While my days weren’t filled with stuffed animals, the fear remained. A memory sticks in my mind, of watching an eclipse in third grade through shadow boxes. We were warned not to look at the sun, even with sunglasses, because it could hurt your eyes. I looked anyway (you really could see the moon blocking the sun!) but was told by another third grader, something of a bully, that I was going to go blind as a result. He had me so convinced I was going to go blind – not years down the road, but later that afternoon – that I rushed to the nurses office, crying. I was unwilling to say why I was crying, because I knew I wasn’t supposed to look at the sun, but I was inconsolable. Ultimately, my mom had to pick me up and take me home.

Almost twenty years later, three years living fulltime as Rebecca, I confessed to my mom why I had been crying that day, and asked if she remembered it. “Yes,” she said. I asked if she had any idea why I’d been crying. “No,” she continued, tears of regret and past pain springing to her eyes, “but you were unhappy and asked to be pulled from school often enough that it wasn’t too unusual. I’m sorry I didn’t know what was wrong.” I heard in her words not only talk of an eclipse, but an oft-repeated apology for not somehow catching my trans-ness, bringing it up, helping me even when I wasn’t yet sure I wanted help. Panic attacks for me these days are few and far between. I seem to have, fortunately, left that stage of my life behind me. But I’m not past fear. Instead of a nameless, faceless fear, the fears I face are all too real: Discrimination. Bigotry. Being fired for being trans. Violence. Rape. Murder. Those fears have been following me around lately.

I’m on meds to try and help resolve my anxiety, because I still think that – even without regular, major panic attacks – my baseline level of worry and stress is much higher than it should be. There’s a part of me that wishes something would just happen already, so I could fight back, rally the troops, sound the alarm. Then I remember something did happen. Getting fired in September was not a pleasant experience, and in spite of my attempts to make lemonade out of the experience it still haunts me, ready to jump out of the shadows. My fears may be reasonable, my constant and sometimes paralyzing anxiety is not. And I don’t want to simply fight the anxiety into submission, I want it gone, removed as a constant background presence in my life.

Impostor syndrome has been on my mind while writing this post. I don’t really deserve the praise, the press, the money I’ve raised do I? I always feel like something of a faker when I talk about my big plans and big dreams. I worry someone is going to call me on it, “You’re not really an artist,” “You’re not really an advocate,” “You’re not really an activist.”

For so long, I’ve been used to assuming the world sees me differently than I see myself. That their positive perception of me was wrong because I was hiding my female identity, my anguish, my pain. Now that the world is seeing the face I do want to present, is perceiving me as I wish to be perceived, I’m having trouble getting used to the idea.

When you’ve expected unhappiness for so long, it’s difficult to allow happiness in.

1. What do you love?

I love getting out of my head. The feeling of doing something purely physical: playing a song on the piano that I know really well and flowing into the music; biking along the lakefront; holding a really good handstand or whipping around on a Spanish Web; a mind-blowing and body-cleansing orgasm.

I love solving a problem that has been itching at me. Of making technology bend to my will, and deliver satisfying and consistent results. I love the relief that comes when a solution is Right and True.

I love my body when I’m able to feel feminine. I love looking down and seeing my breasts, feeling their weight. I love the wonder of skin and and bone and muscle.

I love a strong sense of community: artistic, social, familial. Of understanding, and being understood. Knowing, and being known.

2. What do you fear?

I fear ridicule. I fear denial of my self and my identity. I fear violence against my person, I fear assault, I fear rape, I fear murder. I fear that who I am will close more doors than it opens, that the ‘trans’ part of my identity will subsume the rest of me. I fear that my friends and their friends and everyone I meet thinks of me as “that trans woman.”

I fear that I’ll always think of myself as a trans woman; that I’ll always think of myself as a woman* instead of a woman.

3. What do you want?

I want happiness and contentment. I want to be able to identify as trans without having to identify as trans.

I want to be financially secure and independent.

I want to be in a strong, healthy, loving, sexy, sexual relationship.

I want to be calm, cool, collected.

I want to be satisfied, artistically, professionally, socially, sexually, personally, privately, publicly, and completely.

That’s terrifying.

Ignoring the reasons dating is scary for everyone, I’d like to talk about two specific areas I’ve been giving a lot of thought.

First, I’ve been in the same relationship since before I started transitioning. And before that, I really didn’t date. I had a girlfriend, H, near the beginning of high school (who recently got married to her now-wife in Vermont, natch) and hooked up with one girl between H and my most just-ended relationship. Since hitting puberty, I’ve seriously kissed maybe three people. (I’m not counting spin-the-bottle bullshit kisses.)

This certainly wasn’t because of a lack of interest. I wanted to be with someone, yes. But I had have self-esteem issues, and wasn’t am not good at picking up on others’ interest in me. Looking back at when I was presenting as male, I’m guessing this was at least partially because I had no idea how to romantically interact with women as a man, and absolutely no idea how to romantically interact with women as a woman. (Which I wasn’t presenting as, anyway.)

And now I’m single, but with this weird time-jump where I feel just as awkward as I did at 15, but now presenting as a woman. A woman with what feels like no flirting/courting/dating history or experience.

I’d imagine this general idea – of not feeling like you know how to flirt or date – has to do more with my having been in a long-term relationship and less to do with my being trans. I think being trans heightens it, but I think being trans heightens a lot of issues that everyone feels to one extent or another. But I can’t help echoing my constant refrain of “I wish I’d transitioned earlier,” because my fantasy-world version of adolescence involves me having some dating and romantic experience…

(My fantasy-world version of college and post-college also involves me not having to transition while in a relationship and not royally fucking everything up to begin with. So yeah.)

My second big issue is that, well, society isn’t know for its huge acceptance of trans people. In particular, ‘chicks with dicks’ are one of the most reviled groups under the sun. It’s true that, being out and being interested in women, there’s less of an opportunity to be a victim of trans-bashing. But that’s not horribly reassuring.

To be totally blunt, I’m just getting out of a relationship that was sexually comfortable in no small part because the relationship developed as I was beginning to transition. So my discoveries about my body – about changing sexual experiences and preferences – were also being made with an aware and supportive partner. But now I have this body, and am incredibly conscious of how possible it is I’ll be rejected for it.

I wonder what the hell I’m thinking getting out of a relationship with someone who does love me. I wonder who out there could possibly be interested in dating someone like me. I have 25 years of training telling me that not only am I not sexually desirable, I’m sexually abhorrent.

The first issue, a lack of dating experience, I’m hoping to solve by trial and error. One of my big attempts at self-growth over the past year has involved being more honest and direct, and I don’t see why that can’t apply to dating. That is, say what I want out of a relationship rather than play stupid games, and ask when I don’t know what signals I’m getting. Obviously much easier said than done, but I don’t think it’s an impossible goal.

The second seems less simple, and is much more a confidence issue. I don’t really consider myself someone worthy of love, so expect others to view me that way. (That was a fun sentence to write…) I’m hoping that actually trying to get out there and date will help, but the realist cynic pessimist in me worries that it’ll justify my fears instead.

As I said: terrifying.

*By “on the dating market” I mean that I’m neither in a relationship nor thinking of myself as ‘off the market’ due to relationship complications that I won’t get into.

Earlier this week, Little Light posted is a dream a lie if it don’t come true / or is it something worse. The post is now behind a password but I did have a chance to read it before it was password protected. The thoughts behind password protecting the post are here, and no, I don’t have the password, and don’t know how to get it. I’m going to write about the post anyway, as  best as I can remember. I apologize if any of the details are wrong, but the general gist is accurate.

The post was about someone Little Light knew, a trans woman we’ll call Alice, who suffered a serious injury and was hospitalized. Alice had been on hormones for a few years, and was living full time as a woman. She had not undergone The Surgery, but was happier for living as Alice, as herself. After being injured, Alice ended up partially paralyzed, unable to care for herself, and unable to communicate without extreme effort.

Alice’s doctors decided – despite clear evidence that Alice identified and was presenting as a woman – that forcing medical staff to use ‘she’ around someone with a penis would be too confusing. They instead used ‘he’ and Alice’s former, male, name.

Likewise, Alice’s family decided – despite clear evidence that Alice identified and was presenting and as a woman – to take her off her hormones.

For those of you who are trans, or familiar with trans issues, you probably know what that means in the physical sense: stubble reappeared on Alice’s face, her skin became less soft, and (over time) her body fat and muscle would start drifting back toward ‘male.’

That’s a really simple sentence, but I actually had a bit of trouble writing it, because the implications are so vast.

Apparently, in the days after the accident, Alice had been showing significant improvement day after day. After her family decided to stop her hormones, after it became clear the people around her were going to continue to use the incorrect name and pronouns, Alice’s health began to slip and deteriorate.

I’ve thought a lot, over the years, about what my “worst nightmare” would be. Whenever the idea of “fears” comes up, I usually imagine something around transitioning: being outed, being prevented from transitioning, transitioning and still being unhappy.

This – what Little Light described happening to Alice – blows all of those fears and nightmares and horrors out of the water.

Because, in spite of popular culture’s view on transitioning, hormones aren’t only about physical changes. I feel better on hormones than I did without. They don’t magically make me happy, but they remove a weight I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying, allowing me to feel my emotions – positive and negative – more purely and truly. (And when I was depositing sperm, I had to go off hormones for a few months so I know exactly how miserable the return of testosterone makes me feel.)

I keep telling myself that something like what happened to Alice could never happen to me. That my parents support what I’m doing, and my family understands how important it is. That my friends would fight tooth and nail to prevent it from happening. But it’s easy to come up with unlikely, contrived scenarios where the people closest to me aren’t able to fight for me. And I end up just like Alice, trapped – literally, rather than figuratively – in a body that I would rather die than be forced to inhabit again.

Coming out of Little Light’s post, someone created TransProtect, a site that (eventually) will host information on legal steps to safeguard the sanctity of trans individuals bodies. I’ll definitely be speaking with my lawyer (read: my dad) about putting together a living will, but it’s a miserable feeling to be reminded of how precarious the things we hold dear – our very sense of self – can be.

(For those of you who aren’t theatre people, tech refers to technical rehearsals, where lights/sound/etc are set. It comes before dress rehearsals and/or previews, the final rehearsals before a show opens.)

The show is going fine, although I’m planning to head out of work early tonight and finish up some sound and video work. And yet, I’m really scared about it opening on Friday. Not simply stressing out, but scared. And, after thinking about what parts of the show terrify me, I realized I’m not just dealing with stage fright (although there’s some of that) but with some deeper internalized transphobia.

It keeps stemming back to this issue, of recalling how I felt about gender and my own identity growing up and in comparison to now. I can’t get over hatred of my younger-self for not doing anything about being trans, and a hatred toward my body for being trans in the first place. I don’t want to be trans – I want to be done with it; with the show, with transitioning, with being trans in the first place.

And so going on stage and celebrating my trans identity is rubbing me a little raw.

Which isn’t to say the entire piece is celebratory. I’ve tried to acknowledge that I’m on a difficult journey. But I feel obligated to end more positive than negative, if for no other reason than saying how I actually feel seems so vulnerable, in a show where I’m obviously already putting a lot of myself out there.

I was thinking, yesterday, about a line in the show, spoken by my fifteen year old self: “Puberty is already shaping my body in ways that I hate. Bringing me closer to manhood. Taking me further away from being a woman.” For whatever reason, it made me remember my dad teaching me how to shave.

We were living in our second house, the house I still identify most as “home” in my memories. We were in my parents’ bathroom, and I had a nice layer of fuzz on my face and neck. He showed me how to apply shaving cream, to make sure the water wasn’t too cold or too hot when rinsing the razor, how to shave without cutting yourself.

I felt totally humiliated by the whole experience. I couldn’t voice it at the time, but it was like someone rubbing my face in my masculinity, in how my body was going one direction when I so desperately wanted it to go in the other.

I realized, though, that I have something of the same sensation with ‘feminine’ experiences – getting makeup or buying clothing for the first time. I do get over it, something which never really happened for shaving, but the very first time I’m doing these things I can’t help but feeling like I should know what I’m doing and would, if only my life had turned out right.

Getting back to the subject of this post (internalized transphobia, for those of you still with us) I’m struggling a lot with being OK – let alone happy – with who I am. It is so damn easy to see the things I don’t like about my body, and source them back to being trans. (Not helped because my stupid girl friends are too attractive! I need uglier friends!) (Not true, friends who are reading this. I love you!)

I’m really looking forward to have some me-time after the show, because I think the big thing that will help with all this is time. Time to get to know myself better, time to be myself, time to reflect and let all the big changes of the past year or so sink in.

And hopefully I’ll make it through the weekend…

I really hate the body snatch episode. Really really really. I hate it when it’s used for humor, I hate it when it’s used for drama, I hate it when it’s used to teach the good guy a lesson, I hate it when it’s used to teach the bad guy a lesson. I just hate it. And I think I’m starting to realize why. It’s a mishmosh of reasons, but I’ll try to make them coherent…

I feel like I’m in a permenant body swap, and I’m terrified I won’t be able to swap back. That I’m the character being taught the lesson about ‘appreciating what you have,’ or ‘having sympathy for others,’ or whatever lesson the body swap plot device is being used for this episode. But that the lesson never ends, and I never get to go back to normal. That somewhere, there’s someone walking around with my body, using it and doing things to it and I’m stuck in this horrible body that fits all wrong and doesn’t work like it’s supposed to,  that I never asked for and don’t want. I’m terrified that the body I have will forever be “my” body, that I’m stuck with it.

And, as is so often the case with the transition, I’m scared everyone will know my fear and realize that I have no idea what I’m doing, and point at me and laugh.

This has gone somewhere different than I intended, as I didn’t initially have a goal with this post beyond “brainstorm about why I don’t like the ‘body swap episode’,” but I’m realizing so much bigger than that. I so rarely go into any amount of self pitty, or self-loathing, but it’s all there.

And I am at the end of my rope and I don’t know that I can handle this…  want to be done with the body swap episode; to be done being trans. I want to go back to my body, that’s nice-shaped and pretty, that doesn’t require taking  pill after pill every day for the rest of time along with thousands of dollars of hair removal, that learned how to put on makeup and pick out an outfit… I want to be done. I want to swap back and have the little lesson about this bullshit or that, and have the episode be over.

And I can’t. I don’t get to.  As Cedar pointed me to hir post, Risk, Danger, and Internalized Transphobia, I actually have to embrace all the bullshit and danger and institutional hatred to be who I want to be. I just finished reading the post (and, as ze said, it made me cry) (more than I already was from stupid Angel) and I can’t decide if I feel better or worse. If I want to go out and fight the world, or crawl into a hole and die.

But I’m still breathing. I hope.

-R

My identity as trans hasn’t really centered around genitals. Sure, I’ve fantasized about what I’d look like without a penis from a pretty young age, but my concept of myself as a boy or a girl didn’t pertain exclusively around what is or isn’t between my legs. I’ve never really though about surgery as something I’d want to do, or would feel like I needed to do.

Likewise, I enjoyed being sexual  (alone or, ideally, with a partner) prior to starting my transition, and I never felt like I was forced into a ‘male’ role by having a penis, even though that may have been how things looked to an outside observer. Even as hormones have changed how I experience sex and feeling sexual, I’ve continued to enjoy those feelings – and managed to feel feminine – penis and all.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking more and more about the possibility of having surgery…

This round of thinking started while shopping for clothing with a friend. I was trying on some skirts in the dressing room and realized I ‘bulged’ in an obvious way, something that doesn’t happen when I’m wearing pants. Likewise, when I went up to circus class today, I was the only woman in big baggy sweatpants, cuz I’m not dying to have a discussion about chicks-with-dicks. But if appearance were the only issue, I could always wear a gaff (and, indeed, I may try one) but it’s become something more than that.

I realized the other day, as I was lying on the couch watching TV and thinking about how I think about myself as gendered, that I don’t want my penis anymore. I still enjoy the pleasures it offers (not least of which is peeing standing up) but the idea of laying on the couch with a vagina just felt much more ‘right,’ in a way that it hadn’t before I started transitioning. I don’t know if I can explain it much better than that.

On the other hand, there are some serious roadblock – mental and practical – that deserve mention. First, any surgery is kind of gross, but SRS particularly is a tricky, and icky, procedure. This page has links to lots and lots of positive experiences (and pictures of positive surgery results) but also links to bad experiences and pictures of what could politely be called surgical ‘complications.’ (And more rudely, “Oh god, what the hell is that?!”)

In addition, surgery can range from around $6,000 for surgery in Thailand to up to $15,000-$20,000 for surgery in the US and Canada Now, there is a chance my insurance would cover some/all of that. But, if that is the  case, I’d need to get moving, since my COBRA insurance runs out in about 18 months and no one was particularly eager to insure me the last time I checked. (“Will be on drugs for the rest of her life” doesn’t inspire insurer confidence.)

(I do feel compelled to note I managed to save the $4,390 for my current round of hair removal in about 9 months, putting me at just under 4 years to save up $20,000. And, as I joked with my therapist, if I were planning to drop $20,000 on surgery I’d do some serious fundraising. If I can post to my blog about the posibility of cutting off my penis (a nested-parentheses-note that it’s not actually cutting it off, but rather inverting it to make a vaginal cavity) I can damn well pester friends and family for money toward that end.)

Finally, the idea of drastically changing anything about my body is really scary. I’m sure that’s true for most people, but I think because I’m so used to having a mindset of “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” and because I’m so terrified of changes in my body making things worse (possibly leading to shouts of “freak” and “pervert” while walking down the street) my tendency has been to avoid decisions that might have a negative consequence, even if the positive outcome could be amazing. (Hence what I feel was a huge delay in going on hormones in the first place.) I think that’s part of the reason why surgery never really even appeared on my radar until recently.

In any event, I don’t need to make a decision right this second, and hopefully I’ll be able to better wrap my head around things as I think about them more.

-R

PS – I also need to do a post on legally changing my name, something that I imagine would come WAY before surgery, and that I might start the ball rolling on within the next month or so.

PPS – I like that Wikipedia has an entry on the penis game.

In my memory, the locker room is huge; cavernous and echoing. I have no doubt if I revisited it today, my growth would have shrunken it down in an almost comical way. And, although I don’t remember any specific incident, I remember the faces of my aggressors, and the knowledge that if I didn’t say the right thing they would beat me up.

They never did beat me up. And, looking back, I don’t know that I was ever actually in danger; whether the training of our white, middle-class upbringing would have overrode their dislike of me. But I remember feeling that fear.

As I said, I haven’t truly felt my physical safety threatened in maybe fifteen years.

But I sure have been thinking an awful lot about violence lately.

I haven’t been able to find good studies about trans violence. I’m assuming this is because the trans community is often lumped into the GLB violence statistics, and because the trans community isn’t large enough to have warranted tons of study on its own. That said, general stats on GLBT youth show that almost all queer youth experience verbal and/or physical harassment. Likewise, the Transgender Day of Rememberance is dedicated to celebrating trans men and women (mostly women…) who were killed because of their identity and expression.

More to the point, “common knowledge” among the trans community says that verbal harassment should be expected, and physical violence is almost a right of passage.

So even though I haven’t experienced any violent attacks or threats, even though (almost) every single person I’ve come out to has been fine with the transition, and even though every person I interact with on a day-to-day basis has been nothing but accepting and supportive, I fear violence. I am surrounded every day by a culture that makes trans women out to be a joke; something to be pitied (at best) or hated (at worse). I was raised to believe who and what I am is an object of ridicule.

Is it any wonder, then, that I have trained myself to expect violence? That, without any first-hand experience of violence or verbal harrassment against myself, I am looking for it around every corner?

I almost wish the violence would just come, show itself, so that I could survive it and move on.

Almost.

-R

I knocked on my roommate’s door. “Can I come in?”

“What’s up?”

“Just wanted outfit input.”

“One sec. Lemme grab my robe.”

MG was in town for her birthday, and we were all meeting her at a nearby restaurant. She’d specified in the Facebook invite to be ‘dressy,’ especially for the girls.

I don’t exactly have many ‘dressy’ options. Most of the unreasonable amount of money I’ve spent on clothing in the last few months has gone to either comfy, every-day stuff, or things appropriate to wear to work. Neither category would satisfy MG’s request for ‘dressy.’

“So do you think I’ll get in trouble if I wear this?” I had on black pants and a black sweatshirt under lose gray top for which I don’t have the vocabulary.

My roommate, fresh out of the shower and in a red robe, said”I like it,” and my heart sank a little.

“That good, huh?”

“No, I mean, I like it a lot,  but it’s not exactly ‘dressy’.”

I sighed. “Yeah.” I tried something else, which was deemed “even more casual than the other outfit.” At last, t I put on black pants from Old Navy and a blue-and-white striped almost-dress top, the same thing I’d worn for New Years. I yelled through the closed door, “I need to tell you something, and then I need you to kill me.”

She paused, and said, “Ok…”

“I already wore this outfit!” I whined as best I could, channelling my all my 24-going-on-13 energy, and she laughed.

Dinner was actually fun, although getting there was rather cold. (Ahh, Chicago. As I’m writing this, my temperature monitor says it’s eight degrees out.) I was included in the “ladies” comments by the waitress and felt mostly good about everything.

Flash forward a few hours. We made it back to the apartment and were discussing whether to go out dancing or stay in drinking (or one and then the other). MG had bought a few tops earlier in the night and wanted to try them on before deciding which one to wear, which spiraled into calls for a ‘fashion show,’ put on by ‘the girls’ (the birthday girl and some of her and our friends, my roommate, and – somehow – myself).

I’m realizing my inclusion in such ‘female’ activities has a few components. First, I’m pleased and nervous to be included at all: What if I screw it up somehow? Are they including me because they think of me as ‘one of the girls,’ or because they know I want them to and they’re humoring me? Will I be able to get over myself and think of myself as ‘one of the girls’?

Then, I get quiet and try to participate without drawing too much attention to myself. This usually works for a while, until the final phase, when something happens to make me feel like I’m very much not ‘one of the girls’ and I end up hating myself for trying to participate in the first place.

(Incidentally, this progression is not unrelated to why I’m sitting at home writing this at 12:30AM on a Friday night while everyone else left about a half hour ago to go dancing.)

The first stage involved me sitting around in my roommate’s room as all the girls tried on tops around me and I tried not to look at bras and breast and other things that start with ‘B’. I was feeling awkward and like I shouldn’t be there, when I was finally given a loose zebra-striped top to try on. I was  told I looked good in it, which led to the second stage, where I actually started to enjoy myself.

Make note that enjoying yourself is just setting yourself up to feel worse later. I know I’m going to reread this tomorrow and hate myself for saying it, but it’s how I feel right now as I sit here feeling sorry for myself.

We proceeded with the show, which involved everyone taking turns doing a model walk around the dining room table, with the exception of JM. She was playing announcer, and I think ultimately has body issues right up there with mine, but has the foresight to not get drawn into things that will make them flare up and ruin her evening. Or maybe I’m reading too much into things…

Anyway, we all went around and everyone came back out for the vote on which top MG should wear. I believe no one applauded for me because they simply weren’t voting for the top but, again, my hear sank a little.

After Marta ‘won’ the show (and the birthday tierra) most of us went back to change. My roommate stayed in the top she was in, because it made her boobs look amazing (I can’t blame her) and a few other people stayed in things for the fun of it.

I then looked at the pictures, which was my big mistake. I think I could have continued to enjoy myself, feeling all included and all that jazz, had I not looked at the pictures. I don’t know what anyone else would have seen, and I’m not posting them to find out, but I saw myself as fat and mannish. I’m going to acknowledge the zebra-print top did not help, and a few of the girls did seem disapointed when I changed out of it, but the pictures really made me feel shitty.

So I was enjoying moping, keeping some other girls who weren’t dying to go dancing company, when MG came in and sat down on my roommate’s bed (where we were chatting). She was obviously down, and had been going about the room changing tops, redoing her makeup, and generally fretting.

When we coaxed what was wrong out of her, it turned out that she was also feeling shitty about the fashion show because, as she put it, “Everyone else looked better in her outfits than she did. I’m fat and everyone else looked better than I did.” I bit down my first thought, “Really? You thought I looked better than you did?” I was afraid of the answer. And I bit down my second thought, which has continued building and gaining momentum for the last hour or so:

“You think you’re fat? You think you’re fat? You are beautiful and womanly and it makes me sick to hear you call yourself fat. If you want to lose weight, do it. Get off your ass and do it. I am sitting here hating myself because I let myself get caught up thinking I was ‘one of the girls’ when I’m not, and the climb to get to my goal seems a hell of a lot farther away than yours. I want to give up, crawl into a hole, and pull the lid onto myself. I hate hearing people say, ‘You’re so brave,’ or ‘I’m so proud of you,’ because I’m not. I’m scared and I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s too big and it’s too hard and…”

And now I’m crying at the keyboard for twenty four years of hating my body and hating myself for not speaking up about how I feel sooner and for having to speak up at all and for doing something that’s hurting the people I love and that’s hurting myself and for instability and for all of it.

It’s times like this I don’t want to go to bed, because I know the bad thoughts – the fears and pressues and insecurities of which these are just the tip – will come creeping out from behind the shadows and attack.

Before everyone left to go dancing, EU – without knowing what was keeping me home but able to guess at some of it – tried to give me a pep talk, about having fun with friends and not focusing on what other people think and living for the moment. It made me feel worse.

And I just spent some time talking with SS online and she told me I’m wonderful and beautiful, which just made me cry harder.

I feel like with every step I take, things get harder instead of easier.

-R

But now I’m all upset and trying to figure out where it’s coming from. I like knowing where my emotions come from, and estrogen isn’t horribly helpful for that… I’m also trying to figure out how or if what happened tonight is linked transitioning issues. I’m watching Six Feet Under (which is a really good show) and  an episode where one fo the characters gets carjacked and then taken forced at gunpoint to take the carjacker around town, and feel like it wasn’t horribly helpful to my emotional stability, particularly because the character who was carjacked was gay and there were lots of calls of ‘faggot’ being tossed around by the carjacker. Likewise, at Julia Serano’s talk, she mentioned the potential dangers of having gender expression not matching legal papers, with asshole cops and the like.

I was just talking with SS, and used the word ‘vulnerable’ about the situation. It really sort of threw me – I wouldn’t in a million years have used it to describe how I felt or am feeling. I’ve admitted to feeling emotionally vulnerable before, but don’t know that I’ve ever said “I felt vulnerable” about a physical fear. I don’t like that that’s potentially a part of transitioning, or of living in the world as a woman (hell, it’s not potentially a part, it’s definitely a part). Again from Serano’s talk, she said some cissexual women (see this post)  will brush off transsexual women’s complaints of feeling objectified or fearful of interactions, as it’s ‘just’ part of ‘shedding male privilege.’ (These are not Serano’s words, and not even her words of other people’s words, just my impression of how some cissexual women see the situation.)

I don’t know. I’m kind of rambling. I’m just unhappy to find an intersection of two of my least favorite things: feeling vulnerable and feeling unsure of where emotions are coming from…

-R

PS – Gods, I like asking questions as the title of posts.