Science Fiction

I was thinking tonight about the me that used to be. The man I used to be. Three science fictions movies came to mind: The Invisible Man, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and The Incredible Melting Man.

The Invisible Man
I have noticed as I start to explore this world as a woman that I feel more ‘real’. Part of this has to do with letting go of the role I was playing as a man. I would like to point out that I never thought of my male self as a role. To me, my male self was real. Most of my friends will tell you he was real person. They will usually tell you that they also miss him. However, when I look in the mirror, he’s not the one looking back. When I go out presenting as male nowadays I tend to feel invisible. I’m either ignored or greeted with some confusion. My friend Becky told me I look more like an FTM transexual than a cisgender man. Guys don’t tend to treat me like another guy. They seem to express some ambivalence towards me. I feel like they just want me to go away. My sense of male privilege is fading away too.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

I was always considered short. For a long time I was also thin and slightly effeminate. As such I wasn’t really very “manly”. Now, with the effects of testosterone blockers on my body I am shrinking away. Fat is moving around and I look slimmer. My upper body is starting to feminize. When I started to crossdress more often, my wife gave me a pair of her old satin pajamas. They fit fairly well except around the shoulders. I was feeling particularly feminine tonight and got those pajamas out of the drawer. After changing for bed I went into the kitchen to get a drink of water. I reached up to grab a glass out of the cabinet and noticed how much more roomy the pajama top is now. My neck is not as thick as it used to be either. The only good part about shrinking as a man is that I’m becoming a thin and graceful woman. I am also pleased to find out I’m not short anymore. I’m average height now!

The Incredible Melting Man

In this movie the protagonist began to melt like an ice cream cone on a hot day. He was exposed to cosmic rays during a space flight. Well I have not had the opportunity to fly in space but I have been exposed to hormones. By suppressing my testosterone I am limiting the effects that that hormone has on my body. The naturally estrogen is also having a slight effect as well. This combination is effecting my features. My wife was looking at me a few weeks ago. She said my face looked like it was melting away. It used to be a little rounded and puffy. I also was starting to develop double chins (yuck). Today my face is thinner in places. My cheeks have more definition and my skin is smoother and softer. It makes me think that my face is like melted wax that is being reformed by the hormones. My body is being slowly being reformed as well.

The whole experience of transition can be like living in a science fiction film. Your body is changing and reforming. Personality and mental processes get remapped to a more feminine model. Going out in public as your target gender can be almost as strange as visiting another planet. Now all that’s left is to get a light saber. Actually you could say I’m still carrying my ‘light saber”. Someday in the future a kind surgeon might press the button and retract the blade once and for all. Then I can start living a genuine life instead of a sci-fi one.

Routine

For the past few days I’ve been feeling a little empty. Life continues and it just seems….ordinary. Plain vanilla ordinary. I get up, do yoga, shower, do my hair, get dressed, go to work, come home, change into dad, help with homework, eat and go to bed.

I used to take great joy in getting ready for work. Makeup was fun. Heels and skirts made me smile. Now, not so much. I have reached a state where I’m finally so comfortable expressing my womanhood that it’s routine.

Don’t get me wrong. Finally being able to live nearly full time is something I wouldn’t trade for anything. I have reached a point in my transition where I am ‘just another woman’. The newness has worn off.

At work I noticed I’m referred to as ‘her’ and ‘she’. I almost miss catching someone using the wrong pronouns. I am getting tired of guys opening the door for me. I may be a woman but I didn’t lose the ability to open a door for myself. I brought our old microwave to work to replace a broken one in the breakroom. Not ten steps away from my car a guy I work with grabbed it out of my hands. “Let me get that for you!” he said. Two months ago the guys would have had fun watching me carrying it in heels. I’m starting to feel frail. It’s as if my femininity alone is making me weaker and more dependent. Some women seemed to just accept it. My wife doesn’t. My daughter doesn’t. Then why do I feel that way?

Tomorrow is another day. I am going to try my damnedest to make it a good day. I’ll find something, no matter how small, that will make life a bit more special again. Even if I’m just another woman.

A few little things

I had a few things rattling around in my head so I thought I would put them down. Two are responses to questions and the rest came up while I was pondering the past.

A friend and I were talking over lunch when he asked how I knew l was a transexual. I said “someone told me I was”. Well someone did tell me but that wasn’t how I knew. The first time I dressed completely as a woman was when I figured it out. I was awkward and nervous. Frankly I looked awful. But I noticed something. The only way I can describe it was that the noise in my head had stopped. It wasn’t noise like a sound but something like static that ran through my thoughts and never went away. Sitting there allowing myself to absorb the feelings and emotions, my head was clear. The noise went away. I spend a lot of time as a woman nowadays. Nearly full time. Even at home being Dad I’m just me, not masculine or truly feminine, and the noise is not there. However when I try to be a man, really try to be who I once was, the noise comes back. I hate it. It’s louder and more disruptive than ever before. I can’t wait to shed that persona and get back to just being me.

Recently I was having a discussion with another trans person. The subject of my refusing HRT after my doctor approved it came up. This person (I refuse to say who) told me I was scared to take the next step because I still was uncomfortable with who I was. This person also said that once I was able to accept myself then the decision to start HRT would be clear. Hmm accept myself….. Well anyone that knows me now, knows that I accept myself. I accept being trans and all it entails. I am as comfortable being a woman in a bar full of bikers as I am trying on clothes in a woman’s changing room. Hell I spend 9 to 10 hours nearly every day in public expressing my self as a woman. This makes me happier about who and what I am than I was the previous 47 years of my life. I think that qualifies as acceptance. What this person did not understand is that it’s not love of myself that stays my hand but love of others. I refused to start estrogen because of my wife and family. It’s not me that is not ready. It’s them. They are still learning to accept the changes I am going through. It’s harder for my kids because they really don’t know why I’m going through this. I have jumped ahead sometimes recklessly starting my transition. Now I have reached an equilibrium point. Things are balanced enough so that we are all still happy. Estrogen right now would throw off that balance and our love for each other might be jeopardized. That is not a risk I am willing to take. I am not sure that she could fully understand my choice. Her family has rejected her. She has never been married, let alone been in a long term relationship. Her choices carry different consequences than mine do.

A few days ago I was in Arizona helping sort out things in my dad’s house before we sell it. The house has been empty for a couple of months and that gave me tons of time to be alone with my thoughts. I was thinking about my childhood. I found some things from my mom that my dad hadn’t thrown away after her death. I was going through her old dresser and found some perfume and a really old lipstick. The perfume was a newer variety not the kind she wore when I was little. However it sparked a strong memory of me playing with the perfume she used to wear. Standing in front of the dresser I could smell that distinctive scent from long ago. How it smelled on my wrist. I opened the lipstick which was hard and sticky. The first time I put on lipstick last year I wondered why the smell and taste was so familiar. That old tube of lipstick smelled similar and I had a vision of my younger self trying it on.

My rememinicing led me to think about other scenes from my youth and how they foreshadowed the events leading up to the present. I was never very athletic and I remembered being told I threw like a girl. We had a very macho neighbor who was a former marine. He used to call me by a feminine form of my birth name. The first time I heard the word sissy he was talking to my parents and pointing at me. It was the first but not the last time I heard that word applied to me.

Another neighbor had a daughter who was almost my age. She used to ask me to come over and play dolls. There were few boys my age so I agreed. I would bring my GI Joes over to her house but was forbidden to use them. She used to hand me her Ken doll because he was Barbie’s boyfriend. GI Joe was icky according to her. If I could not use my Joe doll (yes doll, they were not called action figures in the early seventies) I would drop Ken and grab her other Barbie. Barbie had a better wardrobe than Ken and was a lot more fun to dress. Besides it always seemed like something was wrong with Ken. In fact GI Joe would sometimes sneak out and shoot him.

A neighbor a few houses up had a pool and every summer the whole neighborhood would meet there. I used to wear a speedo like swimsuit that was popular at the time. They were kind of like the boy short panties I wear under my tighter skirts. However, I used to watch the girls in their one piece suits and wonder what it felt like to swim in one.

My childhood wasn’t all spent thinking about girlie things. I spent most of it like many other normal boys. In fact I was pretty sure that I was a ‘normal’ boy. I used to hike through the woods alone and with my brother. We caught frogs and crayfish in the ponds and streams near my house. I climbed trees to heights that would scare me to death today. We played cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, astronauts and alien monsters. My dad taught me how to shoot a bow and how to fish. I did all these things knowing with the certainty of youth that I WAS a boy. A boy that would grow up to be a man. A man who would get a good job and find a terrific woman he would marry. Then we would buy a house and have children then live happily ever after.

I did grow up and all that happened. Maybe not the happily ever after part. The simple fact that I am trans threw a wrench in those plans. If we can find a way to scrape through each day it’s a triumph. Who could have predicted that the smiling happy boy climbing trees in the summer sun so long ago would grow up to be a woman.

We are all experts. Right?

I think it’s human nature that when we are faced with something that profoundly effects us we try to find out all about it. Cancer,heartdisease, diabetes, erectile dysfunction, we run to the net to learn every piece of information available. However, being trans seems to raise the bar.

I have met transgender folk that are walking Wikipedias of trans facts and figures. I actually had someone tell me the exact dosages of estrogen and progesterone I should be taking. Not to mention how I should be cycling the progesterone to simulate menstruation. I guess it doesn’t matter that I have high blood pressure or that my hormones are definitely out of balance. The same person also gave me a definitive timetable for my feminization. By the time our conversation was over I knew my exact bust size after 6 months of HRT. Hmm 32B sounds good to me but I’m not so sure.

Also, my iPhone calendar has been filled up with dates for all kinds of things trans. Let’s take a look. I know when I have to file to have my name changed. How many electrolysis appointments I need to clear my face. I already know the names of all my surgeons for SRS, facial surgery, tracheal shave, and boob job. Wow, I never knew there was a transition spreadsheet available online.

Now I don’t want to seem like I am bagging on every trans resource out there. I’m not. Personally I have found a lot of useful information about transition. I’ve just learned to take the flood of information I get with a grain of salt.

The other drawback to this deluge of info is that the emotional aspects of transition are stripped away. Except I think, the descriptions of how hormones are going to turn me into a weepy teen girl. The first support group meeting I went to en femme ended up being broken down into transition checklists and endless discussions of the similarities between MTF brains and cisgender female brains. All this punctuated with streams of information pouring out of the attendees’ smartphones. I got stuck listening to an argument about which surgeons have the greatest success in creating sensate vaginas. All I wanted to do was talk about the feeling of my skirt brushing against my legs for the first time.

Transition to me is an experience unlike any other. It’s a chance to discover the woman that was hidden inside me. I want to remember what it feels like to walk along the beach in a maxi dress on a spring morning. I want to savor every minute shopping for purses with my daughter. I want to know the satisfaction of picking out the right outfit for a special night out with my girlfriends. And I want to hug my wife and feel her breasts press against mine. Becoming the woman you’ve yearned to be is more than facts and figures. It’s regret, fear, pain and heartache mixed with emotion, sensation, and wonder. Please don’t focus all your energy on the how. Focus on the journey. This is your second chance at life, enjoy the ride.

The keys to the kingdom

We are finally moved into our new home. Plus I have a bit of free time to finally put something down. There are actually two meanings to the title of this post. Here is the first.

About two weeks ago we received the keys to our new home. We started moving our things in immediately so we could start cleaning the home we were renting. Well, I have spent more time in our old place getting it ready leave than I have spent settling in our new place. Plus our land lord is being a total maniac about the old house. California has allowances for normal wear and tear on rentals over two years. She ignores that and wants us to replace the entire carpet over a few stains that are no larger than a quarter. That’s only the beginning. She says we “tortured” her beautiful home. Yes, she said tortured. The fact is we left the place in better shape than when we moved in. Needless to say my wife and I have been really stressed out and angry. Now it looks like we will have to sue to get any of our deposit back.

I can tell you one thing, I have done more cleaning, painting and small repairs in a week than I have done over my entire life. The repairs were done out of courtesy because we knew we would be blamed for it. On the plus side, most of them were done in girl mode.

Unfortunately most of my transition was put on hold for most of this. I forgot to take my spiro and my little breasts actually shrunk. Emotionally I was a wreck. Things are slowly getting back to normal.

The second meaning of the title came a few days ago. I finally had my second appointment with my endocrinologist. On my first visit I had shown him a picture of my first outing as a woman. Needless to say I have changed a lot since then. When he walked into the exam room this time he didn’t recognize me. Even he was shocked at how sensitive I am to just taking t-blockers. We talked for a while and he asked about my visits with my new therapist. During this chat he did my physical exam and declared I was doing fine. He ordered a couple of tests to make sure my potassium levels were ok and that a few other things were still within normal limits. When we were done he turned and asked the one question I had been waiting months for. He said “so, do you want me to start your prescription for estrogen today?” I froze. Then in a voice so devoid of emotion it scared me, I said “no”. No. I just turned down the keys to the kingdom of womanhood. I refused the holy grail of full HRT. All I could think of was my wife and kids. I said no because of them. I said no because I know I am reacting so strongly to the absence of testosterone that my reaction to estrogen might be just as strong. I am not ready. No matter how much I desire to start HRT, I can’t. My wife already thinks I’m lying about not taking hormones. She sees the effects everyday and she is still trying to absorb all the changes. My wife still has some trouble dealing with the fact that I have been going to work as a woman for the past 7 months. Estrogen at this point would be the deal breaker for us. We’ve been through so much this last year and now we are trying to make a new start in a new home. I don’t want to ruin the progress we are making for something that feels so selfish to me.

That said I still want estrogen. I’ve cried thinking about what I passed up. But, the door has been unlocked for me; and whenever I feel the time is right I will talk to my wife. I will let her know my decision, which will be mine alone to make. Then I will call my doctor and the next chapter of my life will begin.