The Post that Drained An Entire Laptop Battery

My birthday is on Sunday.  I will be turning 29 years old.  As usual, I feel bogged down enough with holiday-related stresses that I honestly don't feel like planning anything huge; at most, there might be dinner with some friends.  Getting older bothered me a lot more before I transitioned; it felt like I was putting off this huge life decision and I was fully aware that the longer I did so, the more I was short-changing myself.  Now that I'm full-time, I'm actually kind of looking forward to my 30s - I feel like the first 3 decades of my life were practice, and now the stuff I'm doing actually counts towards my future.

I remember my birthday last year - per usual, I didn't really want to plan anything so I just had some friends over my apartment.  I don't really remember much of what we did - what I do remember is that I was stressing out because it would be the first time that a lot of my friends saw me presenting female.  The other thing that stands out is that, while no one had any objections to my doing so (which makes sense, as it was my friends in my apartment on my birthday), people were calling me "he" or by my male name, and I made the decision not to mention it, and it bothered me a bit.

In other news, my company's holiday party is on Friday night.  It's going to be my first formal event as a woman (and I haven't got a thing to wear!).  It's almost funny how sharply my opinion on formal things has changed since I've transitioned - having to dress up as a male made me want to choke (I really hated suits and ties and the like), whereas getting to dress up as a female is something I look quite forward to.  Heh, even typing that last sentence, I used "having to" referring to maleness and "getting to" referring to femaleness - that pretty much sums up how  I feel.  It should be a great night, although I'm going to have to make time this week and figure out exactly what I need to do to get ready for this thing.  I'm going with a male friend of mine who should be a lot of fun - he's fully aware of my trans status and it's no big deal at all, which means I should be able to kick back and enjoy myself.

I started playing the internet dating game.  I'm playing at perhaps the world's slowest pace - to be honest, while I think it would be nice to start meeting guys, I definitely don't think it makes sense to start really trying to find someone until I'm completely done with transitioning.  Right now, I'm kind of in Practice Mode with the whole thing.  It used to honestly bug me something fierce when female friends of mine would complain about random guys hitting on them - nothing like people complaining about something that you would give anything to experience, right?  But now that it's finally happened (granted, it's online where it doesn't count), I'm realizing just how awkward the whole courtship process can be, especially in terms of "how do I politely explain that I'm not interested?".

As a quick aside:  Joel has turned me on to This American Life, a radio show/podcast where people give first-person accounts of interesting facets of their life, based on different weekly themes.  I really like people, and the strength of this show is that it gives a great window into other peoples' stories.  The other day I found the episode, "What is This Thing?", about love and what it means to be in love.  I bring this particular episode up because the second story, "View  from the Other Half", is one of the most accurate and engaging telling of what it is like to try and find a mate as a transperson that I've ever heard.  For the people who read this blog as a way to understand what it's like to be transgendered, please give this show a chance:  (click here for a direct link to the episode)

A friend asked me this weekend if I'm attracted to guys or to girls.  For the longest time, I had given the answer of 'both', because I held the belief that it would be silly to reject a potential mate simply because of their gender.  But when I was asked this over the weekend, I actually stopped to think about this for a little bit and told the truth - I'm not really attracted to women that much.  There are things about women that I like, but it had always been from an angle of "this is what I want for myself"; since transitioning, I've slowly realized that from a romantic standpoint, women aren't really offering anything that I'm looking for.  At the same time, I've started noticing guys more, simply because there is now a realistic chance of experiencing dating/relationships/love as a woman.  Good times.

I'm slowly becoming aware of people that do have a problem with my transitioning.  At least one person has asked my roommate "what are you going to do when he starts hitting on you?"  (me being the "he" in that sentence, of course) - this question is ridiculous for a whole host of reasons.  There are people I see at my job - mostly outside vendors/technicians who never really got to hear my side of the story - whose opinions of me have obviously changed since I went full-time.  There are people who I used to interact with a fair deal who don't really talk to me anymore - I think these are the people that don't technically have an issue with me, but still don't have a clue how to approach me (as if I have become a different person).  Fortunately for me, none of these people really matter, because for every one of them there are dozens of people who are totally cool with things, and those are the people that I choose to surround myself with on a daily basis.

(Wow, I've been in my bed typing in this thing for an hour and a half now.  Yay for laptops!)

The hormonal side of things has been going allright.  I now have (what I think are) breasts that are visible even if I don't "pad my stats" - every morning I use the "how many fingers do my breasts cover?" test to track growth.  I haven't been aware of people suspecting my past in the last three months - this is a hugely positive change from worrying about it every time I went out.  The only people thing that can still be improved (without surgery, heh) is the name/pronoun things amongst people who have known me for a long time, but people have already gotten a lot better over the last few weeks/months.  I have received compliments on my appearance from people that I can only assume are genuine, which honestly makes me a lot happier than I probably show.

Emotionally, being a woman is a total roller coaster.  Happy, angry, sad - all of these feelings have intensified when I experience them, and they come and go a lot more often.  When I am feeling negative - ugh.  I have caught myself lashing out at people, I have definitely found myself crying on the job, and I sometimes go through emotion-charged spurts where I want to make sweeping life changes because some random bad thing happened that day.  Overall, though, I feel a lot more clear-headed these days, which is good.  I guess that it is the tendency of males to squelch their feelings, and now that I don't do that, I feel like my life is falling together in a good way.  Empathizing with others makes me happy, and I'm getting better at doing so all the time.

Also, while the estrogen obviously affects me quite alot, I think losing testosterone is affecting just as much if not more.  I used to be very competitive - to the point where that was something I was afraid of losing before taking hormones - and now I'm really just not.  It shows, because I still play competitive games with my friends when the situation arises, but I now focus alot more on having fun than I do on winning.  In this regard, I almost feel like I've freed myself from being this person that I didn't really like.  My main motivation for competing was self-validation that I was good at things; I'm now focusing less on that and more on just being a good person in general.

Quick aside #2:  I went to the store where I play Magic a few weeks ago and there were some people that brought in a Wii and a copy of Super Smash Brothers: Brawl.  I play this game a few times a week with some friends, and am reasonably decent at it given that I have a history of playing fighting games.  One of the people playing left, so I asked the other guy if I could play.  He agreed, and we played, and I won a few times.  And that's where I experienced something that I've always kind of looked forward to, but didn't even think about until it happened.  I could tell that (a) he was pissed that he, a tournament player, lost to a woman, and (b) his friends were going to completely make fun of him for that fact as soon as I left the room.  It kind of makes me wish that arcades still existed so that I could experiment with this phenomenon some more. :)

And of course, since I speak of transition, it is probably time to start thinking about surgery.  There are a few issues that I need to sort out, not the least of which is "How am I going to pay for this?".  Other considerations include "How do I find a doctor?", "Isn't this going to be the most physically painful surgery I'll ever experience?", "What if things go wrong?", and "What exactly is the procedure for SRS?".  I have been purposely putting this off because I haven't wanted to stress myself out too early, but I am aware that in less then a year I will technically qualify for a sex change operation.  In typical Michelle fashion I spend lots more time thinking of life after surgery than I do the surgery itself.  My parents have been recommending the show Sex Change Hospital, which I have downloaded months ago but still haven't watched out of fear of what I'll see.  My threshold for pain isn't the best, and thinking of things like genital electrolysis kind of scare me, so I do my best not to until I absolutely need to (which will be in a few months).