Leafy thoughts

It was an unexpectedly nice dry day today, so when I finished work I finally got out of my jammies and robe (oh, so comfy!) and into work clothes and went outside to do some much needed yard work. When I'm doing work like this, it's almost all brawn, no brain, and I don't plug into any tunes as some do, so I tend to get into a contemplative mood.

Here's one thought that came to me. Not too long ago, getting into work clothes, which are really crappy old boy clothes that I keep around for the purpose, would take away from my joy in being a woman. Now, I find that it's no big deal. They're just work clothes, and sometimes I need to get dirty. I might not feel particularly feminine dressed like that, with my hair tied in a practical ponytail, but I know who and what I am. I don't need clothes to be comfortable in my own skin. I even chatted with a neighbour who, as it turns out, knows our kitty because she works for the woman who runs the cat care service.

Here's another thought: the classic trio of sex and drugs and rock and roll (thank you, Ian Dury) were what I mostly used to stave off gender dysphoria. I've written about all of those separately, but it had never occurred to me that all three together played a large part in my cursed adaptability. For most people, sex and drugs and rock and roll are fun, and they were fun for me too. But they were also attempts to find out who I really was that really had the opposite effect of keeping my real self hidden away. Funny thing about that. I'm digging R&R again, and I'm hoping for new and improved sex in the not-too-distant future, but the drugs have to stay in the past.

Nothing very profound, but it helped me get through several bags of leaves and other yard debris. I don't like doing yard work any more than I ever have, and probably less, but the physical aspect of it was good. And so was the contemplation.

My own way, and getting out of it

This afternoon, we came back from a few days of vacation in San Francisco. I won't give you the usual travelogue except to say that we love our friends there and also that the Raveonettes rocked.

We were there from Saturday evening until this morning, with nothing fancy planned. Packing should have been easy, and I gave myself a lot of time to do it. But somehow, I was not happy with what I had packed, and it triggered some silly tears on the way down. Packing for me as I am now is a skill I have not yet mastered. I'm not good at planning outfits days in advance. I'm not good at anticipating what I might need. I'm terrible at choosing among only a couple pairs of shoes.

But the tears were for more than that. Really I packed just fine. I had no problem with outfits for any of the things we did. But it struck me on the plane that I'm still working out how I dress for any particular occasion, or no occasion at all.

Recently, I went into winter mode. I'm no longer going to the "office" (for counselling sessions). It's cold and wet. I've been wearing skinny jeans and boots a lot with various tops and whatever coat or jacket works for the weather. It's not a bad look for me. It's certainly one of my looks. But I don't want to get lazy and fall into that look all the time, even though it's winter. I like the way I used to dress for counselling—a dress or top and skirt, sometimes with flats, sometimes with heels, often with a jacket. When the weather got cooler, then it was dresses or skirts with tights and cute little ankle boots. I liked the compliments, but mostly I liked the fact that I knew I looked good and was at the right level of feminine for me.

Looking feminine is important to me. Not because I have to prove that I'm a woman. I'm way past that. It's about me presenting myself in ways I want to, in ways that make me feel good. I'm a femme. That's me. That doesn't mean office wear to go to a club or out shopping, but it might mean more skirts and tights. Tights are one of the few things that get me through winter, and there are a lot of cool patterned ones right now. When I have a choice between jeans and a funky skirt, I want to make sure not to fall back on jeans all the time.

As I was working this out on the plane, as is my wont (blog writing in my head), I hit upon something that caught me in the stomach and really made me cry: at least sometimes, I'm still afraid. Afraid of being all the woman I can be. Afraid of not measuring up to my own standards. Afraid of being myself and not hiding.

I hate fear. I hate how it makes me feel. I hate how it leads me to keep myself down, to run for safety. Fear is the first negative emotion that a baby experiences. It's truly primitive, and it hits at my most basic sense of self.

I really have nothing to fear, but emotions aren't rational. They tend not to respond to "that doesn't make sense." It takes a bit more work to get them in line. Therapy, anyone?

A few resolutions for these next couple of months before I head to Montreal:

• Allow myself to express myself as I really want to in any given situation. That might require a bit more shopping, but not a lot. It's mostly about making good use of what I have.
  
• Get back to serious portion control and get back to a weight I feel comfortable with.
• Work some aerobic exercise into my day somewhere. I'm not as busy as I was. It's just a matter of priorities.

I'm really quite terrible at resolutions, but I might have enough incentive right now to make some changes. Changes are coming up for me anyway. I should get ahead of the curve.

Two months and two weeks

I hadn't made a video in about three months (more than I was remembering), so I figured I was overdue. I actually tried to make one a while ago, but I guess I wasn't in a talkative mood, because it went nowhere. This time, even though I didn't plan anything, it turned out.

I'm much more of a writer than a talker, but sometimes I do like to talk. And I imagine things come out a bit differently when I do than when I write.

Attitude adjustment

Sometimes I feel...boyish. No, not like a man. But male-bodied. Because my body is still more male than female, despite more than a year and a half of hormone therapy, which of course can't change everything. Sometimes I'm conscious of all those mismatched pieces—I feel tall, I feel big, I feel flat, I feel angular, I feel unfinished. I don't feel like this most of the time, but sometimes I do. Sometimes my heritage weighs on me.

This happened yesterday when we left a theatre after seeing Whip It, which, by the way, is well worth seeing for a number of reasons. I went to the washroom before we left. I wasn't looking around, but for some reason I felt like I was being looked at, critically. My hair was down, which I am discovering might not be my most feminine look, strangely. I was wearing a kind of pea jacket, which I think looks nice but is to some extent gender neutral. The feeling probably had much more to do with me than with any looks I might or might not have been getting.

After I have had genital surgery, will I still have these feelings? The operation won't change my height or my size or my shape. But will it change, or at least help change, my attitude toward myself? A significant part of me will no longer be male, the use of which part provided me one of my only strong links to being a man. Once I have a vagina instead of a penis and testicles, will my heritage still weigh upon me? Will it weigh less?

I cannot allow myself to fall into the trap of thinking this operation is going to be magic. I do think that it's going to be a change of great significance, a feeling that has only grown stronger with time. Yet when the procedure is done, it will still be me out in the world, the same me everyone can see and interact with now.

Through most of this process, even from the very beginning, I have had some serious attitude. Fuck yeah, I'm a woman. I was acting like that well before I had any right to do so. It keeps me walking proud and, yes, tall, and probably has kept me from being seen as a target. I don't know why that attitude has been shaken lately. Maybe it's part of the lead-up to surgery. Maybe it's me making sure that my expectations are realistic.

I think part of it comes from the recent discussions about whether we are trans women forever, whether we want that label or not. That was bumming me out for a while, but sometimes it pisses me off. Not that someone would want that label for themselves. That's their business and their right. But that someone would try to push it onto me. That feels a bit like what we in Canada call "tall poppy syndrome." Don't stick up above the crowd. Don't get above your station. Well, fuck that.

I know who and what I am. I know where I came from. I know what I've overcome. Just as I will always be both a Canadian and a French-Canadian-American-Canadian, I will always be both a woman and a woman who started life as a boy. Should I aspire to be less because of this? Are certain things out of reach because of this? I don't think so.

I have to get my attitude back. Not stop being realistic, just make sure I have the confidence that any woman and any person should have. The world tends to run over people who lack confidence. And that confidence will not be found in the result of a surgical procedure. My attitude is in my head and in my whole body.

The tag line for the movie Whip It is "be your own hero." No elbows to the head, I promise. Just good, hard skating.

From rags to riches

On Thursday, I had a good visit with my doctor, or rather with yet another medical school student and my doctor. Actually, I like meeting with the med students. I'm all in favour of more physicians with knowledge of trans health care, and I feel kind of privileged to be helping them learn. Plus, they've all been really nice.

Turns out this was not the big post-op planning session. It was good, however, to learn that my lab results were all in line, including better cholesterol numbers. Yay for All-Bran with psyllium, low-fat cheese, and more fish! My blood pressure is very good too, as good as when I was power-walking a lot. Now if only I could get back to some kind of aerobic workout!

It was a good visit, but I left kind of depressed. I think I was set up for it by discussion a few days ago about whether we remain transsexual forever and whether we are ever fully women. At the community health centre I go to, it would be rare for me not to see at least one other trans woman. And all it took was seeing one easily-clocked trans woman to send me into a funk.

Oh, how we strain against the strictures of our male bodies! So many times, they just don't cooperate with our efforts to turn them female when we're already grown. The face, the shoulders, the chest, the hands, the hips—there are so many ways our bodies can betray us.

We have a pretty fucked up condition when you think about it. An undervirilized brain in a body that develops fine along male lines is just a horrible way for nature to go wrong. And yet our personalities are in that brain that developed differently—a perfectly healthy brain, just mismatched with the rest of the body. To shake out of us the feeling that our bodies are not right, that we should be women, you would have to shake away our very selves. You would not be left with a man but rather with a shell.

So we do everything we can, or everything we can afford, to right this terrible wrong. We live as our brain tells us we must. We correct the hormone balance that our brain says was wrong. We have skilled surgeons take away the dangly mistake and give us the vagina we ought to have had and sometimes the face we need to see in the mirror and the breasts that hormones would not grant us.

And yet none of that will change the fact that we were born male-bodied. Nor will it give us ovaries and a uterus and thereby the possibility of bearing children. None of it will change the bones inside us—shoulders, ribs, hands, feet, hips. None of it will help us learn to be full-fledged women and not just girls in finery.

Yes, there are times and circumstances in which this compromise feels...grotesque. We try so hard, and this is the best we can do.

Interestingly, I never have those black thoughts for very long. Are they the reality I am denying? Or are they simply demons trying to take away my joy? Because however much those things are objectively true, or can be seen as true, they don't describe the lion's share of my experience. Am I living a delusion, or do I actually see more clearly?

Because however imperfect this woman is, whatever her flaws, she is still a woman. Life echoes that back to her again and again, day in and day out. All those medical miracles are simply to allow us to feel in our bodies the way we feel in our hearts, and to allow others to see, even if only a glimpse, our true selves.

Every day, I feel honoured to be a woman. Not that there is anything dishonorable in being a man, if that's what you ought to be. But this woman is far happier than that man could ever have been. Every day, I thank the Goddess for the privilege I have, and acknowledge my own efforts. Every day, I feel gratitude to everyone who looks at me and sees a woman, especially those who knew me otherwise. Those people owe me nothing, regardless of what my brain tells me. Yet they freely give me love and acceptance, and blessings upon them for it.

Today was my last official day at the agency where I did my counselling practicum. I had a good session with the one client I had remaining. I helped a new practicum student. Very often, the office has been quiet on Fridays, but today it was bustling. One of the former clients who spends a lot of time there was cooking spicy meat patties over rice. Another told me, not for the first time, that he wants to see me around the office. The very first client I had came for a visit, just happened to do so, unaware that it was my last day. We had a lovely reunion. I told one of the staff who had never known about my status that I was trans. Her response: so what? It didn't matter to her, but she was glad that I had trusted her. Before I left, I was handed a card full of well wishes.

Honoured. Happy. Grateful. Proud. Humble. Appreciated. Loved. What more could anyone ask for?

Beaucoup d'information

Finally, two weeks after it was mailed (nice job, Canada Post), I received the complete information packet from the Centre Métropolitain de Chirurgie Plastique. Lots of reading to do, but fortunately I'm already familiar with some of it. The timing is perfect, because tomorrow I will see my doctor, and I can bring the material to him for questions.

Every development like this makes the process just a bit more real. Seeing all this information in front of me puts a huge grin on my face. It also gives me pause and makes me realize just how serious this whole thing is. I do realize it. And I still feel very, very good about it.

Just over two and a half months from now, I will be on a plane to Montreal, and a very important part of this odyssey will begin. In the meantime, life doesn't stop. Doctor appointment, Samhain, trip to San Francisco to see friends and have some fun, more tests, maybe another doctor visit or two, Yule, and my 56th birthday. And during all that, work both paid and volunteer, and all the other little things that make up my life.

I wish speedy healing for all my friends who had their genital surgery this month. Thank you and others who went before me for glimpses into your own surgical experience. My time is coming soon.

Name that blog

I can't remember when I first called this blog TransCanada. Not quite from the beginning, but close. It's a take-off on the film Transamerica, of course, and also a reference to the fact that I am Canadian. Especially since I've changed the subtitle, it doesn't even scream "transgender" or "transsexual" any more. There are a few companies called TransCanada, and there is a Trans-Canada highway and a Trans-Canada trail.

I've been thinking, however, that it might be time for a name change. This has to do with the somewhat controversial question of whether I am transsexual once I have transitioned, especially after my sex has been biologically and legally reassigned. Am I transsexual, or was I transsexual? I was certainly born transsexual. There's no question I was born with a male body, and I've lived with it more than 50 years. But once transition is complete (at least this transition—life is full of them), once I've crossed over, am I still transsexual or transgender? If I'm trans forever, then what does transition mean? If I'm still transsexual or transgender after transition, does that devalue transition?

One reason I stayed far away from all things trans for so long is that I wanted to be a woman, born a girl, with all the right parts and chromosomes and everything. And I knew I couldn't have that. I was afraid of being a freak. I was afraid of being not quite a woman. That just wasn't what I wanted.

So when I alleviated my woeful ignorance and learned that, given time, I could change my sex is every way except chromosomally, then I knew I had to do it. It was still a compromise, but not nearly as much of one as I had feared. It was much closer to the dream come true than I had dreamed it could be.

But is it less of the dream come true than I claim it to be? Some think so. Some think worse, of course, considering me to be a man until I die, but their ignorance is profound, and I ignore them. But some think I'm trans for my whole life, and that I have to deal with.

I've said before that I will never pretend to be other than I am. I will never hide my origins, even if I will be selective about those I tell. I am and shall be a woman. A woman of transsexual history, a woman with a past, whatever. But a woman now. If I am branded a trans woman forever, a woman with an asterisk, then just kill me now.

So that's why I wonder about the blog name. I purposely gave it various "trans" names in order to be obvious in search engines. Do I want to be obvious any more? The subtitle references my "late-blooming womanhood." Should the whole title go for something similar? Something more subtle than TransCanada?

I wonder as well about the future of this blog. I love to write, but I didn't start a blog until I had a subject that really engaged me, first Second Life, then my gender odyssey. In this blog, I've written non-personal entries, but not that many. It's mostly been about my own personal transition. Once I am post-op, will I have anything left to write about? It will just be my life. I find my own life interesting, but at that point I'm not sure who else will.

"The future's not ours to see," wrote lyricist Ray Evans. I guess I'll just have to wait to find out how it all unfolds. To quote another songwriter, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

Addendum: My Twitter friend Suvi-Tuuli did zing me good once when I said I thought of myself as a woman, not a trans woman. She said, that's a good attitude to have when you go for your prostate exam. :)