Reversal

After an unintended 6 week break from updating, I'm back and hopefully will be posting a little more frequently. Part of what took up a lot of my time these past few weeks was moving to a new apartment. Even though I was only moving around the corner, the move still took up a lot of my time.

Whenever I move, the issue comes up about how to move my clothes. My family has helped out with many of my moves but because of their negative feelings about my transgender identity, I've always had to try to hide my clothes in some way. The increasing size of my wardrobe has only made hiding things more difficult. To avoid this issue and because the move was only a short distance in town, I decided to ask my friends for help and avoid having to ask my family for help.

A couple of friends were able to help but because of shenanigans with the apartment management and lousy weather, my parents ended up coming to town for the afternoon to help me finish moving. This necessitated a change in clothing.

I have lived as a woman for over 9 months now and in that time, few if any of my friends have even seen me dressed as a man. After I changed clothes, my friend couldn't stop staring at me and said it was so strange to see me dressed as a man again.

Being seen by other people for the first time dressed as a woman or man is an important step in the life of any transgender person. This was the first time I experienced what I would describe as a "reversal" of this situation and had someone be so used to and comfortable with me as a woman that she was surprised to see me dressed as a man.

I hope this will be the only time I experience a "reversal" like this!

Wardrobe Discussion

I'm visiting my family for the weekend and as I was chatting with my mom this evening, we began to talk about my degree progress and how things will probably go for the next couple of years. We discussed how comps and the dissertation will generally go and also talked about the possibility of applying for jobs in the Fall. For the last couple of years, I have been suffering repeated sinus infections, which seem to be much more intense and frequent where I currently live than any other place I've lived before, so improving health would be one of many benefits of getting a job and moving somewhere else sooner rather than later. My mom then said that when the time comes for applying for jobs, she feels that I need a new wardrobe. A male wardrobe. I couldn't bring myself to tell my mom that I don't plan on wearing male clothes for my interviews.

I feel that situations like this will only continue to increase in the future and I'm uncertain how to deal with them. Do I allow my parents to pay for new clothes for me that I don't intend to wear in order to not upset our relationship? I'm torn about decisions like this because I want to enjoy my relationship with my family for as long as I can but I also don't plan to stop living as a woman. I've been trying to balance my relationship with my family and my need to be who I am, and everything has been going very well. But I'm not sure I want my parents spending money on expensive clothes like dress shirts and suits that I don't intend to wear.

Fortunately, the "wardrobe situation" won't be an issue for a while so I have some time to consider my options.

An "Easy" Change

Yesterday, I was watching TV with my mom and we ended up watching some of Sarah Palin's appearance on Oprah. At one point, Palin made a comment related to abortion being "easy" and I said that I disliked people characterizing abortion as "easy" because it gives the impression that it's something that women just choose to do on a whim, that it's not a difficult decision that people struggle with.

While my mom did agree with that, she said she still feels that abortion is easy compared to dealing with the consequences of getting pregnant, either by keeping the baby or giving it up for adoption. She said she felt that as a society we don't want to deal with the consequences of our actions anymore; if there's something about our life that we don't like, we want to just change it instead of dealing with the things that happen to us. If something interferes with our life or the way we think our life should go, we want to just change it.

I do think women should be told all of their options when they get pregnant but I also believe that safe, legal abortions should be available to women who choose to have them. Getting rid or abortions or making them illegal isn't going to stop them from happening, it's just going to make them more dangerous and potentially deadly for the women who choose to have them, as they were before Roe v. Wade.

On a more personal note, my mom's comments got me to thinking about how they would apply to me. I can easily see her arguing that wanting to dress and live as a woman is me seeking an easy change because I can't handle being a man who's a little different. I'm not happy being a man so I'll just change and be a woman. Staying a man would be me dealing with my situation and becoming a womann would be me avoiding the situation by looking for an easy answer. While I don't agree that living as or becoming a woman is "easy," my mom's comments helped me understand her feelings better.

Thanksgiving and the holidays

I'm currently at my parent's home for Thanksgiving. We will be having Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparent's house tomorrow with most of my family. I love my family and enjoy spending time with them. We get along well and I am thankful to have such a strong relationship with my family but as I've often written about on this blog, times like this always make me very aware of the differences in our feelings about who I am as a transgender person.

The holidays in the past have always made me acutely aware of my feelings but I feel it's going to be especially hard this year because I feel I've made very important strides in understanding and expressing who I am as a transgender woman in the past year. I am now living almost entirely full-time as a woman and I am beginning to explore the possibility of becoming a woman through hormone treatment and surgery. The only time I'm not a woman is when I am with my family.

They are still unable to accept that I am transgender. They firmly believe that crossdressing is wrong and they have a very definite image of who I am, an image that doesn't include being a woman. So whenever I am with them, I feel like I once again have to hide an important part of who I am.

Some of the decisions I will be making in the future will make it more difficult to hide that I am a woman; I don't know how they will react to these decisions so next Thanksgiving they may not want to see me at all.

For now, I'm going to be thankful for what I have, time to spend with my family and the freedom to be who I am when I'm not with them, and worry about the future later.

Ripping the band-aid off

I went home today to celebrate my sister's birthday and every time I go home, I leave feeling stressed and upset.

I love my family and we get along for the most part but the more I move toward becoming a woman, the more I feel like there's an 800-pound gorilla on my shoulders weighing me down every time I see my family. The disconnect between who I am and who they see me as/want me to be is growing larger all the time.

I had hoped to talk to my sister today to feel out if she might be a potential ally in the family but I didn't get the chance. I had hoped to show her pictures of my Halloween costume as a way of gauging her feelings about crossdressing in general, since Halloween is sort of "safe" since everybody dresses up as unusual things for Halloween, but her computer was running too slow to load the pictures before my parents got there. And a couple of things my sister said while I was there made me question if she could even be supportive. Right after we sat down to eat lunch, she made the comment that my hair is too long and I need to get it cut. Then after I mentioned a woman's name, she asked if I liked her and after I said she was married, she asked if I have a girlfriend and if there's anyone I like. Finally, when we were playing a board game later, she said my fingernails were too long.

To me, these comments make it apparent that my sister has a very particular view of me as an average, if someone quiet and nerdy, guy and I don't know how easily being a woman will fit in this view. It doesn't mean she couldn't be supportive of my decision but it does give me pause about discussing the subject with her.

This is the disconnect that I mentioned before between my family's view of me and the truth. And I'm all alone in dealing with this disconnect; my parents want to ignore it or just hope it will go away and the rest of my family doesn't know about it at all. Trying to deal with this all on my own often leaves me frustrated and upset.

Sometimes I feel guilty about how nice and generous my family is to me, questioning if I even deserve it; if they knew that I want to be a woman, would they still be nice to me? At other times, I feel angry about having to hide who I really am. And many times I feel the same at once.

I sometimes feel like just ripping the metaphorical band-aid off and dealing with the consequences because that would be a lot better than trying to hide an 800-pound gorilla.

Halloween

Halloween is often called a crossdresser's favorite holiday but that isn't the case for me.

First, I want to say that I do like Halloween, it's just not my favorite holiday. I have a serious sweet tooth so I always enjoyed trick or treating and getting a lot of candy! My favorite Halloween candy is Brach's mellowcreme pumpkins which, for those who don't know, are basically pumpkin-shaped candy corn. I also enjoy Hershey's almost annual special Kisses; I like this year's Candy Corn Kisses but I loved last year's Pumpkin Spice Kisses and hope they'll bring them back sometime. I also do enjoy dressing up in a costume but because I have the opportunity every few months to cosplay at an anime convention, Halloween isn't the only day out of the year that I get to wear a costume.

One of the main things I don't like about Halloween is getting scared. I don't like horror movies and could do without the 5 million commercials we get for them on TV at this time of year. I also don't like haunted houses or anything else that involves being scared so one of the main attractions for many people on Halloween isn't something I'm interested in.

After my sister and I outgrew trick or treating, it became my family's tradition on Halloween to turn off all the lights in the house, get the bowl of my Mom's chocolate spiders and sit down to enjoy a non-scary Halloween movie. Occasionally we'd watch something like Frankenstein or Bride of Frankenstein but the main movie we'd watch each year was Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I still have fond memories of that film and will be on the lookout for it on the movie channels each Halloween. I've continued the tradition on my own by watching a movie around Halloween, usually Young Frankenstein or The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Even without enjoying being scared, most crossdressers still say Halloween is their favorite holiday because it's the one time each year that they can go out in public en femme. As a kid, I had a strong desire to dress up as a girl in some way every year but I was never allowed to because my parents were so against it. I only started dressing en femme at Halloween in college after I had already become more open about being transgender. So Halloween always led to a feeling of disappointment instead of being the one occasion where I could be free to be who I am.

Also, as I take my first steps toward becoming a woman, I am dressing full-time so being able to dress en femme in public is not a unique thing that I can only do at Halloween.

I do still enjoy Halloween and am looking forward to the party I will be attending this year but, unlike many other crossdressers and transgender people, Halloween isn't my favorite holiday.

On Hold...

Well, a new semester is almost here.

Things haven't gone exactly how I had planned. The summer was excellent. The students were great and seemed to very easily accept me for who I am. They seemed to have no problem accepting me as a man who wears women's clothing. Even the one student who got very upset about receiving a bad grade on an assignment never made any reference, to my face, about how I was dressed.

I was able to enjoy four wonderful weeks of dressing the way I want to everyday, and I am going to cherish the memory of that time. It showed me that I can do it, that I can be who I am and not have to constantly worry about what other people are going to think.

Now...family issues have led me to decide to put dressing full-time on hold. This is not a permanent decision, just a temporary one as I work through some issues. I want to preserve the positive memories of dressing full-time this summer and not have paranoia destroy the positive experience I had. But who knows. in six months I may say "Screw it! I can't take this anymore!" and start dressing full-time again. We'll see...

What does this mean for this blog?

Well, as you can see from the long period of time between the first post and this second post, I'm not the most frequent updater. I don't know if you can really call something with two entries a blog. But for now, I hope to continue this blog. Though I may not be dressing full-time, I'm still a transgender woman struggling her way through academia. Instead of being a record of my personal journey, it may begin to focus more on my research.

I don't know if I even have any readers yet or not (probably not) but I guess we'll see where this goes.