Musings from my everyday life...

There are those good days and then those bad ones. Today is not one of the good ones and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I did not sleep well the night before for starters but then this melancholy set in that I can’t seem to shake entirely.

I have always been a very complicated person. When I was young I was painfully shy and felt inadequate and nervous. It’s not that life petrified me but I was never able to be myself. To this day I don’t know what being myself really is for I was too afraid to be that; possibly for fear of being found out and singled out as a freak. I became very good at going stealth as a consequence. I had to learn to fit in.

Life moves so fast and we go from phase to phase without ever catching our breath. This period of my life will be used to settle in to defining who I am and what I want to do with the rest of my life. It is already approaching the longest time that I have ever lived completely alone and the silence has afforded me a lot of time to refle…

Be true to yourself and don't hide behind a mask. This has taken me decades to learn. Rejecting the way you were made is like saying that you are not worthy of God's love. Many of us are born with challenging circumstances and if not they are thrust upon us during our lifetimes. Being gender disphoric may be a difficult challenge but it can be overcome. The only critical key to doing this however is to learn to love yourself as you are. The lucky ones who had their difference acknowledged and accepted were able to live their early life with the self assurance that they were accepted as they were. They either transitioned or at least expressed themselves openly without fear of judgement or reprisal. However these are the minority of cases and in fairness to my parents, I never let them in on the secret due to my conforming to what was expected of me; the dutiful son who does what he's told. If I am still hiding now it's because my coming out story is still in progress.

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In order to solve the riddle of my GID I really need to think of myself as a person first and as a gender affiliation second. I am neither fully female nor fully male but simply myself; a person created by God with a variation that makes me unable to conform to a stereotype or be slotted perfectly in either camp. This is something I've had to learn on my own for no one was able to teach it while I was growing up. I think every transgender person has this type of personal journey to travel in order to feel self love and be whole. Otherwise we're just constantly failing to measure up as brother, father or husband. This process of discovery can but not necessarily lead to full transition.

This time alone has afforded me to reflect upon the nature of my identity and tend to my damaged psyche. I feel increasingly peaceful and more able to tend to the challenges and my sense of self worth has benefited as well. It has shown up both in my work life and private life in the form of an …

My public face as a woman is one of a conservative and middle aged female. As some of you have seen from my pictures I am not into the sex kitten look but instead feel I am somehow a variation of my mother. Conservative pumps and pearl earrings are the order of the day for me. With the calming effect that repeated practice has brought me I can now focus on my feelings instead of how to conceal the fact that I am a biological male in disguise (to be clear I don't see myself that way but it is a literal fact). Inside I feel female and very very happy when I am out and about and it is this happiness that will ultimately prevent me from doing anything to my body.

It appears that my venturing into the world as joanna is going to suffice in satiating my gender disphoria. I am elated for this fact because my previous doubting was causing me a great deal of concern. Disphoria requires treatment and, as Jack Molay said recently in one of his blog entries, controlled crossdressing is a very…

Something I have failed to do truly completely is to fully embrace myself for who I am. Dressing up in women’s clothes for me has always been something to feel ashamed of. Even now there are still vestiges of feeling like I am failing at being a man every time I don that dress. It’s hard to remove something so completely engrained in your psyche. I suppose I understand now why there is such a thing as gay pride parades – heterosexuals don’t celebrate their normalcy because they have never had to struggle for self acceptance. I am still not quite where I need to be but I am so much closer to the end of the struggle than near the beginning. Emulating a female is not something to feel embarrassed about because there is nothing wrong with being a female. It is not showing weakness but strength to go out in public in a dress and face the world and I need to repeat that to myself every time I go out.

I stepped out yesterday and had a perfectly lovely time while fully embracing what I was …

I don’t entirely enjoy feeling stuck in the middle between genders. I look at people like Andrej Pejic the model who enjoys blurring the gender lines. But he has established an existence and gains his living in this fashion. He is getting paid to be controversial and be the media darling. People like me who have established themselves as male all of their lives can’t do a switch over or a re do. My change of gender presentation is like a mask in many ways because I am living the rest of the time as a male.

But I need not see that as being stuck. I am choosing to see it that way perhaps because of the faintest hope in rekindling a connection with someone in the future. If I were not attracted to females it would not be an issue whatsoever but, even though I need to be true to myself, I am still not ready to spend the rest of my life alone because of the way I am. Unfortunately being trans is often a prescription for membership in the “lonely hearts club band”. I just need to figure…

While I am not certain yet whether I will ever move to another level of transition, one thing that has changed slowly over time is the way I feel about myself as a person. I don't really feel like a man. I have learnt and been trained to live as one all my life but I don't exactly feel I am one. There has always been something off with my identification as a male. As a youngster I was sensitive, shy and girly looking. I still have feminine features as an adult which now help me pass as a female. So what remains is to see where the tide takes me, I have accepted that my relationship with N is beyond reconciliation and that my kids are growing up rapidly. Living part time is allowing me to test the waters of what a full life as joanna might be like. So far it has been revealing and rewarding but questions still remain.

My own version of transition will be painstakingly slow and that's the way it needs to be. Like the slow and deliberate peeling of an orange because I have ha…

Well it’s now officially over between N and myself. I suspect this is for the best because having weighed all of the factors involved and given my rather advanced GID it was never going to work anyway. There is admittedly a pang of sadness in admitting this because my lack of normalcy really hits home at times like these. So now I can focus on living my life on my own terms not being concerned about how to fit the demands of another person into my life. Certainly there are disadvantages to being alone but when all is said and done I don’t believe that transgender people (who are essentially stuck in the middle between two genders) fit in very well as life partners to conventional genetic females. Most of the people I know are riding a tenuous balance between outright hostility and minimal tolerance for their condition. It is rare indeed to find a couple that works perfectly when dealing with this condition.

At least now I can deal with my condition with complete lucidity and acceptanc…

The next series of steps have to do with balance. Balance in life is crucial in order to maintain harmony of mind, body and soul. Now that I have come to an understanding of what I am, I need to figure out what space my being trans needs to occupy in my life. Is my ultimate goal to live mostly as Joanna or is it more of a split between male and female? I don't have the answers yet but I do know that I am going to enjoy the process of discovery instead of spending my time hand wringing and stressing over it. The answer will come naturally and organically and I don't need to pressure myself into anything now.

N and I are off but maybe on; i don't really know. But I can't worry about that now as I did before; after all I was trying to fit myself into her expectation of a male and keeping Joanna as invisible as possible. So invisible that her seeing me dressed was something that terrified me for fear it would turn her off having feelings for me as a mate. That plus trying …