transretrogurl

What I love about this blog, other than the fact that I can leave it for weeks and still come back when I get a perfumed urge, is that it works, for me, as a whiteboard for my internal chaos. Occasionally I like to be serious and say things that have been bubbling around in my head, and putting them into a blog really lets me sit back, read them, often tick myself off for being a drama queen, and carry on with the good ol’ drab existence.

I haven’t done a philosophy posting for a while. Interestingly I’ve been thinking a lot about stuff in general, where I am, where I want to be, all the usual rubbish. And I’ve been insanely busy; if you read the last blog my marathon didn’t go unpunished. In fact, it got a little worse, but more of that (it’s amusing) later in this post.

Usual caveat – I’m going to be frank and honest; if you’re not a t-girl/CD/fetishist it might come across as, well, a little strange, but bear with me. I’ll put piccies like the one above in to lighten the mood; don’t worry, it’s not a doom and gloom post, just a little more introspective than normal.

But a quick catch up for those who haven’t read the other million or so words in the ridiculously large number of posts I’ve done. Fifty two years of manic madness in a couple of paragraphs.

When I was born (in 1969, which seems a different world; which was the problem) I was intersexed. Well, not properly intersexed – my mother was not a stable person; I don’t hold it against her, but she had an alcohol issue and a valium issue. Not the best things to be addicted to during pregnancy. Both myself and my sister, plus a couple of failed attempts in the ten years between, had issues. Mine were the effects of an estrogen wash on a male fetus. My memories don’t kick in until around 1984 (I kid you not) so all this stuff is based on physical evidence – I have two scars that really prohibit me from ever wearing a bikini; it literally looks like my legs were sewn on. That’s where ‘mass’ was removed, basically proto-female genitalia. Fast forward twelve years and when I hit puberty the body kinda went a little nuts. Instead of hair growing ‘down there’ and bits dropping, bits didn’t. Instead I started to develop breasts which, when you’ve been brought up male (those scars down there were because ‘we let you cry until you tore something’; again, I kid you not) it’s a little, well, unexpected.

Now, if my love of dressing in clothes of the feminine persuasion started then it would make sense. But it didn’t. My urge to dress was way earlier; I was caught in *primary* school dressing in a girl’s uniform I found. I was six.

Anyway, back to the swelling. This was 1981 which was still pretty prehistoric when it came to the treatment of physically non-binary people. So the medical solution, like before, was ‘go male!’. Cue a long period of taking ‘antibiotics’, which in actuality, looking back, was a course of male hormones. This resulted in hair growth ‘down there’, things dropping and the breast growth stopping. But not going away. So my puberty, well second puberty, was a time of rapid growth (I literally shot up a foot or so) and lots of anger, which stuck with me for a long time.

I mention this because I had an amusing issue with waxing a while back (blogged it for your amusement). Result of that is I now make an effort to keep my chest shaved. In fact I’ve just signed up for four months of laser treatments to remove the hair pseudo-permanently on my chest and back. This means I can see the breast growth; I kept the chest hair unconsciously bushy and it hid it. Now it doesn’t.

They’re not huge, not by a long shot, but they are noticeable. I self-medicated with a low dose of estrogen for six weeks, stopping for the marathon, and female hormone treatment is meant to take a while to get started. Literally within a week I had hyper-sensitive nipples and noticeable fat placement in the chest. It’s like the body was just put on pause when I was treated with a serious dose of testosterone back in ’81. Who’d have thunk it?

Anyway, one of the things I say to everyone when chatting about pretty much anything in life is the concept of ‘the endgame’. Where do you want to be, what are you aiming at, etc etc. And when I talk about self-medicating people automatically assume the endgame is full transition.

It isn’t. That is not the reason at all why I am doing it (and yes, I’ve started doing it again now my daft exercise and fund raising for Cancer Research is done for the year). I’m doing it because I want to not be suffering from Gender Dysphoria every waking moment of every day.

My logic is this; I have classic gender dysphoria symptoms but have never associated them correctly to what they are. I am genuinely uncomfortable with the masculine lifestyle and aspirations, always have been. I put it down to being ‘sensitive’, which is a nice label we people that grew up in the time before acceptance for ‘not being physically or mentally macho’. I have an almost constant urge and need to masterbate (yeah, sorry, should have warned you) and have since I went through puberty. In addition to a constant urge to get sexual relief, I also don’t physically want to have sex, nor have I ever. Never felt the urge. My cravings are all around femininity; my fantasies are either related to looking, dressing and behaving completely feminine, or physical intimacy while feminine with a man.

And those fantasies have been the same since I could remember. I’ve never got off on anything else. The constant urge never goes away, and this is one of the symptoms of GD (I read a great article written by a post-op woman who described in eerie details her issues before she transitioned and they were identical, down to the details of her fantasies, which actually made me feel a lot better about them).

Taking female hormones, albeit without consultation with a doctor (and I know it’s dangerous but I really couldn’t face sitting through intensive therapy reliving my childhood and every failure I’ve ever had trying to be a ‘real bloke’ just for a doctor to say ‘you know what, you have GD’), has already smoothed the urges. I feel peaceful, although a bit foggy in a delightful pink way.

For me it feels like a proper balance for the first time since I can remember. The person I am internally isn’t a woman. And it isn’t a man. It’s just me.

So a little amusing story to finish that will explain why I am writing this blog. Last week I managed to both accidentally and intentionally out myself to a colleague at work. I’ve made a serious amount of effort my entire life to keep this side of me away from ‘his’ life. It’s been tricky the last four years or so and I’ve tripped up a couple of times; I have a good friend online who knows, my best friend from childhood knows, my sister knows, my shrink who I have stopped seeing because of Covid knew (and liked that side of me a lot; she said drab me was incapable of being happy whereas Sarah is nothing but happy, and she was right). But no-one I work with has ever known.

I’ll keep the story vague as ‘names have been changed to protect the innocent’ etc etc, but I was very drunk last week and ended up drinking in the foyer of my hotel until 2:30am. I was with two people, one of which I work for, the other I work with. The person I work with is a reasonably new starter and a lovely person; she is T and since I found out I’ve been massively impressed. It never occurred to me, because of when I grew up and the atmosphere of the places I have worked, that there would ever be an option to be the person I am internally *and* the person I am professionally, but she nails that perfectly.

Lots of drinks were drunk, lots of funny stories were told, and as the night drew on towards morning the conversation took an interesting turn. I don’t remember the exact moment and I may have been confused; pretty sure the person I work for came out as bisexual. And I’m sat there thinking ‘if only you two knew the other side of me, it would blow your minds’.

And before I could even think about it, I found a selfie of Sarah on my phone and, as the person I work for was recounting something entertaining, I casually showed it to the other person (making sure that my boss couldn’t see).

I have no idea why I did it. It just felt like the moment. In the past I would have kept it to myself, berated myself later for not being brave and, ironically, less of a man for not admitting it. Yeah, that sounds mad to type.

The look on her face was priceless. Utterly priceless.

Long story short, she made an excuse to pop outside for a vape and I took what I assumed to be a hint and joined her. We had one of the most fun conversations I’ve ever had; trying to explain 46 odd years of fun cross-dressing, asexual gender binary behaviour in ten minutes when you can barely talk without slurring is nigh on impossible, but I think, and hope, I managed to explain it without coming across as insane.

It felt good to come out to someone. Normally I wake up the next day after a drinking session (and yes, I get the irony of whinging about my mother’s behaviour that led to swimming in Estrogen while in the womb while also talking about yet another drunken night’s hi-jinks) with the guilts. What did I say, who did I say it to, where are my underpants kind of thing, but I woke up pleasantly relaxed. Could be down to the artificial hormones pumping around my system as well, but I’ll put it down to making the right decision for a change.

But no good deed goes fully unpunished. My boss was too drunk to find his hotel, and needed somewhere to crash for a couple of hours before his early train. The hotel I was staying at had huge beds and, even though he’d come out as bi (don’t read anything into that, the guy is a brilliant laugh and a genuinely nice person) I told him he could crash on one side of the bed, I’d take the window. It’s a friend thing to do.

Once I’d crashed out I realised I hadn’t applied my Estrogen gel – he was asleep already, snoring loudly, so I tried, carefully, to step over him. Thing is, the beds at this particular hotel, which is a Pod hotel, are huge but they take up the whole width of the room. And they are four feet off the ground; all the storage in the room is in drawers under the bed so they are high.

In stepping over him I lost my balance, over-extended my leg and landed badly. I’d done the marathon literally eight days before and my muscles were still damaged from the walk. And I managed to re-tear the muscle I tore two years ago, the one that damaged the nerve and led to 30 days of no sleep due to the pain.

Yeah. So on top of scraping metal fragments out of my eye, I also managed to reveal my deepest, most intimate secret to a work colleague and damage my back. In fact my back was so damaged I had to cancel a ten hour session of Sarah fun with Cindy; I got as far as driving 40 miles towards London last Tuesday before I realised my back was so bad I couldn’t get out of the car without screaming. Sigh.

It’s not all bad news though; saw a physio yesterday and the damage is down to a hyper-reaction of the body; when you damage nerves, especially in the back, if you re-damage the area the body will react more than it normally does. I have stretching exercises that have reduced the pain down to ‘easily bearable’. I have a Cindy session in exactly two weeks where I plan to do something really cool (can’t say what until I do it, if I talk about it I’ll find some reason not to do it).

Did you spot the nice deflection from the subject of this blog? So, I find myself swimming in female hormones, not wanting to fully transition but not wanting to spend the rest of my life in the self-hating drab mode I have worn for forty odd years. It’s an interesting T-Junction to be sat at, let’s just put it that way.

Going to be a twofur today I think, I’m going to do a Frock Tale to let myself relax and give Sarah some time in her pink head-flat to herself.

Stay beautiful and stay true to yourselves. Just don’t take as long as I’ve taken to find the true you.