Maiden’s Journey

I’m feeling (yet again) that the entire idea of my ever living as a woman is impossible and I’m pretty sad as a result.  This partly stems from a couple of things that I have read on social media that have upset me. Maybe the lesson from this is to not read stuff on social media and that probably is good advice! The first thing was an article someone had written about the history of classification of transgenderism as a mental illness in the (US) medical establishment. It was all factual and actually really interesting. The thing that I took away from it though was the term psycho-surgical, i.e. that gender reassignment surgery was a physical surgery to treat a mental condition. I have no qualifications to say either way whether being transgender is “mental illness” or not but reading about it described in those terms affected me. I think that I view my gender as a physical condition and that I am a woman but my body doesn’t align with that. What I read was more like feeling this w...

Today I have been to the first day of Royal Ascot (for non-UK readers, posh horse racing event).  It’s work, going with clients, but as work goes, quite fun!  It is traditional at this event for men to wear formal attire, and for the zones we are in, the full top hat and tailcoat outfit is required. That is ok, but very hot on a sunny day. Maybe actual men enjoy dressing up like that, but as a secret trans woman, it doesn’t do it for me.  There is a dress code for ladies also but that still allows a huge variety of personal expression that is denied to me as (ostensibly) a man.  Thousands of people go to this event and every where one looks, there are ladies looking fabulous with gorgeous dresses and hats in all different styles.  I’m not particularly into horses to be honest, but for people watching, Ascot is unrivalled.  Tea dresses that twirl, long pleated dresses that swish, one lady with an almost mermaidy dress. Sure there were plenty of ill-advised o...

I went for a short (1 mile!) jog this morning as a gentle attempt to ease back into running after a long break (years!).  A long time ago, I did a couple of half marathons and could comfortably do a 5 or 10k. I was never very fast but it was an achievement for me to be able to get around the course. Somehow, having been unable to run any kind of distance in my youth, I became able to do it in my thirties. No idea how or why.  However that was ten years ago and I think it is seven or eight since I last did a Half. Now I’m late into my forties and with a desk job, and working a lot of hours, exercising has slipped out of my routine.  Getting measured for the hire suit yesterday, specifically the waist measurement, confirmed that sitting on my behind all day has consequences. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m getting a bit of a tummy. And I don’t like it.  It’s not all bad, as some weight has settled on my chest and a tight underwire bra shapes me quite nicely and ...

I may not be actively doing anything about gender or transitioning but mentally and emotionally I am feeling positive about it.  The slightly odd title to this post is literal - I have need of a top hat. Most years I go with work and clients to Royal Ascot which is in a week or so. I don’t particularly like horse racing to be honest, but I do enjoy champagne and a day out of the office so it has its compensations. One of the requirements, and part of the charm of the event, is the dress code. Hence the need to hire a top hat and tails.  It’s on expenses so doesn’t really matter to me, but I do think that in the long run, if I am going every year, buying my own would be better, except that wouldn’t be on expenses, that would be my cost. But I could get something less obviously a standard hire suit.  This was in my mind when I went to book the hire. Maybe I should buy one?  What I really wish I could do, obviously to us anyway, is follow the ladies’ dress code and wear...

My feelings continue to swing back and forth between a real desire to begin transitioning and a wish that it would all go away and I could be content to carry on life as a man.  That understates the extent of the feelings though.  It’s not a vague “I wish I was a woman <sigh>”. It’s a longing for a female body. It’s cupping my chest in my hand and feeling the fat under my skin and how it is a little like a breast but not and wishing it were real. Knowing that I could take hormones and make it real and fulfill this urge to be like the girls that has been there since puberty. It’s feeling comforted by the feel of my underwear which just feels right for me, but uncomfortable because I have other things down there that don’t fit in very well. Worse, believing I’m feminine from the sensation of wearing them but then seeing the truth in the mirror and hating it. When I am wearing a bra or crop top and have the sensation of the stretchy band around my chest and straps over my s...

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...