Is It Time?

I was recently reading a Femulate  post in which Stana relayed several of her most asked questions along. One of the questions revolved around establishing a female voice...not just a feminine one.

It is true, no matter how feminine you look, your voice can give you away instantly.

To begin with, I have constant problems with my voice to start with. It is very raspy. Coming from many years working as a disc jockey "back in the day." If I had my choice, I would/could develop a voice which sounds like Jacqueline Bisset.  ( Right)

My problem is I am voice lazy too. Being full time, it is easy to relapse into old voice habits and then try to bring out a more feminine tone when I am out in public. Sometimes I  think I am more successful than others but it doesn't really matter if I am just guessing...does it?

At any rate, I have a couple options. One would be to have Liz help me, or it's possible to schedule an appointment with a VA voice therapist, or finally take a course such as the one Stana recommends called "How to Develop a a Female Voice" by Melanie Anne Phillips.

The only benefit of the first two options are they are free. But then again, you get what you pay for.

My next step is to ask Liz about her opinion and ask my VA therapist if she has heard anything about the in house therapist there. I know she has outside recommendations, but as always, there are financial considerations to look at. Plus, Melanie's course is not that expensive.

I know one thing for sure, the voice status quo is getting old and it's time to do something about it. Instead of my voice being a liability to my transgender presentation, it's time to work on making it a positive.

Spooky

One of our old cars seemingly knows when we have some extra money, so it can break down. So today I had to cancel going to one of my transgender support groups. It wasn't such a difficult decision since the weather forecast is calling for a possible mix of rain and snow all day today. Plus a chance of the dreaded freezing rain.

We still managed to go out to dinner last night after dropping the car off at the mechanic's place. Nothing spectacular happened out of place as the place was nearly empty and we have been there many times before. I was wearing one of my sweaters and jeans and light makeup since I wasn't planning on going there anyhow. Close to what I was wearing a couple nights ago when we went into pick up Liz's son at the drugstore where he was getting off from work. Where something did happen.

At the front counter, was a guy and his teen aged son checking out and he nearly broke his neck turning around to look at me. He felt the need to turn completely around to stare at me. I looked, and per norm, his much younger son was paying me no attention at all. I thought the old man was going to say something but he didn't.

On the positive side, I finally had the chance to meet the transgender guy who works there and that was fun. He is the one who has the "he and his" pronouns written on his name tag.

Such is life!

Spring?

Old picture with short hair.

Well, March is up to her old tricks. A couple days of positively beautiful Spring weather, followed by a couple of days of rain and/or snow. What it does do though, is get me moving in checking out my seasonal wardrobe. I do have some serviceable pieces left over from last year and they provide a great starting point for this year.

I have also saved back my birthday gift certificate to use. I plan on abusing it for a couple items to wear to my workshop at  the Trans Ohio Symposium and at the Transgender Day of Visibility event Liz and I are helping at. It's coming up in a couple of weeks, so I can't keep putting off doing my shopping.

Getting my nails done is also a priority for me this year and I have to S&S for them. Save and Schedule.

Tomorrow I have another support group meeting at the Dayton, Ohio Veterans Administration  which I might have to miss due to a forecast of everything from rain, to ice, to snow.

Such is life around here (Ohio) in the Spring! 

Cyrsti's Condo Quote of the Day

"To become the woman I am,

I had to murder the men in me."

Jessica Semaan 

When You Fall Off the Wall

We have been writing about climbing transgender walls here in Cyrsti's Condo recently. Of course when and if you climb walls, you can expect set backs and even falling on occasion. Falling though, often is how you learn and discover how badly you want to transition. After all, it's quite OK to enjoy being a cross dresser and not transition any farther.

Long ago, a close friend said I "passed" out of sheer determination. While I never figured out if it was a compliment, I felt it did describe me to a "T." No pun intended.

Two of our regulars were kind enough to send in more comments on their personal "walls."

FABULOUSCONNIEDEEMarch 16, 2018 at 1:59 PM

Climbing a wall is one thing; repelling the other side, another. That point where your little voice was telling you something was wrong probably first started as you had reached close enough to the top of the wall to peep over to the other side. Eventually, it spurred you on to reach the top, and spoke to you as you sat, straddling the wall. Dare I say that this is the place that separates the cross dresser from the transitioning transgender woman (or man)?

For me, balancing my life atop that wall was terrifying and exhausting. I know, and know of, many trans women who find it to be terrific and exhilarating there, though. To them, acquiring a lifestyle of playing both sides, the masculine and the feminine, is part of the game they desire. I had grown so weary of playing the game, because my desire was to have a life - not a lifestyle. Rather than living out my femininity by individual experiences and events, I had to commit myself to taking the ultimate leap to the feminine side, and experiencing fully the good and the bad of it.

Life on this side of the big wall does require facing even more of them, but I've found many of these walls to be lower and easier to climb. In fact, some of my walls, now, can be merely stepped over. "

Paula GoodwinMarch 17, 2018 at 4:54 PM

I think that stage of trying to work out whether you are a cross dresser or need to go "full time" is often a question not so much of do I need to change, as can I bear not to. Certainly for me there can a stage when the wall was behind me and it was going back to trying to be "Him" that felt like climbing the wall. Eventually it just became easier to stay on the female side of that particular wall, of course that then meant another wall was in front of me."

Thanks! All you fellow climbers.

Sunday!

Again! Another week has flown by. Very much a typical one on the home front.

No trips to the doctors or therapists this week, except for my recent hearing test, it looks like I will be around for awhile at the least. I hope so, I still have quite a bit to do!

I did read a couple interesting links from Bob and did send a message to a nearby LGBT organizer in Dayton, Ohio, so I can pass along his ideas. Recently, his posts have been very pro - transgender in the LGB spectrum, so we will see what will happen.

The link from Bob was called "What Do We Do About Women With a Penis?" by Cassie Brighter. It leads off with: "The Penis in Women's Spaces, the Cotton Ceiling and the Definition of Womanhood. It's a very long and well written post with several intriguing ideas from which I am going to try to pass along. Or, you can follow the link above to read it yourself.

One paragraph starts with a circle of women all cis except one transgender who become nude in a circle:

"Nineteen of these women are vulva-clad, vagina-equipped natal, cisgender women. One of these women is trans. While she might not refer to her genitals by the words 'penis' or 'testicles,' that’s what they are anatomically. And, though transformed by several years of female hormones, her genitals are likely to be understood as "male genitals" by most women present.

This is the challenge we face: Do we allow the trans gal to participate in the exercise (which includes shedding all clothes and touching one’s genitals), or do we specifically exclude her, for fear of triggering one or more of the other women?" 

The post goes on to explain an answer, or answers to this complicated idea. Also, if you are wondering what the term "Cotton Ceiling" means, here is your answer:

"The term "cotton ceiling" was coined by porn actress and trans activist Drew DeVaux in 2015. It’s been used to refer to the tendency by cisgender lesbians to outwardly include and support trans women, but draw the line at considering ever having sex with them."

Finally, as I try to break this down for you, the post goes into the trans woman in "women's spaces." She (Cassie) writes:

"I beseech you, please show up with humility and patience. If a cisgender woman talks to you from privilege, acting entitled and expecting you to "mind your place," resist the urge to get mad. It might not be malice, it might just be ignorance. Be gentle in correcting pronouns, explaining trans basics, correcting misperceptions."

Later on in the post, we transgender women are referred to as "refugee's" in women's spaces.

As you can tell, there is a lot of ground covered here. Thanks Bob for sharing!

Hope the rest of you had a great week!

Transgender Day of Visibility

This year I am determined to not miss the Trans Day of Visibility. I can't remember why I missed it last year but I did.

The day is held on March 31st and this year, it will be held in the Cincinnati Zoo campus auditorium.

As part of my new desire to volunteer more within my larger (non VA) cross dresser, transgender support group, I volunteered to help with an information table.

It's interesting to note also, this years event is being hosted by "Living with Change." It has been set up thanks to the generous donation from the CEO of the Pure Romance Company.. "Generous" to the tune of two million dollars. The CEO just happens to have a transgender daughter and it's worthwhile reading the story by following the first link above.

Of course I asked my partner Liz to go and help too, so we are planning to have a great time!

More Walls

As we get ever closer to my workshop at the Trans Ohio Symposium, the impetus to "fill in" my topics gets stronger.

Thanks to you Cyrsti's Condo readers, I am settling in on the walls we have to climb over to successfully negotiate a Mtf gender transition (and trans guys too). The first wall I described was cross dressing. As soon as we feel secure enough in the mirror, many times, our thoughts turn to going out in the public's eye.

The second wall we face, is what happens to us when we do it. Much of the excitement we felt looking into the mirror and seeing a girl look back, has a tendency to turn into utter fear as we go out. I know when I first started to live a feminine life, I would look for any semblance of a mirror to reassure myself. Slowly but surely, I became relatively comfortable walking around as a feminine cross dresser.

Then, a little at a time, a voice was telling me, something was still wrong. I was tired of just feeling like I was a guy walking around cross dressed as a woman, I wanted to live more like a woman. At that point, the  real fear of loosing what was left of my masculinity set in. Did I really want to keep going down the road I was on. All of a sudden, labeling myself as a transgender woman was very scary.

As we have discussed though, fear is a powerful motivator and I sat out to do the best I could to co-mingle with cis women and see if I was accepted. This wall was as tough to climb as any previous walls because I had to communicate with the public and often the same ones. It was during this time period I settled on yet a new name and one wig, so I could look the same.

As I made it to the top of this wall, I could look around and see the world as a more feminine person. Most importantly, after the fear subsided, I found I felt really natural. Plus the more natural I felt, the more people around me were beginning to feel it too.

It was about this time, tragedy struck my life and ironically opened the doors wide to consider the next wall. Living my life full time as a trans woman and sacrificing all of my male privilege.

It's All in the Smile!

It turns out, science has now mapped out the specifics of how each gender smiles:

"The dynamics of how men and women smile differs measurably, according to new research, enabling artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically assign gender purely based on a smile.

Although automatic gender recognition is already available, existing methods use static images and compare fixed facial features. The new research, by the University of Bradford, is the first to use the dynamic movement of the smile to automatically distinguish between men and women.

Led by Professor Hassan Ugail, the team mapped 49 landmarks on the face, mainly around the eyes, mouth and down the nose. They used these to assess how the face changes as we smile caused by the underlying muscle movements -- including both changes in distances between the different points and the 'flow' of the smile: how much, how far and how fast the different points on the face moved as the smile was formed.

They then tested whether there were noticeable differences between men and women -- and found that there were, with women's smiles being more expansive.

The article goes on to say:

Lead researcher, Professor Hassan Ugail from the University of Bradford said: "Anecdotally, women are thought to be more expressive in how they smile, and our research has borne this out. Women definitely have broader smiles, expanding their mouth and lip area far more than men."

The team created an algorithm using their analysis and tested it against video footage of 109 people as they smiled. The computer was able to correctly determine gender in 86% of cases and the team believe the accuracy could easily be improved."

A smile maybe more than your best accessory...it may be your most important one, as a transgender woman. 

Read more here from Science Daily.