Musings from my everyday life...

What’s left for me to determine now is this: is it possible for someone to truly be dual spirited and live this way for the rest of their lives? This is a question I have not answered adequately and until I do I will not be truly comfortable with my current lifestyle. I feel I am struggling instead of just living one day at a time and discovering myself as I go. This is unfortunately part of my nature. I seem to need certainty and control, but there is none of that here instead a lot of greys. It’s interesting to note that after a particularly wonderful day like yesterday, when I was able to spend the day fully en femme, I still come down to earth with a small thud. Yes I am giving myself a break and trying not to be too self punishing but the elements of small guilt are still there. That’s not going to be workable if I feel bad about being who I am. Therefore there is still work to be done. I mean its simple right? My GID is going nowhere and there is (to my knowledge) no known

I had my yearly physical yesterday. My doctor knows I'm transgendered and so , besides taking my blood sample and checking vital signs, we discussed where I am in life with all this. Interestingly he immediately zeroed in on the main crux - my marriage ended over this and now a second one (at least partially). He wanted to know if I intended to spend the rest of my life alone. I started to almost cry as he had really nailed it. I guess I have not really given up hope entirely about finding companionship. After composing myself for a moment I answered that if it came down to my mental health or suppressing my trans nature to be with a woman I would choose to stay sane. I am still working at voiding myself of the pairing instinct in order to become truly whole. This work needs to be done in order to fully understand myself. Because even if I have abandoned the idea of physical transition, I am still weighing life transition. I might one day desire to live and work full time as the

Who’s in control – is it me or the crossdressing? Right now the answer is more the latter. Although I have accepted my right to cross dress as being a fundamental requirement in effectively dealing with my GID and quell any thoughts of transition, I still need to rein it in somehow so that it does not control my life. For a number of months now I have been coming home, immediately converting to Joanna mode and heading out the door. Although I have seen hopeful signs that this is starting to slow down (for example yesterday I left work, ran an errand in male mode and stayed that way for the rest of the evening) it has still been the overwhelming thing on my mind besides my children. So there is work to be done because if I am going to accept this behaviour as part of my norm I need to be the one who pulls the strings and have it less feel like feeding a nicotine habit. Make no mistake that cross dressing can become addictive as it is fun and challenging, however it can pretty much

These days, I am very firm on the idea of never transitioning and it is related to my renewed sense of self. I am now defining myself in a way I had previously thought impossible and can be more emphatic in this certainty. Of course it helps that I don’t require surgery or hormones to present as a woman but it’s more than just that. By allowing myself to be and present more female in my daily life, I have learnt to understand why I still appreciate my other side and have begun to forge the dividing line between the two aspects of my personality that make me who I am. This would not have been possible without letting Joanna have her way for a while and truly breathe. I have finally found a peace of mind that I have never before known. In spite of its inherent challenges, I am more positive about life because this one unsolved area was my Achilles heel. It had been the one mystery I could never solve because I never allowed myself to. Transition may be a way to find peace for many

I found a new blog yesterday that really touched me. I think it’s because it’s written by a person who expresses herself in ways I can really relate to. Her name is Charlotte and she is struggling to find peace and balance while living with her gender disphoria. Like me she is divorced and has two children that she loves. http://lottiesjournal.blogspot.ca/ Charlotte sounds like a lovely person and I very much like the way she writes. It’s written in a very self effacing prose that really shows who she is underneath. She has (as most of us do) a coloured history of malfunctioning relationships as she tries to reconcile her sense of identity with an attempt to form bonds with females who cannot cope with people like us. It’s simultaneously sad, touching and hopeful in how she deals with daily survival and love of family while grappling with a misconnection between body and mind. I intend to follow Charlotte’s blog from now on and see how she forges ahead with finding a semblance of

I am, by my own admission, a complex person. In the negative connotation this can mean complicated and liable to over think and tend towards a kind of masochism. When I was young I was nervous and shy and not particularly confident and it took me many years to try and overcome these issues. To this day, although some people might not agree, I am still a shy person. I have just learnt to compensate for my shyness in order to function in my line of work where it cannot be on display. I do often need to speak in a room full of people. I believe that I am now good at it but it has taken effort on my part to get there. On the positive side I am a thinker and I enjoy that. I am educated and relatively well read and have an analytical mind. I need to understand things before accepting them at face value. Although I am a spiritual person and believe in God, I am not particularly religious in the conventional sense. I don’t follow the dictates of the Pope or hang on the latest pronouncement o

In my opinion, what confuses an autogynephilic male the most is experiencing the emotional joy of his “femaleness” while having a sexual release as a male. This is a reflex which, while being in tune with our biological nature, runs counter to the wiring of our brains. How many times do we hear the stereotype of a man, upon finishing intercourse, wanting to get up quickly and say “ok what’s for breakfast?”. The woman still wants to cuddle and prolong the emotional connection with her mate while the man’s brain is already somewhere else. This is also what happens in a sense during the orgasmic excitement of presenting as our female selves. It can be a very odd mix of emotions and I can almost understand why people like Anne Lawrence might want to equate it with a kind of alternate sexual orientation - thereby making it easier to include it with a host of paraphilias. She even authored a paper called “Becoming What We Love” in which she argues for a more subdued and less stigmatizi

I am fascinated by love. I think I should be more specific in saying that I refer to love in the context of a romantic relationship. You see, I thought my wife loved me and then I thought that my ex-girlfriend loved me. But to what extent was that true? I know that recently I asked my ex-girlfriend to remove some Facebook photos which were tagged with loving comments because in light of our breakup they now seemed hypocritical to me. She defended the photos staying put by claiming that this is the way she felt at the time. So that’s what love is like the tap on the faucet that one just switches off? It is this type of response from her and other discussions that made me finally start to take the bloom off the rose in my view of our relationship. I felt duped and betrayed. How could she so easily do an about face when I had not? My ex-wife was much the same thing. I was in the hospital for 10 days in emergency with a tear in my carotid artery. She came to visit me for an hour in all

We need to be totally honest with ourselves about who we are. Without complete honesty and a lack of guilt of shame we cannot continue to lead healthy lives. Let’s face it our transgender nature is not going away any time soon so we might as well get on with the program as things are. By being honest with yourself you can be honest with others and in the process feel a sense of relief that you are living life without anything to hide. This is probably the biggest hurdle we face as transgender people. When the time comes to tell someone it should also exclude a sense of shame or guilt about who you are. After all we did not choose to be this way. We did not choose to be this way anymore than we chose our eye colour or our height. But for decades we persist in thinking that through behaviour modification, we can eradicate all traces of our condition. Eventually the message gets through but not after having suffered the slings and arrows of self doubt and depression that comes from fai

I have been on my own for 7 months now and during that time have rarely passed up on an opportunity to dress. However, tonight it's cold and I don't want to go out; which is why I consider this a small victory. Might I be arriving at an equilibrium point that thus far had eluded me? Only time will tell. After so many years of denying myself the right to dress I have now lived a situation where no one is here to hold me back. I had been behaving, however, as if that opportunity would soon disappear so I had better make the best of it while the going is good. Which is why I consider tonight a victory for my mental balance and sense of well being. I know who I am (dress or no dress) and I can be me regardless of my attire. I am not going to stop dressing female but I will be more judicious in when I do it. All the while devoid of guilt or shame. That sense of security in that I can dress tomorrow or the day after is comforting. Who knows, there may be hope for me yet.

This morning at work I ran into a work colleague I had not seen for a while as I am employed at a firm that has over 700 people at this particular location. He had gone through a health scare and like me is also divorced. In fact he still has a brain tumour in his head that he is coping with. He is in his late forties. We are not close friends but every time I encounter him, I am struck by his positive attitude and his smile. It is like his close shave with death has empowered him to live his life truly one day and even one minute at a time. For indeed we never know when our time is up. We also spoke of our similarity in having teenage kids and of being on our own. It was nice to be able to compare notes and realize that we had similar experience in not being able to find understanding partners when they themselves had never had their own children. Of course he does not know the added complexity that I am transgender but that’s another layer entirely. It was so nice to have star

Ken Zucker does reparative therapy on children under 10 years of age to dissuade them from adopting an identity counter to their birth gender. For many parents who are trying to do the right thing in raising their children this becomes a viable path to explore. For others it means allowing their child to explore who they are and after consulting a therapist letting the natural inclination of the child to govern. If their child shows sufficient tenacity in their choice of gender identity then they are allowed in some cases to transition. I must admit that I do find some validity in both approaches although Zucker's reparative approach is more about repressing the child's natural inclination which may or may not represent a phase. Every parent wants the best for their offspring and desires for them a healthy and productive life and with this issue being so elementary to their core identity it needs to be focused on with great care. To make an error here could represent dire conse