transretrogurl

It’s been an odd couple of days. Welcome to ‘Understatement Theatre’. There’s a lot of emotion and reflection going on inside my head at the moment, with drab-me pacing up and down, stepping over Sarah’s discarded pink heels and empty bottles of nail polish, looking pensively to her little girl-pad where she resides, just behind my pre-frontal cortex between the intelligence and the catholic-level guilt.

It’s a busy place in there, especially now.

I find myself somewhere I’ve never been before. Sarah, and the various incarnations stretching back to the pre-history of my life, have always been a secret, something I treasured but always saw as an aberration, a naughtiness, even a failure somehow.

It’s a guilt and a mind-set that many of us carry around. Some of us never let the inner girl out. Some of us embrace her fully to the point where she becomes more than he.

For me I’ve always been ashamed of her. Mostly because I grew up in a time when the sexual divide was more pronounced, where England had legal homosexuality and transgenderism…just. When you found yourself associating with the other sex, and not in the ‘back of the bike-shed’ kind of way, you learned to suppress it.

Societal Norms, I think they call it. Pink for a girl, blue for a boy, strength as an attribute for a man, tenderness and delicateness for a woman. Even now, and I know we have a long way to go but the combination of the internet and the chance for decent people to have a say means we are heading down the right road, there are still implicit definitions of behaviour.

So I find myself at a crossroads. I’m escalating and the old drab-me is now as scared as Sarah. I no longer have the fear of betraying or failing my other half, she knows. I no longer really have the fear of revelation as I’ve taken steps to announce myself, not explicitly, but laying the foundations so if ever my secret was revealed it wouldn’t be the end of everything. My best friend knows and is more accepting than I would ever have hoped.

So why I am suffering angst?

It’s a simple answer, and I can sum it up in four simple words – “he, she, his, hers”.

Those little words, those little declarations of gender, are huge in my mind right now. I’ve always grudgingly called myself ‘he’ internally, partly because of the, you know, external genitalia and excessive gorilla-like hair growth, but mostly because that was what I was told I was.

But is it valid any more? I’m starting to have to face the fact that when dressed I smile more than I ever do in drab, I’m more relaxed even though my body is being squeezed in all types of random directions via corsets, bra, heels and the like. I should be completely uncomfortable and ill at ease, but I’m not.

But I need to temper this. Being a girl is a lot of work and I’m essentially a lazy arse. I can’t do make-up, if given the choice I’d spend all day in Star Wars pyjamas. Drab me has life very easy.

So am I ‘he’ or ‘she’? Or am I both?

And I find myself laughing out loud. We place such strength and wisdom in simplistic labels. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to have a label. Every one of us is different, a combination of a huge amount of experiences and internal chemical levels. To try and categorise people is to fail to understand.

It doesn’t matter whether I call myself he or she. I’m me, and that’s all I need to be.

I love Sarah right now. She’s a part of me I adore, a part of me that lets me do things I cannot do ‘normally’. I’m not going to suppress her any more, but equally I’m not going to go bananas, if you’ll excuse that term.

She is a delicacy. She is the last cookie in the box, the one that tastes so good because there are aren’t any more. She is me, I am her, and to hell with labels.

I promise I’ll lighten up soon. I have lots of delicious thoughts at the moment about going back through my memory and re-creating all the girls I have loved to date. Right now I need to shake this guilt and fear because they are so utterly unnecessary.

So stay beautiful sweeties, and always be true to the person who lives inside your head. I happen to think my pink-passenger is a little bit cute…..