My therapist and I were talking a few weeks ago about how hard it is to give non-TS people an idea of what a transsexual feels, to get them to understand what motivates us. We tried a few analogies, and all of them seemed to fall short. At the end of the session, she gave me an assignment: come up with an analogy that gets the idea across.

I worked on it for a couple of days, and this is what I came up with... www.anniesocialgraphics.com/life.html. She seems to think it's pretty good, but I'm not so sure; it seems a bit overblown in places and not all of it is really applicable to everyone.

What do you think? Any better ideas?

Looks good to me, Annie. I've always thought of it like being trapped in a costume you can't take off, and people interacting with the costume. After a while, you do get used to it and almost don't realize what's bugging you about it.

Dennis

That kind of sounds like this book Dennis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_Mask

Melissa

hey Annie, that is very concise, and well-put. Kudos.

Bravo!  Wish I'd said that!

I'd add something I gleaned from reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence many years ago:

QuoteI might have thought this was just a peculiar attitude of theirs about motorcycles but discovered later that it extended to other things -- Waiting for them to get going one morning in their kitchen I noticed the sink faucet was dripping and remembered that it was dripping the last time I was there before and that in fact it had been dripping as long as I could remember. I commented on it and John said he had tried to fix it with a new faucet washer but it hadn't worked. That was all he said. The presumption left was that that was the end of the matter. If you try to fix a faucet and your fixing doesn't work then it's just your lot to live with a dripping faucet.

This made me wonder to myself if it got on their nerves, this drip-drip-drip, week in, week out, year in, year out, but I could not notice any irritation or concern about it on their part, and so concluded they just aren't bothered by things like dripping faucets. Some people aren't.

What it was that changed this conclusion, I don't remember -- some intuition, some insight one day, perhaps it was a subtle change in Sylvia's mood whenever the dripping was particularly loud and she was trying to talk. She has a very soft voice. And one day when she was trying to talk above the dripping and the kids came in and interrupted her she lost her temper at them. It seemed that her anger at the kids would not have been nearly as great if the faucet hadn't also been dripping when she was trying to talk. It was the combined dripping and loud kids that blew her up. What struck me hard then was that she was not blaming the faucet, and that she was deliberately not blaming the faucet. She wasn't ignoring that faucet at all! She was suppressing anger at that faucet and that goddamned dripping faucet was just about killing her! But she could not admit the importance of this for some reason.

Why suppress anger at a dripping faucet? I wondered.

Any bells going off?  When you were in denial, did you suppress anger at your true nature?  Did you project your anger onto other things and other people?

Sorry for the big, long quote.  But I wanted to make sure you had all the context.

I've found this book a constant inspiration.  The whole thing is available online, for free!:

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/PirsigZen/

Karen

Karen...

What a great excerpt! And what a brilliant way of getting across a concept that could be difficult to explain any other way.

Thanks for the link by the way; it's been years since I've read it, and I'm long overdue.

Annie