I do wonder

Once again in the little sanctuary of Bar Wotever I find myself talking to my friend N she's a lovely lady who opened me up to the idea of being a female bodied male by saying there is no problem with transgendered people the problem is with the definition of gender in society. It's a deeply powerful statement to say that it's OK to be me and that it's the world that's got the problem, something I had never considered before until she said it.

I haven't seen her in a while the world being busy as it is so I made a point of thanking her and telling her just how important that was for me to hear. We spent the rest of the night chatting about all things Transgender which is always really great for me, to find someone else who I can feel comfortable with talking about these things is rare but rarer still to find someone with a passion for talking about it someone I can talk things through with who doesn't get tired of me working through my thoughts and ideas but actually finds them interesting. That is a truly wonderful thing.

I talked to her about the unspoken pressure to transition I feel in the transmale community and how it seems to me that it is almost as if transitioning is seen as a cure for the condition of being a trans. That it is seen as a natural progression of the condition that once I have identified as a male in a female body that I would want to cure myself by going through the process of transition, but I'm not sure I believe in that anymore. I don't think I am sick or wrong or whatever word one would like to use. I don't think I do need a cure I have found a richness and diversity in this garden that is my transmale identity, a continually changing and evolving identity that I am beginning to enjoy. Yes I have tough days, days where I am disconnected from myself, where I doubt my maleness and question my decision not to try and make my body look more like the body the world tells me I should have as a male, but don't we all have those days? I also have good days days where I feel at peace with myself, days where I feel as male as any man that walks down the street and real and here and connected to the world and this body I am living in. The fluidity of my existence is more and more important to me, more important than fitting into the box that will bring me acceptance. I have jumped out of my box and I am running around the garden, my hands waving above my head and the wind in my face, I don't want to go back, back there I cannot breathe. 

She is right it's not my problem that people can't see past the flesh I carry, in fact it is often the case that the passing glance reveals the real me. It is then that I am addressed as 'Sir' once a closer look is taken then it's the uncomfortable and uncertainty of 'Miss' and though I pretend not to mind it is disappointment I feel in this correction. Yes it's both right and wrong my body is female but I am not, this is a lonely garden few people it seems stay out here. The box is safe full of comfortable pronouns and others the same, sharing similar thoughts and responses and bodies making it all comfortable and safe. You know who you are, your wearing the right skin, and that skin attracts the right people to you.

 

Priscilla saves me!

I was wondering around in my funk feeling sorry for myself, but luckily it couldn't last as I was booked to go out with my friends to see Priscilla! No one on this earth can compare to those fierce beautiful creatures ( I just know I'll get in toruble for saying that ). Otherworldly the perfect mixture of power and delicacy, so seeminly fragile but so undaunted by the world surely they are the fiercest of us all to stand head and sholders above the rest in their sequins and makeup and proclaim to the world that it cannot break them even when they are broken they will not surrender. I love them.

They are the larger than life, completely unapologetic and without compromise, the toughest of the tough. You just don't mess with a Drag Queen unless you want to hurt. They are my heroes.

I always remember going to a cocktail bar near Warren St when I was much younger with a female friend of mine. We were two lesbians in a bar full of Drag Queens, you could feel the strength in that bar. I was both terrified and excited all at once to be near them, they looked me over with a cold stare assessing me in the kind of way only a Drag Queen can. I smiled back and laughed when they made jokes at my expense, they are allowed to, they make a coward of me in this world. They relax a little realizing I am not one of those crazy take offense at anything lesbians and we have a few drinks and chat about nothing in particular and it was easily one of the top 10 nights of my life.

Dark Places

I'm in a dark place today, I stood in the shower turned the hot water right up and secretly hoped that if the water got hot enough it might wash my breasts away and leave me with something closer to what I feel underneath. It sounds strange I know stupid even, I suppose I hope somehow that the need to make a decision I can settle with would be taken away from me and I could just somehow fall into being physically more myself without having to deal with the confusion and uncertainty I seem to have to deal with to get there.

I wonder sometimes quietly in the back of my mind where I don't want to say out loud if I'd be on some level a bit relieved if I was diagnosed with something that would require me to have my breasts removed. I thought I was comfortable with my body or at least resigned to it but today I feel trapped and alone and desperate to escape this flesh. I am in a dark place today.

Sex Education and Stone Femme Shoes

Last night I went to see Stone Femme Shoes at the RVT, the second of six shows put on there by Wotever about sexual and gender identity and other stuff too often drawn from the personal experiences of the performers themselves. So far there have been two shows Sex Education by Josephine Wilson and this week Stone Femme Shoes by Jet Moon and both shows have blown me away. Their courage to lay it out there for the audience to look at astounds me. Some of the content is raw and it pulls at me in a way that says this is something real not imagined but felt and touched and from the real world.

Josephines' work was personally affecting to me because I could see so many parallels to my own life. It touched me in a way that was immediate and direct. Her open venerability her journey, not quite fitting into the world and searching for that place you can call yourself home reached right in and opened up old wounds I thought long buried, but also fueled a new hope that I could find that place and that even more importantly I wasn't alone. It sounds a little tired I suppose but I refuse to apologise for it, we all want to feel like we aren't the only ones be it hard or easy sharing experience is part of what builds our humanity connects us to each other and the world.

So I came to see Stone Femme Shoes thinking it would be interesting, but not really expecting it to have the same kind of resonance that Sex Education the week before did. I could not be more wrong. It was just as raw, Jet was incredible, allowing us to see her not just unapologetic and powerful but also human and real and breathtakingly honest. She shocked me and shook me made me look at myself and ask what my perceptions of femme were and how had they been affected by my need to be male and my years of suppressing my femaleness. I've been guilty of making femmes invisible in my time, I've overlooked and simplified. I couldn't do that after seeing this show. My perceptions of the femme landscape have been fundamentally changed and I'll admit I am more than a little ashamed with myself for not being smart enough or brave enough to explore this on my own. This show spoke to me or something in me and I really wasn't expecting it to, it's going to take me a while to digest it I think.

These shows so far have been so powerful to me, I think it is so important for people like myself who are asking the kind of questions we are to have people like Jet and Josephine to share themselves like this, they comfort and disturb, give us answers and questions. I am so looking forward to the shows to come and do so hope that these shows aren't a one off and that more people get a chance to see these and that I get a chance to see them again!

Small Steps

So today, I have registered on a transgender noticeboard, approval still pending. It is a small step into a place where I may be able to talk about things I am thinking and feeling and seeing what other people have to say and think about themselves. I have noticed a plethora of subgroups within the wider transgender umbrella and I find myself wondering what subgroup do I fit into? In my very basic understanding of the whole definition thing I believed I would come under transgender which I do but that covers all kinds of people that I am also not, so what am I?

More investigation is obviously required. Do I really need a label? Should I label myself? These feel like questions I should of answered years ago, it feels unfair and in a way childish to be asking them and yet I know ask them I must or i'll never work out what I'm about. It is quietly exciting but also very daunting to find myself at what feels like the begining all over again. Hopefully they will accept my registration and I can find out a bit more.

Beginings are never easy.

Hello out there,

Now where do I start? I was born biologically female, but all my life I have lived in a sort of grey space between genders.

Mostly without even trying I am mistaken for male and I don't really mind to be honest. Sometimes I'm proud of it. Gender to me has always felt kind of fluid, I've never been comfortable in girls clothes, wearing makeup, playing with girl toys. I've always preferred the rough and tumble and directness of boy's I understand their logic, I am comfortable around them.

Girls make me nervous, I don't know how to act around them, I don't seem to understand the verbal or socail cues they expect me to. Maybe that's a result of exposure rather than biology I don't know. Even as a young child I was treated like a boy by other people, people would call me a my father's son etc. I didn't fight that or get upset I embraced it even that young. My mother was a tomboy and saw nothing wrong with my non-girlie behaviour. I am a girl, but not one too maybe that's why I feel out of place.

What this meant as I grew older is that I was left with a question hanging over my head, not just the obvious one that other people asked themselves, is it a man or a woman? But a question in my mind that I have carried with myself all my life, what does this mean to me?

When I was young, in my mind I had no gender I was just me. Admittedly I played superheroes with the boys, not with dolls or my little pony's' but I thought nothing of that. I was different from oher boys physicially, some of those differences frustrated me but generally I could live with them. Funny how looking back and remembering this now accepting that I am of a transgendered nature I get it, I knew the word girl referred to me on some level but in my mind I was a boy which is why puberty was such a shock. My mother prepared me for the whole thing with a detailed chat on what was going to happen but again somehow I just didn't feel like it applied to me. I thought I'd be the way I was forever.

I think could of lived with most things, but the day I started growing breasts was quite possibly the worst day of my life. And as if life had a personal vendetta against me I wasn't one of those girls who was going to always complain about their lack of endowments ( I would of so been happier with that ) I had all the curves not in excess but in abundance. I could no longer deny my gender it was there right in front of me whenever I looked down, and other people could see it too and all of a sudden I was a girl and me no more. I know it must seem a trivial thing, but for me at the age of 10 or 11 it was like my body had rebelled against me, betrayed me. And I began a long walk down the road of ignoring my body, I just simply pretended it wasn't there anymore. I didn't look in mirrors and I didn't look after it.

So now I was a girl in everyone elses eyes I could not deny it, could not blur the lines and slip between like I had before. I was trapped, locked in and without escape. I was put in dresses, sent to an all girls school where I felt very alone. A few girls I met I bonded with because of their boyish nature but we were all girls there and growing up to do what girls do, get married and have kids was what everyone was about. What we were all expected to do and most girls seemed happy with that. They all talked about boyfriends and getting married, how many children they wanted. They also talked about careers and what they wanted to be when they drew up I must add but all of that seemed secondary to the whole meeting a man and getting married bit. For a while I worked on accepting that, there were no alternatives really available to me in that life. I like most young girls accepted that that must be what lifes' all about, but something still nagged at me and I think it must of shown as grew older less and less of the girls I had met there kept my company. I became a loner, not ridiculed or excluded actively, just not sought out for company. I was strange and different and that made them as uncomfortable around me as I was them. Having said that I did still have a great time there, I was sporty and they had loads of sports to keep me occupied and it was a good school. Just this feeling sitting there in the back of myself never left me this, not quite right feeling.

It was also the first place I came across the word lesbian, one girl in my class was teased ruthlesly for being one though at 11 I doubt she actually had made that decision yet. It was more just a word girls could use to be cruel and hurtful to her for not being pretty enough or something. Looking back now I should of actually talked to her about it but I lacked maturity and in my desire to fit in didn't want to start bringing attention to myself by association with her ( sounds terrible I know but these are the thoughts of my childhood ) This did though introduce me to a new type of possibility for my future I started to consider the word homosexual. I learnt the word, what it meant but that was about all. It didn't scare me or shock me it was just something else if anything it felt kinda comfortable in my mind. At this point I should probably mention that I have an incredibly liberal family and this allowed me to find the space to do this at a young age I know there are people out there who don't get the chance to ask these questions until much later and I am deeply grateful for my family.

Then a few years later I had a stroke of luck and we moved my very colonial environment to London, city of opportunity. Where peoples are as diverse and varied as snowflakes. I was terrified.