You are currently browsing the GenderBlog weblog archives for July, 2010.
31 July 2010 by kathleen.
Several people have asked me at one time or another, What’s it like taking estrogen? Once I started writing, the story grew a little larger than I prefer for a blog post. In a nutshell, here’s what happened
For more detail on these experiences, please see the GenderSong reference page My Experience with Hormones.
Posted in General MtF topics, Prostate cancer & SRS | 1 Comment »
28 July 2010 by kathleen.
I live in coastal southeastern Virginia. Hurricanes are not as frequent here as they are in Florida, or even as they are a couple hundred miles south in the Carolinas. However, we get them often enough to keep them in mind this time of year. In the winter, southern California is subject to mudslides, and this time of year to wild fires. In the Mississippi valley, you can get floods March through May.
What to transmen and transwomen do for emergency shelters?
I am post-op and, how you say, legally female, but I still have a hair problem: distinctive male-pattern baldness under the partial hairpiece I wear. Sure, I could go to a shelter. Would they let me stay in the women’s area? After they saw me without my hairpiece, would I still be allowed to stay there?
Those of you who are pre-op and on hormones for a year or more — where will you go?
The question is just as serious for transmen. You face mortal danger whether you stay in your residence or go to a shelter.
The best solution I can think of is to prepare a list of possible alternatives to public shelters. A hotel is an easy enough answer for me because I am financially comfortable. though I can imagine a situation in which hotels are not available for a variety of reasons. I don’t have a Plan B yet. How about you? Even if you never use them, having a couple of plans is a good idea.
Posted in General FtM topics, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »
25 July 2010 by kathleen.
I wrote a week or so ago about the value of chatting, but I didn’t explain how to chat.
I can start with an example. Back in the ’70’s there was a British series called Fawlty Towers. John Cleese and Prunella Scales played Basil and Sybil Fawlty, owners of a small, seaside hotel in the south of England. In a third of the episodes or more, there was a scene in which Sybil was on the telephone with one girlfriend or another. You only heard one side of the conversation, Sybil’s, which inevitably went like this, “Oh, I know…… Oh, I know….. Oh, I knooooow…….” to unheard remarks.
Men don’t get it; men think it’s funny. The value in Sybil’s repeated phrase is feedback to the other party. It doesn’t much matter how she feeds back, it’s only important that she does so. Her girlfriend knows that she, Sybil, is listening. Sybil is repeatedly giving her friend small, innocuous positive strokes.
There: I’ve the the cat out of the bag. Chat to give your girlfriends positive strokes. Praise them; remark on the colors they’re wearing; empathize with them (”Oh, I know……”); let them know your are listening. That’s how other women will know your are one of them.
Apply this skill especially if you are keeping your marriage together across your transition. Use the technique on your partner, starting today: “Yes…… Uh-huh….. Uh-huh…… Really!…..” as she talks about the kids (or the grandkids), or the house, or the party coming up next week. You are giving her reinforcement that you are present — here, now — and listening to her. Your attention is an assertion that she is a worthy, valuable person. She gets those strokes from her girlfriends; as you manifest the woman within you, make yourself a valuable friend by doing the girlfriend-things she’s used to.
Anyway, that’s how I chat. It’s a learnable skill, doesn’t take much practice, and greases the social wheels so nicely!
Posted in Being/staying married, Sex & Gender Roles, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »
23 July 2010 by kathleen.
Today I read an article on BoingBoing which referred to yet another article describing how women are marginalized in movies. The reference was to the Bechdel Test for women in movies.
The test asks 3 simple questions:
An astonishing number of movies fail this simple test.
To pass the time while I dilate, I do a lot of Netflix. I had a vague feeling that there were an awful lot of movies about men, and darned few about women. The Bechdel Test demonstrates this very clearly. I was not imagining.
I hear vocal transwomen complaining that transwomen are marginalized. That’s almost correct — our society attempts to marginalize women, no matter how they got to be women.
There is something you can do to fight marginalization. When you hear of a movie that fails the test above — don’t rent it or see it in a theater. If you’ve already seen it, do not recommend it. When you patronize and promote such movies, you contribute to marginalization. You can affirm and respect yourself instead.
The good news is that society doesn’t always marginalize. I described a couple of days ago how my employer empowers and validates me. As a woman, I am as qualified as any other employee, male or female, to present a face to organizations in the local community.
Just because you are a human being, you deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Expect such treatment, and settle for no less. Affirming, accepting environments exist; permit yourself to find and enjoy them.
Posted in Media and Arts | 1 Comment »
21 July 2010 by kathleen.
Again today, I was the face of my employer to someone in the community. I feel deeply honored.
We have an internal group of employees aged 50 and over. I am on the committee to find speakers and other activities for the group’s bi-monthly meeting. Today we had a speaker from a local chapter of the Institute for Learning in Retirement (ILR), which is part of the Elderhostel Institute Network.
I contacted the local chapter, arranged the speaker, greeted the speaker in the lobby, introduced him to my coworkers, then had lunch with him afterwards.
Yes, me. I, a transwoman with a moderate case of GERD (reflux disease), which renders useless all my attempts at developing a feminine voice. I, who am not yet quite finished with beard removal, I was the face of my employer to this man, and by extension, to the group he represents.
The company I work for doesn’t just pay lip service to the words diversity and inclusion — they believe them and they live them. In doing so they honor me and all my coworkers of every color, every nationality, every religious belief, and every point along the continua of G, L, B, and T.
I am blessed to be working for this company. To everyone reading this, I wish you this: that you, too, might find an employer who will treat you with the honor and respect you deserve as a human being.
Posted in AutoBiog, Transition on the job | 1 Comment »
19 July 2010 by kathleen.
When I was a young man, dating, back in high school and college, my (female) date accepted responsibility for keeping the conversation going. She chatted.
Women chat among themselves — when men are not around — about the little details of daily life, the details that are important to us. We tend to notice the details, and we take the time to experience them. We fuss with our hair and makeup; we are attentive to styles, textures, and the subtleties of color, as I wrote about in March.
We chatter incessantly while we’re shopping with our friends. We chat when we go out to dinner. If our dinner companion is not talkative, we take the lead. We entertain if we have to, maybe not publicly, but we keep our date amused — at least, we do if we ever want to go out with him again.
A few years before my transition, my wife and I went on a river cruise. There was an older couple seated near us; just a man and a woman. He rarely said more than a word or two at any meal. She tried to converse; in fact it appeared from the tired look on her face that she’d been trying to converse for decades. Meanwhile, at another table four women were gaily talking back and forth, at every meal. You could easily imagine a look of longing on the lonely wife’s face: if only he would talk!
So, do that: talk. As a transwoman dating an average sort of guy, talk. You will entertain him, whether he appreciates it or not. Whether you like him or not, do your duty and talk. As a transwoman married to an XY woman, your greatest social value is to hold up your end of the conversation. She will appreciate it, all the more so if your male personality was quiet and somber.
Whether your partner is male or female, you will make your partner very pleased to be with you when you talk.
Posted in Being/staying married, Sex & Gender Roles | 1 Comment »
17 July 2010 by kathleen.
Many of us who now recognize that we are transsexual — many of us just didn’t know. We thought when we married you that we were “just” crossdressers or transvestites. Maybe not even that: maybe we thought we just had a fetish for makeup or shoes or nylons.
And many of us who thought we were crossdressers also thought we would get over it; that if we got married, the urge to crossdress would go away. I mean, we thought it was sex-based anyway, so when we started getting regular, healthy sex in marriage we wouldn’t need to crossdress any more. Yes, I know now there were several misconceptions in that thinking…..
So if you, our partners, feel betrayed, if you feel we lied to you, if you feel we were dishonest: wait. Some of us knew at a very early age that we were really girls not boys. Many others, though — like myself — just didn’t know, thought it would go away, or were in any case sure we could control it.
We did not withhold the information to hurt you. We were ashamed: we knew boys shouldn’t dress like girls, and we tried not to do it, but it was so hard, and we got so depressed when we didn’t dress.
If you are the spouse or parent or sibling, or maybe just the friend, of someone who now says “he” wants to be “she”, it is most likely that he didn’t know that his condition was more than transient.
Please consider a different context: suppose he found out at age 25, or 40, or 55, that he had a congenital heart condition that required him not only to have an expensive — but elective — surgery, but also required him to avoid sex because of the stress it might put on his heart. You might feel afraid for his life, and sad that it might be cut short, but would you feel betrayed?
Posted in Being/staying married, AutoBiog, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »
15 July 2010 by kathleen.
I saw a post the other day that indicated that the preferred term for someone who is/wants to be a gender different from the birth gender is transgender, not transgendered.
Oh, shoot! If so, I’ve been doing it wrong, using the -ed suffix pretty consistently in both the website articles and the blog posts. I may have to go back and fix everything, if I decide to drop the suffix.
I recognize and acknowledge the logic. Language, however, is as much about sound as it is about meaning. To my ear, the -ed suffix sounds better.
Suppose that my gender is MtF (or male-to-female), and because of that I am transgendered. My brother, God bless him, seems to like his birth gender, and he is male. Saying he is a cisgender male sounds plausible, but calling him a cisgendered male sounds better — to me. Saying male cisgender, however, doesn’t work for my ear.
American English tends to be very lazy about converting nouns into adjectives. So you may eat a Phildelphia cheese steak, but I think you might more correctly call it a Philadelphic cheese steak, although if you chose to say Philadelphia-style cheese steak I would be quite happy as well. I don’t expect to change the speech habits of several millions of Phildelphians; I’m only citing an example of the grammatical construction.
In any case, I will think some more about the wisdom of the -ed suffix. Maybe on a quiet day I will make the change to all my documents, or maybe not.
Posted in General FtM topics, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »
13 July 2010 by kathleen.
My partner asked me the other day, “Does being a woman meet your expectations?”
First, being a woman exceeds the expectations I had for my own state of mind. I expected that I would feel really excited and happy for a few months, or a year, but that then I would go back to feeling about the same as I did, say, two or three years before my transition, before I began to feel good about being transgendered. In fact, 2-1/2 years after my transition, I still, daily, feel good and excited and more alive than I have felt since childhood.
Second, I expected to be using makeup more heavily than I do. Instead I am enjoying clothing more than I expected — though I might have known because of the care I used to take with the selection of color, pattern, and texture in neckties. I’ve appreciated color and texture for a long time, and the possibility of experimenting and experiencing color on a daily basis: awesome!
Third, I expected more resistance from the people around me; I expected to be read more often. I am delighted that my gender has never been challenged. I am far more confident in my woman-ness than I ever imagined.
Fourth, I believe that daily I get better and better at living warmly and openly, as my mother did. I am able to be at ease with people, and am getting better at putting the people around me at ease, too.
On the downside, I had a few months right after my transition when I got really tired of curling my hair with the blow dryer every morning. I’m happy to say: I’m over being tired of it. So, over all, being a woman is way better than I expected, and I am way more comfortable than I imagined I could be.
Posted in AutoBiog, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »
11 July 2010 by kathleen.
Hearing people talk and seeing forum posts from those who are newly experiencing their transgendered nature, I suspect some people may feel confused. Just wait till you see how confused I am!
Over the past few weeks I’ve collected terms and phrases that have become part of my life. If
then this list might be of value to you in sorting out where you are, or where your friend or loved one is. Or, if you have to explain to someone what the heck is going on with you, maybe you’ll find some words you can use to explain your situation.
I know this list is not the last word on the subject; I hope it helps someone. You can find Kathleen’s Glossary here.
Posted in General FtM topics, General MtF topics | 1 Comment »