bio from ScarletLetter

[sistawendy]

What follows is a bio-cum-rumination-on-my-transgenderedness that was solicited from me a few months ago by one of the editors of Scarlet Letters. (That's dev, of course, for all you MOOers.) I had a link to it on an earlier entry, but that link has since expired, so I'm immortalizing it here.

I am at least outwardly vanilla: I have a wife, a four-year-old son, a 9-to-6 job, a mortgage, and a black Lab. Nearly all of my time is spent in the male role, unless you want to subtract a few percentage points for the long hair, two pierced ears, panties (Jockeys), women's jeans, and shaved armpits. I'm out to my wife and son, my parents and sisters, and a wonderful group of friends who keep me sane, but not co-workers, in-laws, or neighbors.

How I identify myself isn't as easy a question for me as you might think from reading about transsexuality. I suspect that it isn't as cut and dried for some other transsexuals as they have publicly claimed because (at least in the past) telling the truth meant not getting the treatments they so desperately needed. Personally, I don't spend that much time thinking about my gender identity; I'm too busy with the aforementioned job and kid. I've never had the sort of epiphany that some transsexuals have described that told them that they needed to change sex. As I go through my daily life, I'll often think of things that I or people around me say and do and label them according to gender, but it isn't really an obsession. Sometimes I practice my femme voice when I'm alone. Being called feminine makes me happy. On the other hand, I'm pretty careful to be daddy at home and one of the guys at work, but more for pragmatic reasons than genuine enjoyment.

My transgender impulses are bound up tightly with my sexuality. You might have come across the word autogynephilia; it's the condition of being aroused my imagining oneself as female, and it describes me. When this word was coined by a specialist in the field, some transsexuals expressed outrage that anyone would dare to accuse them of having such base motivations for changing sex. I'm here to tell you that there's at least one who does, and my experience is that there are many more.

In an ideal world where I could magically rewrite the past (and I mean from birth), I would be female. Sex with men isn't a common part of my fantasy life; I'm not attracted to them. Sometimes I imagine myself as a single woman with a career and the child I have; sometimes I imagine myself as a harem slave.

How does all the stuff in my life fit together? In a word, uneasily. My wife isn't enthusiastic about my transgender leanings, and I suspect it would be pretty hard to find a straight woman who is. I did tell her that I liked to dress up before we got married (she even helped me get into my costumes for a couple of Halloweens, and let me wear some fetish clothes to bed with her), but I have to admit that I didn't fill her in about how strong my desires are, partly because I was in denial about them myself. I didn't go out in drag (except for Halloween, which hardly counts) for a few years after we got engaged. The only outlet I had was what I wore under my Clark Kent clothes. After a year or so it felt to me like I imagine solitary confinement must feel. I told myself that I had to do it to stay married.

The wall of denial came crashing down in the summer of 2000 when my wife found out that I'd secretly been taking illegally obtained estrogens. When I found a web site where I could order hormones my heart raced. It had been a dream of mine since I was in my teens. The illegality involed didn't make hormones more attractive, in case you were wondering; it made them more annoying to obtain and raised the nagging possibility of being prosecuted. When I got the first blister pack, my hands shook.

I took Premarin, among the least expensive estrogens available, for a couple of weeks, enough to notice some breast tenderness, reduced sex drive, and the oft-reported calming effect. I think it slowed the growth of my facial hair, too. I gradually increased the dose, and after a while, I experienced severe abdominal cramps. So severe, in fact, that I wondered if I'd gotten a bad batch of hormones and threw the remaining half of what I'd ordered away.

I had a fantasy scenario of what would happend when my wife finally noticed breast growth: the relationship would end spectacularly and I would be free and elated. I couldn't muster the courage to tell her what I was doing any sooner. The fantasy scenario isn't what happened, of course. My wife found out from the very people who'd sold me the hormones. Taking the hormones was cruel to my wife and far beyond irrational. I knew that even while I was doing it but part of me wanted escape from what I saw as the drabness and asexuality of my life too badly to care.

You might think that if I was popping illicit pills in an attempt to alter my body that I was hell-bent on transition and trying to fit into a female gender role. The irony of my situation, though, is that I find actually trying to pass so nerve-wracking that I don't do it recreationally anymore. I hardly relish the prospect of the constant stress that transition must be; I've talked to enough people who've done it to know that it's a lonely, traumatic experience.

So, for the time being I'm not growing breasts and I'm seeing an experienced, industrial-strength shrink who specializes in transgendered clients, and trying to patch my marriage together. Our sex life hasn't satisfied me for years, really since my son was conceived. At my shrink's suggestion, we're working on fixing the sex part of our relationship first. It's no longer possible for me to be sexually stimulated without imagining myself as female. A lot of my fantasies involve bondage as well as transgender; I'm hoping that if I can bring my wife far enough into my own erotic universe at least that sticking point can be removed. Whether that will be enough, or even if it's possible, time will tell. So far we've tied each other up once. For me it's much better than the sex we'd been having, but there still room for improvement. My wife has pretty intense performance anxiety and isn't really comfortable talking about kinky plans in advance, but forward progress has definitely been made in the last year or so.

I've been trying to find people for my wife to talk to who are in similar situations without much success yet. All the other significant others of transgendered people seem to be either too maladjusted or too into it for my wife to relate. I have plenty of friends I can talk to about my situations and places I can go to be one of the crowd, but she doesn't, and that needs to change.

As for my son, my shrink has recommended that I not treat transgender as a big deal, as long as I can make him understand that the other kids at school might not get it. I agree with this approach, not least because it's the easiest for me to implement. My son saw me in drag for the first time this past Halloween. He gave me a long, funny look, but he didn't say anything or run away, which wouldn't surprise you if you knew him.

Lest I give you the impression that life as a transgendered husband is a complete drag (pardon the pun), there are things that I do for kicks: sewing, which I've just started doing in the last couple of years, is a wonderful skill to learn if you don't quite have a feminine shape. (I make nighties for my wife, too.) I like historical costume: I've made an Italian Renaissance gown and bought an eighteenth-century-inspired one. I love corsets, and I've made a couple for myself. I recently made a schoolgirl outfit. I have a huge fetish for leather: for my last birthday my wife gave me shoulder-length black leather gloves, and I love to wear them with my thigh-high boots, my leather mini-skirt (thank goodness leather shops have after-Christmas sales too), a corset, and fishnets. Fishnets are great if your wife won't let you shave your legs. I like long gloves because not just for the dynamite look; they also hide my sunburned, unshaven lower arms. I love shopping for girl clothes, especially with friends or my wife. I go dancing at my local BDSM play space with friends every so often. It's kind of nice being the only one in drag at parties: I get plenty of the attention I crave. I prefer high drag, but not completely over the top. (No platforms or feather boas for me, thank you.)

I can't say with any certainty just how characteristic my current life is of transgendered people; I've been too busy living it to study it thoroughly. In my teens, however, I did devour all the books I could find on transsexualism in the library at the university near me. I read the books primarily for turn ons and how tos. I think they had a pretty limited influence on how I viewed my options, especially after I'd talked to transsexuals in various stages of transition. One medical factoid that did give me pause was reading about the famous study at Johns Hopkins that claimed that SRS and hormone therapy were no better than placebo as a treatment. I've never read the actual study, but one transsexual I talked to pointed out that this study was done in the 1970's, when gender specialists did their darnedest to turn male-to-female transsexuals into straight housewives. No wonder.

If there is one aspect of my life that's typical of transgendered people, it's that important parts of my life are in flux, which among transgendered people is common even at ages -- 30's, 40's and beyond -- when most people have settled down. There's an element of adolescent angst surrounded by the trappings of adulthood, which is somehow appropriate for somebody who wants more time to sort things out.

Comments

[danizana.livejournal.com]

i see you as a real woman and you have the right to get married and get childern and ghave a famaly if thats you wish, but Dana International is not a house wife:-)

Love ya
Danielle
((^_^))

Re:

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'm amazed that you read as far as you did!

[danizana.livejournal.com]

Well I do read, I have to get to know you all... so we understand each other,lol well i did scan through it first time, then said what the hell I will read it ;-)

Love ya
Danielle-Zana
((^_^))