It's starting to get better

More and more frequently when I look into the mirror I see a woman looking back at me, and she’s always a welcome sight. Sometimes I still look hopelessly male and I curse my reflection, but most of the time now I see the woman who I was always meant to be taking the place of the male body I so loathed, and I’m filled with overwhelming joy. There are some major male identifiers that won’t change without surgical intervention and I can accept that now. If things keep going the way they have been it will be just fine.

Ever since puberty I’ve had a major body image problem. Most of it had to do with my acne, but when I looked at the faces of other men I never saw myself in them. I always thought something was off and I could never put a finger on it before. When I first came out to myself the body dysphoria I experienced was soul crushing and it nearly overwhelmed me. After what I’ve been through up to this point, it’s hard for me to describe how wonderful I feel now. Even with still having a long way to go things are significantly better that they were before, and the sensation of dysphoria which once seemed to be so pervasive every waking moment of my life has greatly diminished to the point where a bad attack of it is rare.

It’s not just about my physical appearance though. My behaviors, likes, dislikes, the way I filter information and the way I perceive the world around me has changed as well. I think a lot of it had to do with moving out of the condo. There was a part of my brain that was clinging onto my masculinity for my Ex I think, and once I was in the new apartment the female side of me took over for the most part. My roommate says that the changes in my behavior have been profound, but I never really noticed until he pointed it out to me. (Apparently I’m a typical shy girl or something like that.) I just act normal and go with whatever feels right.

When I flip into guy mode now it’s just as disarming as it used to be when I flipped into girl mode. In guy mode I’m not dysphoric about my body; I’m dysphoric with my brain, which probably sounds crazy. It’s like something is off with my mind and my way of thinking. I’m kind of repulsed by my male brain and I wish it would just go away.

I don’t always notice the switching. I was watching something on TV with my roommate maybe a week ago and he made an innocent, jokingly suggestive comment and I burst out laughing. He told me that he could tell I was in guy mode because in girl mode I would have blushed. (I’m very bashful.) I suddenly felt almost ashamed, like if someone was to have told me that I was acting like a girl back when I primarily identified as a male. Am I that different in guy mode vs. girl mode? And how can one person be so different and still be the same person? Being bigender is confusing.

But still, even with the flipping I’m more convinced now than ever that transitioning is the right thing for me. I used to be afraid of the male part of my brain getting body dysphoria the more female I appear, but that hasn’t been the case at all. In fact, I can’t wait till I get to the point when I can’t pass as male anymore. I already did 31 years are a male and I didn’t like it much. I think female will suit me better, and I make a better looking than I ever did a man anyway.  Heck, I might even be pretty someday.

Paige

Dreams part 2

I can't take it any more.

Today sucked. It sucked really bad. I can hardly formulate a sentence right now.

I may be bigender, but I'm incapable of being happy or comfortable in my male body any longer. I keep going back and forth, over and over again. When I'm in male mode I'm never happy.

One trend that's been obvious to me is that when I present as female everything changes for me. I don't look in the mirror and hate the way I look, I'm happy with my body, my cloths are comfortable and damn if I don't clean up nice with some makeup.  

I still hate the male secondary traits, but I've never hated the female ones that have developed so far. The more female I look the happier I am.

When I'm in female mode AND presenting as female I feel like I can relax and be myself. I like to laugh, make jokes and dance. I'm actually comfortable in my body, while presenting as male I feel like I'm about to squirm out of my skin.

You can probably see where this is going.

For a while I thought I was going to transition but then I decided against it as I keep flipping back to male mode. However, I'm not fucking happy with my male body. The notion of continuing on this way for the rest of my life is unacceptable and it's driving me into a depression that threatens to overwhelm me. It almost has a few times already and I don't want to go back to the hospital again.

So I have revised my plans.

I'm going to start electrolysis next paycheck. I get paid in two days. My gender therapist gave me a card for someone that some of her patients were really happy with. I will call them after work to schedule an appointment.

As soon as possible I'm going to try and move out to Hillcrest, the gay district of San Diego. If I can get a roommate to share the costs, I can rent out the room I sleep in now and use it to pay my part of the rent. I've talked with my wife about this plan and she thinks it's a good idea. If we can't rent out the room then I can still pull it off, but I wont be able to save much money at all and I really NEED to be saving my money at this time.

If the getting a roommate plan doesn’t work out, then I can just stay where I am now for the time being. Once my wife has steady work I will sign the mortgage over to her and get my own apartment out in Hillcrest. While I wait for that to happen I can at least still get electro.

I want to live in Hillcrest because as soon as I can get a bit more confidant in myself, I want to start living part time as a female. Hillcrest will be the most forgiving neighborhood for this, and it's where I'll be harassed the least. (Hopefully.)

The money I'll be saving by living frugally will pay for the electrolysis, and some will also go into a second fund. My goal is to have round two of laser resurfacing no latter than 6 months from this date. Then there will be a recovery period for at lest 3 months before I make any further decisions.

I will join a trans support group of some sort. I was worried about doing so before because I'm bigender but fuck it. I desperately need to meet more people like me. 

By this time I shall have my voice, walk and female gestures down. Then I will take a good hard look at myself and reassess.

If I'm still not happy with my complexion I will have to save up for one more round of resurfacing. I don't this this will be the case, but you never know.

If I am, then I will ask myself if I'm really ready to go full time, and if this is how I want to live the rest of my life. If so, the next thing I will do is FFS, the first procedure being forehead re-contouring, hair line decent and eye brow lift plus trachea shave.

After surgery there will be a huge change in my appearance and I will start to live full time. Then I can save up for the nose-job/jaw FFS. Once I'm happy with my face I'll take care of my boobs if necessary. As for SRS, I'm fine for now. That may change at some point, so I'm keeping that in mind.

The good thing about this plan is that I really don't have to make any major commitment until my first FFS. That's not going to be for a while and it gives me plenty of time to work things out. However, now I at least have a plan. 

Of course, this is very much like my old plan when I thought I was going to fully transition and then I decided against it. I no longer have any choice. I am Bigender. However, while I may flip back and forth between male and female I'm now 100% confident that I will never be happy until I can present and blend in as a woman. 

So there you have it, back to Transbigenderqueer or whatever I am. At least I'll die in the right body.

Paige Abendroth.

This may just be my worst entry ever.

Jello blog.

Yesterday was fun. I was invited to go on a walk with a friend, but there must have been some communication breakdown as it turned out to be a run, which was fine with me but I wish that I wore looser clothing as I was trying to dress queer and my pants were waaay to tight to sprint in. =P It turned out to actually be a profound, thought provoking experience which I really hadn’t expected, but I was grateful for it. I think I'll save that experience for a latter post.

Afterwords we went back to his house in Hillcrest, he made an awesome diner. Then we wandered around the gay district for a while, mostly people watching. So, I saw dozens upon dozens of gay “bros”, muscle bound macho guys wandering about – but where are all the whisper thin artistic types??? Are they all already taken? Maybe they're just avoiding the clubs. (Mental note – look up “queer open mike poetry readings in San Diego” tomorrow.)

We ended up at some tiny club/bar that was mostly populated by lesbians and queer people. I liked it because it wasn’t so overpoweringly loud and they were playing 80's music, which I love. =P My friend seemed to like it too, but I wonder if it may have been because he spent a lot of time time checking other people out. ;)

I got back from Hilllcrest at 0200 and I went to sleep at 0230. I woke up at 0700 so yeah, not much sleepies for me. =( I snuggled up with my cat until around 0800 and then I got up as it was obvious that a full nights sleep had once again alluded me.

After I got cleaned up I walked over to the new Panera Bread that just opened near my condo in the hopes of getting some early morning exercise and a healthy breakfast, but I was disappointed. They got my order wrong and when I got the right one the egg whites on my sandwich were paper thin, cold and rubbery. AND it was on white bread, which is nutritiously worthless.

After that I wandered over to Walgreen’s to get some other supplies *whistles* and then I headed back home. All in all it was a good walk, especially since I'm still wearing my hoodie to cover up the wounds on my left arm and I got hot as hell. Those wounds are going to leave some nasty scars and seeing that the hot San Diego summer is rapidly approaching I'm going to have to stop worrying about freaking people out and just wear my normal clothing. It's going to be hard to explain them when coworkers see my arm. The department picnic is next week and I don't want to go.

I spent most of the rest of the day practicing mindful meditation. It was very hard for me to let go of some of the issues that I'm dealing with at the moment, but I did a pretty good job I think. I mostly focused on environmental stuff; first the breeze blowing through my window and later in the day some classical lute music I have. No complementing the empty nature of reality for me today.

I'm still having a very hard time figuring out who I am. When I look at myself in male mode I see myself as a man, but then I take a picture of myself and I'm disgusted by my appearance. I'm still not who I used to be. It's like how I used to be in female mode. Everything is wrong with my face and I refuse to look like that any more. I was in guy mode most of the day but I still wasn’t happy with my body. It wasn’t until I presented as female at around 1800 that I finally felt like myself.

It's weird; all my muscles relax and I feel loose and comfortable when I'm like this. I might still be shy, but I actually feel like I'm comfortable in my skin where normally I'm super awkward and clumsy. Normally I'm in another body that I'm trying to control, screaming instructions desperately while it flails about.

When I'm in female mode and I can present as such, everything feels right. And, when the dysphoria isn’t to bad, I feel happy. I mean, REALLY happy. But of course, I've never even been out of the house nor has anyone other than my wife seen me present on female mode. Maybe this is all a delusion and I'm just in denial that I'll never be accepted by anyone as a woman.

Can I be happy if I transition to female and still accept the male side of me? Will they blend together? I spent all last night and this morning being unhappy with my appearance. As soon as I presented as female everything was OK.

I'm afraid that eventually I'm going to have to pick between one or the other lest I go insane. If it comes to that, I know which one I'll pick and it scares the hell out of me.

Uh, on a happy note I actually wore pretty stuff today and if I might say so myself; I looked damn good in it. Most of my outfits are just like guy mode – black shirt and jeans, except that in female mode I wear a large Jr. tee-shirt and size seven flared pants. After I put my face on and got dressed I was so happy with my presentation, but I felt sad as it's not like anyone would ever see me. I think that I need some social validation so that I can start living part time in female mode.

This is why overcoming my social anxiety is my top priority in life. I NEED to be able to go out as a female and live my own life. If I'm always worried about other people judging me then I’ll never be able to grow into my own person.

So that's my cryptic post for the evening.

TLDR – I'm a woman and I just want to live the rest of my life as one. Uh, I think. Check with me tomorrow. =(   I just want it to stop and I want to be a woman.  Or a man.

Paige

TLDR – I'm a woman and I just want to live the rest of my life as one. Uh, I think. Check with me tomorrow. =( I just want it to stop.

Paige Abendroth

For Month HRT Anniversary!

As the title of this entry states, today is my four month HRT anniversary!  Four months ago when I started HRT I was all screwed up and now. . . I'm still all screwed up.  However, I'm not as screwed up as I used to be, so that's good.

Before HRT my biggest source of gender dysphoria was my body.  Now however, it's much more of a emotional and psychological thing.  Yeah I've said it before, but I'm still amazed at how well my body has taken to HRT.   It's gotten to a point where I think I think I look weird in guy mode but I look normal in female mode, excepting some stuff like my stupid brow ridge and my jaw which is waaay too big.

At this point in time I should note that I'm in female mode and that my opinion may change next time I flip. =)

The fact that it's only been four months is extremely encouraging to me and I can't wait till I hit the six month mark, which is a sort of milestone for people on HRT.  For transwomen anyway, I'm not sure about transmen.  I'm sure that I'll be on estrogen for the rest of my life, which I know that I'm cool with in guy mode as well.

Another thing that's going on is that I'm beginning to get over my social anxiety, bit by bit.   For years it's kept me from expressing myself and doing the stuff I wanted to do . Basically, I've run out of fucks to give about what people think about me.   I'd rather just be myself and if someone has a problem with that can fucking piss off.

So today I did something I've wanted to do for years – I got my ears pierced, and my eyebrow too.  I searched the interwebz high and low and it was obvious that the best place in San Diego was Enigma Piercing. http://enigmapiercing.com/  I went to their second location on Adams Ave as I flipping hate Pacific Beach.   The staff kicked ass!  They were super professional and personable.  Really, I felt like I was getting my shit pierced by a friend of mine and there was almost no stress.  Then again I was a Navy Corpsman for eight years and I'm been around tons of needles, so that probably helped.

On a side note, if you want to get a piercing but your scared of the pain just fucking do it.  (But check with work first. =) ) It wont be nearly as bad as you think it will be and afterwords you'll feel like a fucking rock star.  For me, it was a sharp pain that lasted like two seconds and then it felt fine. Easy-peasy.

A year ago, or even just a month ago I wouldn’t have been able to even walk into the place let alone get some piercings done as I used to be terrified of drawing attention to myself.  So yeah, while I'm still experiencing some social anxiety it's getting a lot better.   Now I need to thrust myself into some social situations in order to desensitize myself to them.

Last night I put a bunch of peroxide in my hair to make it more blond and bring out my natural highlights.  After the piercings I decided that my hair sucked so I gave myself a haircut. I'm happy with the results and when I was done I looked at my reflection and thought, “Ya know, I kind of look like I'm gay.”  I'm sooooo OK with that.  In a couple weeks I'm going to get my lip pierced and then I'll stop for a while.  I'd really like to get some tattoos also, but I need to start my electrolysis asap so I just wont have the funding.

Damn the torpedoes!

Paige A

Who am I?

Over the past couple days I’ve been thinking about my identity. Recently I’ve been discovering parts of myself that I never knew existed. Wants, desires, dreams, needs. . . Then yesterday after work I was driving in my car when suddenly I came to the realization that I don’t know myself anymore.

Uh, this is something I’m actively trying to figure out right now so please excuse me if I’m a bit cryptic or I don’t make much sense. You’ve been warned.

I began to identify as Bigender about a year ago. Now, a lot of changes can occur to a person over the span of a year, but this year has been unlike any other that I’ve ever experienced. I profoundly changed when I joined the Navy and then again after I married my wife. Over time I’ve become much more responsible, honest and my work ethic kicks ass. But over the years there have been things about me that were the same since adolescence. Basic beliefs about myself and the world in which I lived in. 

I’m not the same person that I used to be a year ago. Not at all.

I try hard not to refer my male and female aspects as being two different people. That’s not the case and I don’t want to give anyone that wrong idea. (No, I do not have dissociative identity disorder.) However I’m going to do it in today’s journal in an attempt to help me to explain what’s going on here.

I’ve been suppressing my female self my whole life. As a child I learned at some point that I couldn’t like girl things and that I had to behave like a boy. It’s hard to remember that far back as I’ve only just begun to comprehend how being duel gendered has been impacting me from a very young age, but lately I’ve been recalling more. As I’m typing this now I just remembered my dad scolding me for playing with Rainbow Bright toys with my cousin. I loved; “Lala Orange”. Just typing that made me cringe when I know that there’s nothing wrong with it. 

That’s the power of shame and the effect that it can have on a child. When you’re young and impressionable you depend on your parents and other adults to explain to you how the world works and your place in it. Today I know that there’s nothing wrong with a child playing with toys typically associated with the opposite gender or even how they dress for that matter. However, I still feel a hint of that old shame and embarrassment when sharing that memory. 

I don’t remember the words that were spoken, but I knew that I made my Dad angry with me and that I was doing something that was WRONG and that I should feel awful for having done it. So I didn’t play “Rainbow Bright” with my cousin anymore, although in my childhood daydreams where no one could see me I would still sometimes imagine that I was her. 

Now that my female self is out it’s like she’s a child exploring the world around her and discovering who she is. I never wanted kids before and I most certainly never wanted to be pregnant, but when I’m female the fact that I’ll never be able to experience that hurts me, like I’m being denied of something that’s rightfully mine. I never imagined being married to man but now the idea is just as acceptable as being married to a woman. All these taboo’s that I’ve held in the past, many of them reinforced by my Roman Catholic upbringing and many from having been raised in a binary gender society are gone and now I’m finally free to grow.

My mind is consumed by wants and desires that I never could have imagined, and so many other things in my life that once seemed significant to me before have now become trivial. What and whom am I becoming? Am I losing myself and being replaced or am I evolving into something else now that the fear is gone? 

My face is so different now that I don’t recognize it mirror. I’ve tried to take a few new pictures of myself in guy mode to update my Facebook profile but don’t look like me and I don’t want to startle my family. It’s not that I don’t like my face; in fact for the first time since Jr. High I’m finally growing to be happy with it. It’s so unfamiliar, like I’m a different person, or like I’m becoming one. It's MY face, who ever I am.

I just can’t shake the feeling that something is changing me. I have no control over it nor do I want it to stop. I was so unhappy before all this began and I’m still unhappy a lot of the time. But as I discover all these new things about myself, as much as they frighten and hurt me initially, I begin to accept them as a part of me. I embrace them and I change a little more. 

I think I may have just figured it out. I’m not losing myself or becoming someone else. What’s happening is that I’m becoming the person who I was always meant to be. Wild, unbound and hungry for life. 

Annnnd once again I figure out complicated life shit by writing down the random thoughts going through my head in real time. Neat huh?

Paige

An Ocean in my Soul

Hi,

I'm feeling rather moody today. Down in the dumps and all that. I was just reading the Rolling Stone article about the lead singer of Against Me coming out as transgender. https://imgur.com/a/hydSB I'm super happy for her and I also find it very encouraging to see such a high profile person coming out in public like this. At the same time, I'm envious because I want to transition too and I can't.

Maybe I should mention that I'm writing this in girl mode.

When I'm in girl mode I'm basically a transsexual. I experience the same soul-crushing gender dysphoria and all that, but if I was to fully transition I'd just end up being miserable because eventually I always go back into guy mode. I know I've said this before, but sometimes I wish guy mode would just go away. Thing is that when I go back to guy mode I won't feel this way at all. See the paradox there? It sucks.

I think that I'm going to have to put a lot of work into my appearance if I'm ever going to get over my dysphoria in girl mode. AND I'm going to have to come out of the closet. I need to be out to my family and out to everyone else I know. The fact that I'm keeping such an important part of my life hidden away like some sort of shameful secret is making things worse. I'm NOT ashamed to be who I am and I don't want to live this way any more.

Explaining what it is to be bigender is rather complicated. For example, if I had to pick between one gender or the other I'd pick female in a heart beat. That's because I'm in female mode. Whenever I flip back to guy mode I'll prefer to be male. It's such a dramatic change in how I think, yet still I'm the same person and I like the same things for the most part.

I've decided to keep a detailed spread sheet in order to track when I flip back and forth, how it effects my mood, what makes me feel better and so on. This way I can at least be proactive and find a way to deal with this the best as I can. I have a pretty good idea already, but there may be little factors that are playing into it that I haven’t noticed.

I'm going to listed to “The Ocean” for about the 50^th time today and then I'll get right on that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvWeP18RpmM

“There is an ocean in my soul where the waters do not curve.”

Paige

On realizing that I’ve always been Bigender

Before I get going, I just wanted to mention how happy I am that President Obama came out of the closet (heh) in support of same sex marriage yesterday. He’s the first US President to do so, and it’s worth noting that every President who has championed a civil rights cause has had civil rights legislation passed during his term in office. Here’s hoping for another four years.

OK, I just wanted to get that out of the way. 

On Monday I saw my wonderful gender therapist and we were talking about my long battle with depression and social anxiety. She got around to asking me if identifying as bigender has changed how I look at it.  At first I thought that she was just asking about how it’s affected my mood since I first began to identify as bigender about a year ago, and I asked her to clarify what she meant. 

We got to talking and she helped me to realize that I’ve always been bigender, and that throughout my life it’s had an enormous impact on my depression and my social anxiety. It might sound silly, but I was so clueless that I never really thought about how it had affected me as I grew up. I'm almost embarrassed by the fact that this hadn’t occurred to me earlier.

Suddenly things clicked into place. Repressed childhood memories of liking both boy and girl toys and cartoons, wishing I could be a girl sometimes but not always, getting in trouble for messing with my Mom's makeup, (sorry I ruined your lipstick Mom) the feeling that I was different from all the other boys in my neighborhood which isolated me, my biological father’s attempts to masculinise me and stomping around in my Mom's high heels wearing a sheet as a dress came rushing back to me.  The clues from my teenage years have always been pretty easy for me to identify, but I’d never thought about how being bigender affected me as a child and what sort of impact it’s had on my long term mental health.

I didn’t have a happy childhood for other reasons to begin with, but it’s now clear to me that my gender nonconformity exacerbated those issues considerably. Everyone knows that being gay or being trans is not a choice; you’re born that way. (Well, there are some ignorant twats who refuse to believe it.) Makes sense that some people like me are born bigender. 

I’m confused about my own gender identity as it is, and I have the support of a tiny bigender community and the power of the interwebz at my disposal. Imagine what it’s like to be a little kid who has no idea why they are the way they are. That’s enough to screw you up reeeeally good. 

On a side note, it also makes me wonder if there aren’t a whole lot more bigender people out there who don’t realize it. Maybe with this media attention we’re getting at the moment, plus the fact that transgender people are becoming more accepted in society, more people will realize they they’ve been gender variant their whole lives and the pieces will “click” into place for them as well.

This is one of those night where I have a million things I want to say, but I'll save it for tomorrow. 

Cheers.

Paige

The Paige and The Pendulum

Hello bloggy, my old nemesis. At least we meet again, although this time - we fight to the death! Have at you!

Sorry, just trying to spice things up.

So for the past few months I’ve been pretty dead set on transition and I’d lost most of my male identity. Then over the course of the past couple weeks I’ve been in guy mode more and more. A lot more. My therapist told me last night that my gender “pendulum” is swinging back the other way again, but I already knew that.

In a way I’m disappointed. As I’ve mentioned in the past, when I’m in female mode I can’t imagine that I’d ever want to be a man and I get rather obsessed with the idea of transition. I really thought my gender identity had stabilized enough that I could make a flexible plan in regards to my future, but it seems that’s not going to be the case. I had already decided that I needed to put the brakes on everything and to slow down until I was in a better place mentally before I came to this realization, so it doesn’t effect anything too profoundly which is good. Still I’m a little bummed out.

A little bummed out vs. profoundly depressed, which is what’s happened to me when going into this state of mind in the past. Now that I’ve been through this a few times I think I’m getting a little better at dealing with it. Like riding a wave instead of letting it crash over my head, pulling me underwater. I can’t control my gender changes and I may never be able to. That’s something that I’m going to just have to accept. Maybe down the road something will change, but for the time being I have to learn to accept the fact that my gender may never be static.

Acceptance is the big word here. I need to accept that being bigendered is an intrinsic part of who I am, and I have to accept myself for whom and what I am, regardless of what gender I happen to be. I think I’m taking my first steps towards that, but I have a long way to go. Still, I can tell that this is getting easier over time and that’s a reassuring feeling.

Elsewhere in the news I start DBT this Thursday afternoon. Group therapy quite frankly scares the shit out of me so I’m both looking forward to it and being terrified at the same time. Perhaps if I could combine those two emotions I’d just feel indifferent about the whole thing?  Paige Abendroth - emotional alchemist.  Eh, maybe not.

Someone relatively new to the forums over at Bigender.net had made a post yesterday about how she felt like being bigender and what she's currently going through, and that same post could have been written by me maybe nine months ago.  It's amazing how we as Bigender people share this unique experience, one that the average person could never really understand.  Heck, I don't even completely understand it myself.  It made me a little happy to think about how far I've come and it made me a little sad, to see that someone else is just starting to go through it. 

Yesterday evening I was on the phone with someone and she asked me to describe how I know when I'm a woman vs. when I'm male.  I said something like, "if you took away all of your physical characteristics how would you know you're still female?  It's something that you just KNOW."  Your average cisgendered person never thinks about this stuff because they don't have too.  But if you fall somewhere under the trans-umbrella you become hyper-aware of your gender(s).  (Or of course you can have no gender at all for that matter.)  

I afraid that when I tell people I'm bigendered they're not going to understand and they'll assume I'm a cross-dresser.  (Not that there's anything wrong with being a cross dresser mind you.)  I don't "pretend" I'm a woman for fun, there's nothing sexual about it and I don't dress in frilly pink dresses and prance around the house.  (But again, not like there's anything wrong with doing that if it's your cup of tea.)  I wear the same types of cloths in both modes - a black shirt with a band logo on it and blue jeans.  Whoo-hoo.  They are of course male and female tee-shits and blue-jeans though, and that's just to make myself feel comfortable.  

I guess that part of accepting myself will be accepting that other people don't accept me.  That's something to think about.  I think that's a good spot to end this entry, have fun and take care.

Paige