Welcome?

OK, if I've heard it once, I've heard it a million times. "Welcome to Our World" 
From the first development of sore breast "buds" to the dry skin to the hot flashes, my genetic girl friends have laid it on me.
Hey, I love it. Obviously, I want to be in their world.
Also I should point out (as with most of my life) I'm fairly certain I'm doing this transition thing backwards. I have experienced a ton of feminine socialization, it's keeping up with their world physically or at least
coming up to speed has been the challenge.
I always knew of course that female was the high maintenance gender but really?
Filling a bathtub full of 10w30 weight oil to re-lubricate my skin which could have been reacting to the fact my body was doing a wonderful job of self combusting all summer is an example. As I have written, all those frilly girly shower or bath moisturizers just aren't cutesy girl stuff...you need them!
Now summer comes to an end and it's time to add another intensely feminine aspect to my progression-hair.
We all know how inherently sensual a woman's hair can be.  For out entire lives we watch girls and then women seemingly always primping or playing with their hair. In addition, you have probably read a couple of the articles concerning how much the average woman spends on her hair in a lifetime.
All right, go ahead and say it girls: "Welcome to Our World". In an incredibly short period of time, I've had to step up my shampoo game  to a shampoo with conditioner and now a shampoo with conditioner for regular color treated hair. Plus, lets not forget the spray bottle of "Freeze and Shine" which I'm supposed to spray five times on my hair before I use the blow dryer with more attachments than an old wrench set I kept losing pieces to.
As I said, I have a lot of catching up to do but that's all right. It's really different to reach up to adjust your wig and it's your head and hair and all ready I feel helpless to do much with the actual style I have.
I am fond of saying "I'm nothing if not persistent" and I have two really positive factors working for me:
The first is I'm told I have good hair to work with. The second and most important is I have some really good friends to help me!

Crossing the Line

As promised, back to this hair thing.
Of course, we have discussed breasts seemingly a zillion times here in Cyrsti's Condo.
Now it seems,  we have a ways to go in the hair department.
The more I write seemingly the more there is to write.
I wrote a bit about looking androgynous but now I want to add a little extra.
With my hair the way it is now, I think I have taken a huge step in looking natural.
That's good, right? Absolutely and the public dynamic instantly changed for me. Eons ago, Janie Black wrote a piece on her blog (I paraphrase) "would you rather be a bland woman or an attractive trans girl?" Remember, I paraphrased a lot.
Basically, all of the sudden, you are just one of the crowd and not the center of attention.
For all intents and purposes, I'm arriving there and it's a real adjustment.
To be truthful, I guess there was some sort of ego involved with the fact that if I couldn't be a real attractive genetic woman, I would do my best to be a real attractive transgender woman.
In essence "Your a good looking woman-for a man."
Then I changed all of that this week.
It turned out going in for my first serious hair styling turned out to be the biggest move I've made since I took my first dosage of Estrogen.
Wow.

Closure

I've been trying to find the words to describe this week and close it out and get ready for what's next.

Perhaps one of the more exciting parts of all of this is I'm in another "warp speed" phase of life. In a little less than two weeks I have my appointment with a new doctor which I call my second phase of HRT.

As I do with most of my major transition events, I have a tendency to become more than a little withdrawn to consider what just happened.

I always considered my hair was going to be a Major piece of the puzzle. How big it turned out to be- I wasn't quite prepared for.

First of all, the obvious. I took a huge step to becoming complete- head to toe. All of the sudden, I became androgynous. With the help of the hormones, all of the sudden my hair tipped me towards the feminine side of the spectrum no matter how I was dressed.

Then there were the fun things such as the visit to salon after I calmed down and their reaction to my hair.
I have mentioned I'm very fortunate to have no male pattern baldness in my family and of course my hair has not been subjected to a lifetime of treatments. No coloring, no perms or heat just naturally gives me a younger fuller head of hair. My daughter commented how bitter she was that she "didn't get my hair instead of her Mom's". Of course my BS detector was figuring daughter and stylist were just being nice but she took my grand daughter back there a couple days later. It turns out the crew wanted to compliment her on my hair and wanted to see the completed process. As you remember I had to go as a guy with three days of beard to be evaluated on facial hair removal. Ironically, the first time my daughter saw me as me was in the same crummy picture I posted here.

There is more to this of course which I'm going to get into in my next post!