Maiden’s Journey

Not something I had really thought about until today but I was responding to a question on Twitter about what the online trans community means to me and I had this realisation of how lonely it can be if you are trans.  I am not out except to one close friend and ally, and I have only had them for about three years. Prior to that I had no one to whom I could share my thoughts and feelings.  The life of a closeted trans person is lonely because of the secrecy.  When I first started to realise that I was looking at girls to imagine what it was like to be them, there was no way I could tell anyone that. At my school in the eighties that would be to invite more bullying. And who would understand anyway even if I could talk about it? When I first started experimenting with wearing my mother’s clothes in secret I had to hide, not risk being seen, cover my tracks. I was finding out about how I felt when dressing and what I liked, but I had to keep this to myself.  When I fel...

I guess this is another aspect of my questioning whether I am “trans enough”.  I can only apologise for keep going on about this, but it is a multifaceted problem so there are many things to say! What it comes down to is this: I didn’t think I felt dysphoria, so I thought that meant I was not trans.  What do I mean by that?  I suppose I was starting from a limited understanding and the assumption that dysphoria was the cliche of “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body”, which probably no one in the real world has ever actually said. But growing up with almost no knowledge about trans issues, that was the full extent of my understanding.  I don’t feel trapped in the wrong body. I don’t really have much anxiety about my maleness at all on a day to day basis. So I sort of assumed that I don’t “have “ dysphoria and by extension, that I wasn’t “proper” trans.  Except that I do have dysphoria.  I just took a while to realise that was what it was.  Dysph...

 My last post was entitled “to be a girl or to be like a girl” and was about how I obsess over this question in trying to work out who or what I am. It’s similar to the “am I trans enough?” question that I (and many others) also grapple with.  Sorry to have wasted your time dear reader, but only now do I realise that I have been going around in circles asking myself completely the wrong questions.  Well, it’s not entirely the wrong question, more that I have been conflating two questions into one and that is why I have never managed to escape the circles of my own wants and fears.  My mistake is in mixing “what do I really want?” with “can I go through with that?” It is hard to be clear about what I really want when this is always thought of together with my fears of consequences.  What I have realised is that I have to deal with the two questions separately.  I suppose that people pay therapists to point these things out and get to the answers more quickly...

if Hamlet was trans? Not exactly.  Do you mind if I continue with the theme from my last blog about whether I am trans enough? Like I said, that seems to be a very common question for people in the trans community but I wouldn’t say it is quite how I characterise the issue in my own head.  The question I grapple with is: do I want to be a girl, or do I want to be like a girl?  What do I mean by that? To be a girl, I mean going the whole way and transitioning. To actually fully become female. Or is that I want to be able to be like a girl when I want to be, which does not involve major interventions and change, just being able to dress sometimes, grow my hair, have female friends and be seen as “one of the girls”.  Those things are all nice and have served me well over the years. I could continue with occasionally being like a girl and never go any further and that would probably be fine.  And yet there is a part of me that wonders what it could be like if I actu...

 This is a question I ask myself all the time.  And having spent some time reading posts from the trans community on Twitter it is clear that I am not alone in wondering this. In fact, someone tweeted that their therapist had quipped that it is such a common question among trans people that it is practically a symptom of transness.  So why do we all keep wondering this?  It is partly Imposter Syndrome for sure, doubting whether I am qualified to be part of the trans community. Others have said similar, so that seems to be a common feeling too.  The usual response from the community to someone questioning whether they are trans enough is to say that if you ask the question then you are, and it’s not for anyone else to say how trans you need to be.  I don’t think that quite nails it though.  They’re right in so far that if you’re asking the question then you are certainly somewhere on the trans spectrum, but that doesn’t deal with the “enough” part....

First contact with a real girl that is.  Apologies that this post will contain some reference to mild sexual experiences but I will try to be delicate.  As I have mentioned in other posts, in my teenage years I was as attracted to girls as the next boy, but I was also very much attracted to the idea of being them, although at the time I had no idea this was not “normal” and maybe signified something about me.  Unfortunately I had little to no success in getting a girlfriend. Ok, let’s be honest: no success. At all. Maybe I wasn’t masculine enough! Hmm.  I was fourteen before I first kissed a girl. We met at the ice rink, skated together and chatted and then before she had to go home, we “snogged”. I had zero experience so had to follow her lead and she was rather vigorous in her kissing. Forceful even, and pushed her tongue well into my mouth. Frankly, I feared she might eat me. Nice to get a score on the board, but I cannot say that I enjoyed the experience. You hav...

The term “female embodiment fantasies” is something I have learned fairly recently, thanks to the Internet and the access it gives me to papers on gender dysphoria and transgender issues.  What I am going to write about here is my inner world as a teenager. A time when I had never heard of gender dysphoria, female embodiment fantasies or even trans gender. I was aware of “gay”, and that everyone at school viewed that as a Bad Thing, but that was all I knew. I didn’t know anyone who identified differently, had never even heard of anyone changing their gender. This was the nineteen eighties and I knew nothing.  I knew nothing about gender identity but I did know how I felt.  Please forgive the indelecacy, but as a teenage boy (for so I was), I spent a fair bit of my time fantasising and pleasuring myself. That is normal I guess, but was the subject matter of my fantasies “normal”?  I am sure I stared at my female classmates just as much as the rest of the boys did. But...

 The first time I wore a dress was a special feeling.  At the time, I didn’t know that I was in any sense transgender or gender questioning. I was thirteen and didn’t even know such things existed. I was aware that when I looked at the girls in my class, part of my fantasy was to wonder what it felt like to wear their clothes, and especially their underwear and tights and skirts.  My first opportunity to find out was slightly unexpected and from the source of my German teacher who wanted her class to stage a pantomime for Christmas. In German obviously.  I was cast as one of the ugly sisters (oh how apt!) or to give me my German name, a hassliche schwester (apologies for the spelling, it’s been a while and there should probably be an umlaut in there somewhere.) Our teacher kindly provided the costumes, and I was issued with a dress. It was a long strapless gown of gold satin, which my mum surmised has come from the teacher’s kids dressing up box as it had some elasti...

I have written previously about my first attraction to a girl when I was eleven and how I was as fascinated by how it would feel to be her and wear her swimsuit as I was attracted to the girl herself.  At the time, I had no idea that this was not “normal” and that it was a sign of who I am inside. I had no external reference as to how you should fancy girls, except for other teenage boys’ conversation which was mainly as sophisticated as saying “phwoar” a lot. This does not provide the unknowingly gender questioning boy/girl with many clues.  School did provide most of my early attractions and fantasies though.  One of the new subjects we had to do now I was at senior school was “performing arts”, which was on rotation with art and music. It was sort of a combination of drama and dance and took place in what was officially called the “theatre” even though it had no stage or seating. It was more of a dance studio space I suppose but strangely had no windows or natural ligh...

Although I didn’t realise it at the time, my first attraction to a girl was also my first attraction to being a girl.  It is strange that I still remember after all this time, but maybe that’s the nature of significant moments in our lives.  It was 1986 and I was eleven. It was the summer between primary school and senior school and we were on our family holiday on the Isle of Wight.  I had sort of fancied girls who I thought were nice or pretty or whatever, but only in a childish innocent way. I guess playing at the idea of something without any real concept of what it really means. Up until this point, I had never properly fancied anyone in that way. I didn’t even know how! This holiday was just like our previous holidays. We had been to this place before, stayed at the same accommodation and played on the same beach.  The beach was brilliant there. A little stream trickled down from the cliffs and ran over the sand to the sea. All of the kids would take their buck...