The End to a Gender Transition?

At my hairdresser yesterday, she asked me a question her transgender son brought up...does a transgender transition ever end. Her son felt as if it would never stop primarily because he would have to take hormones for the rest of his life. I agreed with that plus added in for me I wondered if my Trans-PTSD would ever go away.

An example happened today. Being Saturday, I went with Liz to two of her martial arts classes and went to the grocery store. Going into today and still loving my latest hair do, I thought I was doing my best to look good.

It must have worked, because everywhere I went, I didn't have any problems. Well, actually, I did have a problem, myself. No matter how hard I tried, once again I couldn't relax and live in the moment. All of a sudden, I was no better off than when I was a beginning cross dresser so many years ago.

I still don't know how long it will take for it to ever go away. Perhaps it never will. Maybe living all those years as a guy will always imprint me.

A Quiet Week Turns Busy!

It turns out when I was laying out my week's worth of activities, I left out two important ones.

Thursday night was Liz and I's monthly visit to one of the cross dresser-transgender social club's dinner meetings. It's held in a pleasant little restaurant across the river in Newport, Kentucky which features (among other items) a very good bison burger. What I like about it too is the noise level is low enough you can have conversations with more than one person.

A smaller than average group showed up, normally, it is well over twenty. Last night it down to around twelve. Not much out of the ordinary happened except one cross dresser bragging about a licensed concealed weapon she was carrying. The same cross dresser who managed to mis gender another cross dresser at the end of the table twice.

Mention was made concerning the Cincinnati Transgender Day of Visibility. Which will be here before we know it on March 31st.

This morning was one of my favorite appointments, my hair dresser. As you may or may not remember, she is the one with the teenage transgender son. As always, the time went all too quickly and she made my hair look great.

Necklace by "Liz T Designs"

This is an older picture which closely approximates the way it looks.

Along the way, we chatted about how HRT was effecting me and why I looked better since the last time she saw me. I explained part of it was because I was wearing form fitting leggings and a light weight pastel blue sweater. Both of which are capable of showing off more of a feminine figure without any kind of padding. For whatever reason, I have always preferred a more natural feel and wearing the minimum of under garments. Finally, my hormones are beginning to shape me into having hips of my own.

Unfortunately, she told me the story of how her son (a 14 year old) had his heart broken when he lost his girl friend. Because he was trans and because of her Mother of course. So sad.

The topic led us right into politics and all too soon, the end of a wonderful hour of my life.

The Moderator

As you regulars may have noticed, I spend a lot of time here in Cyrsti's Condo posting feelings concerning what the "moderator" is up to. I suppose much of it is because I don't fully understand her feelings or I just need something to write about. In the past several months, she has dazzled me with her comments on diverse subjects as gender dysphoria, single handily trying to break the anti LGBTQ sentiment at Chick-Fil-A ...all the way to believing the whole world is a rosy place for transgender women and men to live. Even though, I don't understand or agree with her on occasion, at least she doesn't lack for opinions.

And, speaking of opinions, here is Connie:

"I find it very hard to believe that a trans woman could avoid gender dysphoria and public scrutiny, especially if she's gone so far as to take on the responsibility of being a moderator for a trans support group. She should, at least, know that the vast majority of us have suffered these things. How lucky she had been to never have had any negative experiences until just recently. 

Very few of us have complete passing privilege. I've often thought that those who do pass as a woman, without scrutiny, must have had a tough time presenting as a man. I would think that they probably got picked on and bullied for being perceived as a wimp or gay. 

I remember the ads in the back of comic books, portraying the 96 pound weakling getting sand kicked in his face at the beach. If you bought their product, you'd be all muscles by the end of the summer, and you could get your revenge. At age 11, I was about 96 pounds, but not necessarily a weakling for my age. I was, however, quite adept at transforming myself, with the help of my mother's clothes, wig, and makeup, into a fairly passable young woman (even if not a passable eleven-year-old girl). By the time I was thirteen, though, testosterone had started its evil, and my frame, hands, and musculature began making me less passable as a woman. There was no option available for me in 1962 to suppress the testosterone, let alone access to HRT. I know now that I would have done whatever I had to in order to avail myself of such. Instead, my puberty brought on a giant dose of dysphoria, as I publicly (and "publicly") worked to show myself as the "after photo" in the comic book ad, while still engineering opportunities for allowing my femininity to shine. I recall envying not only the girls, but also the boys who

apparently hadn't yet started puberty. A small number of those boys never really developed a "manly" body, but it's probably about the same chance of one out of 450 that any of them would have been trans. I would estimate, then, that the chance of a trans woman completely passing (naturally) would be no better than one in 50,000. Even though these very few could easily pass as a woman, living as the 96 pound weakling man could be awfully rough.

Being a transgender woman is a no-win proposition. No matter how well you pass as a woman, there's no escaping the fact that you were born biologically male. Even if you manage to avoid "detection" most (or even all) of the time, you will not be able to erase it from your own mind. I have always been my own worst critic, so there's not much anyone else could say to me that I hadn't already considered of myself. With it being such a rarity that a trans woman could have no dysphoria and also avoid even a disparaging word from a transphobic ass in a bar, I would say that the moderator's luck apparently had a much longer run than most of us have had. Rather than adding to the escalation, though, I would suggest only responding by telling the offender that their opinion of me is none of my business, so would they please keep it to themselves"

In all fairness to the "moderator", she took the job when the group was on the verge of collapse. .She also is an upgrade from a couple highly poiitical (amd slightly bigoted) transgender women who ran it in the past.