Quote from: rejennyrated on February 20, 2010, 09:45:32 AM
What a great idea... I wish I had come up with that concept!
Would you care to post an idiots guide to the basic principles in a new thread Julie? It's sounds like it would make a really fascinating thread all of it's own.
This has come up before in previous discussions about stealth. There is a very good set of definitions by Kate Grimaldi on the Beginning Life Forums website concerning "Step Phases" of passing, both to the public and to ourselves. I'll quote it here, as it's only a javascript link on the site and a bit hard to find. The page link is
here, you have to scroll down and find it under the "Section 3" link near the bottom:
QuoteSection Three: Step Phases (SP) Levels defined. Created by Kate Grimaldi.
SP Levels: Created by Kate Grimaldi to describe perceived degrees of integration of the transsexual experience with society. See "Stealth". Slightly edited by LadyHawke to correct minor typo's.
SP 0 : No passing.
SP 1 : Pass in a crowd where no one is paying much mind. The mall or a busy street. Little person-to-person interaction.
SP 2 : Pass with sustained person-to-person interaction; at a bank, with a waiter, with a sales clerk, or a person at a bar (who is not a "->-bleeped-<-") who flirts with you.
SP 3 : You get that person home and you go to "heavy breathing", and still they accept your womanhood.
SP 4 : [A tricky one to define]. Sustained acceptance of womanhood. The other party, after three weeks, three months, or three years, suddenly has it dawn on them that you were once a boy. No "benign clocking", as Debbie dubbed it. No people who say, "Ohhhh. Nowwwwwwwwww I get it. I won't say anything though. She's so nice and she tries verrrrrrrrrry hard and almost succeeds. Her secret is safe with me as I will never tell, even her, that I know. After all, poor thing, I'd break her heart and I do like her so." Or from the Twelfth Night by Shakespeare when the jester, Feste, says something like, "I profile from my enemies and am abused by my friends."
SP 5 : Your past, as you remember it, is that you see a female in your mind's eye, even though you know for sure that you were not trying to be one. For example, I remember myself as female in high school even though I can see from the photographs that I was hardly that.
SP 6 : I am GG. You realize you were a woman trying to be a man -- like Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night -- only it was an act. The real you has been female all along, and you, of course, knew that all along... but you see how it was a GG doing all those things along the way. Not just a recollection (as in SP 5) of being a female doing it, but a layer deeper at SP 6, seeing the femininity colored those actions and not a "male upbringing" and how little you really know of men.
Appendum, written by Cynthia:
The SP levels are really looking at yourself and seeing just how well you can pass. If you walk down the street in the city, do people see a woman? (SP1) If you go shopping and talk to clerks and salespeople, do they see a woman? (SP2) If you flirt with a guy (or girl) and rush to a hotel room for a passionate hour, does he (or she) still experience you as a woman? (SP3) If you make friends and hand out a lot and they don't know your history, will they still witness you as a woman 3 months later? (SP4) When you look back on your childhood and youth, do you see yourself as female in those memories, a girl doing all those things? (SP5) Without thinking, without taking a political stance, do you see yourself as GG? (SP6)
I think, in my own opinion and not defining this for anyone else but myself so I'm using the feminine perspective, that when we reach levels 5 and 6 we have come to the true realization that we have been female our whole lives, despite what others may have told us or thought about us at some earlier stages. It then becomes a matter of seeing ourselves as females with a unique set of life circumstances and we adjust our hindsight views accordingly. It's not a lie, a deception, or a falsehood, it is merely a perspective looking back as female to experiences that do not change the fact of who we have been all along.
I remember my first boyfriend at age 11, I remember my first kiss with a boy, I remember playing dolls and dress up and house with other little girls as a child. These are not made up fabrications, I really did those things. But I remember my childhood now from the point of view that I was female back then, even if it was a female in the wrong sort of body, not a little boy being naughty and hiding things from his parents. I may have also due to life circumstances for example been forced to wear ragged clothes or go barefoot, but that doesn't change the fact of
who it was that experienced those things. For me it
was a little girl, as suppressed as she may have had to be for necessity's sake or for sheer survival in a hostile environment. It is not a lie or deception when I tell you that Chloe experienced those things, because I did.
Maybe we put too much emphasis on "changing", on "transition", on being entirely one thing and then suddenly becoming entirely something else where we have something to hide. Hey, I didn't just wake up one morning as an adult and decide, "well damn, I think I'm female now." I have always been a girl, a young woman, an adult women. I do share experiences with other women because I did those things. Maybe not all of them and maybe not as much, but that repressed little girl came out every single chance she got, and from the perspective of an adult woman I can see it was her who was always REAL; it was the pretend person who was the lie and the deception. I have no reason to remind everyone I meet that anyone other than that real person ever existed. Of course I can if I want to or if I think it will help others in the same or similar situation, but it's not being dishonest if I don't.
