When I was young I was into boys (sexually), I enjoyed pleasing a male friend. As I got older I found out that according other people like my parents, church, god, etc. Being into boys was wrong, very wrong in fact, horrifically wrong. So I decided to not be into boys and I steered myself into being attracted to women and somehow I was very intrigued by women so it was easy to convince myself that I was a heterosexual male, in fact after a few years I forgot I had ever been attracted to males.
It wasn't until I transitioned (which seemed to me like the ultimate shame) that I felt like I could re-explore who I was and I realized, remembered that I was attracted to males. But I was so entrenched in being someone else for my family, for my friends, church, god, etc. That I actually thought for a while that being on estrogen changed my sexual orientation. Far from it. Estrogen if anything brought me back to being myself, my true self.
So you can see from my illustration that all I had to do in order to find my true self was to stop being something I was not, right? Easier said than done. I suspect most people get lost in their false self, believe the lie and die apart from who they really were.
So it is easy to see how an individual can believe something that isn't true. I believed for a time that I was a heterosexual male and I convinced everyone around me it was true, but it wasn't and it always felt wrong to me and yet I gathered my fears against me, hated what I was and deceived myself into thinking I was something else. Strong words that convey a simple reality. And for practical purposes I was a heterosexual male.
Transition was for me a mind-Phuck.
I talked at length with a woman I had known for five or six years about my experiences. My key point being that I had to shed a false self that I created in order to fit in. I also shared with her that I felt like in order to be properly healed and re-born as my true self that I needed to move and experience a fresh start with new people who only knew me as my true sex. This woman explained to me how this is a very common experience for non-trans people. They may not suffer the exact same experience but they go through their lives living for other people, not being who they are, creating a false self. Common. Our situation has to do with our sex, other people experience the creation and destruction of a false self regarding other aspects of their being, not the same but pretty much the same. And many have to move and start over with new people to avoid the prejudice or the outside influence.
So...
What have we left here?
Well... I will just say this. Passing is important to experiencing life as one's true sex. It's (in my own experience) critical. However, I have found that if you really want something, it if is crucial to you then you will find a way to make it happen. It took years for me to be able to make it happen and living in the interim sucked big time, my goals were what kept me from taking my own life during those years.
I didn't transition because I wanted a female body or boobs or a vagina. I transitioned because I needed female socialization. I am stating this because I think it may make me different from some other people. To me the most important aspect of transition was the goal of female socialization. I needed to be acknowledged as being female in order to experience life the way I was supposed to experience it, in order to alleviate my dysphoria, my "GID". I did have FFS and BAS and SRS and I take hormones but only in order to facilitate being able to experience life as female. I never gave much thought to whether or not I was attractive. I wasn't motivated by body parts. Does this make me different? I dunno... probably, everybody is different right?
As far as Female Rites of Passage.
Axelle, you know as well as I do that whatever you focus on you get more of. If you focus on how M2Fs are different from other women then you will end up with a lot of differences at the end of the day. Whereas if you focus on similarities you end up being very similar at the end of the day. Personally I think focusing on any one thing will deprive you of a lot of other aspects of life. Focusing on any one thing blinds you to a world of other things (in my experience).
As usual the remedy is meditation, not transcendental meditation but traditional meditation. Transcendental meditation does not allow the mind to become like a still pond (as it should be) rather in my experience transcendental meditation causes the mind to become like a river. When the mind is still like a pond and a tiny drop falls into it, the ripples will spread and that tiny drop will be absorbed fully, acknowledged and experienced. That tiny drop that would otherwise go completely unnoticed.
http://www.mro.org/zmm/teachings/meditation.phpCausing the mind to become still is important. Many unfortunate women who transition live with Cognitive Dissonance for the rest of their lives.
QuoteCognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously. In a state of dissonance, people may feel surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment.[1] The theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to create a consistent belief system, or alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements.[1] An example of this would be the conflict between wanting to smoke and knowing that smoking is unhealthy; ~http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
QuoteA classical illustration of cognitive dissonance is expressed in the fable The Fox and the Grapes by Aesop (ca. 620–564 BCE). In the story, a fox sees some high-hanging grapes and wishes to eat them. When the fox is unable to think of a way to reach them, he decides that the grapes are probably not worth eating, with the justification the grapes probably are not ripe or that they are sour (hence "sour grapes"). This example follows a pattern: one desires something, finds it unattainable, and reduces one's dissonance by criticizing it. Jon Elster calls this pattern "adaptive preference formation".[6]
Simple examples of Cognitive Dissonance by trans women...
"I can't be stealth therefore stealth is a bad thing, it's a lie, dishonest. Being trans is part of who I am, being trans makes me who I am. Growing up as the wrong sex is part of what makes me what I am, my ideas about life and myself make me who I am..."
"Just living as one's true sex after transition is running from one closet to another, I am afraid of that. I am my ideas about myself, if I transition and become someone I am not I will die because my ideas about myself make me who I am and I am the past, I have to marry the past with the present or I will cease to exist."
"I will probably never pass so I am trans. Women who transition who think they aren't trans anymore should be locked up in institutions because they are crazy."
"The present is thus therefore I believe thus."
My point is that once we begin to fool ourselves into believing we are something we are not... It becomes impossible to believe in any reality without dragging our false self into the picture. It is impossible to separate ourselves from our false self failing anything except something akin to "enlightenment". Normally life kicks us in the head or we hit rock bottom or we spent a week diligently meditating and it simply occurred to us or maybe we overcame a tremendous fear, one so scary that we thought we were going to die but instead we came out the other side of a leap of faith as a stronger, more self-aware person. My experience was transitioning and telling everyone that I was transitioning and going full-time during a time when I had to maintain employment in order to survive (adding to my fears) meaning, I am not retired. I still have to function among other people in order to be able to survive.
Have you ever heard the expression, "Oh pish posh, Stealth is so wrong, nothing worse than running from one closet to another, bleh..."
Well unfortunately many trans women do the closet shuffle. Meaning, they go from being their false self, the one that was created to alleviate the Cognitive Dissonance that real 'GID' causes, to being a trans woman. Meaning they continue to use their Cognitive Dissonance to create another false self. For instance, a woman might say, "What about all the Rites of Passage we will never experience?" Hum... Well let's see here. What is really going on? Why focus on what you don't want or what you don't have? What purpose is it serving?
Must we relinquish ourselves to recreating the process over again?
Do we decide, "Gee... I can't be a real woman so I am going to be a trans woman for life." Then go about determining what makes us different from "real" women?
The point of my talking about convincing myself I was a straight male in the beginning of this post was to help demonstrate how in order to be our true self, we have to strip off the false self, not perpetuate the false self.
This is where the road forks.
Some who transition will decide to be trans women. It may seem sensible to them, it may seem logical to them. It may seem healthy to them. If you had told me I was a gay man with GID back when I was in denial I would have gotten angry and I probably would have said some terrible things because you would have provoked my greatest fears. I was spending all my effort trying to hold-it-together, trying to be a man and I knew all the time I had never arrived, I knew I wasn't a man and I was terrified that someone else might notice, notice that I was different, notice that I didn't fit in and cause me to have to begin to confront my fears.
People do the same thing with being trans.
Simple as that. Doesn't really need any more explanation than that.
And of course when they do decide to be trans for life, they have all kinds of sensible reasons for adopting a new false self. They go boldly into their new closet thinking they are noble and righteous, doing the community a favor.
But the reason a person should transition is to be herself or his self. Not to support a "community". Transition is supposed to be about being Authentic.
So...
That story I shared with you (Axelle) about going through the mountains and the scull and the crossbones...
The easiest way to get one's self out from under a heap of fabrication is to meditate, make the mind still, like a pond. Focusing on any one thing will create a giant blind spot in your life whether it is focusing on the negative or focusing on the positive. Being authentic is about stripping away the layers.
Understanding how Cognitive Dissonance works can be useful.
About Female Rites of Passage.
This is the scary part. I realize that not everyone is like me. My needs may not be your needs. But what I have found in my own life is that there is a commonly held reality that remains strong and that "reality", that Universal Consensus is that women are born female. So for me the first and foremost rite of passage in being female is to be born female. What that means to me is that I have to create a situation where other people simply take it for granted that I was born female. I do this by removing myself from people who knew me from before and placing myself amongst people who only know me as female. Until I was able to do this all my interactions were tainted. All of my interactions were poisoned. All of my interactions were "dirty".
But as I said before... "The most important thing for me is to be able to experience female socialization."
I could care less about having a vagina or breasts or anything... For me it's about Female Socialization. And really when you think about it, Female Socialization is intrinsically tied to Female Rites of Passage. If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it does it make a crashing sound when it hits the ground? Female Rites of Passage are only really meaningful when they are "heard", when they are told, when they are shared.
The most important rite of passage for me was sharing with my tribe that I was female. Most members of the tribe never even realized they were sharing in this rite of passage, it was simply taken for granted like the color of the sky or the Pope and his hat, the bear going doo doo in the woods. But it was and is so crucial for me. I need for people to see and know me for who I am. That is why I transitioned. That is why I had SRS. That is why I have spent the last decade struggling to have something that many will only ever dream of.
I was born female.
In order for the sprout of wheat to spring up a kernel of wheat must first fall to the ground and die. Someone else talked about the "undead". The use of Cognitive Dissonance to wed the corpse to the new life, the creating of a monster. Sort of severe terminologies but the point being that if you are going to do something, don't leave it unfinished, don't leave it half done.
I suspect that Female Rites of Passage are about realizing that transition doesn't stop with hormones, clothes, voice and surgeries. Transition can go far beyond those things. In America people are all about buying things, you can buy a football uniform, a football and a helmet, you can buy a mouth guard and shoes with little spikes on the bottoms but no matter how much stuff you buy it won't make you a football player. At some point you have to get in the game. You have to go beyond what can be bought.
I know you already know this but this is an open discussion and I am hopeful that I may inspire someone. Plus I win because I have the longest post in the thread. Yay.
