Block

I keep trying to find words for what is happening to me, way to express the things that run through my mind, run through my heart from moment to moment. At times I am strong full of my own self belief and solid in my conviction then moments later I struggle with myself question my decisions, choices and statements. I feel one moment real and the next a fraud.

This is a lonely gender, when I say I am a Trans male all focus is on physical transition, when are you going to transition, oh so your not transitioning yet as if this is in some way a mark of my maleness. I am male my body is not, but I am male, I don't see myself as a woman, I know I am not a man and I don't want to be a man but I am male. How does this work I hear you ask. I have spent my life so far hating the body I am in because I believed that in order to be male I had to have a male body. As a result of that thinking I have lived with self loathing and have in many different ways self abused and tried to kill the body I am in and some nights in the dark with no one around to tell me I was OK I thought I had managed it, but I kept waking up with the sun. A bittersweet sense of relief and disappointment so closely interwoven I could not separate them. If I had had the option of physically transitioning at 19 when I first found a way to tell the people around me how I felt then I most likely would of taken it but back then it was not an easy thing to do and I was more prone to self destruction I suppose. The only thing that kept me alive I think was a promise I made to my mother to not kill myself after she caught me trying to. So with that promise in my head I took the route of slow death as I  got older I became more and more despondent more and more isolated and were it not for the tireless care and patience and love of some very special people I may have succeeded but I still could not say aloud the words that burned in me I am male. I want you to recognize me as male.

Finally in my 35th year I realized I didn't want to die like this anymore, I began to look after my body and found that I could make it look more like I wanted it to in my mind this helped me to keep on. I then met some more amazing people who offered me not only acceptance but the option of being male and not physically transitioning. How is that possible? I asked myself and found within me an acceptance of my female body if I was able to define myself as male this has opened my mind up to so much the landscape of my gender and sexuality have been laid waste and change from moment to moment I have no words to define myself anymore I try and use the ones I find in websites, so far I am comfortable with Transmale or female bodied male,  and for now I believe I can find comfort in the acceptance of the community around me.

Lovers and Fighters

Off to The Lovers and Fighters Convention by some magic of the universe I am dressed as smart as I can to the one show I desperately wanted to see but couldn't get tickets for. It's funny how the world just does what you want sometimes.

So my lovely new butch friend from the RVT had her friend drop out at last minute and she thought of me to ask to go and see it ( amazed and grateful I really was, how lovely of her to think of me after such a short time of knowing each other ). So got there early and met another friend as I was crazy excited about going and I sure as anything wasn't going to sit at home and bounce a hole in the floor :). We sat watched people drank gin and bourbon ( not together of course ) and then she had to go catch her movie. Not much later my other new friend turned up in cow print pajamas and quite unsurprisingly carried them off very well, I think it's a confidence thing myself you can't have style without confidence.

Anyway off we went to see the film I was super excited people around me also had made an effort we were the best dressed in the NFT that day.

The film was a video document of a performance of The Genderqueer Playhouse, filmed in front of an audience ( some of whom I recognized hehe ) interwoven with interviews with the performers themselves. I was instantly jealous that I had not had the chance to see this myself but very glad that someone ( in this case Mike Wyeld ) had had the idea to record this for people like myself to see. This film spoke to me as a celebration of the myriad of gender identities out there and it offered me a huge comfort once again seeing people I know, some of whom I have seen perform, once again giving of themselves so personally to get the message across that this is not a binary world in terms of gender. There are many twists and turns to finding that place we can be ourselves in. Sometimes the journey is fun and sometimes painful but definitely worth it.

For me just beginning to find my feet on this journey this is a deeply important message, before I started to accept my own identity questions and reach out to other people who had already started exploring this I didn't know there was any other option open to me other than being male or being female and that's a scary place to be for me finding myself asking questions about my gender again after so long. 

Like I have said before if I was 19 and had the options available to me now I probably would not have thought all that long about it, I would of gone for it no question, but now I've lived in this body coped with it found ways of not hating it a part of me has become more afraid of the idea of changing it. Which is in itself strange, someone asked me quite recently what if I had the surgery and I didn't like the results and my reply was even if it all went horribly wrong and I was deformed by surgery it would still be no worse to me than the body I already have. That answer shocked me I didn't see it coming the words fell out of me like they had been sitting there for years waiting for that question and when it came I didn't have the time to filter it for me or for my questioner. I don't know what to do with that answer, I don't know how it fits into this new world and I am afraid of where answers like that will take me.

For now though I am just holding onto the messages from the film I hope in the future I can see some of the performances I haven't had a chance to see yet, I look forward to getting to know some performances better and to see where the Trans community goes with the documenting of it's history. Already so much has happened in my lifetime I have seen so much change and it has given me hope for the future. I hope we in the Trans space can continue to keep its inclusiveness I think it is the most powerful tool there is. To make everyone welcome and accepted is a message that cannot be eroded I hope.

I also think it is incredibly important that people are starting to recognize the importance of documenting the Trans movement more and more. These are the voices and stories that will help and save more people like me looking for somewhere safe to think the things we have not dared to, to find the spaces and people to talk to about what we could not before and this sense of history and community can help to reach out to more of those people lost in their own gender wastelands.