Valentine's Day extra note for married genderqueer couples

the missus and I went shopping and she purchased a cute purple dress from Target. She picked the purple over the other colors, and I always defer to her taste when shopping, because to share one's clothes is as intimate as any other human expression. Also, we've devoted ourselves to having more sex.

Can anyone say: Best wife ever!

Winter fun

My weekend conference was a tedious success (however, the my wife and I had a great, productive, fight in our hotel room) and now I'm in DC for less glamorous conference on composition in undergraduate studies. Yawn. However, I'm on the company dime and enjoying the snow. Alas, no gender bending fun save for my hotel room. And am bored without the missus. Currently on a Fringe season one marathon. Good show. BTW...I'm discussing writing about gender in Shakespeare's plays...(he's the original modern trans personality).

I need advice

I have ordered my first batch of hormones, low dosage, for experimental reasons. Shrink approved.

Want to see how it affects my emotional center.

For all you transitioning peeps:

I think I have to do it...it's like a crawling vine over my brain. All I can think about. Not always positive. I feel like it will consume me.

Why is self acceptance so hard? I feel like my Neurotransmitters are fucking with my heads

Relate?

Just need some feedback

long time gone

Hey all, I've been following you and remaining silent for these last few weeks. Things have been great and things have been...well drab. Wifie and I have shopped, and bonded over girlie things and she has been encouraging me to develop a female personae, however as a private venture only.

Believe me, as a 6'4 200 lb t-girl I get that without radical, possibly unhealthy dieting and hormone regiments I'm not very passable. It does get me down, but I get back up...

At the small community college where I work a student of mine is getting breast reduction surgery to become more androgynous. We have the same trans issues, and chat about them freely. Each is privately freaked out about transitioning but yet cannot let the idea go...

anyway... if you haven't seen Wonder Boys, check it out. There is a gorgeous tall brunette cd/tg transwoman in the first half...the rest of the movie is brilliant.

I wish you all well

Cass

Combined Gender Identity and Transsexuality Inventory

Take the COAGTI test here.

See how transgendered you are...well at least almost. Keep in mind girls that these tests aren't 100% accurate and you'd be better off seeing a therapist and taking it under supervision.

I score 190...probable transsexual.

Sounds about right

Socio-Politico-Personal Ramble On

So a few things over the last year or so that clarified for me as a crossdresser and a transgendered person: accessories make/break a casual outfit (I prefer femme, professional girly), Great shoes elevate any outfit, even sweats. And I’m much more comfortable in traditional female roles than I am in traditional male roles.

Like many of you I began to dress young and as I grew older (and after many purges) the urge and need to dress grew, to the point you have to own up to being what you are, which is gender variant. And even though I have been doing this for so long, the field is always turning over and over, and sometimes the old roots peek out.

I can’t help but think the trans-political movement the zeitgeist, or at least one that is occurring on a less mainstream culture. A mini-zeitgeist. Cute. In the last hundred years our masculine America has seen great social progress: women, African-Americans, Homosexuals, and now Transgenders have fought and are fighting for basic rights. The male America is shrinking, as is its white population. A social revolution is quietly occurring and we bear witness. The world gene pool is trending to a more mixed population, which is essential for long-term survival. Think: mutts are less prone to debilitating genetics than pure-bred dogs. Gender and other social constructions will also trend towards an androgynous style. And along with it sexuality and attitudes about sexuality and race.


Nuff said. Time to dance.

Check out T rock group Blind Dog Wanders and a smart diva dance pop Lady Gaga

For those interested in new summer music to rock out to check out Blind Dog Wanders on myspace music.

An eclectic sound, based on guitarist Laura Gonzales' songwriting, BDW channel the driving rhytyhms of prog rock, and on "the Light" middle eastern/Indian grooviness. The vocals are lovely. It will be very satisfying to watch this group mature.

Too bad I don't live in LA to see them live. Oh yeah, they look great, too.

For those who are seeking new tunes to dance away to summer nights...check out Lady Gaga...whose working class roots and hard-nose business sense + high glam= the new Madonna...(Brittany Spears was supposed to be the new Madge...but Gaga has the creative vision in spades, plus the working class/cut your teeth in the clubs history Brit lacks).

She also likes boys who look like girls. Read about it here.

A sigh

Personally ladies, this spring has been good, but psychically rough. Like it or not I am/was a latent trans woman, like many of my generation, mostly because of socio-political-technological reasons. Transwomen/men today benefit so much from the internet. Not that it is an excuse, but growing up in such a kudzu culture... it took me a while.

Geez, if I were a teenager now, dealing with these same issues, my life would have a different arc.

That's not to say my life to date isn't valid...it is. But everyone else views your lifestyle as a choice, not necessity. You know that ennui, trans people, how there's that fuzzy, gauzy past, our past sexuality, our past identity, past whatever, that exists, that acts as a standard to the growth of the trans personae, the true personae.

Regardless...a friend asked me today "What do you want from this self?" It was an old friend, a straight friend. "What does this voice sound like?" He meant the tone...and all I could say was aggressive, confident, proud.


And I thought about that. And what that meant.

And I hadn't thought about what I wanted, I was just too busy being me for the first time.

I came up with an answer, that may change...




My hobby is mirror.

Lipstick, rouge and heel
peel back my skin and skull cap
and like a goddess spring forth
into my bathroom,
my smoke ring
like a laurel
upon my gigantic pretty head.
From lips smack truth,
pink, or brown, or fuck hot red,

and black, deep pitch, and yes, I suppose

I am a freak
and showed up at the wrong address, the wrong party,
my real body somewhere else
doing whatever manila chore it does when it isn’t with me.
‘cause I mean who wouldn’t
want to be with me?

I be illusion, drum, and wail
give me a scarf I can make seas sick
with my pitch and bob.

And so what? The stork is not a smart bird,
after all, I am not weak, and though my smile
makes you sick, some clown
in a dress, some perv with the nerve,
you say, I am iron, to reforge myself,

to be iron is to destroy stone.







Note: Manila is meant to recall vanilla. Lately my girlie self has been more...aggressive...thus the diva turn in tone towards the end. In my small town I am very aware of how most stones (trans-phobics) react to difference. Down here, from my porch, I better be ready to back it up.

Ciao!

National Poetry Month: Maxine who was once Max

This poem was written by an aquaintance of mine, a fellow writer and psychology teacher, Scott Whitaker. I saw him read in December and he read this as well as few other gender related poems.

As usual trying to find GLBT realted writers or poems to celebrate National Poetry Month.


MAXINE WHO WAS ONCE MAX

What she has become is a bridge between.
O hormone, O facial cream, dream after dream after dream.
For her it is fingernail, warm belly, shaping with corset
What nature has given her into beauty, rather than the casket
Form she was born into; for the whalebone ship
Sets her bones true. Her heart speeds across
The figure in the mirror, returns and admires
The reflection that has come far from its pallor,
From brickyard and from country songs and docks,
Where she once held herself up to be no more than a fish
Swimming tight circles in a pool beyond touch.
She has given up her name for this. It has taken much.
There is no better feeling than this
Leaving one world and stepping into the next.



You can look at the T-shirt here.

Personal notes

For the last twelve days, I have felt an enormous feminine pull, however the feelings were internal, and not focused/worried about on my exterior feminine wiles. Example: it's as if my brain is playing some video game where you get to play the true you, and you get to watch yourself on screen. My poor male image of myself has been supplanted by a feminine one.

Any thoughts?

Fireflies. Moon. Darkness.

--note this book is a quick read--unfortunately it was one book I kept putting down and then getting distracted from finishing--thus the delay in the review.



Liam waxes and Luna wanes and poor old Regan must witness, like a far away star that the moon has enticed to supper

Chemistry? Why did it have to be about chemistry? Regan cries in Julie Ann Peters’ young adult drama Luna, Regan whose heart is burdened by her brother, Liam’s, secrets, as Liam transitions into Luna, which threatens to pull the entire family’s life ordinary blah blah suburbia into chaos.

Peters adopts the last tenants of macho suburbia as the blueprint for Liam’s home life: go talk to the coach, son, let’s re-build a Volkswagen, son, date pretty girl, son etc., a blueprint I recognize from the 80s and 90s, and which no doubt persists today, hopefully a little less macho than it once was, I think, for much of that macho-ness is a hand-me down from be-a-man-disease from the 1950s, which slowly erodes away as younger men become fathers. Younger men who hold on to macho-ness a little less tightly, I think. Not Liam’s Dad, though, unfortunately for Liam’s Dad, Liam has discovered the internet, and that he’s transgendered.

Oh, Liam’s known since he pined for a bra when he was twelve. During one of Regan’s slumber party Liam edged his way to the slumber party floor, where his toenails were painted by Regan’s friends and Luna slipped out, just so much. All he wanted was to just do his toes and talk, you know, be a girl. All he has ever wanted. And now older, he has vocabulary, now, he has trans friends, albeit virtual, and they, be their existence, give Luna permission to grow.

First there was Liam, then Lia Marie, the slow moth cocoon of Luna, only a silky nub. As Liam ages the truth of his nature grows, and Liam becomes only a shell as Luna struggles with going out in public, wigs, and coming out to Dad (Mom’s an after thought in this—a shadow of a pill user), and avoiding a black hole of depression.

Peters nails the issue from all sides, the pain, the burden of the secret-keeper, the parent’s self-serving fog, the consciousness enlarging experience of cross dressing—the high of stepping into a new identity. Peters even nails the revulsion stones feel when they encounter a trans person. Trans people are freaks to everyone else, the stones; the clerks quiver, jocks hate, an older man stalks them at Taco Bell. Regan is witness and protector. Secret keeper and soul guardian.

The book is really about Regan and the hazards Luna’s secret wreck upon her life. She’s a loving sister that deserves her own life, only Luna’s life is too big for one person, and Regan is almost swallowed up.

Which is why the novel is so haunting, because you want all this little family to just tune into each other and open up. Dad is too gender blind to see that his son is anything but a regular boy, Mom too career blind to notice. And Liam (and I mean Luna in boy mode) is so freaking eager to be the dutiful daughter it made my stomach ache. Of course no one allows him to partake in these roles, only Regan, who allows Luna into her bedroom at night to do her make-up and play with wigs and pose in the mirror. It’s a beautiful mess, beautiful in the way dying stars are beautiful, because Luna’s emotional scars are palpable.

For trans teens there is no easy solution to the pain. If everyone were more tolerant then Luna would have found herself earlier, perhaps, but this is not the case. The paperback version includes a discussion group for teens and adults, which was a happy find. The very fact this book was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young Adult Fiction is happy news indeed.

Come As You Are

Nirvana broke when little ole me was a freshman in college. I remember wearing hose under my jeans to a party the week Nevermind exploded. If memory serves I humiliated myself by telling my secret to two hot girls who got kicks out of my drunken twin gender ramblings.

Everytime Kurt appeared in a dress it felt right. Nevermind him passing, the fact he allowed his energies and essences to mix was what was important.

Guilty as charged: sexual arousal while dressing

To say that I get aroused while dressed is an understatement.

However 9 times out of 10 my arousal is less sexual and more personality-centered.

Last night, after several glasses of champagne and much senseless Facebooking with old friends, I tottered around in my 3 inch sexy sandals and found myself eager for some sexual action.

My orientation is straight-bisexual. Let me explain. I am attracted to women. I am not attracted to men, however I fantasize about being the love interest of men. Yeah, figure that out.

Oh. I've experimented before, and always it was enjoyable, but I've never been in love with a man. Never. The few flings I've had never lasted longer than the event...no crush, no strings, no attachment. When I'm out and about it's the ladies I'm looking at, for fashion, for sexual pleasure.

When my wife was pregnant with our children she told me to get porn, the playboy channel, read erotica, call a phone sex operator, just don't fuck around. And she closed up shop for 12 months (w/r/t the second child she closed up for 18 months...yes 18 months w/out sex will make anybody whacky). Perhaps it was the booze, but last night I found myself calling a phone sex service, not for fantasy, but just to talk about crossdressing, submission, and the various sexual fantasies I've had over the years. It was fun, but frivolous and stupid. Like I could use that cash back, but it didn't break the bank, and it was as expensive as a shrink session. So be it.

I bring this up not for kinky confession, but to address the issue that crossdessing and transgenderism is sexual. It is erotic and arousing. Sometimes we deny that when we try to intellectualize our experience.

Transgenderism is a wide and wonderful ride.

Pleases Me Much

Sculpt. Shape. Carve. Dress. Paint.

Pleases me, it does, to mold into an image
That defies slump and wrinkle,
As if an old man who after 65 years didn’t have the courage
Or confidence to speak his mind
Finally got up from the kitchen table and told his wife
He wanted to quit his job and be a sculptor.

Pleases me it does to sober the frame into something challenging,
The curve of the back sure,
Legs attached to feet
Which balance and flirt in high heels.

This invention pleases me much,
As any whimsical touch
Be it a brush,
Or the feel of a woman’s suck,
Or a delicate wine and steak high
Or echoing starry trumpet notes of children running round.

Creative Non-fiction part one

Correcting My Walk

I.

The boy stares in the mirror: the posters on the ceiling stretch back behind him like tall oversexed flowers whose elongated backward faces pull his eyes away from his fists, which pump at his side.

“You should practice,” his mother had said after they finished their walk. She offered him water, he wanted soda. “Make you fat,” she sighed as she pulled the glass from the cabinet and gave it to him to fill, as if to say make your choice.

She had made the suggestion as they had walked round the highway at the back end of the hospital, the oaks fat with serum, and plump crows. “Pump your arms, or your fists, and don’t put your feet in front of each other.”

The boy had only blinked back. He couldn’t see what she was talking about, as if what he was looking for was just out of his line of sight, as if it floated under him like a jellyfish under a boat.

“And don’t put your feet in front of each other,” She added, working extra hard, walking extra fast, looking back over her shoulder as if to say, hurry up.

He nodded and trusted his mother, and stared off at the line of crows.

That night he tried to relearn how to walk.

He detested staring at his doughy pale skin. He wished he had a sunburn at least, and instead looked to the ceiling lacquered with posters. And as usual the boy looked beyond the movie posters, beyond the drywall, into the bones of old sleep, in where he once dreamed of being small, lost on a rolling wave of mud, and debris; a wall that eventually overtook him. He looked into the dream as it wormholed into other old bones of his childhood, the first time he was mistaken for a girl, the way the cat had fallen asleep in his arms, the afternoon his mother was so sick she collapsed on the floor, and being so young all he could think to do was run to the door and call for Daddy.

When he looked down his hands were white, his knuckles like eight wrinkled stones.

The boy returned his eye to the mirror, the ceiling above him, and pumped his fists and marched, careful not to alternate his steps, to not move with his hips as his mother had coached.




II.

Sharp spring sunlight arcs through the warm air of my mother’s bedroom
where one by one
the costume pieces slipped, clipped and rolled
in my palms like toy dice.
The Halloween wig upon my head,
the pale red lipstick I stole from the downtown drugstore,
smacked and dabbed on tissues
as my mother and grandmother had done so many Sundays
on their way out the door.

Sun & heat floated the air.

At that moment, in my mother’s nightgown and heels,
the world became a hot wine glass, refracting light
and warming skin and voice like balm.

From then on when my parents asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up
I would say anything

But would think only this:
Transforming, existing in sunlight, my skin bristling under fabric and disguises,
the small matters of attending to beauty cluttered about me like dime-store treasure.



III

When spring nights were not so humid and my mother did not have schoolwork to accomplish she bullied me from the basement couch to walk up and down Farmville’s hilly neighborhoods of magnolia lined homes, the sloping green of Longwood’s campus below us like a pool of green felt. And on these walks she began to press upon me the most awkward of talks: sex, girls, pot, self-esteem, the future, all of which was as fuzzy to me as the haze that shimmered upon the blacktop.

“I’d rather you smoke pot, than have sex before marriage.”

She was adamant about this. I didn’t get it because I had done neither, and they had not exacted their gravity upon me yet. If her talks were the sun, I was Pluto. Not paying attention.

And it was upon these walks my mother would try to correct me.

“You swing your arms too much. Don’t walk with one foot in front of the other.”

“What?” I was never listening, usually thinking about Tina Dimocalli, the Filipino girl in my class, whose photo I kissed every night before bed. As if that would make her love me.

“You walk like a dork. Your arms, swinging as they do.” I remember rolling my eyes at her emphasis of “dork.” She continued, breaking into a weird cacophony of elbows and hips and feet that was supposed to be me.

“It’s how everyone else walks.” I said. So she was saying I walked like a spas?

“No it isn’t.”

And so I would try, modeling her graceless gait, only to eventually step back into my own stride, which now memory only rewinds to awkward: lanky, with the light sway of the hips, like a girl, like I was excited to be going somewhere.

View from the box

Whether carapace or quills
growth must occur.

To look in the mirror and be separated
from the body that stares back
erodes all defenses.

The bottling up of the voice that slips between gender
is as old as story itself

as Aesop's hare, who dared the sun
that he could hold his voice longer than the sun could shine,
and in doing so nearly lost his ability to trick his enemies.
He was given a pretty tail instead of his shout
to warn his mates.
Now he relies on speed, luck
and the ability to become as still as sun in midday,
the flash of tail that had once only belonged to the females
of their breed.

Adaptation is underrated, I'm thinking, and outside
the bathroom mirror, the rabbits eat, freeze, eat, and dart.

Like the rabbit I too eat, freeze, eat, and dart.

But the edges of that box are visible to me,
and what lies beyond
is too good to pass up.

A few words about gender dysphoria

Dysphoria (from Greek δύσφορος (dysphoros), from δυσ-, difficult, and φέρω, to bear)

The opposite of euphoria (Dysphoria, Wikipedia.com)

Sisters, misters, those who not know who you are when I began to realize that perhaps my femme feelings and desires were other, I searched high and low for descriptions of gender dypshoria, hoping that to name the thing would be to tame it.

Hoping in my heart that I wouldn’t have it. For to have it is to face looking at the same face in the mirror and wonder, hope and yearn to be other, softer, made of light. Made of goodness.

See I always thought it meant you felt trapped in a woman’s body.

Which I have not felt.

Or that one hated their genitals.

Which I definitely did not. Let me assure you.

But dysphoria manifests itself in anxiety. Once while at work I looked down at my fingers typing and at once they were bathed in light and became the hands of a woman. Nails, polish, hairless, and pretty.

Like porcelain.

Like the very sunlight itself.

The hallucination/vision lasted only seconds, but the impression remains with me to this day.

Once I stared at a girl’s painted toes as she played with her mule. The mall noise became river water over stones. And for a second I felt her skin, as if my skin had somehow become the vehicle for her sensation.

Oh, to allow your consciousness to spread beyond the male body is holiness.

Is sex.

Is a painted lady.

Is a sculpture.

Home from work early

And you know what that means...

sporting my new shoes (fab)

and my two fav skirts

along with my fav sweater.

Oh yes, guitar, and singing


The blue gypsy skirt cost me 2.50 at the thrift store and the shoes 25.99 during the big Amazon Women's Shoe Sale a bit back. It's hard to find size 15 in the Goodwill.

The pearls were a freebie from the thrift store. The cashier smiled at me when I oohed and ahhed over the baubles. She winked and tossed them in. Sometimes it's great being T

Oscar Blah

My back has been barkin' all week. You know what that means? Grumpy Momdy. All the tea and beer in the south could lighten my demeanor. However reading all of my mister-sisters/and signified others who roll around in trans like it was fur have kept my spirits up.

Am trying to get on with my literary career (was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry this year, which is like Rob Redford saying, "Come on to Sundance!")

I'm rambling. Back pills. Red wine.

The Oscars have not impressed. The nominated films do. I think the scrim upon the awards shows is tattered. Do we want to watch blank, vacant celebs spend thousands, and as an industry, millions?

I'm trying to be a thrifty T-girl and buy used, or close-out.

I 'd like to get some pants/jeans/slacks but I'm afraid my skinny male behind will thwart me. Any suggestions?

Oh, for SFCDGF...Cassidy Bryn is a viscerally more light name than my homme name, than my feminized homme name...stephanie (which I don't hate...it's just like why bother sticking with something so mundane when living something that is much more?). Cassidy evokes my prankster mood, my penchant for pretty names (it rolls, it lingers in the mouth, the double ss make it sexy) Bryn is my fav Celtic femme name, and though my heritage isn't worn on my sleeve, it is given its place.)

My Fav Mellow Trans Song

Technically, Robyn Hitchcock was thinking Drag Queen/transvestite when he wrote it. He is like in his sixties now. Still it is a touching and mellow tune that's pretty edgy. Here's a link to the you tube....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm1Pi7AF7BE

It is one the CD "EYE" and some compilations....