Transition, Tension and Making Sure September 7, 2008
Posted by Marybeth in acceptance, appearance, dissonance, hormones, society, transgender, transsexual, work.3 comments
Sunday, September 7th 11:36 am
Good morning everyone!
Today I am writing from the inside of my apartment looking at the beautiful Gatineau Hills across the Ottawa River. I thought that I would visit here today as my wife is at a retreat all day today.
Being at the apartment is a bit like being on a retreat for me too. I’ve got my snack (a trail mix with chocolate that I put together before I left this morning) and a hot mug of mocha. I am dressed comfortably femininely (a beautiful blue silk blouse!) with a touch of make-up on. I feel peaceful and energized!
Fall is in the air, summer is ending and the new year has begun! That’s how it feels to me at least. I guess going to school for around twenty years of my life has conditioned me to think of September as when the ‘real’ New Year begins. As I figure it, I am now in Year 18 of work. I will ‘graduate’ at year 33.
Everyone who took time off work is back at the office and the wheels are starting to turn again. At least they would be except that being a Canadian government employee, whose responsibilities include monitoring United States policy positions, means that first I have to wait until after our October 14th election and then after the November 4th U.S. election before things really get moving again for me. I guess that just gives me more time to ensure my transition rolls along smoothly.
I can’t wait until I go full-time because then I can just start living a regular life again. As it is right now, I schizophrenically dress as a male during work days, despite my testosterone levels being as close to zero as they can possibly be, and then dress regularly whenever I am not at work. It is actually quite stressful!
Why?
Because I think, feel and understand myself as a woman now. My self image is all female and that feels great. The high levels of estrogen I am taking right now combined with the androcur and finasteride make me as hormonally female as any girl going through puberty, but some people, despite the feminine vibes they are getting, insist on calling me ‘sir’. Ouch!
I used to think being call ‘Sir’ was a showing of respect but as I learned in the military, there are many different ways to say ‘sir’. I am getting the less respectful versions these days.
I can’t say as I blame them really, I hardly look like a sir anymore (and as time goes on, I will look even less ‘sir-ish’), even if I am wearing a suit and tie. If that’s the case though, I’d rather they just not say ‘sir’ at all. I won’t insist on ma’am yet (if ever), but I just wish they wouldn’t say sir!
One thing I am getting very self conscious about now is my hairline. I have decided that I want to get that looked after before I go full-time so I am going to see a hair replacement doctor this week to see what he says. I kept hoping that the hormones and the 2.5 mg of finasteride that I take every day would lead to some re-growth but my timetable isn’t going to permit me to wait it out.
Here is an example of the difference.
One with the hairline showing.
One without it showing.
Which looks more feminine?
(… neither isn’t an option! 
…)
So off I go to get hair replacement surgery!
If I look at it positively, the six to eight months that it will take for my more feminine hairline to be noticeable will give me that much more time to lose weight, work on my voice, finish my electrolysis and build my wardrobe so that my transition can be as uneventful as possible. It will also give me and my wife that much more time to be together before I move out.
More time is good, I guess…
That said, it is getting tougher to reconcile the increasing tension between my personal picture of myself and what some other folks seem to see. I know that I look quite feminine in many ways but the suit I wear to work most days and my receding hairline seem to trump my mostly feminine features for some folks.
I guess the one thing that bothers me the most about my current state of transition is that lack of recognition of my femaleness. I feel female, I see myself as female and I usually react to things in a very female way. I understand intellectually that because of the hairline and/or the suit some people will treat me as male but emotionally it is getting harder and harder for me to take. My life is strange these days because I seem to be being taken for a stereotypically gay male by people instead of an androgynous, mostly female person.
You think they are confused, imagine how uncomfortable I feel!
I try to stop myself from acting too feminine while I am wearing a suit but it is really getting tough for me to do these days – never underestimate the power of hormones! I have to admit I am getting to a point where I am really not worrying about it too much but some people in my relatively conservative workplace do get unnerved by it 
.
In short, I can’t wait to go full-time but I don’t want to go full time until I am as passably feminine as I can be. If that means waiting for another eight or so months until the hair replacement gives me a more feminine hairline, then I guess I will have to wait it out – and continue to confuse the heck out of folks!!
Just one thing though…
Please,
Pretty, Pretty, Please,
…don’t call me sir.
Love,
Marybeth
Soul and Body February 3, 2008
Posted by Marybeth in acceptance, dissonance, fate, gender, society, transsexual.1 comment so far
Sunday, February 3, 2008 05:48
Good morning everyone! It is a nice minus 5 degrees Celsius outside here this morning at my wife’s place, so outside I am, enjoying fresh air and a warm drink (tea with honey!). It is quiet and dark, me alone with my thoughts, a computer and a feeling of camaraderie with all those who might read this entry once complete.
Female to male transsexuals say that they have the mind of a woman but the body of a man, and I agree with that description but I think it is equally true that we also have the soul of a woman. I think that it is the combination of a female mind and a feminine soul that ultimately determines our fates.
Scientists have shown that in the womb it is the brain that develops first and the body that develops second. So imagine, if you are inclined to, all those souls in the ether searching for their chance at reincarnation. Masculine and feminine souls patiently waiting for the perfect match.
One feminine soul must have been hovering nearby when I was conceived. She must have recognized the sympathetic energies that had coalesced into the newly formed fetus with the compatible mind and joined to become one with the baby soon to be born. Hormonal changes in the womb caused an imbalance, male genitals were formed, and I was born.
My soul informed me that I was female, the essence of my being instinctively acted and reacted in a feminine way. I knew that when I grew up I would be a woman like my mother. I related to the world as a girl would in every way until I was told that I shouldn’t act that way. Until I was corrected by those who cared for me and shown the correct way to behave. I was punished for acting like a girl and rewarded for acting like a boy. And so I began a lifetime journey of rejecting my soul. My soul was in conflict with my body and with society for all those years – is it any wonder that, as time went on, I became more and more frustrated and depressed?
My feminine soul, my subconscious, instinctively indicated one course of action which my manufactured male persona, my ego, had to constantly assess for social acceptability and reject those instincts that were too feminine. Instead of acting spontaneously to the outside world, my ego had to step in and monitor every action – like a simultaneous translation, it translated my feminine perceptions into a learned/imitation male response. It was like taking a picture with a digital camera – there was always a perceptible delay between when I pressed the button and when the action was taken.
Why was I so depressed and frustrated? Why was I more comfortable alone? Why did I seek out the solitary escape of computer games and the mind-numbing effects of alcohol? It was because I was spending so much of my time and energy fighting against my feminine instincts – second guessing everything (it looks like a tree but is it really?). My soul told me one thing, society expected another.
Happiness and peace are what results when soul and the body, the subconscious and the conscious, the id and the ego are in agreement. In non-transitioned transsexuals each aspect is pulling in opposite directions and this naturally leads to discomfort, frustration and depression. For transsexuals, the mind and the soul have always been in agreement, it is the body and the expectations of society that are out of sync.
I know that now that I have begun the process of transition, I feel a happiness and peace I haven’t known since I was a little girl. For the first time in my life my soul, my mind and my body are becoming reconciled and it is a truly joyous feeling!
How do I know I am a woman?
My soul tells me so.
Love,
Marybeth
Untangling the Threads March 31, 2007
Posted by Marybeth in acceptance, appearance, confusion, differences, dissonance, dysphoria, family, gender, love, plans, reflection, resolve, society, transgender, work.1 comment so far
Saturday, March 31, 2007 4:06 AM
It seems I am writing in ‘chapters’ today.
In the past two entries I have come to the conclusion that living in the past is both harmful and ultimately a sacrilege. Anything that takes us too long away from the full experience of the present and planning for the future is potentially wasteful of the most precious resource we have, our own lives.
Perceptive people may point to my writing of this past hour and suggest that my actions betray my conclusions. I would agree but also hasten to suggest that my writing allows me to learn the lesson. Without writing it down I would continue down the same road and suffer the same consequences I believe I have understood in these reflections.
Which is to say that it is a balance but one that is, as all balances are, difficult to maintain. Socrates once said ‘An unexamined life is not worth living’ but at what point do you stop examining and resume living? I struggle with that question all the time, the message my subconscious seems to have been sending me suggested to me that perhaps I had the balance wrong or that I was spending my time examining the wrong things. It is a message I hope I can remain mindful of.
So where does all this examining leave me?
As my previous entries have indicated I am on the road to self acceptance after a lifetime of doubt, self hatred and running away. I have decided to accept my ‘True Self’ and am currently in the process of reconciling the seemly irreconcilable.
My greatest challenge right now is to retain the best parts of my constructed self as I more fully express my repressed self. I want to hold on to the achievements of my male existence as I transition to female. It is a simple concept but a truly monumental task. Much like ‘I want to climb a mountain’ – ‘I want to climb Mount Everest’. Well maybe not that bad but it scares that heck out of me. I had good reason to run, I assure you!
But I am not running anymore. I have slowed down, turned around and am walking back towards that which I treasure and fear most. .Me.
As we grow up most of us go through a period where we hate how we look, are uncomfortable with our ‘changes’ and are confused by new ‘feelings’. Suffice to say I had similar feelings though perhaps a bit more ‘completely’ than others. I needed to adjust my expectations in both ‘body’ and ‘mind’. Heterosexuals may feel some discomfort as the body changes but ultimately they are quite happy with it. Homosexuals are usually fine with most aspects of the body but experience dissonance between societies expectations and their desires. Transsexuals can get a double-barrelled helping of angst, they are definitely in the wrong body and, given that, cannot give and return the love of their desire in the fashion they would prefer, regardless of what their sexual preference might be.
A wise man once counselled that we must learn from the past, as we live in the present, and plan for the future.
I have spent my whole life running from a fundamental fact. Running from this fact resulted in a life that was partly based on a lie. Trying to unravel which parts of my life, what accomplishments, what friendships, what obligations, what EVERYTHING was based on either the assumption that I was male or based on the actions I took to maintain the facade of maleness and those things in my life that were based on the bits of the real me peeking from behind the mask is a huge task and one that I expect to spend the rest of my life coming to terms with. It is a bit like untangling two balls of yarn, one yellow and one blue. Yellow is female and blue is male. One is the real me the other is the manufactured me and the expectations / assumptions of society based on that. One is the feminine thread and the other is the masculine thread. The only problem is that given that most people aren’t usually 100% feminine or 100% masculine, the threads merge so I also have a greenish looking thread to decipher and part of that thread is the real me too.
If that last bit sounds confusing to you then you can imagine how confused and conflicted I feel. I am living it everyday.
To make it a bit more concrete for you, I will demonstrate the conundrum with something I am struggling with right now. Did my wife fall in love with me because the ‘real me’ shone through (my hope) or did she fall in love with me because of my masculine body and the fact that I was male or was it a combination? My feeling is that it was a combination and the balance (there is that word again!) is what will determine if we stay together through this or not. My hope is that we will at least remain friends, though I could totally understand her hating me intensely for this imposition to her life.
Everything else in my life is the same story – what is the balance? Does my employer value more the quality of my work, my integrity or my good nature or is the evidence of my gender more important than that? What about the network of contacts in my job? I suppose I can always get a new job but what about my close family? My extended family? My close friends? People that I pass on the street that ‘clock’ me? People I just meet? What a minefield!
And yet I must transition. I must rebalance my self, honestly.
I have learned that running either through repression or escapism only leads to frustration, anger, focusing on small things because the big things seem insurmountable, depression, loss of hope and death.
Putting it off only means more lies and more threads to untangle.
Love,
Maura
Assumptions and Expectations March 26, 2007
Posted by Marybeth in acceptance, appearance, confusion, differences, dissonance, dysphoria, family, gender, reflection, society, transgender, transsexual.1 comment so far
Monday, March 26, 2007 4:29 AM
I wrote quite a bit yesterday but it was really disjointed – a bunch of thoughts with no real point – other than to reflect the confused and frustrated state I find myself now I guess.
What is at the root of the confusion and frustration? If you’ve read very much at all of this journal you could come to a number of conclusions. I will list off a few.
Possibility One:
Maura is a frustrated idealist upset that her idea of the world and the way people might live together and don’t out of selfishness and greed sets her to be critical of everyone else but not critical enough of her reaction to it.
Possibility Two:
Maura is not really Maura at all she is actually a frustrated he looking for solace in the ‘softer’ sex. His rantings about his transgender nature are just that a sissy boy looking for the easy way out – being selfish and caring only about his perceived injury.
Possibility Three:
Maura is an intelligent, kind and observant soul that only wants to know and understand others and be known and understood in return. These writing represent her attempts to ‘deprogram’ herself from all the assumptions and expectations that she makes about others and others make about her.
I could go on – there are many different possible motivations that lead to a pouring of the soul out into the digital sea. Some noble, some crass but given that I enjoy some privileges as the author of this missive into the darkness I will choose one of the possibilities and explain why it perhaps is the explanation that I would most like to believe it to be most true.
Transsexuality is something that is so fundamental and so mysterious at the same time. It should be obvious – a sapling will grow up to be a tree, a piglet into a pig and so one. We gather the information we have available, make reasonable assumptions based on the data and then our expectations are formed both from those assumptions and our own individual desires.
This legitimate process when applied to a transsexual child leads to so many problems. The baby has physical characteristics that lead you to assume it is a boy. The baby can’t disagree with you so all you have to go on are appearances. You are the proud father so you expect that the boy will grow up big and strong / slight and smart / as manly and virile as yourself. You invest your most precious child with your own hopes and dreams. The baby grows up and tries to understand the world and adapt to the world. It sees its parents and recognizes that these are beings much like itself. It experiments and learns and grows. The parents allow the child to experience everything it wants to but protect it from falling off a cliff or burning their fingers or ….
And this is the nub of it.
My parents ultimately protected me from being myself. As if expressing my feminine nature would be dangerous. They saw a baby, assumed I was a boy and expected that I would grow up into a man. I have to believe that they were indeed looking out for my best interest. I know from personal experience how difficult it can be to be ‘different’. But expecting an orange tree to produce apples is ultimately going to be a frustrating experience for both those who want an apple and for the orange tree desperately trying to grow apples.
I may have been saved from early pain and suffering by my parents insistence that I act like I looked but I was going through pain anyways. In the school yard I wanted to play hopscotch and jacks but I wasn’t allowed (some girls were O.K. with it but others wouldn’t let me – boys don’t play hopscotch!). My best friend in kindergarten and grade one was a girl whose mother noticed that we were best friends and informed her that I couldn’t come over and play anymore because girls shouldn’t have boyfriends when they were six.
Perhaps if this was a more accepting world and others wanted to understand and know me for who I really am and not solely on their assumptions and expectations then I wouldn’t have had to lie to so many people about my gender. I would have been free as a child to express my true self and perhaps attended to the physical inconsistencies in the same way that you might attend to a sliver of wood that gets imbedded in the skin. If you remove right away the pain goes away and you can live without discomfort. If you just ignore it, it just works its way further under your skin until you find that you are getting mad without any reason, frustrated at others and confused.
In short the way I am right now.
This is why I need to remove the sliver – to address the root of my dysphoria and then I will be able to resume my life from where I left it when I was six years old and was forced to live according to someone else’s assumptions and expectations.
Love,
Maura
Reflecting Upon the ‘Ideal’ February 3, 2007
Posted by Marybeth in acceptance, differences, dissonance, dreams, ideal, l(i)(o)ve, l(o)(i)ve, plans, reality, reflection, society, survival.add a comment
Saturday, February 3, 2007 6:38 PM
A note I wrote to my wife reflecting on life.
What is the ‘ideal’?
For me, for you, my soulmate, my beloved?
We are, unfortunately, two peas in a pod – never close enough to each other, too alike, sometimes, to realize our differences – too accommodating to allow them to get in the way. I move to the left, as you are moving the left, I am smiling and then, both turning to each other we realize that ‘we’ are smiling.
The ‘ideal’ is that we would agree on everything and learn from each other how to better enjoy the things we already enjoy. One plus one equals infinity.
Reality is accepting that there is a world beyond the two of us. Reality is accepting that there is God who loves and condemns. Reality is suffocating.
To breathe the fresh clean air of winter – alive in the absence of life. Exultation – a triumph of our will to survive over the reality of the elements.
To languish in the permissiveness of the heavy humidity of late summer, surviving the oppressive heat. Relief – an acceptance of the our responsibility to the future.
Idealism. Cynicism.
Acceptance. Condemnation.
Freedom. Servitude.
Reality.
How do we reconcile the winter of our idealism with the summer of our responsibilities?
How do we live in hope of our triumph while enduring the despair of our survival?
We mortals shift our coil for the merest of moments and our struggles are like a gust of wind in the leaves of a great oak. Our time on earth is short yet we are immortal in God.
We ‘need’ to have meaning but what meaning is there in ‘reality’?
Meanings only exist in an ‘ideal’.
To realize our triumph we need to fight against the oppression of ‘reality’ and those who enforce it. We need to accept our responsibilities and never waver from our vision of the future.
So that we can breathe the fresh, clean air of a reality shaped by our idealism.
So what is the ‘ideal’?
It is our destiny.
L(o)(i)ve,
Maureen Beth
Dynamic Tension December 3, 2006
Posted by Marybeth in dissonance, dysphoria, reflection, society, transgender.add a comment
Sunday, December 3, 2006 3:46 PM
Dynamic tension.
What an interesting concept… It seems that there is dynamic tension in almost everything we do. Waking-Sleeping. Work-Play. Public-Personal. Good-Evil. Male-Female. In fact, the lack of dynamic tension could be exemplified by stagnation or even death.
A concept related to it (though I wouldn’t think synonymous) is stress. What is at the root of stress? Likely tension between two things, say a deadline and the amount of work required to do before it, for example.
Peter Senge in his book ‘The Fifth Discipline’ referred to this when he wrote about the dissonance or the gap between an ideal and reality of a particular situation or in a person / organizations goals. Stress results when the tension caused by an increased divergence between the two becomes less and less sustainable. When it gets this way one of three things can happen: reality can be made (perhaps through a superhuman effort) to match the goal; the goal can be abandoned resulting in more or less the status quo perhaps slightly shifted towards the goal though not meeting it; but the third thing that can happen is an explosion. This is the most dramatic thing that could happen because it is the discovery of a third way or, in other words, an evolution or a revolution. The explosion breaks binary- it destroys the old paradigm and results in a new way of looking at the issue.
The disonance or stress is caused by the willful ignorance of the continuum between two states – in this example between an idealized goal and a perceived reality. The dynamic tension between the two poles is the playground of life.
Societies, especially rigid or orthodox ones tend to determine that one this is ‘good’ and one thing is ‘evil’ and then impose these qualitative boundaries on their citizenry. A healthy society has an on-going debate about the relative strengths and weakness of various approaches to a wide variety of issues. An unhealthy society accepts one way and one way only and then ultimately destroys itself when it fails to react to a threat that hasn’t been foreseen and thus has no pre-determined solution. A healthy society reacts to an unexpected issue in the same way that it deals with all issues – through debate and discussion of alternatives.
In my life I have had to deal with a conservative society’s view of gender. In most people’s eyes there are only two genders male and female and you either conform or you are an outcast. To be included you must exhibit the stereotypical behaviours of either a man or a woman based your external sexual organs. There has been no acknowledgement of the continuum between male and female in anything other than a diagnosable psychological condition – transsexualism or transvestism.
A healthy society would enter into a debate and discuss what is known about the condition and what should be done. An unhealthy society shuns and distrusts these transgressions as they are against the ‘norm’ and then forces those who are burdened with these conditions (through no fault of their own) to censor themselves and, in effect, hide or disguise their conditions.
In my own experience this has been sort of like trying to disguise a gaping head wound. You go through all sorts of contortions to hide the obvious because you are ashamed and convince yourself that your contortions are working. You want to be seen to be healthy so you lie about your gaping head wound. Many people see the contortions and may even see the cause of the contortions but, out of respect for your efforts, play along and many others simply couldn’t care less. The end result is you running around all your life trying to hide a gaping head wound, while at the same time the effects of the wound on your body take their, very real, toll. To carry on the analogy, the blood continues to flow out of the wound.
My point through these meanderings today is simply that as individuals and as a society we need to acknowledge the continuum between two seemly opposite states and the dynamic tension that exists pulling in either direction. To end up stuck on either side is akin to being stuck in a pool of stagnant water rather than being caught up in the sometimes treacherous but vigourous flow of a stream.
If society had been more accepting of the male-female continuum (regardless of external organs) then I could have had my gaping head wound treated much earlier, been a much more able contributor to society and, most significantly, been able to be much more honest with those I care for and spare them any collateral damage.
We forfeit three fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people. - Arthur Schopenhauer, (1788-1860) German philosopher
