Taking Back Control, transition edition

    I've been a little quiet here of late, but with good reason. When your transition is stalled for several years by circumstances beyond your control it can sometimes take a very long time indeed to get back on the treadmill. In my case I found a shortcut, and took it.
    It would normally make me a bit uneasy, taking a brief sojourn into the private sector to get something that could take me two or three more years in the NHS, but since the NHS GIC took a huge dump on me that has already cost me two or three years I feel I've served my time. So in the middle of last month I went to see a couple of private doctors to get my GRS referral letters. They are both people I've never seen before, but since they both have NHS practices I have plenty of friends who've seen them at their GICs.
    This was my first experience of private gender medicine, and all I can say is that it's a very different place from the NHS. Not necessarily better, just different. I only needed two appointments, so the cost was fairly modest in the scheme of private medicine. Enough for a significant belt-tightening for a couple of months, not enough to bankrupt me.
    What makes it different is the access. I had arranged both appointments two and three weeks in advance, by email on my mobile phone, over the course of a half hour walk in the countryside with my friend R. A quick online payment for each, and I was good to go.
    Going to each necessitated a train to London, and since I was there for a day I arranged to meet friends both times. A visit to Tim Hunkin's arcade in Holborn with the first set of friends, then a week later a rather nice cafe with friend 2. She felt she had to warn me it was very discreetly a kink cafe, but as I pointed out: "I Googled it".
    The two clinics were slightly different, one was at the private equivalent of a GP's surgery, the other at a very flashy clinic whose main business was plastic surgery. And immediately upon sitting down in the waiting room it became obvious the main difference between the private and the NHS sector. It may seem an obvious thing to say, but for the first time in my life I was sitting among those transitioners for whom transition is something that can be bought rather than something that is a drawn-out process. I'm used to the GIC waiting room crowd, a mixture of fresh-out-of-the-closet first timers and people who've been in the system for years. The emphasis there is on Real Life Experience, living in role, and due to the delays in the system the patients haven't got much else to do but get on with it. So while the first time MtFs in an NHS GIC waiting room are a little overdone on the presentation front, most of them are in jeans and trainers, lived-in everyday clothes from whatever they are doing with their lives.
    By contrast the private waiting rooms, especially the latter one, were full of high-speed transitioners anxious to get to their goal in as little time as possible. I hesitate to go into detail because it's not really appropriate, but if I say the tone was probably more Sparkle than Trans Pride Brighton you may get my meaning. I have little doubt that within very little time all of those people I saw will have had their visit to the surgeon and consider themselves fully transitioned, but will they really have socialised in the same way as the girl who's been full-time going through the process at an NHS GIC for three or four years and is only just receiving her first surgical referral? I worry that maybe they won't have.
    Both doctors were professional and straightforward, and since I had all the paperwork necessary to prove both my HRT and my time living in role I received an assent from each of them. A few weeks for the paperwork to be processed, and there they are. Back into the system. No idea when my time will come, and when it does I'll probably be rather circumspect about it online because blow-by-blow GRS accounts can be triggery as hell, but at least now I know my day will come. One day.

The Day After Tomorrow

    A friend of mine has a date with a surgeon next week, down in Brighton. Not that surgeon, because my friend is having his top surgery. And I'm giving him a lift down there because I have a car and the flexibility of a self-employed person, and he doesn't.
    In a way that particular trip will be a little challenging. Not because the M25 is a particularly scary road or because Brighton is a difficult place to drive around. Or even because the Rollerskate's engine met its end there. No, it's because it's that hospital, the one where as well as FtMs getting their top surgery a significant number of UK MtF people including quite a few friends go to get their GRS done.
    I have never been speed transitioner. I've met people who see GRS as the Only Thing That Makes Them A Woman, and in some cases ignore the other far more important aspects of transition to their ultimate detriment. I have another acquaintance who had her GRS in the last month or two at the earliest possible opportunity for instance, over whom I have serious concerns about the competence of the psychiatrists who signed her off for the procedure because I don't think her Real Life Test has been as real as it should have.
    Instead I have always reserved an open mind about the procedure. It's always been something I can only qualify for at some time in the distant future, so I've concentrated instead on getting on with the job in hand. Living the life and all that, why make any decisions now. In my mind better slow and right than quick and wrong.
    So back to next week.  And next year, and the year after that. What was something I'd safely be asked about in the far distant future has become something a bit closer. I'm not quite sure I'm ready for that.

Discharged

    Last week amid all the election excitement I took one of my periodic trips to the gender clinic in West London.

    To my surprise, I was discharged.

    This might sound like something of a disaster, but it isn't. You go there at my stage in transition for two reasons: psychological monitoring to ensure you're living in your assumed role and nothing's gone awry, and to see the endocrinologist. I get my endocrinology from a doctor at my local hospital whose experience in the field eclipses theirs so the second reason is redundant. 

    Unexpectedly then it seems my getting on with life has been such a success that I'm deemed not in need of their psychological monitoring. I must be sane, or something! As the psych said, there's no point my making the trip to London every six months just to tell them I'm OK.

    I was concerned lest I lose my place and be expected to start from scratch with them on my eventual return. It turns out that this only applies to the psychs, at the point at which I may consider surgery I have only to ask my doctor to refer me back to them and off I'll go. Let's see whether that turns out to be the truth.

    Behind the scenes I wonder whether health cuts are making them reduce their patient numbers by whatever means. It doesn't bother me as I don't feel I need their support at the moment, but I hope it'll still be there for me when I return.

    So, life. It's an important thing to recognise in this sphere, that not all your problems have their root in being transgender.

Goin' home

    My sister thinks I'm regressing into my childhood.
    She's come to this conclusion because I've moved back to my parents house, a place she detached herself from about thirty years ago by moving up north but which I who have always stayed in this corner of Southern England have retained a connection with.
    It's odd, moving back in when you're in your forties. It's not the same place of course. My mum's gone, it's just me and my dad. Plenty of small farm stuff to do, same trials of rural existence on the edge. At times it can seem rather isolating. Rather important then that I can escape to my local hackspace when I need a peer group.
    Meanwhile, bashing away at the startup. Sometimes working on a startup can seem a pointless task when you're developing a product without customers yet. I have a fairly hefty computer upstairs that is completely maxed-out processing text, the odd thing is though while it's doing the job I am at something of a loose end except for maintaining my political corpus. I can only wait for it to finish its mammoth task.
    Data-mining huge bodies of text for a living can sometimes produce unexpected diversions. Remember the Enron scandal? As part of the legal aftermath of one of the biggest corporate frauds in history the company's emails were subpoenaed and are thus in the public domain. The resulting corpus is of huge value to social and linguistic researchers because it offers a rare chance to study relationships and language at a large corporation. When I added it to my pile of text I found myself reading the mailboxes of some of the main players. Like stage magicians spinning plates on sticks, desperately trying to preserve the image of stability as the whole ship went down. Uncomfortably familiar to me, at several points in the past I've worked for companies going under, though fortunately not due to fraud.
    Moving has in a way brought closure; no longer having the flat in town with all its comforts but also its spectres. New doctor with whom I'll have my check-in appointment next week, though I'll be lucky if I've received a note from my endocrinologist by then.
    So yeah, childhood. The past is another country, and not one I want to return to.

I've had a few

     At my workplace, there is a three-storey-high atrium that divides the centre of the complex. It joins a substantial Victorian building to one built in the 1980s so it follows the '80s architectural fashion of exposed painted architectural steelwork and glass with the odd bit of mildly tacky gold trim.

    On the ground floor, seating and a coffee bar. The first floor mezzanine, comfy chairs and glass coffee tables popular for informal meetings. The top level is much smaller at the top of a grand flight of stairs, a single coffee table and chairs, an impressive view across the city skyline, and only an '80s-style glass and tubular handrail between you and a sheer three-storey drop. Jump off that and you'd hit the floor next to the diorama of technologically outdated machinery from the organisation's industrial past in somewhere about a second and a half.

    It's an unfortunate function of our condition, the tendency to notice things like that. I like the view from up there, but the edge is too close for comfort.

    So, regrets. Like that damn song lyric, I've had a few. If you had none during transition, you're lucky.

    You have to sort things that happen into two piles. "Stuff that could have been caused by transition", and "Stuff that would probably have happened anyway". My past 16 months have not been the best of my life, but for example I can't blame losing my mother on transitioning. Or even parting from my wife, deep down I am guessing that could have happened anyway even if not this year. Relationship issues aren't the sole preserve of trans people. Given the three trouble-free years before transition working down a corridor from that atrium though I can't imagine work would have gone sour for the scruffy bloke. Never mind, reap the whirlwind and all that.

     I will never shake one regret though, that I couldn't make it as the bloke. Not that I ended up transitioning, but for the bloke I never was. I know some people never look back, sadly it doesn't work that way for me.
     It's tempting given a new year to talk about grandiose plans. I think I'll avoid that one, just concentrate on getting through it in one piece.
   
     

Cacophony

    It's a cold day here in southern England. Of course, that's a relative term. A Canadian would laugh at our -2 Celcius, while a Jamaican might see it as a *very* cold day. Not the best time to be fixing a boat engine, but at least it isn't raining.
    I feel at the crest of a huge wave that's about to break. Not one of crystal-clear blue water but of murky brown sludge, all my travails of the last year and a bit. Losing a parent, being comprehensively sidelined at work, losing my wife, and doing my RLE for an extended period without HRT due to fertility treatment. I don't think anyone could come through all that without effect, and though I've probably managed better than some people would I'm starting to feel the strain. This week I had to make an urgent trip to the doctor for a carbamazapine prescription, my atypical facial pain flared up. Peculiarly intense, that.
    So more hearings, phone calls with union lawyers, and honestly rather depressing stuff. I have to make as much fuss as possible though, for the sake of those who come after me. Even if it does little to make me Employee of the Month, and especially even if it means I'm out of work at the end of it. As a debt-free dotcommer with no dependants that holds no fear for me, my only question would be which startup idea to pursue first.
    One way to close the door on the past is to move out of my flat. Probably go back to my dad's place, a 40-something living with her parent. But the flat while great for two is a bit much for one, I'm much better off out of it.
    Which kinda brings me to my boat engine and its leaky fuel pipe. I lived on this boat, once. I wouldn't go back to those days, not least because I'm not in a residential mooring, but it is something I will now have more time and money to devote to. This river has been the backdrop to a lot of my life since I was a teenager, and in a time of trouble it's a fitting place to return.
    Next month the river will be in spate, a boiling mass of angry brown water with the boat lashed to its mooring to avoid it being washed away. By May though all that will be a distant memory; the water lillies will be coming through and the fish will be hanging lazily in the oxygenated stream from the weir.
    I'll still be here.

Just another day

    Tuesday came and went. Anther day, just like any other. 365 of them since going full-time.
    To be honest, it's not been the best of years. We lost my mother, work turned very sour, and my wife and I have gone our separate ways. But in one respect it's gone exactly to plan. No more of that sorrow at not being right.
    And that at least is worth having.

Riding the little trains

    Transition is a funny business. You get on with your life, but at risk of stating the bleedin' obvious it's not the same as it was before. Sure, you go to work, do your shopping and everything, but your boundaries are a lot closer. It's a whole new set of social conventions to learn, so you watch your back, there are fresh dangers you didn't have to worry about before.
    Take my weekend for instance. A yearly outing for the Ixion motorcycling mailing list, for reasons too complex to explain we hire a train on the Tal-y-llyn railway in Wales and have a barbecue. A chance to catch up with a group of friends I've known for a very long time, and in a beautiful location. I even had a chance to use a bit of my rather halting Welsh, though I couldn't find anyone who'd sell me a bara brith (best described as the Welsh take on fruit cake) to take back for my colleagues.
    On the whole, not a lot to worry about. Among friends, and rural Wales is hardly threatening. But it was a first for me since transition, staying on a busy campsite full of families on holiday. Using communal washing facilities, being rather visible among a field of tents. What if somebody takes exception to me? One's imagination runs away with the thought of angry campers.
    In practice of course I was fine. I have no illusions about stealth but I don't present or behave in an unusual manner, and wrapped in a big stripey sundress on one of the hottest days of the year I found myself fitting right in. Chatting about the campsite badger - has a habit of raiding people's food - and even subject to a rather amusing conversation about the obsessions of menfolk for machinery. To my great surprise, I fitted in among complete strangers on holiday.
    OK, so my worries were groundless. But that doesn't make them any less valid, we all know there are people who get into trouble not of their own making. But as I drove home through the beautiful mountains of mid Wales I did come away feeling I'd extended my boundaries slightly. Which is yet another small step along the path of transition.

Only me

     Well here it is, the post I didn't want to write. One of the reasons I've been a little out of sight for the last few weeks or months, along with work.
    My wife and I are now living apart. In a very amicable manner and without friction, but that's it. In the end it was a stress thing, she found the idea of my going out in the world and the worry of how people might react to me to be too much. We both tried so hard over the years.
    No house, no kids, not even a dog to argue over who gets which end. (She suggested she'd have had the rear, poop is easy to clean up while dog food costs money)
    There are so many things I haven't done over the last few weeks. Guess I need to ease myself back into life.

Passing it on

    There is an air of desperation hereabouts as I head towards my date with an estradiol patch. I've reached my early forties, been married for nearly a decade, and yet there is no pitter-patter of tiny feet. It's not for lack of wanting, just that the time has never been right for my wife. I say this without malice, I think deep down she's never really wanted a child. There has always been some excuse or other - work, salaries, family difficulties or a small flat - and now the trans one which let's face it is the mother of all excuses. It doesn't change my attachment to her but I am consumed with sadness at the thought of growing old alone.
    I'm in the queue for fertility treatment. Storing a sperm sample in a vat of liquid nitrogen, which I should be able to do within a month or two. It's why I've gone much longer than many on my RLE and have yet to have any hormones. It's odd, having dropped my Finasteride to make sure there's no chance of any effect on my fertility I find I have rather too much of the boy back. I'd grown accustomed to having that part of my body under my own control, to feeling less aggressive somehow, and yet here it is back again. I hated being a teenager.
    But storing sperm isn't the solution. You need a partner who also wants a family. And since I'm not about to dump my wife I face an uphill struggle convincing her.
    There are alternatives of course. Anonymous donation through the NHS is out, you have to be under 40. Or there are services that bring LGBT people together for sperm donation, which is a bit more interesting. You can do it anonymously, as a 'named parent' where the kid knows who you are but you play no part in their life, or as a shared parent which is I guess a bit like an amicable divorced couple.
    Still, it's a big unknown. Are they reputable? And do I fancy entering a meat market? "Above average height transgender engineer who works in the publishing industry, likes old cars and makes cider. Warning, your child may dismantle stuff for fun". Oh yeah, that'll pull 'em in.
    And then there's the embarrassment. Doing your thing into a cup and handing it over. It's bad enough having to do the one thing that's still a bloke about you without someone else having to be in the next room.
    I used to have a colleague who managed to spawn children like I amassed Wrecks at the time. It seemed he could barely keep his trousers on and unseemly fertile women would throw themselves at him in nightclubs. I tried to settle down and get it right, and this happens.
    Life ain't fair, is it.

Getting on with it.

    It's a lovely spring day in Southern England, and I'm off to a friend's wedding in a couple of hours. The magnolia is coming out, and fat green leaf buds are showing on the trees.
    Not being one for treating transition as a tick-box list of achievements, it was a while before it struck me I've been full-time for six months. Life's just gone on. In years of following blogs in this sphere I've read many breathless descriptions of milestones - I've probably written a few myself! - but this one if indeed it is a milestone has passed almost unnoticed. Which is the way it should be.
    Short post? Isn't much more to write on this subject, is there.

Another trip to the doctor

    It was my periodic trip to West London yesterday, to the gender identity clinic. Nice day for it, a hint of spring at the end of February.
    My usual pleasure of a walk across the park from Paddington, then a short Tube journey for lunch with a friend from way back in a quiet London boozer. Being used to London pubs being full of noisy people in suits drinking eye-wateringly expensive concoctions and yakking away at each other about business it was refreshing to find a quiet local among the bustle. For once London Pride was the local ale.
    The clinic was busier than usual. A mix of people waiting, bound into a camaraderie of suppressed laughter by the arrival of a patient who complained continually of the heat but wouldn't remove her heavy coat, then sat and belched periodically. We're a troubled community at times.
    So, to business. My secondary clinician this time.
    These appointments are an exercise in the clinic ensuring that things are going well. A check-in if you will. Their aim is not simply to ensure that we transition, but to ensure that as we transition we do so without taking any paths of no return before we are certain they are the right path for us. Thus these appointments are for monitoring our progress.
    The clinic are motivated by a fear of "regretters". People who've had The Surgery and then decide they were blokes all along. Or vice versa for transmen. It's a justified fear, and one I think we as a community should maybe take more seriously than we do. The regretters are always "someone else" for us, we should recognise that we all have the potential within us for it to go wrong.
    Do the clinic get it right? Probably, for most people. But they only see us for half an hour every six months. It's too easy for the Narrative to creep in, I wonder whether some people I've met have managed to pull the wool over the clinic's eyes and move forward a little too fast for their own well-being. The GICs are too thinly spread for this, but I sometimes wish a less medical and more community-oriented approach could be taken to this keeping in touch.
    So, the usual conversation. Talking about work, my wife, my decision to go to a local endocrinologist rather than their one. That last seemed to be accepted grudgingly, however as I said I wouldn't be doing it if I wasn't lucky enough to have a genuine world expert running my local endocrinology clinic.
    That's it then. So long, see you in the autumn. Then the tube back to Paddington and a train journey home through a still partially flooded Thames valley.
    Another square passed on the game board, haven't landed on a snake.

Is it happening to me?

   I've not been around here much these last couple of weeks. Sorry friends, I've not been around your blogs either. I've not had the best of times, I'm suffering from acid reflux and my insomnia has returned with a vengeance. Crossed fingers that my atypical facial pain doesn't get triggered, that's nasty.
    Unfortunately the cause of all this lies at work. About the same time as I changed my gender my manager retired, and the new one's style of personal management has fallen significantly short of what I had come to expect from the organisation. It's not appropriate to go into detail, suffice to say it has been the cause of some serious stress and I have been in conversation with the HR department about it.
   But this post isn't about what is or isn't happening between me and my manager, instead it's about the elephant in the room. The inevitable question I have to ask but I simultaneously hate asking. "Is it because I'm trans?"
   I have no desire to become a Professional Transgender Person to whom everything that happens to them is because of their trans status. We've all encountered members of minority groups who do that, and they do no favours to the rest of their groups. And nobody's said anything at work, made any references to my trans status, disparaging or otherwise.After all, nobody is ever transphobic, are they!
   The problem is, the timing is a bit suspect. As the scruffy bloke I worked for three years and got very good ratings all through, as the girl suddenly it seems I can do no right despite having a couple of very conspicuous successes on my plate.
   That elephant in the room suddenly seems very real indeed.
   What I have done is fire a shot across their bows. In conversation with HR I have made it very clear indeed that I do not wish to have any turmoil, and in that aim they should be in complete agreement with me. Employee turmoil is very costly for an employer, not to mention embarrassing. I made it very clear that in our community a lot of people face employment problems after transitioning so it is something of which I am very aware. I then asked them to nip it in the bud before  anything they'd later regret happens, because all I want is a quiet life.
   Did I get it right? I hope so but only time will tell. I had to do something, after all I have nearly 20 years experience in dotcom-land behind me and one thing that experience has left me with is this: I sure as hell am no doormat.

Apathy

    There is a collective apathy that descends at this time of year, surrounded as we are by winter at its most depressing, coupled with far too much heavy Christmas food. This year for us it's had the added burden of my mother's passing, not immediate but still close enough for the emotional toll to be a factor.

    Fortunately it hasn't been too much of a burdensome Christmas. My dad hasn't wanted decorations or a tree, so we've had the food but few other trappings. I'm glad it worked this way. I didn't want him stressed by too many preparations, yet I didn't want him to be missing mince pies either. So I've managed all the cake, mincemeat, puddings and turkey.

    Apathy is a strange thing, I know I have a lot of things I need to get on with personally too, yet I can't summon the energy to think about them. Name changes, for instance. I should be busy writing to all sorts of financial companies about pensions, or the DVLA about my driving licence. But somehow I can't summon the energy. 

    Fortunately none of them are in over Christmas anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter. I know I'll be asked about this in February when I visit the clinic, guess the death in the family card will have to suffice. 

    My sister has sent her eldest son over for the season. I think there have been some sibling tensions and she's anxious to defuse them. I wasn't completely impressed as I thought it might be a bit much for my dad, however fortunately he's turned out not to be a handful at all. Prone as 15 year olds are to spending all day in bed or in front of the TV, however I suspect some of the latter is due to being let off the rather tight parental leash. I've been introducing him to my DVD collection as he turns out to be something of a film buff.

    My sister seems to have some problems with my transition, particularly with my name change. She has all sorts of weird theories of her own about it, however as I've had to acidly remind her; it ain't about her.

    So here I am, not feeling very enthused, not in the highest point of transition either. Looking forward to a new pair of Le Dame shoes in the post, and annoyed as hell with Marks and Spencer for discontinuing their tall workwear range. I'm enjoying the freedom of being able to openly shop for clothing though, that one will take a long time to go away. 

    Yep, clothes an' shoes, all it takes to fill a girl's head. Along with deploying a work app for Android, iOS and Windows Phone, a suspected head warp on the Wreck, and getting to grips with how to say one should do something in Welsh, that is. Ddylwn ei wneud rhywbeth arall, na ddylai fi.

Hope you lot had a good Christmas, wherever you are.

On identity

    As the days get shorter and we have a sudden reminder of impending winter, it comes almost as a shock to see nearly two months have passed since I went full-time. Of course, so much has been going on I haven't had time to think.
    I think I'm not alone among transgender people at this stage of transition in experiencing a mild crisis of identity. You don't magically change on transition, you're the same person you always were. So you've had four decades of socialisation as a bloke, and that doesn't magically go away. I don't mean by this how you behave or how you look, but how your life experiences affect you. So you still feel like the person you were six months ago, and back then of course you were supposed to be very different.
    I'm sure it'll pass. Better to think about it now than like some people mask it with an obsessive pursuit of transition milestones and have it stay with you for a lifetime in a ghastly closet of assumed stealth.
    Meanwhile, inner residual bloke or not I have plenty to do. Pressing cider as usual at this time of year, a bumper crop this season. Getting on with shoemaking, casting a pair of foot moulds in plaster that seem to be taking an age for the residual moisture to come out. And things to do with my mother's illness. My annoying sisters are in the air, never conducive to low stress
     Life goes on, eh!

A tale of three phone companies

    I have a tale to tell about the mechanics of changing the name on accounts with UK utilities following a legal change of name. It's not in itself unpleasant, but it demonstrates perfectly the kind of petty jobsworth application of invented non-existent laws that blights the process for those of us who are going through it.
    One of the first things I did on transition was to change my name with the first of my three phone companies, the UK's national near-monopoly, BT. Like most Brits I use them for my fixed line phone, and in my case they also provide my broadband. To change my name with them I simply logged in to my online account with them and updated my details. No need to provide any documents as there is no such thing as a legal name in UK law, they know exactly who I am through my address and bank account. Job done, not bad for a usually slow-moving former nationalised near-monopoly.
    My second phone company was the next on my list for a name change update. EE are one of the UK's larger mobile phone networks, having been formed from the merger of T-Mobile and Orange. I've been with them for more years than I'd care to remember, and have always been pretty satisfied with them.
    So I logged into the EE web site and worked through the section for updating my details. That's strange, no place to update your account name. I must have missed something. So I asked them where to look, via my social network of choice.
    Their reply was this link. A page telling me I needed "A covering letter with a copy of the change of name deed poll document and also the documented proof of gender change." Oops, I don't have a deed poll, I have a statutory declaration. And also what exactly is "documented proof of gender change"? A picture of me dressed as a drag queen? A letter from my doctor? My BT phone bill?
    I pointed out to them that (a)not everyone has a deed poll, and (b)was the requirement for documentation really necessary considering it is not a legal requirement and BT can happily do the change without it. The reply: "Just send us the documents we ask for". More than their jobsworth.
    I am physically unable to send them a deed poll, I don't have one. A statutory declaration is functionally the same thing, I advised them to talk to their legal department. I am not spending money with a lawyer to get my "documented proof", just for a poxy phone company who are demanding something they have no legal requirement for. I refer them to the case of Arkell vs. Pressdram.
    Which brings me neatly to the third phone company I mentioned. I don't know who they are yet, but I know they'll have no problem with my name change. You see, the UK mobile phone market is one of cut-throat competition. There are the network owners, EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three, and a host of secondary service providers such as Tesco Mobile, Talk Talk, Virgin Mobile, and GiffGaff who lease capacity from the network owners. Moving providers is a very simple process.
    So I don't have to put up with EE's frankly ludicrous requirement. I'll simply wait for the end of my contract - not too long now - and move mobile provider to my as-yet-undecided third phone company. Start with them in my new name, and the transphobic EE jobsworths can go to hell.
    Everything Everywhere - except in my pocket, that is.

Week

    So, it's been a week now. Since going full-time female, that is.

    How's it gone? Very well. Beautifully normal.

    If you're full-time, you have no alternative but to just seize the role and go with it. All those worries and uncertainties have to be faced up to and overcome, for the alternative is that the boundaries of your world shrink to almost nothing and you can't get anything done. Hardly the point of Real Life Experience, is it.
    So that's what I did. Just got on with it. Four days in the office, one in London going to the GIC, and two days back at my parents place doing farm stuff.
    I like my office. My colleagues wear everything from the catwalk look to the dishevelled academic look so as long as what I wear is appropriate for someone of my age and height I can wear the widest variety of outfits without looking out of place. I wore the dress in the picture on Monday because I could for the first time in my working life, but I could get away with everything from comfy jeans to million-dollar-meeting power dressing. Somehow I suspect the former will become my norm though.
    London was fun. A lot of firsts: trains, the Tube, London shopping, walking through Hyde Park. Which all seemed as natural as anything  as of course it should, as all those things were hardly new to the old me. It was too hot though. I didn't get my outfit half as wrong as the other GIC patient in her black suit and heavy makeup, but despite my summery top I wished I'd worn some lightweight trousers instead of jeans. Still, at least half of London's natal women were in the same position.
    To be honest, the surprise was my invisibility. I can't believe nobody saw me or that nobody clocked me, but despite my lingering worries nobody took any notice of me. Except for one group, the few women of similar height to me I passed in the street. Without exception they noticed me, checked me out and made eye contact.
    Women do not make eye contact with unknown men in the street, so this was entirely new to me. I have it seems effortlessly joined the Very Tall Women's Club.
    The GIC appointment was routine. See the doc, hand over the paperwork, ask for a voice and fertility clinic referral, get appointment for February.
    So that's me set then. I never thought this would happen.

Bunch of bankers

    "I suggest you talk to your diversity department before you say something you may later regret."
    I was standing in my bank on a hot August lunchtime, a young couple with a very cute but very bored little girl seated in the waiting area to my right and a couple of bank employees in front of me. The obviously rather inexperienced woman on desk duty and a young man with spiky hair and an earpiece, dressed in a shiny suit.
    I'd gone in to process my name change. On paper an easy process, British law being what it is and names having no legal status here. Just tell them what your new name is and that's it!
    Of course, it's not that easy. Aparatchiks like paper, so I'd come armed with my stat dec. "No problem", said inexperienced woman, "I'll get right to it". On to the second screen in the bank name-change system: "Have you got any ID?" I proffered my employer's photo ID with my bloke picture, like a Gold Card in this town. She had the decency to look embarrassed. "I mean, have you got any ID with your new name?"
    I pointed out that since I had just changed my name I was hardly likely to have any such ID, and suggested she look again at the very obvious likeness on the photo ID I'd just shown her. She looked confused, and scuttled off.
    The cute little girl had started playing a game, improbably with a five pound note from her mother's handbag. How the other half live, I thought.
    Inexperienced woman reappeared, with spiky haired man in tow. He peered suspiciously at my stat dec. "Have you changed your name by deed poll?" he asked. I pointed at the stat dec and as politely as I could informed him that a stat dec is functionally equivalent to a deed poll. He looked perplexed and started to say that a deed poll was necessary. At this point I sensed this needed a little focus, and made the suggestion at the start of this piece. At which point I was told to wait while they returned to their lair with an admonition from me that they couldn't take the original stat dec as it had cost me a fiver, a copy would have to do.
    Ten minutes later, inexperienced woman returned. We filled in a form, and I'll have to go back next week to order my cheque book and card. The Action Bank, cajoled into action.
    I don't expect a small branch of a big bank to know everything about gender changes. They probably see us pretty rarely after all. But I did get the sense that they started from a position of "You can't do this!" when they should have been thinking "How can we do this?".
    In a couple of weeks, new regulations will make changing your bank in the UK as easy as changing your cellphone provider or your washing powder brand. Depending on how this lot perform over the next week, I may just take up that offer.

'er in waiting

    It's something of a limbo, the period immediately before going full-time. A lot of doubt alternating with desperate need to move forward. One minute I'm making a big mistake, ruining everything et cetera, et cetera, the next I'm ready to go. I have seen many others run headlong into this without any such concerns. The pink fog is strong in some people, but such as it was it left me a very long time ago.
    Such doubts are inevitable. Healthy even. But far more stress than I need at the moment.
    Last night I left the scruffy bloke behind and went out with my wife. She's not entirely at ease walking with me as the oversized girl, for which I don't blame her. However as the evening progressed and I attracted no adverse attention I sensed she relaxed. We go out together surprisingly rarely as our different jobs restrict our time together, so fortunately she has plenty of time during which she will not have any such worries.
    I was pleased, looking at myself in the mirror. A very narcissistic thing to say, but also a moment of necessary appraisal. My hair has settled nicely into an unambiguously female cut which frames my face well and helps lose its male shape, and I was dressed as any other 40-something woman might be. In short, I was not someone who would attract attention other than through my height, which I can't do anything about.
    I spent decades thinking I would never be able to look like that.
    At work, another meeting with HR. All the policies, steps and hoops to jump through. Very positive, nothing unexpected or unpleasant. Then the point later in the day when I fill in a stat. dec. form with my new name, and there it is in black and white. All the doubts return, and I don't take it to the solicitor's office.
    In an odd juxtaposition, I've been shopping. On one hand a few female clothing essentials, on the other a box of parts for the Wreck. This weekend I'll be getting my eyebrows done before going to my parents place and tackling a rusted-in stud. I won't be doing anything to my nails until after that's finished, you can be sure of that.
    In a few months time, this'll be ancient history. I'll have settled into the regime of my life as a woman, and I'll know the answer to all my worries about my wife. I'm sure it'll have been easier than I expect, but meanwhile I wish my current angst would go away.

Transition is an exercise in selfishness.

    Today I had a meeting at work. My boss and I took a walk through the labyrinth of offices and staircases to the HR department, and sat down with our department's HR representative. I announced my intention to transition full-time to the female role, and set in motion the necessary steps for that to happen smoothly at work.

    Truth be told, this is the last thing I want to happen.

    You aren't supposed to say something like that just before transition, are you. It's a trope, that you should only transition if you have no alternative, you are supposed to want it more than anything in the world. God knows, I've had that one quoted at me enough times over the past few years. Usually from trans women desperate to assert themselves as more trans than me. They just went for it and I struggled against it, therefore I can't really be trans. Cheers ladies. A friend of mine puts it very well: transition is an exercise in selfishness.

    No, I don't want it. What I really want is for it all to go away. A magic bloke pill. I can do bloke very well. Ain't gonna happen, sadly.

    I'm transitioning because I have run out of alternatives. Having just said I don't want it, of course I want to live as a woman in the desperate way only one stuck in the existence of a bloke can. But I'd have to be crazy to also want its effects. Effects on those around me, effects on me.
    I can't speak for my wife, but I sense she is relieved. The past few years have not been easy for her, and we had settled into a stable but stressful existence from which the only exit could have been our relationship slowly withering on the vine. Living with a bloke with clinical depression can not be easy, she has always said it is my depression she has had the problem with more than my being trans.
    So we'd be still here in a tiny flat in ten years time, neither happy, no children, no future. If I transition our relationship may or may not survive but at least it won't wither and my wife has the potential to be happier through living with someone who is not depressed. Only time will tell if it works for us.

    My friend got it right: Transition is an exercise in selfishness.