Maiden’s Journey

My chance to go shopping presenting female came and I let it pass.  It was late and there was a lot of traffic and I really needed to get home, but that is just an excuse if I’m honest. I didn’t want to.  Although what I wanted or didn’t want is ambivalent in itself. I did want to because I wanted to test myself, gain some more experience. I also wanted to look nice and feel good about my outfit and to get a couple of other things to expand my wardrobe. I didn’t want to be conspicuous though, to expose myself to staring and judgments or to put myself at risk of transphobic abuse or attack. The latter is probably unlikely, but the fear is there all the same.  It wasn’t just fear or vulnerability. The exercise felt pointless. I am continually swinging from feeling like I have to transition immediately to feeling that this is impossible and destroying my life for nothing and can never happen. When I planned to go, it felt like a step on the journey to transition. By the time...

Having decided (and written about yesterday) that I need another trial run going in public en femme, I am now feeling a bit daunted by the idea.   It will be only my fourth time out dressed, so it is still a new experience really, but I have at least previously proven that I can do it.   I don't know why I still feel so fearful though.  When I did it before, it was fine.  A few people stared, but that was as bad as it got.  No big deal.   There is also the comfort that it is as difficult as it will ever be, because I am  male under the clothes, and definitely do not pass.  If (when?) I am going to be living this full time, I will have started to feminise, even a little bit, so it will be slightly less difficult.  And it will get easier with every day that passes, as I gain more and more femininity.  So what I do this week will be the most difficult, my future will be better and less hard.  Maybe thinking of this week ...

Looking back at my recent posts, I have been through giving up entirely on my gender; trying to work out how to be as authentic and female as I can be whilst presenting male; and recognising that the only thing that I truly want is to be a woman in every way possible.  Whilst I have confidence in my feelings and know them to be true, I also know that the only way to really prove it is to try. No amount of reading about the effects of feminising hormone treatment is going to tell me how I will feel on oestrogen rather than testosterone.  Imagining what it would be like to have breasts or learning about the Tanner stages of development is never going to tell me how I will feel when I experience it.  I could write pages and pages of these blogs, tell my two ally friends how I feel, even go to therapy and talk about it for hours on end. There is really no way of knowing whether it is right other than through experience. This is scary because so much cannot be tried out privat...

At the turn of the year, I was so sure that I was going to transition, it was what I wanted, and that I needed to do so as quickly as possible.  It started well but I was knocked off course by the first set-back and then progress stalled when I discovered there was nothing else that I could do until I came out to family, and I was afraid to do that.  As I lost momentum, the little things which had been bringing me joy started to become routine, and then, as my "transition" was going nowhere, to feel pointless and even performative.   At which point I gave up.  Small things, such as reverting to male underwear, allowing my leg hair to grow back, and then, a kind of final symbolic act: having my hair cut short again.  Having written daily for a quarter of a year, I stopped writing this blog and a whole month passed before I had anything to say.   However, "giving up" on transition does not also just stop my feelings that I am transgender.  Why ...

I think I am an over-thinker and I get bogged down in analysis of my own choices to the point that I never actually make any decisions at all.  In most situations I don’t seem to be able to trust my own intuition and especially when it comes to the whole gender question.  Given that intuition is probably the only possible guide in this matter, that explains why I am unable to make any meaningful decisions or progress.  What would my intuition tell me though, if I were to listen to it? That I have positive hopeful thoughts when I think about transitioning.  Recently I was driving home thinking about how I could practically arrange the necessary appointments to start hormone treatment and the feeling I got from this was optimism. My rational mind tells me that I should feel fear and uncertainty and anxiety but I didn’t. I felt hopeful and happy.  If I listen to my intuition, then just those feelings alone ought to tell me something.  There’s another thing too...

I’m trying to figure out how to be me and I don’t really know the answer. Knowing that I am trans and that I am a woman but not being out and able to openly express myself as that, I am in a weird place where everyone reads me as male but that’s not who I am or want to be. Although having said that everyone reads me as male, there are some women who do sense that I am different and I’m surprised when they bring up trans women as a topic of conversation more frequently than I think they would with men. Positive conversations too, nothing negative.  I had a meeting this week with a colleague. We talked about my hair being shorter now and I said it was a lot less effort than long hair and I didn’t have to worry about conditioner or drying it, which I had to when it was longer. She said “now you know how we feel” to which I replied “I wish”.  But I don’t think she noticed. Later, she told me about another professional we both know and how they had lunch recently and she was sure h...