Quote from: Clara Kay on January 20, 2017, 01:57:40 PMI'm learning that there are aspects of my personality that are intrinsic to my core identity. Much of who I used to be, who I pretended to be, was but a thin veneer which barely covered my true self. Transition for me was a shedding of, no, a tearing away the male facade, but in the process I stripped away parts of me that were real in a zealous attempt to seek validation from the people in my life. Now, having achieved what appears to be acceptance from the world at large, I feel free to restore my whole self, not worry about what people may think; not feel that I have to measure up to what others expect of me; to stop pretending to be less masculine or more feminine than I actually am. I see this as the final stage of transitioning which is probably similar to what cisgender women struggle with as well. Gender is a spectrum. I suspect that all people trans and cis need to discover where they fall within that spectrum.
Yes, after transition there's a period of integration to accomplish. We are so used to pretending to be someone else through so much of our lives, there's still this element of performativity of being ourselves, mediated by our perceptions of social acceptance, which I think everyone has to deal with to some extent (social forces are very powerful, after all). Now suddenly everyone is gendering us correctly, one's womanhood becomes "known," and sometimes I think other people see it better than we do ourselves.
So we let the guard down. Do something "transgressive" -- and realize that every woman is transgressive in some way, shape, or form, some more than others, of course, but this is by and large true. Every woman I know has some masculine traits. And, I suspect, every man has some feminine traits, though many men refuse to show those traits to anyone, except, perhaps, a lover.
But I'm not sure I'd call this a "spectrum" -- because when it comes to gender, it's still defined by the two poles, that duality, and everyone has a clear idea of what lies at one end and what lies at the other. A stone-cold dyke is still identifiably a
woman, even if she's more butch than most men on the planet. She's still a she, and everyone knows it (or will know it pretty soon). In other words, gender isn't the role, it isn't a set of traits, it isn't a performance... it's an
assignment. What we do within that assignment will look like a spectrum, but the assignment itself really isn't a spectrum at all.
(And sure, there are those who don't technically belong at either end, but this percentage is very small, and it's not like anyone has a clear idea of what the in-between or outside points "look" like, other than being "other.")
So after time passes and the new assignment sinks in, then what?
Quote from: Inarasarah on January 20, 2017, 12:26:24 AMWhen I had my SRS/GCS back in 2004, I could not have imagined feeling the way I feel today. And even though it has only been 13 years of being "me", I truly feel like I have always been this way, and maybe I have been deep inside and that inside me is all that is left.
This is something I've noticed as well... a subtle adjustment of my memories.
It's funny, after everyone stopped clocking me, the only person left to clock me was myself. For the first couple years after the surgeries, immersing myself into simply living a woman's life, there was always a "second" voice in my head, reminding me of my past, of the transition "narrative" as something that defined me. But I just ignored it. I kept living, kept living, with new friends and new work and a new lover, and all around me I'm getting gendered female, female, female, and of course the cis assumption is that one has always been this way.
Maybe they're right.
So of course when the opportunities came to tell stories from my past, I stuck to the cis assumption -- my stories were stories of when I was a little girl, or becoming a young woman. Well, lo and behold, the memories invoked with those stories started to change. Or, maybe, they were the right memories all along, and only "covered up" like our souls had been covered up by the falsity of the flesh, and it's only been a matter of peeling away the layers to reveal the truth within.
Anyways, the point of all this is that the "second" voice eventually went away. Disappeared into the aether. And I think that marks a point where transsexing is really happening, where we start to discover not just how to "be ourselves" but how to fully participate in the... essence... of womanhood. Where we really grok it, and we become it, and it becomes us.
Step into the life dreamed of... and that life steps into you.
