Holiday Greetings

OK so I am admittedly a little late.

I wanted to point out a fine article on my friend Ellen's finishing school for Transwomen.

http://thebea.st/1CNqTMH

In the article I am described as dressing tastefully!  The young reporter who did the piece is both perspicacious and gracious.

Ellens website is.  http://www.lefemmefinishingschool.com

Trans and Gentle Meditation

"Everything you do is irresistable, Everything you do is simply kissable..."  
Why Can't I Be You
The Cure.


One fact of life that I have been taking to heart lately is that we learn about ourselves, in much the same way that others learn about us, or we about them.  We observe their behavior, and then make inferences about their character and identity by linking what we observe to the "facts" about human behavior that I have acquired from my family, friends, education and culture.   When the actual facts are missing or distorted, I am likely to misunderstand myself.  I don't have a special window into my own soul.
Thus when I inexplicably took an interest in my mother's underwear at the tender age of 12 or 13, I had nowhere to turn but books, since I had no other source.  (I wasn't about to ask my mother, or my father.  I didn't need to read a book to understand that this was not normal, and best kept secret for the immediate future.  The books that I found were one's like Krafft Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis.  Such books taught me that I was a budding fetishist with little hope of a cure.  Even though I was not to masturbate for many years,  I accepted the designation, I had no other source of information.  Now fetishist was / and for the most part still is a depressing term.  Somehow your sexuality got screwed up due to some early sexual experiences.  It is easy to assume that the perverse interest I took in mom's panties and slips, was both the cause and the expression of my fetishism.
Today of course there is abundant information about such things.  A hundred stories are shared on the internet.  A teenager need never leave their bedroom to acquire more knowledge about being trans, than I acquired in my first 50 years of life.
Now looking back, I can see the arc of my fate.   Regarding myself as a heterosexual male with transvestite tendencies,  I like most of my contemporaries pursued happiness as I understood it.  I hid my vices (transvestism, masochism) and launched forth.  In retrospect,  there were signposts that might have given me pause.  While I had a number of girlfriends that I enjoyed "making out" with,  I was a virgin until I was 20, and only first masturbated when I was 17.  An Irish Catholic perhaps I had no opportunities?   Not quite, I once spent a night with a married woman whose husband was in Vietnam, a sort of arranged date when I was 18.  I was unsuccessful in popping my cherry.
I simultaneously understand now, that my secrecy regarding my femme inclinations destroyed my first marriage, and yet I can forgive myself now understanding that my story is all too common for transgender individuals of my generation.  I have met individuals with similar stories by the dozens, once I found the internet, and the means of meeting my own kind.
Now I can acknowledge that I was always transgender.   My very physiology indicates problems with androgen in the womb.   I slowly over the years changed the arc and arrow of my sexuality to feminize it.see this for example
I am thankful for learning what I have learned about myself, if envious of the young people who learn it so much younger.
We all need to be humble though.  Our knowledge of ourselves and the human condition is limited by the thick walls of culture, and  the fog of ignorance.   I still struggle with the simple distinctions.  Am I transsexual?  I took hormones and contemplated more dramatic steps towards transition before illness disrupted those plans.   Am I a very repressed homosexual?  Certainly I have dated and slept with a few men in the last few years.    It is coming down to accepting that I will never be sure about what choices I might have made in a hypothetical life, or what those choices would have meant.  At any rate, my children are grateful that I soldiered on.  At least they say so.   And I am awfully fond of them.

My Digit Ratio is Very Femme

"Tell me who are you? "
Peter Townsend

I was reading about the digit ratio.      Wikipedia has a fairly extensive discussion

On average Males have been found to have lower ratios of their index finger length to their ring finger length.  The average difference in these ratios is small.   For males the average ratio is .947, and for females it is .965.    I measured my own, and I was close to 1.0.
  Yes!
 I knew I was depraved because I was deprived, I just didn't realize I was deprived of pre-natal androgen.
But seriously, I realize that this may not even indicate that in my case.  The average ratios do not necessarily apply to the specifics of my genetic inheritance.  ( I should measure my brother and sister's fingers, perhaps while they sleep)  and I have been mucking about in this literature, the scientific basis of gender variance and finding that the answers of science do not necessarily add up to self-knowledge or peace of mind.
Perhaps my deprivation based depravity, is based itself on depravity in a previous life.  Perhaps my depravity however it is caused, only exists in the blindness of the culture in which i was raised.  Perhaps I am willfully depraved.
However my gender dysphoria and associated behavior is caused, I find that understanding certain facts about it, does not necessarily add up to solutions to my gender dilemma, which basically is  Can I sit on the fence forever.... which perhaps I can, in fact I think I probably will.   But fence sitting can be awful uncomfortable, and I wonder where comfort can be found.
Going to Florida this week,  the Everglades to birdwatch, and later in the week the Keys.  In fact I expect to be on Duvall Street on Halloween.  I can't really see myself not dressing for that occasion, but that probably means that I will have to pay for a checked bag.  It is neither easy or cheap to be a part-time girl.

Hair: A Lament

"Give me down to there.  Hair    Shoulder-length or longer".   MacDermot, Rado, and Ragni.


I have had a  happy seven year relationship with estrogen.  Long undecided about the seriousness of my  gender quirk,  I have over and over been surprised by my need to acknowledge my feminine side.  Hormones were perhaps the greatest surprise to my addled psyche.   First trying herbal stuff and then turning to the internet for the real thing in the form of patches that you slapped on your butt, and let them do their magic.  I didn't notice many emotional changes in my estrogen soaked brain, but i sure noticed changes to my estrogen soaked chest, breasts!   Well golly. I guess that I was rather more serious about my femininity than I sometimes imagined.
That was 2007, and within months I began dressing in public and socializing with other open mined and like minded persons as Belinda.  I was still a closeted cross-dresser i suppose, but i had opened the closet and taken a nice stroll around the house.  There were people who knew me as Belinda, and only knew me as Belinda.  And of course with shaved legs, chest, and breasts,  breasts so sensitive I was amazed,  I began to believe that I was truly trans.  In the years that followed, i grew to believe more in the importance of my Belinda-ness to my future happiness.  When i retired, i pierced my ears and began to grow my hair long, finally coloring my old lady hair at the salon,  among the other ladies old and young.   In recent months I had begun to see a gender therapist, began to see a clinic to get legal hormones, and revealed my transgender proclivities to my siblings and children.    All the signs of late onset transition.
Then whammo!  One week I was contemplating my future, and  then the next I was seriously contemplating the concept of no future.  After a few weeks,    I had a brain operation to remove a meningioma,  and took many weeks to recover, but recover I did and when I finally realized that this was not my final chapter, I once again began to think about the future, but the future wasn't like it had been.   I looked into meningiomas, and realized that prudence dictated that i accept the possibility that HRT had possibly contributed to my illness and I stopped taking estrogen.  When I thought my life might be very short, I felt that gender issues were not necessarily the most important issues.   But things have changed now.
Two months without estrogen have left me with a lot of anxiety.   It has made my beard more hairy, my mind more horny,  just feeling in general more mannish and the hair on my head....
Well brain surgery is not ever the best thing for your hairdo.   And then I began to worry about male pattern baldness, and started noticing that perhaps my hair was indeed falling out.  You can just put on a wig,  right?  like so many of the other girls.  I must have 4 of them in the back of my closet.  Each of us is unique in our history, and our relationship to gender.  I have never felt that my male self was a mask or a shell, hiding my female self.   Rather I felt like I had to create my feminine self, and part of that creation was physical,  breasts, hair, hairless skin which remind me when I look in a mirror at any time that I am of two genders or none depending on your point of view.   I can live perfectly contentedly with old lady hair dyed or not, but I fear that old man hair will make me cry.

But yesterday I think I came upon a solution.   Avodart,  dutasteride.   The anti-androgen that is used as a treatment for hair loss.   I know it is shallow to worry about what is on top of my head rather than what is in it,  but I never claimed to be that deep.   My poor hair may not be what it once was, but I am not going to give it up without a fight.  My order is being shipped as I write this.  Most transsexuals take estrogen and anti-androgens at the same time.    I have decided to practice serial hormonics.

Good News and Bad News

"Enjoy yourself ,  Its later than you think"

"Enjoy Yourself" a popular song published in 1949,  music by Carl Sigman ,lyrics by Herb Magidson.


I find myself on the other side of my brain operation undead, and as always undecided.   In the months before the operation i was rushing to try to integrate my life of two genders.  All of my significant others were told of Belinda. I started seeing a therapist.  I checked in to the Mazzoni Center, a local LGBT clinic who I know would give me legal hormones.  This was all done in an atmosphere of some foreboding.
  (See my pre-convulsion blog entries from a few months back.}  http://harmonybelle.blogspot.com/2014/05/transitions.html

Well now all is revealed.  I had a meningioma and was symptomatic for some months before it revealed itself with a convulsion, a trip to the emergency room, and a CT scan there.  I remember being relieved when the ER doctor explained to me that I had a brain tumor.  "Oh so I am not crazy, I am simply damaged."   That was Father's day in june, and basically I was more or less convinced that it would be the end or at least some major disability that would follow this diagnosis and the subsequent operation.  Well it wasn't.  I feel in fact better than I have all year.  The operation was a great success.

There was one kick in the head however that I have only gradually become aware of.    There is a potential link between hormone use in transgender folks, and meningiomas.


http://openmindedhealth.com/2013/06/article-review-recurrence-and-progression-of-meningioma-in-male-to-female-transgender-individuals-during-exogenous-hormone-us


These links are even better established for cis-gender women who use hormone replacement therapy

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23702884


As I have proclaimed a number of times on the blog,

http://harmonybelle.blogspot.com/2009/12/full-moons-pheromones-and-i-phones.html

http://harmonybelle.blogspot.com/2012/04/breasts-bras-and-boys.html

I have been using Climara patches for a number of years, about 7, without benefit of medical supervision.

Based on what I now know, I have stopped, and that makes me very sad.  As a part time girl, hormones were very very important to my identity as a t-girl.  Without them I find myself somewhat at a loss.  I started noticing effects right away, including increased horniness, beard, and possibly the beginnings of hair loss.  Boo Hoo.

So a big big question for me is.   Should I start taking them again.  Or is that a foolish risk?

And if I continue not to take them, what does it all mean for Belinda.  The whole ordeal has been a lot tougher on Belinda than Bill.  Bill has the family, and the family was so good to me and generous with their time during my illness, that I was overwhelmed.   Belinda doesn't really have that consolation.  I only really communicated with my friend Ellen throughout the illness, and she was as always good to me, but most of my casual friends I basically left in the dark, and one particularly close acquaintance, the woman I was providing service to in a M/S relationship.  I abruptly cut it off with when she ascribed some complaints I had regarding her insufferably arrogant behavior as the actions of the brain tumor.
If she is right I can only say;

  "Thanks brain tumor! "

One thing the illness taught me is that I should be more prudent in my choices of who I socialize with.  but I still have to find a way to integrate the lives of Bill and Belinda more fully.  

An Unexpected Turn

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
Thats how the light gets in"

 Anthem

Leonard Cohen.

It turns out that there is a crack in me.   I need some brain repair.   And not the talking off the ledge kind.   It is a week since i had a focal seizure, a little like St Vitus dance, but just in my right arm.  It turns out that i have a disease,   A benign meningioma hovering over my left frontotemporal lobe.
And the consensus is that we will need to go in with the old trephin, whiskey, and cut it out.   Details are being worked out but it looks like early july for surgery.   Shouldn't be too bad my surgeon says but my last surgery was a tonsillectomy about 60 years ago, and i still remember that sore throat.   Anyway in another life i was a brain scientist and even trephined an animal or two.
What goes around comes around and this is going to be a lot more fascinating than electrophysiology as long as i can keep my wits about me.

Transitions

someone's got it in for me.....Bob Dylan  Idiot Wind

When a moth, the size of a bat,  the Luna Moth shows up outside your cabin,  Bob's immortal words ring true.  Especially when the Great Crested Flycatcher, suddenly drops dead out of the sky, practically on top of you,  for the sake of accuracy two, but who is counting.  because as I sit here now in boy mode,  someone has it in for me,  and I think I know who it is.
I am two weeks into therapy.  I have told all my children now, and it has been very gratifying that each of them, there are four, (two who have known a while and two who i just told) expressed their fullest support " I just want you to be happy, being the clear refrain.  I guess I have always considered "transitioning"  to involve a fair amount of blood,  (surgery)  but it turns out that isnt what it is at all, and I am transitioning from the deep closet where I have spent a great deal of time, comfortable time, to the bright sunlight,  You know the one where Icarus met his demise.  See any resemblence between Icarus, and a certain moth?
And what is that demise?   How about this analogy that a friend gave for my present condition.  It is the 15th round Bill and Belinda have been going at it for quite some time.  but the end is near, and it will not be a decision,  one of these fighters goes on, the other KOed.  And everyone is rooting for Belinda, so where does that leave me?
It appears that there is an assumption that two people cannot live in the same body sanely.  But of course they are doing so now, or rather they live today in a state of depression, and anxiety, and I guess the assumption is that the source of that depression and anxiety is that I am two people, in one body.

 Recently, i saw the following quote

Settling may masquerade as practicality, but nothing is worth the erosion of your truest self"
Dr F Emilia Sam
 http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-13888/5-telltale-signs-youre-settling-for-less-in-life-love.html

In the context that it was quoted, I thought that it was another jettison your old self, and get a shiny new self, that dresses better but I am exploring another option.

truest implies three, and I have only been thinking about two   bill/belinda  but what if there were a truest self that underlying them both?  After all Eve had three faces, and I am just as screwed up as she.

Then that self would need a name.

Two Faces Have I

will I walk with a smile on my face,  knowing I live a lie   lou christie  Two Faces Have I

Well now i have done it.  Broke my brain!  And you know how much that can cost to repair!  But what can you do? You have to have one, unless you appear on TV or DC.  So it is into the shop for me.

yes indeed a checkup form the neckup, long overdue.

So I am in therapy, like a fish in water.  Why do i say that? Well therapy it turns out is all about me!

Or should I say us?

Bill and Belinda

And that is the crux of the matter.  It had always been about pronouns but I have been concentrating on he/she but maybe it was always me/us.   Let me describe myself

Bill is antisocial, except for a layer of family ties which are tight.  Belinda is social butterfly with a bunch of superficial relationships.  She has few interests except shopping and makeup and hair of course.  She borrows heavily from Bill in this regard,  Because Bill is a bird fancier and an intellectual, though some of these interests overlap, for example, Judith Butler .  Tell the truth she made him read it, but she couldnt make him understand it.  Bill is a fop, or whatever word you want to use for long dyed hair, and lots of jewelry. again there is a reason for it.  You see they share the same body, and Belinda who occupied it later when it was in some dis-repair made some improvements the most substantial one being breasts which I have spoken about a few times on this blog most recently here.  (They also share the same voice, but there is a battle about that).  So when I strip naked and look in a mirror who do I see?

At this point in time, that is the issue, I dont know if it will be when next I write.  After all I spent 65 years, putting myself in this condition.  It will probably take more than an hour of gender counselling to unravel it.

But it has become increasingly evident that something will unravel

Depraved? Deprived?

We are misunderstood

Deep down inside us there is good

West Side Story....  Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

It has been almost a year.  Lots of things have changed, including my hair color.  I just returned from a transgender conference,  the Keystone Conference, in Harrisburg Pa.  It was my first, which I went to on the advice of my hairdresser.   But it really got me to thinking dark and dangerous thoughts, the enemy of complacency.

When I look in the mirror I see what you see.  Most of my life that was a man, but I am not a man and therein lies a dilemma.  You saw a boy then a man, so you treated me like a boy , then a man.  And therein lies confusion,  gender confusion. 

Now these days,  I look like something else.  I don't think there is an accepted name for it or at least a polite one.  I have small but pronounced tits on my slender frame and I have a penis surrounded by grey hair, though my hair on top of my head is long and brunette.

Now I know having just attended a transgender conference which is how to get the best information about feminization of the body,  that if I had a great deal of money,  I could look in the mirror and see a woman. But i am not a woman despite feminizing myself.  So therein lies the dilemma.   At least in a world that says
"There are men and there are women, and that is not a choice anyway.  We already chose for you,  How?  Look in the mirror."  I say I am not a man and I am not a woman.

And of course, there are people quite a bit like me who say, we have been mis-identified.  a woman living inside a shell of a man, or a man living inside the shell of a woman.  And I do not wish to contradict them.  Finally for the first time in human history you can choose ( if you have the cash), and if you are willing to in some sense obliterate your past. 

I know in my estrogen soaked heart why so many have accepted these conditions. And I know in my estrogen soaked brain,  that in revolutionary times when conditions are overthrown there is unavoidable pain and anger.   

And so I  say ... fie upon it,  the boxes to check,  the bathrooms to choose,   I am not in the wrong bathroom, or the wrong body.   I am in thrall to bad ideas which I acquired from you,  you cis-gendered privileged smug strawman.   I am depraved as you have amply pointed out in a thousand subtle ways, but now I understand.
I understand because heard the voices of young transmen, young transmen who have little money hence little representation in the vendor areas in Harrisburg.    I am depraved because I am deprived.  It is only a question of saying what exactly I am deprived of.  I can label it.  Gender Identity.  But what the hell is that?  (to be continued results of the survey I gave in June)