Went Contra dancing last night.

[Asche]

I went to our local gender-free contra dance last night.  Things went better than last time.  I ended up dancing every other dance, and had partners who were willing to let me dance "follow" (the woman's role), and most of them were quite good dancers.  (It helped that this month there weren't a lot of rank beginners, so most knew their left hand from their right.)  A few even twirled me, which was nice.

As you progress through a Contra dance, at certain points you (and your partner) simply stand at the top or bottom of the line of couples for 32 bars of music, and at thost times I was having fun just feeling like a girl swirling and sashaying to the music.  I still felt a little like a little kid playing "let's pretend," the way a kid might pretend to be Batman, but I didn't care.

It was nice to be able to trust that people weren't going to give me weird looks for calling myself a woman and asking to be danced with as a woman.  I still don't know if they saw a woman or a "man in a dress," but since the event is aimed at the LGBT population, at least I didn't have to worry about men being afraid that people would think they were gay if they danced with me.

In a week, I'll be going off to a music and dance camp, where I'm planning to spend the week living as a woman, so it's nice to feel that maybe it will work.  I'm hoping it will be relaxing and restorative and supportive, because I'm anticipating a tough autumn.  The double life is really getting to me, and I'm worried it's going to be even harder once my bosses and HR know about Allison but I still have to go to work as <deadname>.

[Metroland]

Hi Asche,

It is great to know about Contra dancing.  I've never heard of it before and I always wondered if such a thing exists.  I really like dancing but after a long struggle with having to be the lead, I just rebelled against it and never did any couple dancing.  I switched to tap dancing as it is solo dancing and it was exciting.

What kind of music would it be at the camp? Classical... etc.?

Glad you enjoyed the sashaying .

Ado

[Asche]

It is great to know about Contra dancing.  I've never heard of it before and I always wondered if such a thing exists.

There's a Wikipedia article on the subject which tells you more than you wanted to know about it.

Like square dance, it's a pretty gendered activity, with distinct men's and women's roles, and while all of the groups I've danced at were pretty liberal socially, a lot of the guys are still pretty hung up on their masculinity, and I'd get uncomfortable vibes from some of them when I started dancing in skirts, and even more so when I danced the woman's role.  This is why I've been only dancing at gender-free events recently.  Once I feel more secure in being a woman, I'll try going back to the others.

What kind of music would it be at the camp? Classical... etc.?

The emphasis is on dance tunes, mostly reels and jigs, typically English, Scottish, New England, or Quebecois, but there's a lot of other "folk" styles, such as Scandinavian fiddle tunes, old-time and bluegrass, French and Belgian, even some balkan and Russian folk music.  Very little classical, except some classical tunes used for English country dances.  One year, someone organized a recorder class and we did some multi-part tunes.

This session is mostly stuff organized by the attenders, so anything can happen if enough people want to do it.  One year we had a beginning fiddle class, and I learned to play "hot cross buns" on the violin.  (I also discovered I like viola better.  If I actually had spare time, I'd learn to play one.)