People see what they want to see

 I'm back home in the sunnier climes of the Mediterranean coast where the trees don't lose their leaves and it's ten degrees warmer than where I've been over the last week. 

This is something of a follow-on to my last post. I got by well with dressing in women's clothing but presenting as my official male persona for of all the administrative and other stuff I had to do in my official name. Nobody noticed that my shoes, legwear, tops and other items were feminine. Yesterday evening I ate out with a relative and I wore slouch pants, soft blouse, socks with gold sparkles and women's sneakers, my long fingernails nicely shaped and very much on view, and it aroused no notice at all. People see what they want to see. If they expect a guy, and that person isn't wearing a skirt, then they see a guy.

I'd rather present as female, of course, with a good wig doing the work that my terrible natural hair can't do for me, and with some pretty jewellery, but I'm still not certain that my face can take makeup for extended periods without breaking into eczema, I'm still not sure of how TGirls are received in Italy where I happen to be, and I've lost a lot of courage and incentive after so many things going wrong in recent years. I'm a feminine TGirl and looking feminine is important to me as it affirms that femininity, but I'm also a practical TGirl and, when out dressed, I like to dress as other women dress in order to be seen as a normal part of society around me. Women don't tend to wear skirts much these days, especially not in winter, and so I don't feel hard done by as one can still look very feminine in leggings, skinny jeans, or leather pants. The TGirl obsession with miniskirts or twin set or stockings is a fantasy femininity that I've never been into. I'm a transgender woman and I want to be treated as a woman so I dress the part ... except when I am forced by circumstances and society, like now, to be this male avatar. Since a lot of fashion right now is pretty unisex, I'm finding this compromise style is working for me. I feel femme in myself and I get little reminders of that by what I wear: the softer material of my clothes, my bra pressing into my torso, the lesser density of my shoe soles that makes me feel the pavement more ... the smaller pockets! (aaargh! girls need pockets too!) 

It's not really how I want to live but, with all the strife and chaos I've been through these last few years, and the troubled and hostile politics of the current era, I'm in this compromise mode till things get back on some sort of even keel. I've just demonstrated to myself both this past week and during Christmas week with friends that it's working.

At present, I think it likely that I will transition fully one day. Gently, and at my own pace, not necessarily involving doctors or authorities. I say at present as the intensity of one's transness varies over time. It may be that next year I won't feel this so strongly. That's OK, I've got used to the ebb and flow of trans intensity. It comes, it goes, don't worry about it.

So, since dressing as a girl was the first obvious step when I was very little, I'm heading forward by transitioning my clothing to all female this year, as I mentioned in November. As the world comes out of pandemic, I'll be looking to find a place where a slow, gentle transition can happen, like a caterpillar finding a quiet leafy spot to spin its cocoon. 

I'm also preparing to dump completely that family I came from as I have finally had to admit to myself that violent fundamentalist cultists involved in supremacist campaigns belong in jail and it's time to stop trying to cling onto the little good in them. Several times over the years I have started to write a piece about being brought up by fundamentalists and how it impacted my girlhood and beyond, but it has been too distressing to finish them. With the help of years of counselling and advice, legal and medical, I feel stronger about telling such things as I understand the mechanisms of cultism much better now. 

I try to be kind to people, to encourage them. As much as anything, I see kindness as an act of sabotage against the world that the cruel, the abusive and the domineering want and so often seem to get. I may not always get it right, but I'm trying to act differently from the rage and cruelty that characterised my upbringing. 

There's a long journey still to go and I feel very tired as life's been pretty rudderless and stormtossed for some time. I don't know but I guess there's a chance of arriving somewhere where being fully feminine is possible again as it was when I started this blog.

 

Burns Night

Happy Burns Night to all friends in Scotland or of Scots descent. 

The best Burns Night I ever celebrated was as a student in Devon (almost as far from Scotland as you can get and still be in the British Isles!) when I shared a house with a postdoctoral researcher from near Glasgow who was addicted to Irn-Bru*. Not only had he managed to get haggis in that remote location but he'd even sourced a bagpiper in the guise of a student from Venezuela who, incredible as it may sound, had learnt to play the Scottish bagpipes in Caracas. The piping in of the haggis in the front room of a small cottage was deafening and not something that the locals are likely to have forgotten in many a year!

(*To all my readers outside Scotland, Irn-Bru is a soft drink / soda with an odd coppery colour and indefinable taste that has had some interesting advertising campaigns over the years. Don't worry about it!)

Sue x