Monday 30 March 2015

Becoming

It has been a while now since I've posted any sort of developmental progress in my transition. There really hasn't been much of a reason other than not having a good way to get them down on paper or having something else to talk about. While the changes I'm going through now are, at base, the same as I have always been going through they feel different. I am still having physical changes from the hormone replacement and I'm still having emotional changes due to being myself and learning who I am.

Looking back over the last, almost, two years it feels like I had just gone through the entirety of puberty in a matter of a year and now I'm starting to flesh out, to define, the woman I will become. I feel like my developmental age has almost caught up with my actual age. I'm starting to feel more confident and comfortable in my body and I've fallen back in love with my hair which is now past my shoulders. Honestly, I have changed more physically than I thought possibly, especially for someone who had gone through puberty such a long time ago. Even since last writing about any changes what has happened now is on top of that. I've mentioned before how my skin has gotten so much softer, well recently it has gotten softer again, and smoother. I notice different areas around my body that just feel totally different when I touch them. The odd muscle memory that you don't think of, like reaching up to scratch my cheek, is how I notice many of these changes. I touch my face and my muscle memory says "No, this should be more solid and back a few millimeters.".

Speaking of my face, crying has taken on a new feeling. As a tear goes down my face it takes a completely different path than it used to and it feels different on my skin in general. Then when it falls it lands between my breasts and keeps going. That is a completely foreign feeling to me, normally the forest of chest hair would have sucked that up like a towel.

As I have mentioned I am back in love with my hair. Not only has it gotten longer but it is fuller, stronger, shinier, in general more healthy. I guess it could be, and probably partially is, because I am taking care of it better but it was a change that seemed to happen practically overnight. One day after getting a shower and drying my hair I couldn't help but think it felt totally different to me all of a sudden.

With all of these physical changes I think it would have been impossible for them to not affect me emotionally. I feel beautiful. I look at myself in the mirror, or I touch my hair or skin and it brings a smile on my face, a smile of contentment. It's a strangely familiar feeling to me, one I can't place a finger on but it seems to call from my much younger years. I'm not sure if I can sufficiently put into words the feeling that overwhelms you into wrapping your arms around yourself, tilting your head to your shoulder and feeling your own body just to enjoy it, just to bring to memory how wonderful you feel right now both physically and emotionally. It is powerful, and my solitary regret is not having someone around to appreciate it with me. A regret I feel because for whatever reason, the next feeling that comes up with how wonderful I feel now is how much I'd like to share it with someone. That in itself is a feeling I'm not used to having.

Feelings I'm not used to having is something that has become some of a theme for me now. For the majority of my transition so far I have been in situations I have been in many times before. It is good it went that way, and I'm not sure if it wasn't subconsciously on purpose. What it did was allow me to get used to feeling, for the most part, emotions I have had before in situations I have been in before but now through this new lens. As I have mentioned, dealing with the emotional changes is one of, if not the most, tumultuous parts of my, and I would hazard to guess any, transition. The sorting out of base emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, attraction, etc had to be done, no differently than a teen having to sort out there emotions through a tsunami of hormones. I am more comfortable with them now, I can identify which emotion I'm settling on and can deal with it as needs be. Now that I have done this, I'm more capable of taking on more complex emotions. I find myself now defining myself as a woman. I'm collecting emotions and feelings and deciding how I will let them shape me as the person I want to be.

And now it's story time, and I'll describe a host of emotions new to me.

Well, first of all I should say this. As usual, I am about to write about a few people I just gave this website address to. I'm not sure if they actually read this or not, but apparently this is a thing I do. So without further adieu, I'll introduce these people and in the meantime, hope I cause an emotional tear or two to be shed ;)

In a good way. :)

So recently I have been volunteering at our local women's center on a couple of projects. I've met some fantastic women through the center, strong women that anyone could look up to. I certainly do.

Two women in particular, the two I deal with the most, are women I have no other way to describe and have to others in the past, other than super heroes. The amount of work, time, effort and emotional investment these two women put into their day is just staggering. Dwarfed only by the number of people they help and the degree in which they help them.

One of the two is a little older than me. She seems very much like I could picture myself after a few years. Intelligent, thoughtful, wise, patient... and with a seething feistiness you can't help but feel you don't want to see unleashed.

The other is a few years younger than me. She seems very much like the woman I could have been had I only been a woman at her age. Also intelligent, patient, kind-hearted, getting wiser and while she doesn't have a feistiness that is almost palatable you can tell that being on her bad side is analogous to bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Both of these women seem to be doing exactly what they were built for. The amount of advancement and sheer work that needs to be done around women's rights, health and safety requires women just like these two. It was after sitting and talking with them for three hours about what needs to be done, their plans for the future and how I can help that I came across a new set of emotions I hadn't had before.

I was so struck my these two women that they were on my mind for the rest of that day and I thought about them often after that day. What I noticed was how much I admired them, and that made me realize two things. First, it was the first time I could recall truly admiring someone and not having it turn somehow sexual, and second, how I have never had a role model.

Having no role model was something I have had on my mind off and on after my therapist asked me one day if I had any female role models when I was young. My answer was no, not only did I not have a female one, I never once had any sort of role model. I think I could take up an entire post just on the causes of that, but mainly, I never let myself. Honestly, I had no idea what I was denying myself, but at the same time, what choice did I have? How could I have sculpted myself as a woman I admired when I wasn't allowing myself to feel that way, when I was running away from feeling that way?

It may not seem like much, but to me it was a powerful revelation when I realized both of these women could fill that role for me. It was powerful because for the first time I was seeing myself as a real developing woman, I felt like a young girl looking up to these two women in complete awe at who they are. It was a feeling I couldn't help but hold on to and cultivate. It was too new, and felt too natural to let it go. It felt like exactly what I should feel like at this point in my emotional development. It has brought to mind questions and answers (not necessarily linked to each other) about myself that I had never come up with before. To see two women that seem, to me anyway, to be so much like me, or like who I could be, made me feel like a woman, period. It validated my existence as the woman at heart I always thought I was, the same woman that I hid for so many years I forgot who she was.

It is also a powerful thing to see your path laid before you. What has come from knowing these women is seeing that I am on the right path, or at least a good one for me. I no longer feel like I'm screwing up my chance at being the woman I have always wanted to be, for two reasons. One is that my goal seems attainable now, it seems attainable now because I see how I am the emotional "child"  growing into the adult woman who seemed like an unreachable specter in the dark. The other reason is now I know I don't have as far to go as I thought and the road isn't as perilous and impossible as I was certain it was.

I think, if you were to go back to some of my older posts and compare it to this one you would see the difference in levels of emotions I'm talking about. It is strange going through teenage-like development at 36 years old. Strange, and it sucks too for the reason I would have preferred to go through it when I was a teen. With that impossible notion to square though, it is good to have the maturity of an adult to go through my younger years with. I find I have the ability to section out each new feeling and emotion and nurture it as I see fit. And while I don't have the unknown pleasure of having this happen naturally and mostly without my knowledge, like what happens to teens, I do get to watch it happen. Being able to watch it happen, for me as a trans woman, gives me the encouragement to go on. Self encouragement, the hardest but most useful kind to find. I see myself, wading through a new emotion, or new part of myself and I can see the progress. More importantly I can see myself becoming the woman I always wanted to be.

Sunday 15 March 2015

Gay? Right(s)!

Look at me going, two posts in two days.

I'm not sure if everyone has picked this up yet or not, but I live in Canada. And even though her news reporting has little to do with the country I live in I have been watching a fair bit of Rachel Maddow clips on Youtube lately. I guess it's the combination of her delivery and the fact that the USA seems to be totally insane that has me glued to my computer screen. I find her funny, articulate and interested in the same things I am. Thankfully she is a self proclaimed lesbian, (for the love of fuck I hope I didn't make that up) and perhaps because of that she covers a lot of LGBT rights, well I guess mostly LG rights, but I'm not sure how much Trans rights pop up in the US separately from LG rights.

Through her show however, I have seen a lot of the anti-gay garbage that others get on with. As I've said, I live in Canada but as I watch these people go on with their anti-gay rhetoric I can't help but wonder how much longer until government officials in Canada start working anti-gay policies in their agenda. It worries me because I feel like I am watching Canada step backwards in human rights and I'm not utterly convinced that our neighbours to the south aren't influencing some of the..... less cognizant members of Canadian government.

Now I'm not a political science major so I'm not going to try and explain all the details but for my American readers out there, laws in Canada get passed more-or-less like they do in the states. Very basically, a bunch of people have to vote on a bill, it can be amended before passing, etc etc. (holy watered down version...) though our passed federal laws seem to have more direct impact on the entire country then they do in the US, but maybe not... like I said I'm no expert.

Anyway, there has been a bill (law) recently try to get passed here in Canada that was meant to give transgender people more rights, it was going to be a good thing for us, non-discrimination laws and the like. It didn't pass however. It had the full support of one side of our government but a member of the other side added an amendment that basically said that trans-men and women need to use the public bathroom of their assigned sex at birth. Getting the bill labeled "the bathroom bill" and forced supports of the bill to vote against it because they didn't want this in what was going to be a ground breaking bill. I believe something similar has passed, or perhaps is trying to be passed in a few states in the US, or something similar to it. I know this only because I have been considering going to our local mall (yes, yes, I live in a small city) and go hang out in the men's washroom in protest and before I had the chance I was getting plenty of articles of trans men and women doing this exact thing in the US over a similar law.

And just like that, something clicked and my world started to get smaller. Canada has always been looked at as being heavily influenced by America. I have spoken with a few patriots here that would argue differently but the truth is our cultures are very similar and most of our media comes from the US. Most of our TV channels here are US based and therefore carry US news, I have no numbers but I would have to say the vast majority of TV shows in general are US based. And when you influence a people, you influence their government.

For example, apparently the Canadian government has found it prudent to give tax breaks plus direct funding to an anti-gay group here in Canada called "Crossroads Christian Communications Inc." Thankfully Canada does have fairly solid discrimination laws and after it was found out that Canada was supporting this group the government had to investigate. But therein lies a problem. Yes they stopped funding for the investigation (I cannot find any updates) but the problem is they would have never stopped if the public didn't stumble upon what was happening. Just to be clear, this group had on their website statements like homosexuality and transvestism are sins equivalent to pedophilia and bestiality and are sinners that need to repent. They were taken down when they realized the public's eyes were starting to focus on them. Their views weren't a secret beforehand and the government still thought it a good idea to fund them.

Thanks to shows like Rachel Maddow and you know, being alive, I have heard every possible explanation of why someone is anti-gay. Everything from homosexuals being pedophiles to ruining the fabric of our society to abominations that are against gods will. These people face pro-gay rights with the certainty and smugness of moral superiority. They are firmly in the position that they are correct and you are somehow blind to the truth and you need to change to fit their description of the world.

That is really all it comes down to, they want to shape the world to fit what they are comfortable enough with to let go of their security blankets. When I started this post I had planned on inserting a couple of statistics I could find, like how the divorce rate is a full percentage lower for homosexuals then for heterosexuals, or how that there is zero evidence that suggests that pedophilia and homosexuality are linked at all. I heard the opposite spewed from bigot mouths on many occasions and I thought it would be useful to have those stats here as "proof". The problem is, these people are immune to logic. No one has ever convinced one of these sort of people by trying to talk sensibly to them. So unfortunately there seems to be little left to say to them. They have removed themselves from the conversation by essentially putting thing fingers in their ears and screaming "la la la" over and over.

Do you know what is a powerful deterrent though? Something everyone in the LGBT community is all too familiar with? Public ridicule. Now I know, it feels like we would be sinking to their level by doing this, and I would caution against it but I think it is time. It is time we stop fulfilling the victim role exactly how they want us to, constantly defensive and emotional, because it is so personal to us. We need to climb on top of our moral high ground and start glaring back. Their arguments center around violence, trying to change people, trying to impose your will on someone is violence. Our argument centers on peace, allow us to live our lives without persecution. Instead of getting defensive or hurt when someone says these anti-gay things to you, instead of that, laugh at them. Laugh at them like they are trying to have a serious discussion about Elvis still being alive and well and having margaritas with Jimmy Hoffa in Argentina.

We give them ammunition when we play their silly game. The constant back and forth they want to get everything tied up and clouded in until no one is sure what we're talking about any more. Think about it, when someone approaches you with anti-gay speech you feel compelled to give in to their trolling and get into the fight they just picked. Now if someone were to seriously say, "You know, people who drive red sports cars have huge penis's" you'd look at them with an ill-concealed look of "wtf?" on your face. That's exactly how we should treat these anti-gay children. Give them no ground for purchase, blow them off like the obscurity in history they are destined to be.

Saturday 14 March 2015

My World

I've been thinking about this post for a long time now, a month or more I would say. I feel like I have come to a point where I'm not sure what else to say. I feel like I have been saying more or less the same things over and over just in a different way and quite honestly, I have gotten somewhat bored of it.

What I never get bored of is thinking. I get frustrated with it, I get angry or depressed with it even but I never stop. This is something I have been thinking about in relation to me and nothing else for several months, it is only the last few months that I have been thinking about how to make this a post.

It started when talking to a friend, the conversation was about me specifically and how I was feeling. It was all in good intentions and went something like this.

Friend: "Yadda yadda"
Me: "blah blah"
Friend: "As long as you feel like a woman then it'll be ok."

Now without getting into where that came from, and through no reason of it being said by this person, I couldn't help but think about that statement non-stop. And the question I kept asking myself was a simple one, in form if nothing else. "What do you mean 'feel like a woman'?"

That question has been the focal point of my journey as a trans-woman ever since I knew I wanted to be a woman. I would think to myself constantly that if I were meant to be a woman, or later when I knew the label for it, if I am transgender then there should be something intrinsic about me that is definitively female. I searched my inner self high and low, and over two decades and have only found the question to be a non-starter. The test that every seemingly good answer always failed to pass was, "Is this feeling I have ONLY able to be had by a woman."

The answer to that is of course, "No.". To be the person I am, to be real followers of the values the majority of the LGBTQ2 world seems to profess and I certainly do, I simply cannot believe there is a single one thing that either gender exclusively feels. How sexist to suggest otherwise, wouldn't you agree?

But I've come to see how I live in a perfect world, largely because I spend 90% of my time alone. Not because I'm perfect (lol) but because everything in a world that consists of 90% me is something I clearly mostly agree with. The real world doesn't seem to fully accept this spectrum. Now I'm sure these people have their hearts in the right place, the problem tends to come when the spectrum doesn't work for them. I'll try to explain...

An increasingly large amount of the population is started to see gender and sexuality as a spectrum. I think one could argue a circle, but I'm not going to try that here. Essentially you have male and hetero on one side female and hetero on the other and people fall somewhere in between that. Now in my world people don't care where other people fall in that spectrum. In my world anyone can be who they want to be, love who they want to love, use which bathroom they want to use. Sorry, not "don't care" that's too harsh for my world, people love the fact that you are being you in my world.

In the real world however, a lot of people do get upset if you are something they don't agree with, you can only love certain people and who goes to which bathroom is up for debate. The problem, as I see it, is people lump all of these things together when it comes to fighting for rights. Where people get very emotional and defensive when you try to tell them how they can dress or look or who they are allowed to love, and with understanding. These are the sort of things that are absolutely not up for debate. These are the sort of things that is no one else's business like who or how you fuck. With these, case closed, move along, nothing to see here as far as I'm concerned. Because in my world gender and sexuality isn't something you try to hide from the world, it is something you try to bring to the world, something every human being needs to cherish about themselves.

The other questions though, like who can go where, I'm far more uncertain. The public washroom question is one that seems like I can't think about fairly because I always simply fall on "who really cares"? Clearly some people do but I can't think of a sensible argument that they may be correct so I can't come up with sensible reasoning that could convince these people.

Honestly, that is a problem I have for most of these questions, the Wiccan Rede is the perfect answer, "Harm none, do what ye will." But let me talk about a problem that I had to try to solve in the real world and honestly, didn't. Now honestly my answer would have affected nothing, I'm not in that sort of position, but there was a point that it came to me to figure out.

I was talking with two friends of mine, we were getting together to talk about a workshop we were going to do with the women's center in my city. We ended up talking about inclusion, who would/is accepted in a woman's center? We didn't know the answer, and sadly I didn't find out through no fault but my own from not asking yet. (something I will have to do)  But we had a little brainstorming session. I won't get into our talk but I will explain my thinking on the whole situation.
I looked at it this way. Let's go down the list of who is and isn't included, so we start with women, obviously women are welcome in a women's center. Next is trans-women, which as far as we knew were also welcome. I guess we skipped over gender neutral (sorry) and next was trans-men, we honestly had no answer for this, were they already welcome, should they be and should we convince a center to? And then there is men who aren't welcome. My inner question is, where is the dividing line between trans-men and men? I sort of defaulted to how the trans-men feel about it because I have no idea, really. This is where the spectrum gets complicated and sometimes works against us. And by work against us, I mean it doesn't work in our immediate favour. Nothing but good can come from getting the entire population to accept and fully understand this spectrum.

Why should trans-men be welcome? I couldn't help but think about being in the opposite situation. If there were such a thing as a "Men's center" and they were to say they welcome trans-women I would actually be insulted, profoundly insulted. Honestly, asking myself where the dividing line between trans-men and men felt insulting. Imagine if someone were to ask me, "Where do you think the dividing line between women and trans-women is?" I'd probably go ballistic. If a Men's center was welcoming trans-women I would think they should be welcoming cis-women. Therefore, the opposite seems to make sense to me as well. If you allow trans-men in a women's center, then you should allow men. To say other wise feels to me to be insulting to the trans community as a whole. You are basically saying, while trying to be helpful, you aren't entirely a man and you're close enough to a woman to be allowed. I would chew on a cinderblock if someone said the opposite to me.

I guess I could come up with a working decision if I ran such a place and had to make it myself, but since I don't I have yet to answer this question in any sort of meaningful existential way. I can't answer this question for the same reason I can't answer the question I started with. Where is this line that everyone wants to draw? What are these feelings that are absolutely male or female? I feel like the world is locked in the binary frame of mind simply by giving weight to those questions because I think a lot of people think they have answers. People seem to think too small, they think of one or two hyper examples and assume the rest falls into place. We know the real world isn't like that at all. The real world consists of every option you can think of and they are ALL valid.

I feel like I am example of how much harm these absolute questions with no answers caused. When I was trying to figure myself out in my young years I knew nothing about the world, all I knew was what was around me. What was around me, especially back then, was a constant barrage of binary gender and sexual do's and don'ts. This works for most people because most people are cis-hetero but when you aren't one of those people, the pressure of this imposed binary becomes your cage. When your gender becomes a question, because for most it never is questioned, you have nothing to look at for answers but the ocean of possibilities within your own heart and mind. All I had was this whimsical desire to shed the body I was in and don a new one. I couldn't place my feelings in boxes labelled "male" and "female"

And that's it, that's all I can come up with. The only thing I can equate "feeling like a woman" to is how I feel about how people view me. I can't say "I'm a woman because I feel pretty.". "Pretty" has no gender, it's just a word, but I can say I love how I feel when someone tells me I look pretty. (female being implied) It is the person who I present to others that makes me feel like a woman everything else is just "me".

I guess I spend a lot of time thinking about how the world around a trans-person affects them because I feel deeply affected by it myself particularly when I was young. That's why I have invented my world. In my world there is no gender or sexual pressure on kids, or anyone really. I feel no need to keep sex away from children, in fact I have always found it suspect when people say we can't show kids sexual material but encourage them to violence. (and then wonder why violence is sexualized, sigh) The more comfortable our entire culture becomes with gender and sexuality the easier these young people will find it do discover themselves. Imagine a world where 100% of the children grow up not just being ok with, but being confident in their sexuality and knowledgeable of the sexuality of others. Once that generation grows up we will have law makers, civil servants, volunteers, doctors and their patients, etc etc that would have no need for questions like "what bathroom should a certain group use?". Gendered bathrooms, change rooms, clothing, toys would become a thing of the past, a relic of the "old way we used to think."

Then maybe, just maybe, I could welcome you all to my world.