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

"If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman."

“If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman.”

So I've written about the lead singer of Against Me coming out as trans already, but I have a lot more that I need to day about it.

I've already mentioned their song “The Ocean”, which is basically Laura, (the lead singer) screaming out to the world about her pain and desire to be the woman that she always has been. It's my new favorite song. Yesterday in 100% girl mode it actually made me realize something. Here is the second verse.

“If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman

My mother once told me she would have named me Laura

I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her

One day I’d find an honest man to make my husband

We would have two children, build our home on the Gulf of Mexico

Our family would spend hot summer days at the beach together

The sun would kiss our skin as we played in the sand and water

We would know we loved each other without having to say it

At night we would sleep with the windows of our house left open

Letting the cool ocean air soothe the sunburned shoulders of our children.”

Those are the most poignant and beautiful words I’ve ever read. While listening to the song for like the 10^th time that afternoon it suddenly dawned upon me.

I'll never have a man flirt with me. I'll never be swept off my feet. I'll never have a man (or anyone) awkwardly ask me out on a date. No one will take me to the movies or to a nice Italian restaurant. No one will ever surprise me with my favorite flowers. No one will ever make the first move on me, and therefore I won't be able to let him.

No one will ever get down on one knee and profess their love for me. No one will think I'm beautiful, even when I wake up in the morning and I look like a wreck. No one will make me his wife. I'll never be able to take care of the house while he goes to work, and I won't be able to run errands, do the shopping, exercise so I look good for him, clean the house and then cook a kick ass healthy meal for him so that when he get's home he can relax for a bit and we can spend some time together. When we're getting tired he'll never hold me in his strong arms and make me feel safe and wanted, and he won't kiss me like he needs to have me, and he wont lead me into the bedroom.

I will never be able to have children. I won't have an opportunity to dedicate me life to them, and I wont see them take their first awkward steps into the world. I'll never be able to call my husband at work to tell him that our child’s first words were, “Da, da”. I like to think that he would try to sound strong, but his voice would crack at some point and I would love him more than ever before.

I'll never be able to take them to school for the first time and cry as they enter the building. I won't watch them grow older and watch them as they become individuals. I'll never see them grow into teenagers and reject me as the enemy, and I won't be able to love them more for it. I wont be able to take on a new job to help pay for their collage, and I won't be there when they leave home to become adults.

Some day perhaps they would settle down and make a family of their own and then they would let me know that I was a good mother. If they chose to have children I would be a grandma and I would spoil the hell out of my grand-kids. Then my children would understand that all I ever did in my life was for them, and we would be closer than ever.

I would grow old and slow with my husband and I would give thanks every day that I was his wife. And when we both neared the end of our lives I would care for him, and even when the pain was awful I would cry tears of sadness for how much he was suffering, and tears of joy that I was so blessed to have been a part of his life, and that he loved me.

But I'm fucking bigender.

I'll never have any of that. It's hard enough for transsexuals to find a good partner who they can be open with, and here I am Bigender; not one gender nor the other. I can't transition to the other sex as my gender is in a constant state of flux. Who could love a person that is both a man and a woman?

Until last night I didn’t think I wanted those things in my life. I thought that said gender roles were ridiculous and outdated. But here I am tonight, wanting nothing more in the whole world, and dreading the moment when I flip back into male mode and I'll loose this part of me. I just want everything to stay like it is now forever.

Every day I die.

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

Dandelions and Snapdragons

This is a poem from my male aspect to my female aspect.  It was formulated in my mind while in guy mode, but I didn't actually write it down until I was in female mode just now.  As a result this brought out a lot of strange, conflicting emotions in me.  I cried very hard writing this, because I was so sad and because I was so happy.

Dandelions and Snapdragons -

It's taken me so long to remember you

Climbing the old willow tree

Jeans ripped at the knees

and covered in fresh grass stains

I scaled the brown branches

And I surveyed all that was mine from my platform in the sky

I saw you looking up at me.

Being awkward and alone

Neither boy nor girl

Unable to fight

or play football

Or relate to anyone I knew

Scared and confused

But you where there all the while

waiting for me to turn around and smile at you

And I never did

The onslaught of adolescence

Ravaging our body

Simple times split asunder

As our world grew darker

You called out for me

pleading

And I ran away as fast as I could

Life is a blur with many points of light

Like silver stars in the sky

But those beacons are few and far between

Suspended in darkness

For so many years you tried to make me see

But you were just a child

and I was a man

And I was terrified of you

And then came the day

When I broke into two

Unable to maintain this quiet facade

Shattered - I had no where left to hide

No place to run

And I could no longer deny

That I saw you

Your long, dirty blond hair

Sky blue eyes

And crooked smile

With jeans still ripped at the knees

Covered in bright green grass stains

I had almost convinced myself that you weren’t real

But you've always been there

Waiting for me

I've hurt you so much and I'm sorry

But this time things will be different

We'll be children again

Running through the woods

The sound of our small feet rhythmically drumming against the earth

Leaping over small creeks

Stopping to check for tadpoles and crayfish

Lying on our backs in the meadow

Hand in Hand

The bright sunlight warming our skin

laughing about nonsense

Watching the clouds drift by lazy

As if we had all the time in the world

For now on we'll be together

I will give you all the time you need

I will nurture and protect you until you grow strong

Forever shall I love you

And when you fall and skin your knee

I will lift you up in my arms

And I will give you a bouquet of

Dandelions and Snapdragons

Perky!

Hi there ducky!  I've been in guy mode a LOT this week but I'm back in female mode at the moment.  Not too much has been going on in my personal life, but of interest is the media attention Bigender people seem to be getting due to the SDSU study that I've mentioned in this blog previously.  On the Bigender.net forums it seems that some people are not happy about the study, or the way it's been reported in the media, or. . . something.

Queue rant.

For the life of me, I can't figure out what the fuck problem is.  The idea of "Bigender" is less than a decade old and almost no one knows about us.  Well, now they do, and not only is this a golden opportunity to show people that we exist and that we're normal people who just experience the world differently than the average person, but perhaps through the study of our unique life status scientists will be able to learn more about the human brain.  I mean, this is amazing just for the scientific aspect alone, but we should be embracing this using the media attention to educate the public and let other gender-variant people know that they aren't alone.

A friend of mine got this whole study started through shear force of will and today he made a post where he apologized for it because a few people are taking this personally for some reason that I can't fucking comprehend.  WTF?  He doesn't have a damn thing to apologize for and I'm pissed that other people would make him feel bad seeing how because of his efforts we're currently experiencing an amazing time for our tiny community, not to mention the fact that we might be able to contribute to a deeper understanding of the nature of gender and identity, and how it's programed in the human brain.   Fuck, fuck, fuckedy fuck.

End rant.

Elsewhere in the news, today I bound my breasts for the first time.

OK, they're tiny, but they're also damn perky, or pointy or whatever.  When I wear most of my regular shirts and work shirts I now have two sharp points sticking out which kind of gives my game away.  So today I took an ace bandage and strapped them down, which wasn't hard because there's not really much of anything there.  =P  So it's not proper binding in the traditional FTM sense seeing how I have very little to strap down, but it's something.

Anyway, now it just looks like I have regular guy pecs and I can wear all my old cloths again.  Yay!  I'm only into hrt four months so I'm not sure how much bigger they will get, but I imagine not very much.  I'm both relieved and disappointed at the same time.

I think that's it for now.  I've settled into living in my bachelor/bachelorette pad and I love it.  I started to put my loft bed together today but I hit a point where I'm going to need help so that will  have to wait until my wife comes home tomorrow.

Yup, that's all.  Sleep sweet!

Paige

Oh, this is me making a funny face.  Weeeeee.