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.

May I See Your Gender Identification II

There is a movement afoot to reject the gender binary.  One facet of this movement is an acknowledgement that the gender binary, may be flawed.  What is a male, and what is a female?  This determination is needed for traditional marriage, and traditional post gold medal investigations at the Olympics.  The athletic world where the perils of this common sense distinction have been well established, has taken to avoiding the issue where possible.  Wikipedia: Gender_verification_in_sports  The problems of answering this question in the case of marriage, are discussed in a very informative blog:  Intersex Roadshow.   Being raised catholic, I have looked at that perspective, and written in detail about it, on my new alternate blog, the one where I am pretentious and boring,  (Ok, more pretentious and boring):   The Other Side of That Life I've Been Living.
All these problems.  Why not just chuck the whole thing.   Recently a friend had an exchange with some young people on Fetlife.  My friend was interested in creating coalition and bonding across the generations for transgender people, perceiving a split between TOG and TNG.  The young people, most of whom descrribed themselves as Queer, or Gender Queer, seemed uninterested, because the older generation of transgender people in their opinion was poisoned by indoctrination in the gender binary.  A clear example would be folks who described themselves as transexuals, and went into a doctors care, establishing their "femaleness" to said doctors satisfaction as per legal requirements, and then were permitted sex re-assignment to the other side of the binary.  "Hooey" my young friends would have said if they know any such quaint phrases.  Secondly, they didn't regard being trans and being so very important that it needed to be worked on.   This was one of their identities,  woman, lesbian, queer being others.  They were not by their own descriptions hung up on the gender labels.

So relax Grandma....(Grandpa?)

My instincts finely honed on the generational conflicts of the 60's is to give these folks a virtual hug and a right on sister.  Not that I don't believe that there will continue to be a gender binary  centered around love and family etc. , but only that the ascendancy of this binary to relationships of power, dress, interests, car you drive, cigarette you smoke etc etc.. ad nauseum...is oppresive to everyone, not just those who straddle the gender fence.
That being said, I am clearly a creature of a culture for which the empire of gender was big, even as it was crumbling.   I femulate, and I masculinizie myself when that is required at work or with family.  In that framework, I fret and fret.   Am I looking weird at the mall.  Am I looking weird at the family re-union.  I seek help.  The philosophers provide guidance.   Free your mind. The rest will follow.

From Here to Eternity

Recently I heard that the novel From Here to Eternity had been censored to remove references to homosexuality. this struck a chord because From Here to Eternity was my father's favorite book. At first I thought "so there!" speaking as it were from here to Eternity where he resides, but I understand that Prewitt, the character he most admired would not engage in homosexual acts for money. And anyway, the only really interesting communications would be from Eternity to here. But it did serve to remind me that the forces that shaped me, shaped my father. He confessed that his mother had dressed him funny, (knickers in his day), and he had a deep concern with masculinity growing up in a fatherless home. He certainly communicated that to me. I knew that revealing my fascination with femme clothing would have been very troubling for him, and probably trouble for me. Our biggest mistake together, a drunken prelude to an almost fist fight broken up by my mother, was precipitated by his voicing sympathy with my persecutors because I was wearing "fruit boots" ( sort of Uggs).

It was the time of "Are you a boy or are you a girl?" gender relaxation and the sometimes violent reaction to such. But all the boys were doing such things, so a special boy like me could certainly slide there,and I didn't regard my gender relaxed hair, and colorful cloths as particularly revelatory of my deeper secrets. But now what would he say to his hormone soaked, closet full of drag, semi-public sissy of a son, who was already something of a disappointment?

Well if he has been absorbed back into the unmanifest Brahma; If he has seen the play of male and female in the realms of the Devas and Devi, then he may have a gentle comment.

"Are you the last creature on earth who still wears slips?" and he might appreciate that in my way I emulated his dilemma, choosing masculinity for my public persona, and living all of my significant life up to a few years ago as a man. I certainly don't know very well the demons that may have afflicted that very stoic man who provided me with the proper role model which he never had from his own absent, arrogant and morally questionable father. I found a heart ornament from my mother on a lonely beach a few Easter's ago. I have not had such obvious communications from his Eternity. But the connections were so much more strained,. Anyway I am glad that Prewitt did not turn out to be effeminate, and censored. We each have our blessings and our burdens. My father was a model among men. I see his karma at work still and still doing good in my brother particularly another model among men. Me? I have chosen a different path or it chose me.

Housecleaning

Living in a house with a former lover and planning to sell it, throwing things out, is a task that can easily eat up a weekend. And the little things that lurk in corners and crannies emerge again. Abhijnana, the sanskrit refers to the tokens of remembrance, I may not be Krapp, but i have a lot of crap, notebooks from former lives and forgotten lives, so it is that a notebook casually opened, reveals a diary more than 35 years old, and the thoughts of a younger self, all forgotton until the token brings them back.
Thoughts about an ancient lover, before it all became a habit of years, and before it all became dust and ashes. With regard to a once proudly embraced sang froid,

"Is it an honest reaction against love that would mold me or is it impotence, death of honesty, and the hidden vice"

Later the author discretely allows that

"Certain books were disposed of"

Yikes! couldn't those classic works of transgender erotica, Miss High Heels I would guess. http://www.castlekeys.com/library/Pages/misshh.html

even be refered to in private notebooks? Apparently not, and so hiding and throwing out things became the habit of decades until seriouls things got thrown out.

And the notebook has enough bad poetry to fill a girl's school. the best I humbly publish, this gem hidden in drawers for decades finally sees the light of day. A publishing event of note. Perhaps the literati can be drawn to this blog.

I
Amnesic burrowing creature
in tunnels undre cold earth
silently
sing

Need better poetry?

The forgotton self had copied a poem for that long ago lover

"In the void air towards thee
my strained arms are cast
but a sea rolls between us
our different past."

http://www.iment.com/maida/poetry/arnold.htm#parting