd have seen her confidently making her way, I certainly felt natural and in control rather than nervous.
    Then on Sunday, a rideout with a difference. By coincidence on the same weekend as the support group, five t-girls on bikes, two genetic girl pillions and one t-girl in an insanely fast car thrashing their way round the Berkshire and Wiltshire Downs. At the end of a perfect day we spent an hour just sitting in the sun near the Uffington White Horse gazing out across the Vale of the White Horse, perfect atmospheric conditions meaning we could see five counties.
    As all's going so well it seems unfortunate that I report I'm still feeling the pangs of GD. In fact I'm feeling more of the girl about me than ever just as I write this, even though without the extra stress I've had in previous months it's a lot more bearable than it has been. I can handle being girl-brained just at the moment if the rest of my life is in order. A surprising conclusion is that there is a positive side to not being able to shake the GD, it helps lay to rest that lingering fear that all this might be some kind of delusion. A crazy thing to worry about, but everything's crazy in this game isn't it.

Exploring my height issues courtesy of my mother

    My mother and I had a Long Chat yesterday. Since I came out to her as you might imagine we've had one or two Long Chats. I feel very lucky to have a mother with whom I can talk about this stuff.
    In particular yesterday she returned to a theme she's touched on before, while she's happy to accept me for what I am she really doesn't like the idea of my dressing, physically presenting female in the real world or otherwise is beyond her comfort zone. Not really surprising, it's a hell of a lot for a mother to have to contemplate.
    What I found interesting was her reasoning, it relates to my height. You see, my mother knows what it's like to be the tallest woman in the crowd from the days when the average female height was much shorter than it is today. She's in her eighties now, but back in the 1940s and 1950s as a young woman who stood over six feet tall she found herself the butt of many cruel jokes and insensitive comments. My quest for size 15 girl shoes pales into insignificance compared to her quest for size 9s back in the Austerity years, her feet were so seriously harmed by ill-fitting shoes that she had to have corrective surgery on them. She's been a customer of Magnus and Long Tall Sally for decades. Great. I shop at the same places as my mother.
     In short, she speaks from a position of authority when it comes to people's reactions to women of height. And she does not want me to experience what she had to, but with the added twist of being rather obviously transgendered. She's had her fair share of misgendering too, for that matter.
    I haven't confronted her directly with Jenny mode. She has to have guessed I dress, but she's never asked me directly and I haven't told her specifically that I do. But I have surprised myself with how well I have managed at it, and I told her yesterday that if going out dressed was what I chose to do then I'm sure I'd be able to do a good job. I know my passing skills are weak - at best I struggle at feminity, at worst I have something of the bloke about me - but the effect for which I have striven is one of having made an effort to look presentable. I tried to put that into words for her because I was worried she was imagining me going forth as a grotesque parody of a pantomime dame, this was when she went into depth on her height concerns.
     I think my insecurities about my height and presenting female can be attributed to a mixture of my mother's reaction and my own experiences as an oversized bloke. I've certainly heard her on this theme before, though not until now directed at me. Stupid really, it helped keep me in the closet for years during which I really should have come to terms with everything. It's a wall from which bricks are slowly falling away, but it's not quite gone yet. I wonder whether my mother's version of that wall, for herself or for me, will ever lose any bricks.

Débutante

    Sadly there was no white ballgown for me to wear and I didn't meet the Queen.

   Yesterday evening, I made my debut in the real world presenting as female. There was very little of the worry I expected, it all felt completely natural and I had a great time.

    First up was my normal support group meeting with its usual attendees. A convoluted plan involving changing at a friends house having worked to perfection and the drive having passed uneventfully, I was outside the hall and ready to go. A quick makeup and hair check in the rear-view mirror and off I went. Remember the posture, lose the bloke walk. Blimey, that was easy!

   A grand entrance is ruined slightly when you have to duck for the damn door frame.

   After the meeting a load of us went for our usual meal at a very nice Italian restaurant. A very friendly place with excellent food, though a slight challenge for me because it is situated in a  rather busy town centre, and this being Saturday night you get all sorts out on the street. Including us. :)

    Hell, just go for it.

    I doubt I was fooling anyone, but I couldn't care less. Being large and loud and with an ability to be somewhat in-your-face I was just stealing a hefty slice of bloke self-confidence and seizing the role. And having a lot of fun in the process.

    So, I've done it. And come away grinning ear-to-ear. I'd say that's a result.

Where does the Queen get her socks?

    If you look hard enough, you can get anything made for you. Take shoes, for instance. I've only found one manufacturer of ladies shoes in a UK15 and though their range is very nice it's a little limited if your tastes do not veer towards the slightly more flamboyant end of the spectrum. Not a problem though, when I'm prepared to shell out the cash for a made-to-measure last I've found a specialist who will happily make me any footwear I desire in whatever style I want, and an exact fit.
    Socks, however, are a different matter. Girl mode is easy enough in tights but it would be nice to be able to source a nice pair of ladies socks in a UK15. Such a simple piece of clothing, yet so elusive. You'd think they'd be no problem in bloke mode at least, and I guess that's the case. You can have any colour socks you want, so long as they are black. Or grey, or that horrible barf-tastic brown diamond pattern (Just what bloke under 80 wears those things?). Be still my beating heart!
    You'd think there would be someone out there making bespoke socks, but no. Not even the Queen has someone with a Royal Warrant for supplying her socks. And there in the microcosm of socks is my more general problem. Since being forced to poke my head above the parapet at the start of this year I've had more than one well-meaning person point out to me that my height alone need not be an impediment to my passing as a woman. And I have now grudgingly to admit they're right of course, every now and then when en femme I'll see my reflection and have a "Wow! You almost had it there!" moment. When not placed alongside a girl of the average sixteen inches shorter than me height, I can see it's not quite as unattainable a goal as I once thought it might be. But that alone, fun though it is chasing it, still isn't enough. To be convincingly female in appearance, you have to be able to do so in more than a few situations. And to return to my example above, you can't do that in bloke socks, no matter how good an actress you are.

Sharpening up my act

    Never having been out in the world en femme, I've never really had to bother too much about how I look. I could certainly do a lot worse, but when I'm merely cross-dressing for my own amusement it doesn't matter much if I get something a bit wrong, or maybe do something in a less-than-expert manner. All that is set to change though. If I am to show my face as girl even in the safe space of a TG support group then my presentation needs to be as faultless as I can make it in front of my peers. I'd hate for someone to look at me and think "She didn't make much effort!".
    So to that end I've been busily sharpening up my act. First to receive attention has been my weight. I'm fortunate enough to be in pretty good nick with a very active lifestyle so I wasn't in too bad shape in January, but there's always room for improvement. Someone my size can pack away an astounding quantity of food, so I've simply cut my portion sizes down to those consumed by mere mortals. Not surprisingly this has had some effect. Down from 224 pounds to 213, that's 11 pounds since January. My BMI was in the healthy range anyway, but that's got to be good. Unfortunately though it's had the effect that some clothes, both boy and girl, no longer fit me as my waist has dropped from a size UK18 somewhere in the direction of a 16. My upper body is always going to be an 18 - it's a ribcage thing - but I didn't quite expect this much change at waist level.
    It's also now a couple of months since I stopped biting my nails with the aid of the excellent Stop-n-grow. I have never posessed a set of unbitten fingernails as an adult so now I've grown them to what is for me an unfeasably long length (but is probably not very long in the scheme of things) and shaped them carefully I'm discovering just what a pain in the arse they can be as well as a relative joy to look at compared to the gnawed stumps they used to be.
    Take mobile phones for instance. People with fingernails press the buttons with them. People without fingernails use the fleshy end of their finger. I've spent a lifetime doing the latter, so I now find I'm spearing my fingernail down the gap between the keys and failing completely to text or dial as I want to. Which is probably very amusing to watch.
    It has been worth the effort. If nothing else I've lost the perpetual annoyance of pain in one finger or another where I had bitten a little too close. But I think I'm going to have to resist the urge to grow them further just because I can, and trim them back to sensible levels. Before I catch one of them in something and hurt myself.
    Finally, I've after a bit of effort and research picked a better foundation and taken the time to get a good colour match. Not having too blue a beard I flatter myself I get a good enough concealment without resorting to trowelling it on, so the Clarins everlasting foundation range does the trick and is comfortable to wear, if a little pricey. Having put both myself and my wife in stitches looking at "chestnut", a colour I can only describe as "Game show host orange" and all the colours in between to "ivory", a Goth-like pastiness, I find that I'm a "toffee". I'd always thought of myself as a mint imperial, personally.
    As I have observed before, passing is not my strong point. Someone standing on White Horse Hill could tell I'm not a GG. But at least the above effort should mean that our observer by the White Horse might have a moment of doubt if the moon wasn't shining.

Passing at last!

   Outside the Swindon TG group meeting last night it turned out our car was crooked in its space. My wife: "You park like a girl!". Me: "Passing at last!".

Well, it made us both laugh, anyway.

Femulate Rosie

Casting around for inspiration when thinking that maybe it's time I had a profile picture I did a bit of searching on iconic images of women through the ages. One of the images I turned up will not be the inspiration for my picture for all its power, Rosie the riveter was the publicity character representing the thousands of American women who participated in the US war effort during World War II.

Aside from having the right arms and someone I could probably borrow a pneumatic drill from I don't think I have what it takes to make a success of it but it raised an interesting benchmark: if you can do a good Rosie then I think you've arrived, in passing terms. Being a girl in satin and heels is easy, being a girl in oily overalls is hardcore.

Two Amazons collide

What a day yesterday was. I came out to a lovely lady from Wales, and my burgeoning quest for elegant footwear for the larger girl caused me to meet another Amazon online.

You can read Renee's comment beneath "Large blooming flower indeed". There before me, a real live Amazon like me, only fully transitioned and if you'll excuse my testosterone-fueled bloke side for a minute, doesn't she look lovely!

My carefully crafted defence against the world lies in tatters at my feet for a moment.

If I'd met Renee a coupe of decades ago and I'd managed to pull myself out of the pit of self-denial that was fast becoming depression, a rash and impulsive younger version of me might have run off to the doctor and begun the rocky road to transition, Who knows, I might have made as good a job of it as she has. Or I might have diverged from luscious Amazon into twisted giantess and fallen hard.

But the me who is your scribe is different from the feckless young oik who partied away to Carter USM, PWEI and Nirvana at a Northern university. I've been through some exceedingly rough times, met the most amazing genetic woman, picked up a shiny wedding ring from her in the shadow of the Rockies and found myself as Jenny with the advantage of plenty of time in which to do it and a post-depressive's determination to have fun.

No, life's too good to rock the boat. I'm fortunate that my dysphoria is a lot more mental than physical so if I can handle the inconvenience of occasional bouts of sleeplesness (case in point: today. 2AM? That's a record even for me!) I can still resist the temptation to transition with its attendant risk of birthing a twisted giantess.

So do I tramp off dejected into the wilderness to live my life as a hermit? Hell no! I've just learned that a non-genetic girl my size can pass in spades, and if that doesn't make me one of her disciples, nothing will.

I hope one day I'll find myself on the other side of the world and this rather lumpen Bridget Jones can go out with Renee as can this slightly suspect facsimile of her Mark Darcy (Close your eyes dear, and concentrate on the accent!) . Then I think she and I will both see at first hand why "Best of both worlds" is still my preferred path through this mire.

Large blooming flower indeed

It's been nearly ten years since I came out to my then-girlfriend, now she's my wife so I must be doing something right. We've taken it slowly and had a lot of fun, but I(girl) am still out of sight. Why is this?  Surely in this time and place that should be achievable!

(later edit for clarity's sake, when I originally came out to my girlfriend it was as the cross dresser I thought I was, the realisation that I was transgendered came later. This seems to be a well worn path.)

Here, I come to a shuddering halt. I am a almost a giant. I wouldn't have a hope in hell of passing.

Let me explain. I am 6 foot 8 inches tall. As a girl I wear a UK size 18 dress, but my feet are UK size 15. It's an over-used cliché about transgendered people that they are born in the wrong body, well in my case in a very cruel joke from the creator that's more literally true than for others. A long dress is mid-calf on me, a knee length dress is mid-thigh and a short dress is positively indecent. As it happens I'm in proportion. I may wear a size 18 but my height means I look a lot more slender than most size 18 women and years of walking and cycling mean that my very long legs have a shape most women would kill for. If I could easily buy a set of size 15 heels and I topped off my ensemble with a suitably bouffant wig, I'd be comfortably over 7 feet tall. Cool in a dominatrix-trashy-drag-queen kind of way, but hardly unobtrusive.

If you are of average height, you are fortunate in that you are merely a face in a crowd. You are unlikely to have experienced being significantly different from the rest of that crowd so you will never have been really noticed by that crowd. Try dyeing your hair pink for a week, and see what a difference it makes. The average man in the UK is about five feet 9 inches tall while the average woman is about five feet four inches. I'm a foot taller than most men and sixteen inches taller than most women. As a man in the street, I've had people openly staring at me, I've been the butt of more unfunny height jokes than I'd care to mention and from time to time I attract unwarranted open hostility from people who feel threatened by me. Being tall is not without its advantages, for example violent behaviour rarely comes my way, but a tall transgendered woman of my height would be nothing but a freak in the eyes of the general public and would not be able to pass unseen. It takes a lot of courage for any transgender girl who can pass in a crowd to take her first steps in the open and I admire those who do, I simply do not have what it takes to go out as a girl with very little chance of passing unseen.

I've had a lot of time to think on this subject, and I've concluded that there can be some surprising upsides to this. It is not without regret that I recognise being unable to pass as a woman means I can never consider transitioning, however having that decision made for me by my physical size means that I will never have to face making it myself.