Maiden’s Journey

I wrote earlier this week about ordering my first pair of ladies shoes and how I found this surprisingly difficult to bring myself to do because they represent the possibility of going into the world fully dressed as a woman and not having any shoes is an excuse not to.  A dreadfully feeble excuse, but my cowardice doesn’t need much to cling on to!  Anyway, I ordered them and today I collected the parcel, which I opened excitedly to try them on, only to discover that the store had shipped UK7/EU40 rather than the size UK11/EU45 as ordered (which I did check!). Thwarted. Four sizes too small is a lot and there is no way they were going to fit.  Hence, having owned my first pair of ladies shoes for four hours, I was at the shop returning them.  This is hardly a gripping story, so why am I wasting your time writing this?  Because of how I felt.  Getting to placing the order had taken me a while but when they arrived I was excited. I wanted to put them on and I...

I have done something which scared me.  I know this is going to sound trivial and immensely silly, but the scary thing that I did was to order a pair of shoes.  Terrifying, I’m sure you’ll not agree.  Why am I afraid of shoes? Good question!  I have over the years bought dresses and skirts and lingerie. I’ve even, in more confident moments, tried them on in store, which is clearly far more scary than ordering some shoes online.  Certainly when I first bought female clothing that was pretty nerve wracking and I worried that the shop staff would judge me but I got over that fear and am now quite relaxed shopping for myself.  So much so, I even got an in-person bra fitting at a lingerie shop, which was an enormous leap into the unknown.  Why do shoes feel different? Shoes are for the outside world Of course I’m not literally afraid of shoes (which is called papoutsiphobia if you were wondering). The issue here is what buying shoes means.  Shoes are f...

Or maybe I should say doubt and certainty, because doubt is the dominant feeling, or at least it is this week.   I’m sure it’s the same for many of us who are stuck in that in between stage of knowing that we’re trans but not knowing how or if to move forward with that. Some days it feels like I should just go for it, what’s the worst that can happen?  And other days, the whole idea feels preposterous and a stupid fantasy that I should keep to myself.  Today, I’m feeling the latter. How can I ever be a woman? It’s an impossible dream so forget it.   But I can’t just forget it, can I?  Because it is my biggest, most important and longest standing dream.  The idea of giving it up makes me sad.  I think I’m feeling the sadness more intently today because only a week or so ago, the dream was feeling so real and possible, I felt that I really could do it. The feeling that I could and being able to envisage how and when, this made me happy.  Sitting her...

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...