transretrogurl

I promise a two-fer today if I can keep up the energy to write; this blog post has been a while coming and might be a bit up and down, matching my mood at the moment, but might also make a huge lot of sense for a lot of readers who are in the same boat as me.

I class myself (amongst many things) as a cross-dresser; it’s a blunt and factually accurate while being almost fatuous way of under-describing the multitude of conditions, mental and otherwise, people who have the urge to dress in the clothing of the other gender. If you mention it on any public discussion you’ll get inevitably flamed by many people claiming it’s almost derogatory in nature but it’s a pretty accurate description for a lot of us.

However this post is not about the (mis)labelling of various gender-blurred people, but rather an interesting and extremely frustrating condition I have found myself in and out of for years now.

I’ve talked in the past about this biorhythm like effect of the urge to dress; sometimes it is just horribly compulsive in that from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep I literally can’t think of anything else without my brain interrupting me to tell me just how much of a rush it would be to step outside of Cindy’s establishment in a flowing floral dress. And it’s bloody difficult to deal with, especially given my job which requires me to be thinking on my toes about five things at once (while vidconfing and fixing demo issues normally). And then other times I slope off, internally, to a dark place where I loathe the person I’ve become and think of purging; even now I still get those, although nowhere near as often.

All this has kinda coagulated into a weird dichotomy; in English I seem to be internally contrary all the time. I’ll give you some amusing examples of this.

I’ve been messing about, which is probably the best way to describe it, with non-prescribed female hormones. And I’ve been doing it on and off; some days I realise that it is a daft thing, for me, to be doing as I have no intention of living as a woman (and if you are growing breasts that makes for some interesting conversations with work colleagues/people in the street/ people staring at the swimming pool). Other days it feels like a compulsion to apply the gel; I don’t feel my day is complete without gently rubbing the gel onto my inner thigh.

And I like to think it’s had next to no effect mentally. Any attributable effect, such as the interest in male actors I talked about in the last blogpost, are all kicked off by something I’ve thought about. But I noticed something deliciously ironic and contrary this week.

My sex drive has lessened a bit, and by sex drive I mean the compulsion for fantasy; I am a classic asexual and the idea of physicality of sex, with either gender (apologies for classing only two but stick with me) does nothing for me. I’m more turned on by the situation as opposed to the physical act; the idea of interacting with someone where I am in the female role is a big turn on for me; that interaction could be as simple as talking over a coffee, right up to the sweating/panting activities. Anyway, my urge for the fantasy has kind of dropped off a cliff.

And with it my urge to dress. That’s the irony; the urge to dress does have a sexual component and as the effect of the female hormone seems to take effect my sex drive has dropped. Which is a worry; I don’t want to lose the urge to dress, that kind of destroys the reason to be taking the hormones in the first place for me; I want some of those delightful secondary sexual characteristics to make my dressing more, well, authentic. It’s eye-opening but not really surprising to realise that the core need to dress was a sexual thing after all; not the ‘I need to pleasure myself the moment I think about it’ but that warm ‘my soul feels like it’s been dipped in melted chocolate and honey’ sensation.

And that sensation has diminished. It hasn’t gone away; far from it, I still wake up at 4:30ish every morning and before even awake I’m firing up the femm-iPad and finding a delicious picture or two to upload to the multitude of sites I push content to every day. But I’m gradually losing that drive, which means I need to cut back or maybe even stop entirely the hormones.

Ahh, the irony. But it’s not just that I am talking about when I describe myself as contrary.

I have a number of different social-media outlets where I publish content. And each of them covers a different facet of the person I think I am; I’m cutting way back on Facebook, not because I don’t like it there, but because the algorithms mean my stuff doesn’t get seen by many people. And that level of control, out of my hands, annoys me. When I post a picture I’d like my friends to see it. They don’t, because the algorithm, for them, analyses what they ‘like’ and gives them more of that, and because they don’t see my pictures they don’t get liked. Case in point – Instagram, which although owned by Facebook is much cleaner in the algorithms it uses, distributes my pictures and reels very widely; I’m still getting likes and comments on a reel I put up about six months ago because it got cross-linked to someone famous and keeps popping up on the ‘you like this, maybe you’d like to follow that’ bit. With FB I have 838 friends (just had to look it up) and when I put up a picture I get 20 likes. Now I know that under no circumstances should we be bothered by that kind of false affirmation but it is a little disheartening, especially when the same picture on Instagram instantly gets 100+ likes within 5 minutes of it being uploaded.

So I’ve linked my Instagram to my Facebook and suddenly when I upload a picture to Instagram people actually see it on FB. It’s crooked and dangerous, and highlights just how false Facebook is.

But anyway, I went off on a tangent. My contrary nature means that on one day I am excited, intrigued and responsive to random flattering messages from strangers. And the next I’m annoyed by it. And that’s completely my fault but also indicative of the way my brain is jumping back and forth between two completely different extremes. It’s this contrariness of wanting attention and then being irritated when I get it that must drive admirers insane.

It could be (and by that I mean definitely is) a side-effect of the damage I have in my head; when you spend your whole life not trusting people when they say they like you, but believing them 100% when they say they don’t. I had the sad and poignant moment of a psychiatrist telling me I am incapable of feeling happiness or trusting anyone when they say they care for me.

Sarah has taught me a number of things about myself, i.e. her. The most important is that all the rules I lived by for so long concerning being the person I wanted to be that I perceived society frowned upon, were bullshit, if you’ll pardon my French. I get a lot of genuinely nice and warming interactions with admirers online because I am Sarah and Sarah is me, but the contrary side of me can wake up the next day and be appalled at the exchange of words I’ve had. That’s my problem, and it gets reflected by periods of silence which are most often read the wrong way. It’s a side-effect of online conversations but I’m particularly unproud of my ability to be effectively wanton one day and an ice-queen the next; not intentionally but driven by the tides of my feminine moods.

Hmm, sounds a bit hormonal. Ahh.

Anyway, enough rambling; I promised a two-fer and the other post will be a lot more fun. Thanks for sticking with me as I mentally purged.

Stay beautiful and remember there’s someone else on the end of a text message and they are probably as fragile, confused and lonely as we can be.