A Negative Reaction

Me, discussing a male friend’s girlfriend while he was out of the room: she’s almost as butch as I am.
Another male friend: to be fair, I know lots of women that are butcher than you are.
Me: to be fair, I’m partly butch and partly male.

Conversation explosion. He was afronted by the statement and started to ask how I could be male as I am physically female, I was sputtering as I couldn’t believe that I just said something like that in such context to a friend I don’t know very well, and a female friend that knows me fairly well interjected herself into the conversation and ended it as she is aware of my lack of definite gender identity.

It’s a hard reality when you realize that your tight circle of people that know/understand you doesn’t extend very far. It does make me desire to tell people how I identify as male, in a serious context- but I don’t want to just say something now and then in a couple months ask them again to refer to me with male pronouns and use a chosen name… and I’m not ready to ask for that yet.  I just want to be sure.

Nightmares

I don’t often have nightmares, but right before my alarm this morning I dreamt that someone I’m not ready to talk to about my gender identity found out that I want to transition.

1) They found out because they saw this blog.  I’m not an idiot, I know that putting things on the internet makes it available to everyone, I’m just hoping that this is tucked away enough for me to have to show it to people at this point.

2) While conscious I’m not sure I want to transition, but in the dream I knew the moment I was confronted about the blog that I really believed in transitioning and being male.

3) Gender identity is a real, personal issue.  Not everyone’s sense of self matches the body that genetics handed to them.  I wouldn’t be going through the anxiety and discomfort of considering a transition if I wasn’t already very uncomfortable in my own body.

I have no intentions of telling my family and friends/acquaintances from high school about this for some time.  They know me from a time when I didn’t push the envelope of gender identity and would probably be caught off guard, while most people that know me in person within the last 3-4 years understand my gender ambiguity.
Here’s to life without understanding.

Pronoun Update 1

My therapist asked me what pronouns I prefer today- and it was somewhat out of the blue, I realized that it would be best if I decided so that the people around me feel best equiped to address me. Thus, I will catalog my feelings (over time) on the ridiculous bigendered system of pronouns in the English language.

My preferred pronouns:
She/he
Her/him
Sir
Hers/his
Brother

I feel it important to note that my biological sisters call me sissy, which has been my nickname for as long as I can remember. As I connect this name with the younger period of my life where I felt only genetics defined my gender identity, I do not mind being referred to as “sissy” by my sisters and/or family.

My clothes don’t always fit

I work in a semi-profesional environment. I teach, do research, and go to class. Fortunately, the sciences are generally very relaxed when it comes to dress code for graduate students.
However, that doesn’t make dressing eveymorning easy for DZ.
It’s actually nice that now we’re expected to wear dress shirts/khakis/polos every so often. I love wearing clothes like this- I can’t wait until there’s an appropriate day to wear a tie.
However, it doesn’t mean that I’m perfectly comfortable with the way I present myself at work. Sometimes,’the clothes just don’t fit right.
When I wear dress shirts, I’m a bit more conscious abot how they fit across the shoulders and whether or not my tie is making my chest look curvy.
Similarly, I have outifts that make me feel good. I’ve been into baggy jeans since I discovered that I could buy my own clothes when I got my first job at 15yrs old. Pair baggy jeans with layered white tshirts and a baseball hat and I feel very much in my element.
I’ve recently started two new things however: I shave my sideburns and I wear a frog bra everyday. I wish I could saythat I am binding, but my chest is very large and binding for any sort of daily activity is more physical discomfort than the difference between wearing the frog bra and actually binding. So, from now on, when I say being bound, I really just mean having the bra frog bra on. I am able to hide my chest quite a bit, but it’s certainly up to the observer. Most importantly, I am comfortable like this. I would love to have a flat chest that I could bare to the world and feel comfortable with in a sexual context, but that is a long time coming.

Counseling

Tomorrow morning is my 2nd visit with a counselor. I decided to see a counselor for a number of reasons, but it boils down to my interest in my own mental health.
When I came out as a lesbian (early) in high school I grappled with depression and self mutilation. I don’t even want to be back in the self-mutilation place, but the depression has come back for another round with me several times.
As I recently moved quite some distance from home to start grad school, my relationship of over 4 years ended, and the beginning of graduate school has swept me off my feet, I have certainly been feeling the mental and physical effects of depression. Fortunately, after so many times in the ring with this particular health issue, I am very aware of what it does and how to stop it. That doesn’t mean I’m too proud to say that I can’t take it all on by myself.
At the heart of the matter lies that while everything in my life has been thrown up in the air, my feelings of insecurity and misalignment between my mind and body have resurfaced quite strongly. So strongly in fact, that I am seriously considering no longer pushing them aside and pursuing psychotherapy and gender reassignment.
I think it’s an important distinction to make- that these feelings have resurfaced from many previous times. I didn’t always feel like I should have been male as a child, but I also didn’t grow up in an environment that amplified the gender stereotypes. I was a girl that grew up loving to take electronics apart, play baseball, and build with legos and my erector set. But along the line, I began to question what set me apart from the boys. After my “sexual awakening” (discovering that I find women, not men attractive) I began to have periods where I felt like my body should be turning into a man. That’s the fact of the matter, I feel like a girl that grew up into a man. And now my body is off in some other direction- my clothes don’t fit right, my body betrays my mental state, and I’m not sure if gender reassignment is worth the fuss.
One thing is certainly clear- I can’t keep living like I did during my undergraduate now that my life is free from restrictions and I’m cognizant of the opportunity I have to better become myself.

Hi!

My life is currently undergoing some major renovation.  I am currently undergoing some major mental renovation.  Some serious changes in my life have prompted to thoroughly explore the possibility that I am an FTM transgendered individual.

As I am an extremely busy grad student with limited interpersonal skills, I find it very helpful to write down some of my thoughts to keep myself organized.  Also, I find some things about my views on my gender, whether or not it aligns with my current body, to be unique from many lesbian and FTM bloggers in several aspects so I want to throw my 2 cents in.  I need to get this stuff out, and I hope my experiences can be helpful to someone else.

This blog will contain text in organized essay form as well as stream of consciousness that may leave you wondering “what on earth is this person on?”.  Over time there will also be images and possibly videos as I love to express myself in different ways.