Trans-formation: My gender-queer manifesto

I'm weird.

I say that proudly, as I always have.

Since I was a young child I was the “weird kid” and that was my identity up throughout high school. I never knew why I was the weird kid , and my life up to this point had been a struggle to be taken seriously while still expressing my true self.

I made art. I did improve shows before my friends who would circle around me and wait for me to make them laugh. Who would make me laugh though?

I’ve always felt ostracized from society, yet I didn’t know why. I knew I was different and that something was “wrong” with me, so I had to act how people expected me to act so that I could function in our gender binary society.

<<Sit like a man, talk monotone, take up space, don't think about the fact that when you close your eyes that you see yourself as a woman. You're attracted to woman so that means you're normal right? As long as you don't act on your desires you're not gay. Don't stand like that! Legs shoulder length apart, don't put your weight on one leg. I want to be taken. Someone fuck me. Shoulders hunched forward. As long as you only fantasize about being with a man your not gay. Why can't I stop? I still like women so I'm OK? Squint your eyes. You can do this. Laugh at their stupid misogynistic jokes, at the stories they tell about your female friends. That's what men do and you need to be a man lest you be rejected. As long as you don't cross dress you're still safe.>>

Back then I played along but I hated myself for it. Now I feel like I'm finally growing in body and spirit while another part of me dies, or more accurately, I shed the false masculine armor that I've been entombed within over the years. It still serves me when needed, but I finally realize that it's not who I am, nor who I've ever been. Like a 17 year cicada I leave my shell behind and scream my song desperately into the night as my death rapidly approaches.

I'm not a human any longer. (I'm an Alligattoooooor! I'm a space man. . . Uh, Bowie reference. Yeah.)

I'm an heterosexual. I'm a gay man. I'm aggressive and submissive, a top and a bottom. A coward and a sadomasochist. I'm a woman. I'm a lesbian. I'm a strait female. I'm androgynous. I'm polly and monogamous. Gender is a failed concept to me; I'm a gender-queer outlaw and I don't care anymore.

Who are you? I want you for your compassion, your kindness, your tolerance, your art, your warm body pressed against mine regardless of it's configuration, your intelligence and your wit. I'm finally free from gender and it's limitations. It can be sexual. It can be friendship. It can be both. Love transcends everything. Above all, I want your companionship. I want to be your ally.

Up to this point I've been afraid to express myself because of how I thought others would perceive me. That shit stops today. As soon as I can I'm getting piercings, I'm going on hormones and by the time I'm done I have no intention of being recognizable in either gender binary unless I choose to present that way.

I am who I am, and I'm not a man or a woman. I'm fluid, I'm a contradiction, an alien, a nonconformist, a trans-person and above all an individual. I will sculpt and modify my body to reflect who I am inside and I don't give a damn anymore about blending into the crowd. I'm a gender binary smashing battering-ram and you can't stop me, or the thousands of others out there like me.

I've always been afraid to be myself because of the other people around me. I was terrified of being ostracized from the mainstream cisgender community, but in retrospect I've never belonged to them anyway and I've never felt comfortable in that world. (Nor did they accept me.) This is the end of that and the beginning of the rest of my life.

So now I am naked and unidentifiable. What am I? I'm a human being that lusts for life, love and community. That's something that we all have in common. If only we would focus on what we need from life as opposed to what divides us.

Until that time comes, I will not summit, not anymore. Today I march off to war with a flannel shirt, pink panties, combat boots, a frilly skirt and unflinching cold blue eyes. (The eyeshadow makes all the difference.)  My center of gravity shifts at random from my shoulders to my hips and I no longer try to hide it.

I'm an impossible conundrum and yet I live on, for better or worse. I may thrive in this brave new world or I may be killed without reason. I reflect upon those who have gone before me; They like to burn and dismember our bodies. I hear it's to erase our identities and to warn others - “This is what happens!” http://www.transgenderdor.org/?page_id=1663 It's the same with racial and religious hate crimes. Honor our sisters and brothers.

This is what happens when you are brave enough to be yourself. This is what happens when you try to live your life defiantly.

Yet I remain defiant, as I have no other choice if I am to live and love as I must.

I will fight to the bitter end.

By my hand upon this date,

A mammal.

A gender freak

A human

Someone who likes to wear mittens.

A little comic I made today

Thanksgiving. Or something.

It's late and I should be sleeping, but what else is new.

This has been a VERY turbulent year for me.  Just reading through my blog posts goes to show how emotionally volatile I've been.  My world has been turned upside down and my long journey has just begun.  I have no idea where the path will lead me, but I know that it will be hard, I will be hurt and I will hurt the people that I love, just to find some semblance of balance and peace within myself.  I have no choice in this.

I just want to be a average cisgender guy.  That's never going to happen though and I have to accept the fact that the proverbial Genie is out of the bottle and now there's no going back to how things used to be.  I'm a very queer, bigendered pansexual person who favors my female side. Soon I will be on hormones to develop secondary female sex characteristics. 

Many bigendered persons say that hormones balanced out their female side and their quality of life improved.  I've heard from transgender people that when you go on hormones you figure out whether or not you really want to transition.

What if I want to go all the way?  I feel like "guy mode" is more and more just a front I've established over time in order to conform to the male cisgender stereotype.  In reality I'm very feminine, and if I acted "normally" in my day to day life I would be subject to hostile discrimination. 

This is a scarey time, but despite all that's happening to me I still think that I'm very fortunate.

I have a roof over my head and I'm able to pay the bills on time.

I'm married to the most wonderful woman on the planet.

My health, well there's been problems.  However, for the most part I'm healthy and I'm not dead yet.

I have a steady job with good benefits and a great boss.

I have two cats.  This might seem trivial but I love animals and they mean the world to me.

Despite my world being torn apart by my gender issues I'm very blessed.  I'm very thankful for the lot I've been dealt, and I'll try to remain mindful of it.  What are you thankful for?

Stuck in female mode, other random bits of info

Sorry it's been so long since I wrote.  I've been pretty busy lately.

As for the work situation - no one has said anything.  All they would know anyway is that I've been diagnosed with GID (gender identity disorder) anyway, so it's not like anyone could do anything to me.  As a helpful person on the Bigender.new forums pointed out to me, there are no laws protecting trans people from being fired just for being trans, so coming out at work ain't gunna happen.

I had my first appointment with the gender therapist and she is wonderful!  She has apparently delt with the VA beffore and she has put me on the fast track to getting HRT.  My first appointment with the endocrinologist is December 20th.  According to the woman I spoke to at the clinic the second or third appointment will be when I get my prescription.

I had a weird episode where I woke up as Page and I was stuck in female mode all day.  Now when I'm Page I feel like I want to spend the rest of my life as a woman, and due to the fact that I couldn't switch back I started to think that I was transgender and that I was going to have to start planing my transition.  (If you haven't noticed, I can get very neurotic when I'm in girl mode.)

The next morning I woke up in guy mode and as always, I couldn't figure out why the hell I thought that way.  Some people on the boards have had similar situations, one person going into female mode for weeks at a time for example, and their advice was very helpfull to me.

I met with the UCSD researchers again today and I guess that they're going to do some tests on me, which I think is supper neat.  FOR SCIENCE!

Final note, I've just learned what Pansexuality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pansexuality means and that's apparently what I am as opposed to being bisexual as I've been describing myself up to this point.  Gender is pretty much irrelevant to me and the penis and vagina are just two sex organs you do different things to in order to make them feel good.  Yeah, more labels, but labels help us to communicate who we are to one and other in the most simplest terms.

OK!  I think I've covered the most important stuff that's been going on.  I promise to update more often.

Good! No, Crap! Uh, Good Again!

This was an interesting day.  Sick of the VA dicking me around I went ahead and scheduled an appointment with the gender therapist myself.  This will be tonight at 2030.  After I got her email this morning and confirmed the appointment I was ecstatic.  Yay!  Things are finally moving forward!

Then I left a nasty-gram at the patient advocate office as they have not been at all helpful and they still hadn't faxed me my letter authorizing funding nor have the been returning my calls.  I just figured that I'd pay out of pocket for tonight's appointment and that the letter should arrive in the mail before my next.

I guess my message lit a fire under the patient advocate's ass, because some hours latter one of the head honchos who works in admin came downstairs to my office with my fax!

"Uh, hay.  I found this sitting in the fax in-box with no cover-slip on it.  I know that it's confidential medical information so I brought it down to you right away."

"Hay thanks Greg!"  (Names changed of course.)

"No problem Jargo.  Take care ok?"  And off he went.  He had put a cover sheet on the fax, so I took it off to look at the funding request.  NAME - JARGO ABENDROTH (not my real name but I like it!) DIAGNOSIS - GENDER IDENTITY DISORDER.  There was all kinds of highly sensitive personal information on there and SUPER VISIBLE OMG LOOK AT THIS WEIRDO.  So whoever got the fax now knows all about me, "Greg" knows, and anyone else who happened to wander in to see if they got a fax knows.  And you know how rumors can spread in a small office environment.

I fell off cloud nine back onto earth completely horrified.  I didn't know what to do.  I was shaking and afraid to leave the office.  It was lunch time so I got some chow and gave myself time to work things out in my mind.  So my grand plan is -

If one person says anything about this to me I'm coming out at work.  Fuck it.

I'm sick of being ashamed of who I am.  I feel like my life has been out of control and I'm fed up.  It was supposed to be my decision when I came out, and in fact there's only one person who I work with that I ever planned on telling, and it was not going to be until I was ready.  That's been taken away from me and I'm pissed off.

I'm always afraid of what other people will think of me, of being judged.  That's going to stop right now.  I might just come out anyway.  The Department of Defense is an equal opportunity employer after all.  If I'm discriminated against or harasser I just need to go to HR to get their ass fired, and if that doesn't work I'll sue like crazy.

So what I think I'll do is take is slow, asses the situation over the next week and then make my decision after I've had time to mull this over.  (Unless someone say's anything, then it's "come out as queer time.")  I refuse to be a victim and this situation will only make me stronger.  Now I need to exercise and get cleaned up before my appointment.  RAR.

Things fall apart, but they can be rebuilt

I'm a recovering alcoholic and last night I had a relapse. 

Just putting that out there.

Anyway, the stress being generated by my "gender crisis" has been pretty overwhelming, but as a result of my latest struggle my wife has been put under an even greater amount.  She does not sleep at night and she is having a hard time functioning.  I mean, I even sleep at night despite what's happening to me and she suffers more than I do.  It's all my fault and I feel incredibly guilty.  She should not have to suffer because of me.

Last night I experienced a moment of weakness and I drank again.  I'd been doing good up until this point, especially considering how things have been lately.  I stayed up all night and my wife caught me drinking the the morning.

My wife told me before that if I started drinking again that things would be over between us.  I assumed that my life was over and I panicked.  I felt so ashamed of myself and the fact that I'd hurt her.  Then I freaked out, cut myself like I used to do back in high-school and how I'm going to have to wear long sleeves to work for  awhile. 

She ended up taking it very well, which surprised the heck out of me.  So here I am again, starting over.  It's been three months since I begged for help from the VA and still no matter how much I beg and annoy them still no thereapist.

Tomorrow morning I resume, "operation pain in the ass."  It's obvious that I need a healthy way to deal with my feelings and slipping back into my old habits wont help.

Good stuff for a change.

This is something I wrote on Bigender.net but I wanted to share it here.

I think I made a small break-through. A couple days ago I realized that I had set my standards way to high regarding how I present as a female. Even though I'm in the closet and my wife is the only person who sees me in girl-mode I've been obsessing over my appearance every night, spending almost an hour each evening doing my make-up, getting dressed ect.

And then after putting so much time into my appearance I'd feel wonderful one minute and awful the next. While I always knew it, until now I couldn't except the fact that the changes to how I look are going to take a long time. I've been a guy for 32 years and unsurprisingly I kind of look like a guy. I have plans in the works to feminize myself further, but it's going to take years to get there.

Last night instead of taking forever I just threw on a girl shirt, some woman's jeans and I only put on a minimal amount of make-up on and I felt better about my presentation than I have yet. I dressed how I would normally dress instead of desperately trying to achieve a perceived feminine ideal. I looked more like a man but I felt more like a woman because I felt and looked like myself, if that makes sense.

Yeah, the dysphoria was still there and I have a lot of issues to work through but I feel like I took a step in the right direction and that made me happy. 

 

So yay!  Good stuff.  Also, I talked with patient advocacy at the VA today and they said that they are mailing the funding approval to see the gender therapist.  (Finally!)  Also, they were going to fax me a copy but by the time I left work it hadn't arrived yet.  I hope it doesn't say what it's for because if someone else sees the fax before I get it I'll be outed in a very interesting way.

Tonight I also met up with some people at UCSD who want me to participate in a study on bigenderism.  I love science and medicine, so I'm very excited that I have an opportunity to participate in this.  Also, the opportunity to help the term "bigender" be legitimized in the medical community is something that I take very seriously.  We are such a small minority.  I basically told them that they could do whatever they wanted to me.  

 

Apparently they are going to pay me.  I was going to do it for free, but quite frankly I could use the money so it's a win-win situation.  Tonight at the interview also marked the first time I've ever discussed my bigenderism to another person, let alone a few people.  I'm already a very shy person so I was terrified but I think it went ok, and I feel stronger for having done it.

On an unrelated note, I'm a huge nerd and totally psyched that Skyrim comes out tomorrow.  The Elder Scrolls is my favored game series of all time and I have it preloaded on my computer via Steam.  When I get off work I'm picking up a pizza, going to sleep and waking up at 2300 to get cleaned up so I can play Skyrim when it unlocks at midnight.  I'm going to play it until physical exhaustion overtakes me and I'm forced to go to sleep.  

Goddamn, I'm such a nerd.

Science!