Maiden’s Journey

 Sorry for the misleading title but if you are expecting this to be about undressing in a sexy way, then I’m going to disappoint.  I have already written about how it feels to dress femme, but now I want to talk about the time after, when I have to go back to boymode and how that makes me feel.  Dressing femme feels good. I feel attractive and feminine and love the difference in how skirts and dresses and tights feel compared to my male clothing. Putting on a bra feels like a transformation ritual and something that completes me in some sense.  However, I do have much angst about my transness, as we all do, one part of which is that I enjoy the novelty and the physical sensation and whether the feelings of femininity and completion are therefore real. I do like to put myself through the wringer of self doubt!  So I’ve been trying to normalise dressing femme for myself to see if I still feel the same. I don’t get that many opportunities but I work from home these...

 If you’ve been reading my ramblings for a while you’ll know that I think a lot but haven’t moved forward. Due mainly to cowardice if we’re honest.  So this is a story of not doing something positive, but it is about preparing to do something. Which is maybe a tiny bit of progress?  I’m in the UK where public healthcare is pretty much hopeless for trans people and waiting lists for what services do exist are so long that it’s a deterrent to even trying. Plus it operates on a gatekeeper model so is set up to make you unhappy from the get go. There is however a private clinic that works on an informed consent basis ie if you know what you need and you pay your money, you can get treatment. I first discovered this place online last year. Although I haven’t done anything with this information, I sort of know that one day I will. From the moment I found them I knew. Not that I had even accepted that I could transition at that point, but nevertheless I felt that there was an in...

 As someone who has been blogging on and off for a couple of years about trans issues, it might seem odd that I now write a post about definitely being trans.  If you’ve got through my earlier ramblings you’ll know that I have had a great deal of self doubt about this and even though I have wished to be a girl ever since my early teens, I have never quite been able to accept that I was actually trans. Even though I really wanted to be!  I have this blog, and the trans community on twitter and a discord group of people like me in similar situations for support. Surrounding myself with this support network I felt more “normal” and so far as I can tell, very much like other trans folk.  Of course my brain wouldn’t accept that my being apparently like all the other trans women meant I was one. No! Instead I started to doubt myself more and worry that it was the influence of my trans community that was making me think I was more trans than I actually am, because that’s wh...

I recently wrote about a seemingly quite common feeling among those trans folks who have cross dressed before realising that they are trans; that maybe it’s just a fetish that I have got carried away with the idea of.  To save you the bother of going back and reading the post, I concluded that it was the other way around and the cross dressing came from a wish to be female, not the other way around.  Of course my brain isn’t going to let me off that easily. Not when I can find other explanations to discredit my feelings of transness.  I should preface this by saying that I have no knowledge of neuroscience and that everything I am thinking is probably wrong. However, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and has led me to some worrying thoughts.  Ok, starting with things I do know about the brain. There is something called neuroplasticity which means brains aren’t fixed, and if you do something very frequently the part of the brain responsible becomes more develope...

 Okay so this is a hard one to write about but it is important because it’s one of those things that I keep pushing to the back of my mind but comes back every time I think I am feeling confident that I am trans. Judging by comments others are posting on trans twitter I think it’s quite a common thing we feel, so worth discussing. Even though I think quite a lot of trans people get to know themselves and their female side through a kind of gateway of cross dressing or kink or fetish, to talk about it still feels quite taboo.  I think this comes from a place of uncertainty and the attendant fear that brings. “Am I trans enough” or “real trans” is something we all agonise over. I don’t think anyone wants to admit to themselves, never minds anyone else, that they might have done or felt anything that could invalidate their transness. Combine this with the likelihood that anyone you confide in might assume that “it’s a sexual thing”; or that you might be accused of autogynephilia ...

I don’t actually know any trans people in real life, so my observations are based on the trans community on twitter. A community I joined in my female name (Nicola if you don’t know) and on which I exclusively follow trans women and a few non-binary folk. Maybe I should start that sentence: I’m not sure if I’m trans, but I joined trans twitter as a trans woman. Erm...  maybe there were signs?!  And I have a profile pic of me in makeup, a long wig, skirt and bodysuit. No signs at all! I mean, I’m not sure if I am trans, but I started dreaming of being a girl when I was eleven when my puberty seemed to go in a less interesting direction than the girls in my class and have never stopped dreaming about it since. I think about becoming a woman all the time. If a fairy granted me three wishes, without hesitation wish number one is make me a girl.  I have been experimenting with female clothing, underwear and makeup from my teens on.  But For years I never knew whether I am...

Suppose I choose a day, could be any day, and decide that is the day I do something about starting my transition and/or come out to my wife.  I am pretty certain that I am trans and that I really truly want to actually become a girl and that means transitioning.  I have felt this was since I was eleven although I couldn’t frame it as transness back then, I have dressed in female clothing in secret my whole adult life. It may only be in the last few years that I have discovered enough to be sure of who I am and what is possible but this is not a midlife crisis...or if it is, it’s been going on for thirty five years and started really early!  I know that I want to transition to female and that has been my wish ever since I saw a documentary about gender reassignment in the eighties when I was in my teens and saw for the first time what was possible. But I didn’t have the courage to do anything other than dream. I feared rejection and losing everything.  Now, that’s not...

I read on Twitter recently a question about whether recognising that your feelings towards a woman are as much about envy and a desire to be her as they are about fancying her affects how you feel about crushes and attraction after that.  My off the cuff reaction was that I have both body envy and attraction at the same time. I assume that if I transition that I will continue to like girls and be a lesbian so I feel both at the same time.  Having reflected on this for a while I wonder if it is that simple.  I have written before about my early memories of first attraction. On a family holiday when I was eleven a girl wearing a green crop top over a black swimsuit. I thought I fancied her but my abiding memory is of fantasising about wearing her swimsuit. At school in the drama studio wondering what it felt like to wear a leotard and leggings set.  Seeing the outline of a bra through a girl’s blouse and wanting to feel like her and wear a bra myself. Tights, skirts, l...

 I haven’t written for a while because I had convinced myself that the whole idea of being trans and transitioning was just an impossible dream and that I should give up and forget about it.  And this feeling came over me pretty quickly after having finally got my head around and accepting that I am trans and I do very much wish to fully transition and become a girl. These are things that I was scared to write down, but am now able to. This is me, I am Nicola and I am a girl and I want my body and life to fit with that.  But....and there is always a ‘but’ right? But how can I transition to Nicola in my life? I will lose everything. I am married and she doesn’t know that I am trans. I have total confidence that if I tell her, that will be the end of our marriage. And with that I will have to find somewhere else to live, not see our son, get divorced, etc.  I work in a pretty conservative profession and I have to do sales and win business. If I transition I will throw ...

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...