Maiden’s Journey

Now there is a difficult question! It’s something that I’ve asked myself before and not really got an answer to but which came up again in my research and learning about transitioning.  I have been watching YouTube videos by a trans woman (Ashley Adamson) who posts a lot of advice and meditations for trans people. Her outlook is so positive and this has been really helpful for me to help overcome my feelings of fear and constantly dwelling on worst case scenarios. Maybe that’s a subject for another day.  What I want to explore now is something she said that struck a chord with me: You can put on a dress and do your makeup but that doesn’t make you a woman - you need to also find and embrace your femininity and learn what it is to be a woman inside. I’m paraphrasing and probably getting it wrong, but that’s the message I took from it. I need to find my way to be a woman.  Hence the title here. What does it mean to be a woman?  How do I do that?  Obviously it’s ab...

As I have discussed in previous posts, I’m in a place of feeling “stuck” and although I’m very sure that I am trans and should be a woman, I am not doing anything to progress into transitioning.  Because of fear.  And even before acceptance when I spent months and years going around the “am I really trans?” and “am I trans enough?” loops over and over again, that was also about fear.  I am going to cut myself a bit of slack here though. Being trans is a huge scary thing. Transitioning is an even bigger scarier thing. So I think feeling the fear is a fair enough reaction.  And I am far from unique or by any stretch the most fearful trans person that ever there was. I am quite cowardly generally speaking, but in this case probably no more than average.  I mean, look at the stats: there are many more people who report gender issues or a feeling that they are trans that there are actual transitioned trans women, who are a small minority even among our community. Loo...

I haven’t written for a while. In fact I put away the whole trans idea for a bit. I didn’t want to write. I didn’t want to even think about it.  This was a consequence of a sudden and unexpected reality check that hit me really hard.  I’m in some kind of limbo I suppose. I realised that I was trans quite some time ago, after a whole load of going around in circles. And I accepted it. More than accepted actually, I’m truly positive about it. I love the trans part of me and I know that I am female and that I should be the woman I know myself to be. It’s great. However, I am also terrified of doing anything about it, all the things that I might lose. All the usual stuff. The fear is a barrier and I have made no progress at all in so long.  I’m also someone who lives on hope. I can put up with my situation, or most things to be honest, provided I can envisage a hopeful better future. This is not good for living in the now and enjoying life but that’s a whole other issue so le...

 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...