What Will You Do with your New Time?

 

Image from Elana Korcheva
on UnSplash. 

When we come close to completing a major portion of our gender recovery project as transgender women or transgender men, we suddenly learn we have more to do. It seems our work is never done.

In my case, my wife Liz and I were talking about the rare chance I had to stop my previous life as an unhappy man and start all over as a pleasant trans woman. As she wisely said, not many humans ever have the chance to stop, start over and live their lives again. Then I began to think of all the people I called “Trans-Nazi’s” who just gave off the vibes of being evil people.

I first ran into them on an on-line site I found when I first bought a home computer and started exploring cross-dresser or transgender web sites. Back in those days, complete sex change or gender realignment surgeries seemed to be rarer than they are today and those individuals who went through them were expected to move on completely from their former male life and start all over as a complete woman.

On the site, many of the transsexual women banded against the cross dressers and even the newer transgender women for some sort of supremacy simply because they had more operations than the other person. It did not matter to them when someone such as myself pointed out that my gender was always located between my ears, not between my legs. I was always placed in the gender “pretender” crowd which never made me happy as I waded into the “discussions.” As you can imagine, quite a few of the “discussions” grew quite heated behind the screens of gender computer warriors. On occasion I wondered why we were spending all this time and energy fighting each other when so many others in the outside world wanted to attack us anyhow.

Once I made it away from my computer and into the twisted reality of the old transvestite- transgender mixers that “Tri-Ess” and others put on, I was able to meet some of the “Nazi’s” one on one and changed their name to me as the “A-Lister’s”. They were the predecessors to the girls in the “Mean Girl’s” movies and reminded me of some of the less than pleasant popular girls who set themselves up on some sort of a pedestal when I was in high school. During these social mixers of course, I was left out from being with the “A” girls because I could not match their spectacular femininity. Again, I could not understand why they decided to not bring the best of femininity with them instead of the worst. But the result was that I just wanted to tag along when they went to special gay venues after the regular activities were over and most of the attendees had given up and returned to their rooms.

It turned out, once I got to know one of the “mean girls”, she wasn’t so mean after all and I was invited to her restored home in nearby Columbus, Ohio. She threw very small and diverse parties, and I learned a lot of what I thought I wanted to do with my future as a transgender woman from her. Unlike me, she was headed towards a complete gender realignment surgery, and through our discussions she helped me to determine what the best path may be for me. In her own way, she taught me to be gracious and giving in her femininity.

In other ways, her get-togethers were teachers for me. Such as the time I was in danger of being sexually molested and over-powered by a much bigger man who had attended the party as an admirer (and was only saved by my wife after he cornered me in a narrow hallway.) Plus, the first time I found I could be attracted to a lesbian and her with me on a night when my wife did not attend with me. We ended up leaving the party early and going to a big lesbian/gay venue, but it all ended there because I was married. The only problem I had was being able to make it to all the parties I wanted to because I had to work many weekend nights in the restaurant I was in.

Since I needed to make a living, I found other ways to spend my increasingly beneficial time learning what my future may be like as a transfeminine person. Even though I knew I would never be as attractive as my unintended mentor, I needed to find out if I could still make it to my dream goal of womanhood on my own terms. Too much was riding on my ultimate decision not to research it totally. Which meant trying to establish myself as a new person in straight venues I was used to. To my surprise, I was able to with relatively no problems as most of the world did not care if I was trans or not.

More than anything else, during this time, I was trying to rebuild myself into a person that never gave away any of her male past, unless I was forced to like when I came out as the person, I always was to my daughter, who accepted me and my only blood relation still alive (my brother) who did not. Which resulted in an ugly breakup which on occasion I go into. The easiest thing to say is that we have not interacted for over a decade now.

Through it all, I decided to listen to the person I trusted the most, which was my wife Liz and try to build my new feminine life as close as I could to my mentor (Michelle) so long ago in Columbus. I wanted to be a kind and giving gracious woman. Who used her extra time in life to love and cherish her new family and forget my largely toxic background.

I just had to take my extra time and make it as worthwhile as possible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Test Tube Transsexual

I spend a lot of time here in Cyrsti's Condo dwelling in the past. After all I'm an historian by degree and believe in what happened yesterday may help us to understand today.
Recently, I ran across an article called the Subtle Process of Transformation by Eva Hayward.
She goes through an in depth look at the physical changes which occur when you start changing such a basic human trait such as gender:


"Like the change from summer to autumn, changing sex is more than a conscious choice or an act of will. It may be that change comes on a scalpel of desire or along a hormonal riptide, such that the body is legibly sexed, but this describes only a fraction of what is at play. Hormones, for instance, have ranging impacts. Taking estrogen can cause fat deposits to uproot and travel to new sights of colonization so that hips widen, breasts grow and lactate, and musculature softens. Estrogen can also alter the eye's structure, affecting vision. It can modify the body's heating and cooling and olfactory systems. I remember sitting on a subway train, feeling so disoriented by smelling layers of place, saturated funk and perfume that I got off the train and walked six blocks to my stop. Estrogen has health consequences. Annual mammograms and regular breast exams are recommended for transsexual women. If, like me, you started hormone therapy with Premarin (complemented with progesterone), derived (wickedly) from horse urine, how much of that early transition was about becoming horse-like? And later still, with soy- and yam-based estrogens, vegetal? Hormones are a complicated business, and they're just one plot line in the relentless narrative of sex. Transsexuality not only is more nuanced than it is typically described, it breaches the defended territories of sexual reproduction. Thomas Beatie became a national sensation as "the first married man to give birth." Although other men gave birth before Beatie, he was able to capitalize on curiosity and voyeurism, an irresistible tipple, and start a public conversation about the limits of sex: "How can a man have a baby?"

Of course, most of us have heard all of this before or even are feeling it all for the first time. Eva though, took all of the process a step further:

"And now, with the first successful uterine transplant, in Turkey, and Britain and Sweden following suit, it's only a matter of time before other wombless bodies have wombs. But surgical interventions are not alone in transforming our assumptions about sex. Infants are being breast-fed by all kinds of lactating men and women. And last week, a friend sent me a photo of her "false pregnancy," in which the endocrine system produces hormones that physically express as pregnancy. She is a woman "with a transsexual past," as she would say, and still her body is compelled to reach beyond her history. Sex changes; remarkably and unavoidably. Sex is an unending process, not yet finished with any of us."

This is a fascinating look into what transsexualism is and isn't. Read it all here.