As I am a cliche romantic…I tend to love to do small things for people.

I need to share this cute little tale of mine as I will it to bring smiles to others as much as it does to me (not trying to boast).

Last Saturday night, I closed at Lowe’s (as I often do in my 6 day work weeks). I came home and followed the same routine I had been in for the past few days. As it was Thanksgiving break, my boyfriend and I were separated and had been using Yahoo to communicate through webcam and the call feature. It was working out just fine, but I felt a greater need to be with him. Either way, this activity continued into the wee morning hours, as was normal as well. At about 3am, I came across a recommendation whilst reading Genderfork that I absolutely couldn’t ignore. I used the fact that we had been dating for just about a month then to buy this present for him, and then proceeded to also decide to drive to NOVA (Northern Virginia) 2.5 hours away, at 5am, with no sleep, to see him.

Showing up and having him stagger out in a sleepy daze while I was wide awake due to so much caffeine, excitement, and the chill of a 34 degree NOVA morning on my skin was more than worth what may have seemed like a irrational plan.

We also went out on a date when we got back from NOVA. Brought him to dinner at Cracker Barrel, and then saw Fantastic Mr. Fox (which really is fantastic). A stunning night, and one I won’t willingly forget.

Any way…the present was OP, and it just arrived yesterday. It was so exciting. Original Plumbing is a unique Trans Man magazine based out of San Francisco. The first edition is only in circulation for a while more before the next issue of the quarterly come out, and I snatched it up quick when I saw that. Full of interviews and articles from FTMs, I think I’m definitely going to continue buying it for him. It makes me feel special that he liked it so much and hadn’t heard of it (as I was afraid he might have, seeing as that he is quite knowledgeable about the community).

Yay! I’m silly. I <3 him though.

~Peace.

Two points against me being transexual:

1. Was never confused about why I didn’t have a penis although I can remember when I was very little thinking I did.  Somehow that notion was corrected and I accepted it, though. (What I thought was a penis was actually my inner labia.) Have no angst about not having primary or secondary male sex characteristics. Everything revolves around social role, behavior, self image, interactions, rather than “wrongness” of body. That said I think what I want when I consider hormones is being “more right”.
2. Do not put myself in the male role in my fantasies and I consistently identify with the female-bodied roles in the erotica I read. I love reading stories about people who’s body configurations roughly match mine because so much of the imagery I enjoy involves receptive penetration of all sorts and various ways to be very, very mean to breasts.  Also coincidentally, two things I enjoy tremendously in real life. I tend to be sillily realistic with my fantasies and things which are implausible or seem outright dangerous are much less erotic to me than things I could conceive of, even if it’s implausible I would ever carry them out.

These seems to be pretty consistent pieces of trans sexuality, according to my reading.

(I am becoming exhausted from thinking about this stuff. I tihnk soon I will reach the point where I will just stop for a few months to process it… That’s my usual MO.)

I was trying to buy some nice rolling tobacco from the neighbourhood smoke shop.  After asking for ID, he guy in the shop said told me, “You look too young.” What did he mean by this? “You look too young,” he said. “To be that age.” I don’t know what to say to that.

I talk to my friends about the thinking I have been doing about my gender, and I have been told, “But you are so womanly.” I am surprised that anyone is surprised. Even my token efforts at femininity have been for special circumstances where it was somehow required of me. I see much of my behaviour as masculine, sometimes macho, it the best sense of that term. Not nasty, abusive, patriarchal or demeaning of others.  In groups where I’m comfortable, I observe my behaviour as being much more male than female. Alone with someone else, same thing.  How many friends and lovers have told me they’ve never met a woman like me? I have often explained myself saying, “Dating me is like dating a man” and got agreement. But now, the same people tell me now that I am so deeply woman, they can’t imagine me another way. I don’t know what to say.

It has been years now that I have thought of myself as a crotchety old man, inside. How is it that what everyone else sees is so different? I really just don’t know what to say to it.

It was unexpected, unplanned, and exactly the way it was supposed to be.

Well, sort of.  It took some weird complications to make it happen, but I think if it weren’t for those, it wouldn’t have gone as well as it did.

See, last weekend my dad and I went up the hill to shoot his shotgun and hit a couple golf balls after I’d had some serious relationship issues (more about HIM later.)  My dad seems to think it’s great therapy to blow off steam by blowing up paint cans, and he couldn’t have been more right.  It was the golfing that got me.

On my last swing, I lost track of my form and swung not just my arms but also my back, throwing something out of alignment.  It wasn’t a HORRIBLE injury, just enough that I was done goofing off.  But all that accumulated in my back seriously giving out on me last night.  I was trying to get the baby in her high chair when my back went SPROING, and all of a sudden I couldn’t move my arms, couldn’t lift my head, and I was completely immobilized and panicked.  Good thing my best friend was there helping me watch her or it would have been me stranded and helpless with a screaming 2-year-old for 2 hours.

Anyway, I tried to get comfortable, took my last two Vicodin from my old knee injury and waited on the ‘rents to get back.  I won’t go into the gory details of those two hours, but let’s just say that 1000 milligrams of hydrocodone should have worked better than they did.  I was in humiliated tears before the night was up.

And when they got home, things just got better.  My stepmom the nurse gave me another 1000 milligram and said that was enough for the night, which did little other than to make me drowsy and nauseous, but hardly touched the pain.  My dad, pious believer that he is, decided to get out the holy anointment oil and try to pray the injury out of me.  He sent everyone else out of the room, and I just sat there, with nothing to say.  When he asked if I was alright, I looked him square in the eye and said, “Do you really think I would still believe in a God who would make me this way?”

Once I started, I couldn’t stop.  Everything just rolled from there, but even in my drugged stupor and excruciating pain (probably the reason I didn’t have any reservations about saying what I said,) it couldn’t have come out better.  Everything I’ve been struggling with figuring out how to say for months flowed out like water, and at the end of it, my dad said he would love me forever, no matter how much I decided to surgically mutilate myself.  Well, it was funny at the time.  You have to get my dad’s sense of humor.

No matter how he put it, I knew he was behind me 100%.

…

Whole new worlds have opened up to me.  Of course, I’m still stranded here at the house with my back busted and it’s going against my better judgement to even be sitting here at the computer instead of lying down and resting, but I had to share this.  Yesterday, it was 2 weeks until my birthday and I still had the burden of trying to figure out how to tell him before I turned 21.  Last night, all of that went away.  Today, I’m free.  My dad still cares about me, he won’t try to change me or preach at me, and he knows everything there really is to know about me.  I feel like we’re really friends now.

…

One other thing- as soon as I can afford it, I really want to get on Minoxidil (or Rogaine, see the minoxidil discussion on the Beard Board for details) for my facial hair growth.  I don’t feel nearly so awkward about it now that my dad knows I’m FTM.  Everyone else can just figure it out for themselves, but now that I have my dad’s blessing, I feel free to express my gender and really start the ball rolling towards true transition.

It’s time to start planning my coming out party!

Dec. 2 marks the fifth anniversary of Ohio’s Defense of Marriage Act. In 2004, Ohio passed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

In honor of the banniversary, Equality Ohio has created a video to be delivered to members of the Ohio legislature. It is a part of the organization’s Our Stories project, which seeks to share the real stories of LGBT Ohioans to lawmakers and other citizens. Warning: It’s a tearjerker.

Cleveland City Council unanimously voted on Nov. 30, to approve a proposal protecting discrimination based on gender identity and expression in employment, housing and public accommodations.

According to Equality Ohio, other municipalities also voted on similar measures that day. Akron, Ohio, now includes sexual orientation and gender identity for employment, housing and public accommodations, in a vote of 1o-2. Summit County, Ohio, passed an almost identical ordinance, voting 11-1.

Dec. 1 marks the 21st celebration of World AIDS Day, an international day to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS.

Worldwide 33.4 million people live with HIV/AIDS, according to international AIDS charity, AVERT. Of those 33.4 million people, 1 million live in the United States. Every year the United States adds 56,000 people to that number.

To bring the number closer to home, 15,412 Ohioians live with HIV/AIDS, according to the Ohio Department of Health. In Hamilton County, 1,949 people live with HIV/AIDS. Other urban areas across the state also have staggering statistics: Cuyahoga County, home to Cleveland, has 3,298 people living with HIV/AIDS, while Franklin County, home to Columbus, has 3,023 people.

The AIDS epidemic took the world by surprise. There still is no cure for HIV/AIDS. The treatment is very expensive, and most people have limited or no access to the life-prolonging drug cocktails. It is no surprise more than 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981, when the first HIV/AIDS cases were brought to light.

After many years of research, researchers have discovered HIV is spread through contact with an infected person’s blood, semen, vaginal secretions or breast milk, usually during unprotected genital contact, sharing syringes or needles and, less frequently, blood transfusions.

Currently, prevention and early detection are becoming the route to battle AIDS. Local organizations like Stop AIDS provide free, confidential testing at their offices and in mobile testing centers. The University of Cincinnati Wellness Center even partners with Stop AIDS quarterly to bring the free testing directly to students in University Health Services.

Knowing your status is integral to stopping the spread of HIV, well, knowledge and having protected sex.

The UC Wellness Center also provides three free condoms a day to students, as well as other goodies such as lube, dental dams, adhesive bandages and pain reliever. A student simply has to pop into the office in 675 Steger Student Life Center to pick up the swag and help stop the spread of HIV. Other organizations such as Planned Parenthood also distribute condoms or safe sex packs.

McMicken Commons at the University of Cincinnati is decorated with red ribbons for World AIDS Day.

Stop AIDS also provides other services in addition to free testing, including educating community members on how to access treatment and other services while having HIV/AIDS. Services like financial counseling, transportation, housing assistance and chemical and alcohol dependency are among the array offered by Stop AIDS. For more information call 513-421-2437.

Other programs like syringe exchange programs swap used syringes for sterile ones with intravenous drug users. The reasoning behind these programs is people are using intravenous drugs and spreading HIV/AIDS in the process. By offering a needle exchange, these groups are not promoting drug use, but decreasing the risk of contracting blood borne pathogens like HIV. Currently, Cincinnati has no such program, and 7 percent of Ohio’s HIV/AIDS cases can be credited to intravenous drug use.

In honor of World AIDS Day, people across the globe hold vigils or services in honor of World AIDS Day. Red ribbons are everywhere, even University of Cincinnati’s McMicken Commons had them. Facebook statuses, Tweets and blogs are devoted to the topic or go red for the day.

While all of this awareness raising is good, where is the action?

Wearing a red ribbon will not eradicate HIV/AIDS, but getting tested, having protected sex and using sterile syringes will curb the spread of HIV. There is no cure. Our only option is to prevent it.

There hasn’t been much to report of late, hence my silence. But a bit of happiness to report: One of my partner’s oldest friends is here for a visit and we came out to her yesterday. She was completely accepting and understanding and was really happy we’d told her. You can’t ask for a better reaction.

“What is the one thing you haven’t done yet that you want to do with me, or to me?”

I love these types of questions. I love hypothesizing. It’s fun. It makes my brain happy. “What if” type of questions are like candy to my mind. Hypothesizing about sex makes both my brain and my clit happy so it’s a double treat.
How we came to the question is that today Luke has sex on the mind and for whatever reason I am decidedly not in the mood. We, neither of us, prescribe to the school of thought that if he wants sex, I must provide. However, being of the male persuasion, (I am going by what I hear from other women here since he is my first guy), he has been chewing my ear off by talking about how badly he wants it, needs it, is distracted without it, etc etc. I used to think of myself as a nympho because I have a higher sex drive than most women and butches I dated. I pity men and their sex drive. It seems like a colossal joke to have such different sex drives in different genders.
Anyhow, since we do have a bdsm relationship, some might think that if he wanted sex, he could demand it. If I am not otherwise busy (like today), theoretically he could and in practice I would respond to it some of the time. BUT I am very particular about my personal space and while I don’t mind having my limits pushed once in a while (by I don’t mind I mean it would turn me on), I wouldn’t be able to handle it as a given. If he were to demand sex from me when I was truly not in the mood, I would rain fire on his head and that’s not good for anyone. This is one reason I can’t be a slave or lifestyler ever. I wouldn’t even demure away, I would flatten with disapproval. Once more, not good, for anyone.
Some of the reluctance and caution around playing with that particular situation comes from another issue though. Namely, Luke is MUCH more tactile than I am. I can do without touch and a lot of times I need people not to touch me, specifically when I am upset. Luke has always needed to be touched to feel connected so when he is upset, he touches. When we are both upset, like when we’ve had an argument, that makes for a bad combination. For a long time, he didn’t quite get that or his need to touch outweighed his knowledge of my need for him not to. That invasion of my space, in a way, made me weary of his touch for a while so I instinctually reacted to his simplest touch with pulling away even if I actually wanted his touch. I had just had to push him away so much that it became an impulse. Over time, he has come to (slowly) understand what I mean or at least he’s been “retrained” to not do it, thank god, so we are past that. Who says tops can’t learn?

It’s an art, how I get side tracked. This part, I swear will relate back to why I started writing.
So here’s the thing. Before dating me Luke had never been in a bdsm relationship. *I* have never been in a relationship that didn’t involve at least some innocent form of kink. When we met, I think by the 2^nd time we had spoken I told him I was into kink. I just never have been able to get involved with someone without putting that on the table from the get go. I try to make it sound not so presumptuous as in, hi we’ve just met but I am going to assume we’ll have sex and I am telling you that I need it kinky. But I just don’t want to waste my time so for as long as I remember, if I found someone attractive, I’ve let it be known that I am into kink. I mentioned I started having sex when I was 19 and I met Luke when I was turning 24. However in the interim 5 years, I did manage to do a lot more sexual exploration that he had managed with the added 6 years he has on me. With that being said, he took to topping like a fish to water. If there was ever a case of raw talent making up for lack of experience, this is it. He is one of the best tops I have ever met and he is my sexual soul mate. He is the yang to my yin.
My kink need has always been so obvious to me that I used to be skeptical of people who “come to kink”. I was a kink snob, I admit it. In short, I was a dork. Knowing Luke and growing up changed that.
BUT, short and long of it is while he could handle a cane and flogger on the first go better than a lot of experienced tops I’ve known, he still hasn’t done a bunch of things that I take for granted. Also, not having been in the kink and queer community (and by nature) he is much more conservative than I am. So it’s always fun to hypothesize on sex acts we haven’t done yet and he hasn’t tried so far.

Which (finally) brings us back to the question of the day.
My answer:
I want a threesome with Luke and another guy. I’ve had a threesome before with a butch and a femme. In that situation I was the visiting dignitary. Now I want to play with two masculine people and bring a boy/boi in. I don’t care if he’ll be a trans man or a butch, just masculine. I want to be double penetrated. I want to be whipped while I am sucking cock and all such fun that comes from threesomes. But I want our third to be submissive to Luke while dominant to me. Also I want to watch Luke fuck him and I want to watch him suck Luke off. I swoon at boy on boy action.
So I want a bisexual switch who is clean and trustworthy to come and play with us.
The problem? Luke does not like sharing his toys, specially his favorite which happens to be your truly. Annnd Luke is decidedly into girls. However, as I pointed out to him, he did ask so I answered.
Oh and he couldn’t picture how a double penetration in ass and pussy would work. He was telling me how the mechanics of it wouldn’t work so I had to search till I found some clips that showed it which did not impress. I won’t pretend that it’s easy or graceful or even attainable for long periods of time… closer observation of various double penetration porn made it clear that it’s rather hard even for professionals. All I am saying is that I like the sensation (from being fucked in my cunt while also having a “full sized” plug in my ass) and I think I’ll enjoy the act. I am not going to pretend that I know it’ll be fun. I’ve had plenty of fantasies that once played out not only did not live up to the mental enticement but were downright icky. But I’ve also had plenty of fantasies that were muuuuch better in practice than even in my head.
As for what I’d like to do to him. I can’t imagine doing anything TO him. With him is one thing. To him, well I can’t wrap my mind around that quite. He is my top and thus the doer of things unto moi.
His answer: (to both with and to)
Public sex as in, in a public place and with a public to watch. He IS more of an exhibitionist than I thought. Luke and I have had sex in public areas like hiking trail or a club or restaurant but not yet with other people watching. I had done that before I met him BUT that’s before all my issues with my health and weight and self image. I am honestly much more shy naked wise than I used to be. BUT, while he much be prudish about my fantasies, I am here to please so public sex is on the schedule. We have to wait until Luke has his top surgery but right after he is healed and feels comfy we’re going to do something public. Before that time which would be about a year away, we’ve been playing around with the idea of making some clips to post online. That would be like having an audience without being able to see them. A much larger audience. And the benefit of editing to have as a mental safeguard against attacks of shy. It’s like training wheels for exhibitionism!

Now on to cleanings and Christmas set ups.

Yay!

Last Saturday night, I was shaking my ass in someone’s living room in Olympia.  The carpet made dancing a little more arduous than a smooth floor would have been, but the vibe was moving, and my hips rolled with it.  Like very few other times in my life, I felt unconstrained about my body.  Usually, when I go out dancing, I feel like I have to tone myself down, because I’ll get unwanted attention if I move myself the way I want to.  I feel like desexualized, minimal movement are expected for masculine-identified and/or -perceived individuals. Conversely, gender interacts with dancing norms to prescribe certain sexualized movement for feminine-identified and/or -perceived individuals, to camp it up perhaps more than they (we) desire.   At that women and trans-only dance party, we were making liberating space. Sometimes I don’t even realize how heavy gender expectations are until I’m in the space where it’s a little bit lighter.  I think, “Oh shit, was I carrying that around this whole time?”  The creation of space absent the patriarchal gaze was something that I hadn’t felt for a long time.

That was the beauty of Gender Jam, a weekend-long convergence with workshops, shows, and dance parties, that was inviting to women and trans folks only for most events.  Even though I had been to some variation of most of the workshops before, it was really important for me to experience the creation of safer space.  Just having my existence expected and honored was so precious to me.  I was not an inconvenient person.  I didn’t have to go through the awkwardness of introducing myself by my pronouns, because most folks were also wearing their names and pronouns on their chests.  Cisgendered people, as a group, recognized that they had genders and preferred pronouns!  How many times does that happen?  It was the best-organized convergence I’d ever been to.  The organizers made sure everyone had safe places to sleep and delicious food and clear schedules.  And the organizers did so much fundraising and donation gathering that none of the participants had to pay for anything.

Of course, safe space is not ever an absolute in a world that socializes folks to be racist, sexist, ableist, queerphobic, and transphobic.  Making mistakes is part of being an ally.  I don’t expect perfection of any person or event, as I hope no one expects perfection of me.  I definitely felt triggered and unsafe at times, but even in those moments, I felt as if the values of the temporary community recognized that trans and survivor issues were worthy of consideration.  For example, when someone called me a lady, I felt empowered and backed up by the gathering that I could correct her.  Twice.  Because at Gender Jam, transphobia was not a marginal special interest, but a legitimate concern for community discussion.  That’s how I understand safe space: the point is not to never fuck up, but to fuck up, listen, and work on it together.

My very first blog posting.

I’m not a fan of the holidays. I never have been. Coming from a small family it’s no different than any other day. Except lots of food.

I’ll start off with the good. Yesterday was interesting. I got up a the crack of the dawn to leave the Boro. I got into Funroe around four. I had a good time. Hung out with friends. I still smile thinking about it.

Now the bad. It’s more of a bad joke. I was in the kitchen with my mom talking about jokes people have made about me. Then I started telling her about the Piccnollo jokes. I said I didn’t want to be made out of wood, just a real boy. My mom dead pan looks at me and says “No you just want wood”. I laughed hysterically for five minutes. It was a good one that I had to share on here.

Different bad… My brother is a big dick (couldn’t come up with anything better or worse). I asked him in October when I was home for fall break to call me Seth. He looked at me and just said no. And to this day refuses to talk about it or even acknowledge it.

Now for the ugly. Two things here. First FML. I hate being female and nothing makes me more aware of this mother nature showing up a week early. So I have to make an appointment Monday to see the GYN to start the ball on having surgery. And of course the one that I have talked to about all this is here in Monroe.

Second, harsh truths are hard to swallow no matter how prepared. My dad is 76 and has dementia. I know that his days are numbered. I was home in October. This time when I walked inside he didn’t recognize me. At all. I cried. There is no way to prepare yourself for that. I had to leave home and go stay with a friend. Now I’m lost and very afraid.

I hate the holidays.

In my last post, I talked about some issues that stopped me from investigating trans identity in the past. Now I’m going to talk about why I come back to this same idea again and again, still looking for some way to fit it to myself.

Feeling fundamentally uncomfortable with female identity

I have never understood women.  One of the things I loved about feminism was that it laid out, in print, basic concepts of feminine socialization I had never picked up on.

Reading the Feminine Mystique when I was 18 gave me a window into the world of my sisters. For the first time I began to understand all the behaviour that was always so maddening to me. I finally got why girls and women around me consistently undervalued themselves, sold themselves short, didn’t try something that might be hard and pretended they were stupid when I could tell they were not.

Not to say that I picked up none of this socialization, the more I learn about the world and myself, the more I can see it in me too. But I think that I picked it up to a lesser extent than most other females, and to a certain extent much later.

But a lot of this stuff, I learned intentionally from a book. I didn’t pick it up from school and the media and the culture.  Rejecting the tethers of femininity, but also not affiliating myself too strongly to men has done well for me, I have often felt as I am existing between genders, picking from the best of both worlds.

Always feeling like a gay man

I don’t know much what to say about this, but it’s true. For about a decade now I have felt like a gay man in a woman’s body. Not trapped, but existing. I always feel much closer affinity to gay men than to straight women or lesbians. I certainly have never felt straight.  I wonder if it’s cause some part of me thinks that it’s way cooler to be queer, and it’s a kind of cool I strongly desire.

This feeling of affinity is something I’m not quite able to explain very well.  Like when I meet a gay man I feel like I share something with him, more than a basic cock love. I feel like, we are the same. I wonder if this comes off to gays as a misguided sexual interest.

I came across a word recently that I think I will use to define myself from now on: androphile. Love of men. Or maybe even, Love of manliness?  It’s true, while I respect women and like them, I do love men. I like this word because it is not relative to one’s own gender. To be a homosexual or a straight, you have to have two pieces of information: your gender and the gender of your partners. How complicated for me.

Being surprised that straight boys want to date me

For a long time I thought of myself as someone who mainly dated bi boys. That made more sense to me. The kind of men who are attracted to me are the kind of men who are attracted to others of their gender. But then after I had enough lovers to make up a reasonable sample size (I’m a big slut if you didn’t guess) I looked at it and found that many of them had been hetro-identified. This was definitely a shocking thought, and tends to leave me with the feeling that I am somehow tricking my boyfriends and lovers.

“I’m not a man in a woman’s body: I’m a feminist.”

That was my resolution to this whole problem in the past. I want to be treated equally to a man, not as a man.  I read and read enough to convince me that my gender issues in the past were based more around gender roles than gender presentation.

While I have certainly encountered external resistance in my quest to be the person I am, regardless of gender, and while that resistance has often had a patriarchal flavour to it, the things I am imagining when I imagine being a man are not the trappings of power I have missed.  The one thing I would really, really love, is to be among men and for them to understand me as a brother, as an insider.  I’m sure that’s a silly idea, perhaps something not experienced by all (most?) men, and probably not as fun in real life as it is in my head.

I hope it’s not a similar experience to being an insider with regards to whiteness (or more occasionally passing as middle class) which can be entirely unpleasant situations where others feel safe to expose the bigotries they are too polite to show in “mixed company”. But it probably is.

My body changing recently

I have heard and read transmen talk about their discomfort with female puberty. Breasts, hips, menses… And no penis.  I do not have any recollection of experiencing these feelings, even to the extent that I was told again and again, that every teenager does. I really do not recall any sense of alienation from my body in any way.

I think a lot of this is due to the fact that my body didn’t really change that much during puberty and adolescence.  I got AA breasts that didn’t need a bra and a bit of body hair that I eventually liked because it make me look more mature. I had always had big thighs so while in retrospect they probably did grow, I didn’t really notice at the time.

But now as I come into my mid-20s I have started to round off a little more: I can fit a B cup bra, my thighs and ass have been getting even bigger, I got a little bit of belly fat.  The overall effect is that I am less boyish and more womanly.

At first I felt strong that I ought to be happy about this becoming more pear-shaped and womanly and beautiful. But I couldn’t shake a creeping sense of unease.  I thought maybe I was worried about getting fat, and ugly, and old, and unattractive, and all those kinds of fears that are drilled into women.  I thought of the social power I gain through being hot (I told you I’m confident about my body, didn’t I?), and I thought of that slipping away and tried to process these feelings.

But eventually I realized there was something more at play here: not that I was getting fatter and softer, but that the fat was collecting in places which emphasized my sex, which marked me much more as female that I had felt before, and that this was deeply troubling to me.

Silly as it sounds, I think this point is the one which got me back on the gender-questioning train.  This was the (small) thing that changed in my life that made me re-look at myself and want to make decisions about myself and my presentation.

I’m actually excited about where my transition is going. I went to the therapist on Monday to get the results of my MMPI. I’m not a borderline. But had some interesting points show up. My gender was shown to be male (who would have guessed) and my psychotic scale was a little high. Apparently that happens when you don’t feel like you’re in the right body. On the whole, I was not surprised by the results. Now I have one more appointment and I get my letter! I’m getting really excited about that.

I am surprised about what I’m scared of losing with my transition. I have only looked at the positives of T. It’s silly but I keep having dreams about not being able to sing anymore. I have always loved to sing. I know I’m not losing my voice, but it will change. It will take time to let it stablize. I know it’s not what most people worry about. You know permanent physical changes. But I worry about my instruments and gifts!

Another thing brought to my attention is the aggression factor. I don’t really know how to prepare for this. I’ve watched other people talk about it. I just don’t know what it will do. I’m trying not to worry about it. But it’s in the back of my mind.

TMI UPDATE: So I got a packer about a month ago. I then realized I needed something to hold it in place. So I went on youtube (greatest source ever at least for ftm stuff) and found how to make an elastic band to hold it in place. Two dollars and a trip to Walmart later I sewed one together. I only stabbed myself about five times.

One last thing. STP is an amazing thing. I was having issues with using just a medicine spoon. See I’m larger and need a little more length than the 2 cm a medicine spoon could offer. Plastic tubing (3/4″) fits perfectly over the end to extend it. Now for me, the woman’s bathroom is history. I’m taking a stand. (or a urinal however you want to look at it)

At least twice in the last month i’ve read comments suggesting that there is something deeply insulting about anybody describing themself as attracted to trans men. The implication, i suppose, is that the person is suggesting that trans men are different from men in general – and so aren’t ‘real’ men.

Some trans men get particularly exercised when a woman insists that she is a ‘lesbian’, yet describes herself as attracted to “women and trans men”. I agree this is problematic but the problem belongs to the lesbian in question: how does she reconcile an identity suggesting an attraction exclusively to females with a stated attraction to males? It shouldn’t become ours. In most such cases the woman is bisexual but simply doesn’t want to acknowledge the fact; she’s got a lot invested in her identity as gay, queer, whatever and can’t afford to see it compromised by any suggestion of heterosexuality.

That’s my analysis anyway. I would be very reluctant to enter into a relationship with anyone who ID’d this way, but having issues around your sexuality is hardly a hanging offence.

If anything, we might have a bit of empathy: even in the first decade of the 21^st Century it’s still no picnic to identify as gay. People struggle to feel fully accepted. Can you really blame them then for not wanting to jeopardise their membership of a community where they do feel they belong?

This brings me on to another group of people who may also come to identify as ‘attracted to trans men’. Consider the case of a person – for simplicity’s sake we’ll say a woman* – who has been in a long term relationship with a trans man. During that time she has taken an active role in the community. Her community – because, make no mistake, the FTM community does not consist of trans men alone but also their SOFFAS (horrible acronym!): friends, family and especially… partners. She understands the humour, she speaks the language.

Should that relationship break up is it really so surprising that this woman might seek another relationship with a trans man or even come to think of trans men as the people she’s attracted to? Can she be blamed for wanting to ‘marry within her community**’? Note that, just as the lesbian in the first example risks jeopardising her membership of the lesbian community if she admits an attraction to a trans man, so this lady stands to lose her place in the FTM community once she is no longer in a relationship with an FTM guy. No matter how long she’s been involved with it, no matter how much she’s done for it. Sad but inevitable. Again, how about a little bit of empathy?

And, at the end of the day, if someone does perceive trans men as different from other men, what of it? As long as the difference is a within-group one (trans men are perceived as a subgroup of men with particular qualities), rather than a between-groups distinction (trans men are perceived to be a group in addition to men), then what is the big deal?

* Bio or trans, it makes no difference; because the male and female transsexual communities are different entities in my experience.
** Of course, this does assume her experience of FTM culture was a positive one, which is not something that can be taken for granted in this current climate of buddy-bashing.

Ja, jag var på mitt sista läkarbesök idag. Nu har jag fått transsexuell stämplat i pannan på mig! Läkaren sa att det inte rådde nån tvekan alls, diagnosen sattes och hon skulle skriva remiss till endokrinolog, plastikkirurg och logoped redan idag!

Självklart känns det grymt, men samtidigt kan jag inte riktigt glädja mig. Jag vet ju att det ändå kommer dröja låååång tid innan jag får börja med testo. Men visst, det är ju en milstolpe, no doubt.

Inte helt oväntat pratade vi lite om vad som nu händer i framtiden. Kändes häftigt att höra henne prata om att jag ska träffa plastikkirurg och endokrinolog. Men självklart kom även frågan om kastrering upp. Enligt lagen som den är idag måste man, för att kunna byta kön juridiskt, sterilisera sig. Jag har tänkt mycket på det innan och är ganska säker på att jag ska göra det – gravid vill definitivt inte bli och jag vill att man kropp ska vara så mycket som möjligt som jag känner mig, även fysiskt. Men det är klart, det kändes att prata om det. Det är ju trots allt ett enormt beslut.

Är också lite kluven inombords då läkaren berättade att hon misstänkte en annan sak. Inget som har med ts-utredningen att göra, men som har med mitt allmänna mående att göra. Väljer att än så länge hålla det för mig själv, men ska absolut kolla upp och tänka över det hon sa.

Så, med blandade känslor, men mest glädje och längtan, säger bye bye så länge!

Adam Lambert’s performance on last night’s American Music Awards may have been a lot of things, but inappropriate isn’t one of them.

The performance of Lambert’s latest single featured about three seconds of Lambert shoving someone’s face into his crotch, as well as a passionate kiss with a band member. And this was the closing number of the night – viewers could see worse on other shows that typically take that time slot. Much ado about nothing.

No one cared when Lady GaGa wore a flesh-toned body suit – one that made it look like she was wearing a strap-on at that – and broke liquor bottles on stage when she performed. No one said a word about Rihanna’s rings of clothing that left little to the imagination or when she entered the stage bound up BDSM-style. But when a fully clothed gay man mimics a few seconds of fellatio all hell breaks loose. Lambert’s number wasn’t inappropriate, it was right in line with the other outrageous performances of the night.

Lady GaGa at the AMAs. Photo from Google Images (TheSuperficial.com).

Rhianna at the AMAs. Photo from Google Images (TheSuperficial.com).

After all the press about it, I expected to see Lambert on stage with his pants open and a partner gleefully pleasing the pop star for a vast majority of the song, so when I watched the clip for the first time, I completely missed the controversial act entirely.

And trust me if GaGa – or even Britney – had done it, no one would even bat a false eyelash.

But Lambert’s new album drops tomorrow. I’m sure his camp isn’t all that upset about the hype.

Adam Lambert performs “For Your Entertainment at the AMAs

Lady GaGa performs “Bad Romance” and “Speechless” at the AMAs

Rihanna performs at the AMAs

So I’m a little late on the uptake for this one.  I tried my damnedest to find some way to watch it on the TGDoR, but nothing really wanted to work out for me on that day, period, and I wound up stranded at my trans-non-sympathetic friend’s house.  He accepts me well enough, but he doesn’t really see that there’s a tragedy going on with these people, thinks the surgery is “cosmetic” and didn’t do more than shrug when I told him what day it was, or the Statistics.  I started thinking, sometimes the ones that don’t care are worse than the ones who damn us.

But then I watched Boys Don’t Cry.

Don’t get me wrong, I know the story front to back, watched the documentary on Youtube, read the blogs and news journals, but they don’t take you into the experience of the story like the movie does.  And I tend to relate very heavily to a given character when I watch a movie, whether I’ve got much in common with him or not.  Brandon was Me in too many ways for me to even feel comfortable with, before we even got to the bad part of the movie.  (Well, except in the juvenile delinquent sort of way.)

Anyway, I got to sit down properly with my boyfriend last night and watch it (until his mom got home, at which point I got to sit down awkwardly and stiffly and watch it.  I don’t think she likes me and she’d like me even less if she knew I was a guy.)  But as awful as it was, it was worth watching.  He gripped my hand tight through the worst of it.  The rape scene WAS the hardest part to watch, but I think most of the horror of it all washed over my head until the end of the movie.  I think I sat there staring blankly at the screen for about five minutes.  And then his mom told us dinner was on the stove and she left the room, and then I got my plate and sat with it and I couldn’t eat, and then I noticed there were tears dripping onto my plate, and I just sat there like a statue until reality snapped back and I had to go to the bathroom to blow my nose.

I’m trying to think of the only other movie that made me cry.  I can’t remember.

(Might have been Wrath of Khan.)

So on one hand it kinda left me feeling scarred for life, and on the other hand it brought home how dangerous it is out there, really sort of made the danger and hurt mine to own and internalize, really sparked a spirit to do something about this in me.  I’m not sure what yet, but it’s brewing.  After all, I’m only 20.

…

And that brings home another point.  Last night I stared at my boyfriend’s calendar and started shaking when I realized I have no more than three weeks to come out to my dad if I want him to know about this before my 21st birthday.

I don’t know how to cope.

I’m just scared of how things are going to change around here when he knows.  We’re really tight these days; he’s slowly been turning me into a Trekkie by ordering the first season of Star Trek through Netflix.  Whenever we go out to do yardwork or something together, I call him Captain and he calls me Mr. Spock.  It’s really dorky but it’s something we share, and I think he’s somehow slowly coming to understand me by it.  I don’t want it to end, but in that same way, I don’t want our relationship, as good as it is, to be fake in any way.  I don’t want to be whatever he wants me to be just to preserve our friendship.  I have more respect for him than that.

…

On a happier note, I came up with a name for my… upper region that’s better than “tumors” or even “moobs”.  They are my chestnuts.

wOOt

I’m in my second year of a PhD program in mathematics.  This year, I start the process of finding a thesis adviser.  The search for an adviser in grad school is often likened to dating: the student first meets the professor by taking his class, thus having the opportunity to talk with him/her in a low-pressure situation.  The student then nervously asks the prof if he/she would like to do a private reading course the next term.  If the reading course goes well and student and prof hit it off, reading slowly morphs into research, and after several terms, the student musters the courage to pop  the question: will you be my adviser?  It’s a delicate dance.  When a prof and student don’t work out it can be for any number of reasons: the prof’s math doesn’t interest the student, the prof manages the student’s work too little or too much, or perhaps there’s just a clash of personalities.  If a student wants to work with a particular prof, it’s important to foster a good working relationship from the very beginning.

So here’s where I’m at: I’ve found a professor who I can see myself working with in the long term.  He does interesting math and we get along.  He’s very old, maybe 80 or 82, and he’s eccentric to say the least.  He’s a genius who can’t attach things to emails.  He drinks nothing but grape Crush.  And he happens to have read me as male upon first meeting me.  In fact, I recognized right off the bat that he was chummier with me than his female student, who was a friend of mine.  He felt free to tell certain stories to me that he wouldn’t disclose to her, for instance.  And he made an assumption, however subconscious, that I was a good mathematician.  I didn’t have to prove a damn thing for him to think that; he just assumed it was so.  Being a woman in math is different: once you show that you are indeed as good as your male counterparts, you are generally accepted as an equal.  But as a default, many profs are skeptical of women at first.  It’s an incredibly subtle trend in math, and unless you’d experienced it you’d probably think it was imagined or exaggerated.  But this professor treated me differently than he would have if he’d thought I was female, I am sure of it.  It felt a little slimy, but I must admit it was nice to feel that privilege.

I’ve been working with this professor now for only a couple weeks.  Last night, one of his other students told me that he had heard that my “real” name was Anna.  He was confused and asked her if it was true. Bless her, she said, “No, his name’s Adrian.  And why are you asking me instead of him?”  Oh fuck.  My secret is threatening to burst out of the closet!  I have never been stealth to anyone before, and it’s never seemed to matter.  But now, I want him to continue to think I’m a boy, because that gets my foot in the door.  If I worked with him for six months and gave him evidence that I really am good at math, then my trans status would probably be a non-issue.  I don’t know if it will be an issue as it stands, but I am so scared that it will deter him from working with me further.  This is the first time that being trans has threatened to negatively impact my career.  It’s easy to be out and proud and appear brave and confident when you’re not the one targeted for discrimination.  Now that I might be (and I don’t even know if I will be) that target, I am desperately pulling the closet doors shut!

I’m hoping for the best but damn, am I scared shitless.

Hi all – I’ve been totally slacking on updating this site.  Sorry!  I’m now in the middle of my sixth month on T.  Gosh, that is hard to believe!  About a month ago I went back to my endo to talk about the benefits of injections over creams.  He previously had me on 1/4 teaspoon of the 5% testosterone cream daily.  I’d heard from a few friends that the creams work slower than the injections, and I’d noticed that my results were occurring at a somewhat slower rate than the transguys I knew on injections.  My endo confirmed the rumor that the cream works slower, and started me that day on injections, 100mL once a week.  The nurse taught me how to do it at that visit, and I’ve been injecting myself every Tuesday morning since.

Results: zits!  I have some acne on my face now   But, my voice has dropped to a recognizably male range, albeit somewhat androgynous still.  Also, I’m growing hair!  Lots of hair.  My legs are turning into hairy masses.  The hair on my arms is definitely thicker but it’s also constantly getting bleached by sun, so it’s not noticeably darker.  The hair on my face is growing in consistently but is still thin and light in color.  It definitely won’t look like “good” facial hair for some time.  Besides the hair and voice and zits, I have an insane libido.  And strangely, porn is more appealing now than it has ever been.  Pre-T I never watched porn, but now it’s a semi-regular event.  Along with libido I still have noticed an increase in my physical energy.  Sadly, I haven’t had time in my schedule to be a regular at the weight room, but my running has really improved over the last few months.  I ran AIDS Run, a 10K, in October, and came in 14th out of 120 among the 20-29 year old females (I was registered as female because my license still had female on it).  It was my first 10K, and I know I would have done much worse if it weren’t for the T.

Thanks to being on hormones, I was also able to change the gender marker on my California license to male!  I made a stop at the DMV after legally changing my name two weeks ago.  It’s a huge relief to finally have an ID that looks like me and has my chosen name on it!  Hooray!

… also known as Chloe’s upper respiratory tract.
I am with flu.
No it’s not H1N1. God, enough of this pharmaceutical panic propaganda.
My upper respiratory tract feels both raw and dry which means it tickles which in turn causes cough that makes me think it’s moving mucus but it’s really not, it’s only inching it up so now I have to cough some more because I can’t tolerate that feeling and then my chest feels more raw. I am also oozing both thick sticky mucus and runny watery kind (sexy). My head hurts so bad that at it’s worst I can’t move my head or even my eyeballs, also my intestines hurt because as luck would have it I got my period which means my endio is bleeding inside somewhere AND both hurt worse when I cough of course. My joints hurt but better than that my very skin hurts. Typing hurts for god’s sake. I do have a fever but since varioation is the spice of life, I also have chills and weird outbreaks of sweat.
Pleasant.
Why am I sick you may ask?
Because of sex of course. It was a bit stupid of me (or a lot) I’ll admit because I’ve been feeling this flu develop slowly over the week so I should have known to take it easy… but (yes another but) I was horny all day Friday (while I was at a lecture) and so was he so we’d been messaging back and forth (instead of me paying attention to the lecture) about how badly I wanted to suck him off and him telling me all the things he wanted to do to me. 
Sooooo, he picked me up at the end of lecture and on our way home pulled into a park, parked the car, told me to lay my seat down, pulled down my pants and underwear, fingered me and then produced a plug and some lube. In a second, I was flipped about and after a couple of solid smacks to my ass a plug was firmly inserted making me unbelievably horny. Then up went the pants and the seat and we were on our way to run a couple of errands before going home. Every time he breaked or accelerated, I could feel the plug rock in my ass. You can imagine how I enjoyed getting in and out of car and walking around. When we finally got to the house and pulled into the garage I striped off my clothes while still in the garage (as per his instruction but still in 48 F or 9 C weather), he opened the back of the SUV, layed me down there and finger fucked me to an amazing orgasm. Nothing better than being filled in my cunt and my ass. Then he leaned against the back of the car, I went down on my knees (he had thought of putting aside a nice cushion for my knees cause last time we did this, my legs felt like they were locked in place) and sucked him off. I just hope no one was walking their dog because the way I was moaning… well I sounded like a bitch in heat. And then he told me to hold still as he pissed in my mouth, had me clean him off, then pissed on my breasts, back I went to sucking his dick and he told me to hold my legs together so he could create a pool of piss between them. I am not sure how long we were out there but I was very cold from cooling piss and dropping temperatures when we were finally done and came in for a shower. Of course, I wasn’t about to put my nice clothes back on so I just put on the piss soaked car blanked around me and ran in. Also hope no one caught that.
So flu? Not so much of a surprise.
Of course, a little sickness (ha ha, little… yea) wouldn’t get me down but then we had a fight on Saturday because Saturdays are the end of his hormone cycle which on some weeks means he has the male version of PMS. We are on a weekly testosterone schedule now which means I give him his injections every Saturday and so on that day he has the lowest levels of testosterone before the injection. We picked the weekly schedule to avoid the larger hormone fluxes and mood swings but apparently they can still happen and did. Of course, I could have even tolerated that but I was sick and I would have liked a little consideration (forget pampering) instead of having to deal with mood swings. So meh. Now sick and grumpy.

I’m currently reading Camera Lucida*,  a kind of meditation on the meaning of photography by the French philosopher Roland Barthes. It’s rather a mixed experience: one minute i’m thrilled, the next exasperated. Let’s leave that aside however; what i’d really like to talk about is a passage on page 10 where he writes:

… once i feel myself to be observed by the lens, everything changes: i constitute myself in the act of “posing”, i instantaneously make another body for myself, i transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: i feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice…

Do you recognise what he’s talking about? Maybe it made you smile? Well, for me, reading those lines was like being struck by lightning.

Instantly, i remembered how in the years before i transitioned, i would smile as brightly and as widely as possible whenever i was photographed. This was truer than ever during the years of my marriage. I beam like a sun in practically every picture taken of me in that period; i gleam ecstatically. Yet that was the beginning of the long, slow unravelling that brought me to the point where i finally understood that i had to transition. It was a time when turmoil, pain and confusion reigned inside my mind.

So why the smile? The reason is simple: i believed that if all the pictures of my life showed me to be happy, then i would have been happy – not simply seemed to have been happy, but actually been happy. It was one of those beliefs that possessed me so deeply that i wasn’t aware of its existence.

Now it shocks me: not just the power i ascribed to photography, but the thrall that i was in to images in general. It’s as though i thought that they were realer than reality itself. My life at that time was a constant parade of impersonations of the female sex: i was ‘earth mother’, ‘sophisticated lady’, ‘out and out tart’ – sometimes all in the space of an afternoon! Even after my marriage broke down i didn’t abandon the attempt. It was only after i’d exhausted every version of ‘female’ i could think of that i gave in and bowed to the inevitable.

My naive belief in appearances reflected my own inability to understand why i couldn’t be a woman. I didn’t – couldn’t – recognise that gender identity has to have its roots inside a person. I thought it could be planted on the outside and cultivated till it flowered within. It also showed how deeply ashamed i was of my own unhappiness, the misery i didn’t understand and couldn’t name. What better way to hide a big, big sorrow than with a big, big smile?

Now i smile when i’m happy – although not always and never like i did back then. I don’t do impersonations anymore.

* Camera Lucida (ISBN 978-0-099-22541-6; publisher: Vintage Classics)