transretrogurl

A new classification for a blog post! Who’d have thought it. I wanted to write a blog where I just meandered around topics that are popping up in my heat-addled brain at the moment; the UK has just had a heatwave and according to the media outlets, including the BBC (I’m looking at you, damn master-click-baiters) it’s the END OF THE WORLD (TM). It’s not really, it’s just a heat wave, assisted by industrialisation and the like. But if you read the live news feed (again, looking at you BBC) it appears we’re all about to ignite if we sneeze. Anyway, not talking about that, but my brain has had some time to ponder while I’ve lain (naked because clothes are not an option at night when the temperature refused to drop beneath 25C) sweating.

So, a fun blog post with a number of random and unlinked topics sounded fun.

Things they never tell you about growing breasts – Buds.

In their defence, where ‘their’ are amorphous non-existent blobs, it’s hard to be told when you’re naughtily self-medicating yourself on female hormones, but I ended up having to do some mildly panicked Google searches as I started to develop what felt like a lump under my left nipple.

I’m the worst hypochondriac which is often amusing when I actually have something wrong (see ruptured spinal disk for fun details), and a couple of weeks ago when I was in Dublin and unknowingly suffering from the onset of the latest Covid variant my left nipple was extremely painful. More sore than pain, but I could barely touch it. Driving the car was mad; the seatbelt lay directly over the nipple area and if I turned my head I’d get a throbbing pain in my chest.

I’d stopped taking the Estrogen for a bit as I was umming and ahhing about where my future lay in terms of the dressing thing; as I stated before the irony of messing about with hormones is that whilst they quite obviously feminize you (more on that later) they also, if you’re like me and a little hormonally challenged to start with, tamp down the male aggression a lot. Which is tied to sexuality; I have very little obvious ‘normal’ sex drive anyway and that’s pretty much gone down the drain, although the fantasies I talked about in the last but one post are very much in ascendancy, most notably the man/woman ones, but what little sex drive I have/had was tied very closely into my urge to dress.

Put bluntly, the hormones that make me a more feminine shape also tone down my desperate need to be a female shape. Go figure.

Anyway, drifted off again; my nipple was very sensitive and sore, and when I examined at after the Covid had subsided I found a largish lump, about the size of a 50p piece (for those Uk readers) and about a centimetre deep. Instantly I was concerned as there is always a risk when you take hormones of Cancer; the way hormones work is they reprogram your body to move things about and grow new stuff, and if you are of a certain age your cells can misfire when reproducing (I have a lot to say on this; telomeres are an amazing concept, the end of your DNA strand in all of your cell effectively has a chunk of stuff that does nothing, and every time you reproduce the cell the cell loses a part of the telomere strand. After it’s been reproduced a number of times there are no more telomeres and you start to lose pieces of the DNA that are needed for defining the cell; it’s what aging is. If they ever work out how to get cells to reproduce without losing the telomere strand we’ll be effectively immortal….).

So I was instantly worried. Breast cancer kills men as well, and they are always telling you to examine your boobs. So I did some research.

Turns out I’ve hit puberty. Again.

When I hit puberty first time the amusing mess that is my endocrine system got gleefully confused as to what I was; the removal of a chunk of pre-feminine tissue from bits of my 6 month old body hadn’t got rid of all of the confused ‘he’s a girl, she’s a boy’ programming and boom, when I hit 13 or so my voice broke, my balls dropped and I started to develop breasts. Big time.

If I hadn’t ended up being ‘medicated’ there’s a good chance I’d have been a busty teenage girl. In a boy’s body. Well, mostly boy’s. My school years were one long dodge the bully encounter and having boobs would have made it harder.

I digress; as part of hitting puberty before I started to get the little lumps behind the nipples, but a strong dose of ‘vitamins’ (as I would told/lied to) upped the androgens and testosterone and et voila, stubble, disappearance of my fledgling breasts and a lot of urges to punch things.

Now, at my age, my production of male hormone, which wasn’t that great before and due to some hilariously silly behaviour when I served in the army and an evening where I was dragged outside of a pub and had a very intensive amount of kicks to the crotch, has basically dried up. So when I started to gradually introduce Estrogen it had nothing to fight and gleefully started rewriting my biochemistry.

Hence the lumps. I am developing what are called ‘buds’, the formation of feminine mammary glands. My body is prepping itself to produce milk for the babies it erroneously thinks I’m going to produce.

There’s something delightful, and scary, about that. The photo at the top of the blog is a candid topless one I took last week and you can see I have definite breast shape.

There’s a part of me that is terrified; that life-long shield of hiding any scent of femininity from the world in general is kinda blown away when you’re wearing a t-shirt and there are obviously breasts (and very pert nipples; part of the process of puberty for girls involves the growth of the nipple and they never seem to go flat now).

I’m lucky in one way; on my medical records I have a record of ‘gynecomastia’; interestingly in men over 50 this is becoming a lot more common (reading between the lines, all the Soya products and the like we consume in tandom with a sedentary lifestyle is persuading our bodies that we are actually female so the Estrogen levels exceed the testosterone and again, et voila, moobs). I can play the ‘oh, what a world’ card but the worry with that is that a doctor would go ‘let’s get some male hormones in you’. At which point I would have to tell the truth and say ‘no thanks’.

A delighted part of me is wondering when I will start to lactate; a more worried part of me is searching Amazon for sports bras…….

Appropriate Appropriation

This made me laugh and be cross in equal amounts. I did that lovely session at Wowgals last week (see previous post) where we did some gorgeous arty silhouettes of a pregnant me. It’s one of my little fetishes that I can’t, and don’t want to, stop doing. After we finished the arty shots we decided to keep the baby bump on and do some maternity looks.

A quick aside on the baby-bump; it has an adhesive back to it that you pull a covering off and place directly against the skin (a little tip; if you want to do this shave your stomach. Otherwise removing it is…..entertaining). It has straps that hold it in place, and a tight velcro back the pulls it in very close to you. The lovely thing is after ten or so minutes the silicon contents of the bump warm to you body temperature and it actually, and delightfully, feels part of you. It’s an odd and humbling experience, especially when you put on a flowing maternity dress. It feels almost too real; I’ve found myself getting a little teary because it’s an experience I can never have; well, not actually true – there are 0 reasons why a man cannot carry a baby to term; the insertion of a uterus, with the use of anti-rejection medications, is completely possible. It’s just never been done because there is a unspoken moral statement that men can’t carry babies. It’s a woman thing.

Reason I mention this is I got trolled on Instagram. Don’t worry, I have very few Snowflake genes in my personality (you don’t do my career and life choices unless you have a skin that’s harder than diamond); trolls don’t bother me. I simply block the account, delete the comment and move on. But this one was a little different.

Most trolls, including this one, use a private Instagram account with next to no followers, and no posts. This one had an Indian name, I think, and stuck a comment on a lovely picture (I’ll add it here) saying simply:

‘Do not appropriate us, sir’ and a couple of angry emojis.

Again, I found it amusing and it made me a little cross because what on earth was I appropriating? My account specifically says I’m a crossdresser who really (and I mean REALLY) enjoys dressing up. I was a little baffled as to why someone would get so put out; also why on earth were they surfing my pictures? How do you get to my pictures without specifically searching for me?

Turns out it was a hashtag. I tend to amusingly add hashtags that I know aren’t that appropriate; I’d tagged it as ‘mumtobe’ and ‘maternityfashion’. Hell, the second one was right.

But still, why get angry about that? A part of me wanted to be apologetic and another part of me definitely didn’t. I bought that dress. I paid for the makeover. I posed for the picture. As I’ve said many, many times I get to dress for 0.01% of my waking time.

I did like the ‘sir’ bit. That’s when I knew it was definitely some angry TERF with way too much time on their hands.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Even if they are wrong.

I don’t know things

Yeah, that’s a wide statement, but this one made me laugh as well. I did a look at the latest shoot with Patti at Wowgals where I said to her ‘do what you will, don’t ask me my opinion’. I do that with Cinders as well; it’s lovely to see what someone else thinks sexy and/or attractive looks like.

So Patti dug out one of her own outfits, a gloriously short little black dress and looked like someone had taken a t-shirt and just beaten it with a hammer labelled ‘sex’ until it exuded lust on every level, combined with a black leather jacket that looked and obviously was ‘spensive. And then got out a pair of her prized shoes and squeezed my feet, Morton’s Neuromas and all, into them.

She then spent fifteen minutes manically back-combing my long blonde hair, a process that made me squee massively on the inside as my first partner, back in 1987 and at college, used to do just that before we went off to a rock club. There’s something about that kind of hairstyle that ticks all of my boxes; I was seriously into metal as a rebellion when I was a kid and the video for Whitesnake’s ‘Here I go again’ track from the 1987 album had a luscious Tawny Kitaen sprawled over the bonnet of an old Jag, used to tick all my boxes; both the lust ones and the ‘I soo want to be her’ ones. This look was dead on.

I tottered around on the heels while we took pictures and was immensely pleased with the results; I showed some to a female friend of mine and her reaction confused me.

‘Louboutin!’

I had no clue what she was talking about. Showed it to another friend who is a life-long T-girl and again….

‘Louboutin!!!!!’

It’s one of those beautiful dichotomies but I really don’t have a clue when it comes to female fashions and, specifically, brands. Turns out those shoes are a: expensive and b: very much admired by the female community.

To me they were sexy and painful, in equal measures. When I saw that, new, they cost the same as 1.5 Playstation 5s (yeah, my mind works in nerd currency) it was ‘wow’. Not sure I’d pay that much for those shoes but yeah, they were something else.

I did like the red inset on the heels. Dammit, now I’m looking them up online and I can feel my credit card starting to whimper.

Right, back to enjoying the breeze and the fact it’s not over 30C at 10:00am in the morning.

Stay beautiful and stay cool, physically and socially…..