I originally wrote this for my blog, Chick Like Me, that I started keeping up back in January. It's queued up for tomorrow, and I'm a little anxious about posting it but like it says in the entry, I'm striving for honesty with the blog as a whole. But I thought I would post it on here as well because I think getting some thoughts from the folks here might be interesting.
This is a scary thing for me to write because it's a lot to put out there, especially because the reality is I'm still very very uncertain of how I feel. But I do think that the point of this blog is to be honest, and since this has been on my mind a lot the last few days, and it's not the first time in the past year or so that it has been on my mind. Basically ever since I turned 30 I occasionally have had this creep up on me, I stress about it a little and then it goes away and I go back to watching Doctor Who or reading the Dark Tower. But I never have really talked to anyone about it.
This may come as a surprise to some, or maybe others might have seen it as the inevitable conclusion that they think I've been lying to myself about since I started openly wearing skirts three years ago, but in the past year I have for the first time in my life put actual consideration into the idea of transitioning to living full-time as a female. I can't tell you how nervous I am to even write that, because I know enough about the process to know that it is a tough, scary path that can have some truly devastating consequences, and is not one to be taken lightly or if one isn't sure.
And that's the thing, I'm not sure. What I know for sure is that especially in the past year I have gotten a lot more aggressively "girly." I wear dresses more than I ever did, I have a daily makeup regimen now, I've dyed my hair and am growing it out to suit a more androgynous look, and I even got my ears pierced. Now, I'm not saying that makeup and earrings are what makes a woman. What I'm saying is I have a few times in the last year questioned if I do the things I do because I'm a man who for some reason is drawn towards these more feminine things, or because maybe just maybe I'm a woman who is slowly fighting a war of contrition against the biological masculinity of her body.
Often when talking about male to female transsexuals, the term "woman trapped in a man's body" comes up. Or I will hear TS women say they always knew they were women. This point led me to believe I definitely was not TS because I can't say for certain that I ever felt like, yes I am a woman. But now I'm wondering, how would I know? I was born male, raised male, treated male, etc. throughout my life. The only perspective I have ever known is that of a male in America. My only experience of women is via external sources. Media, education, and of course women that I know and have interacted with. Would I really know if I was a woman or would I only know if I was myself? That's some William Blake s**t right there.
I often say that I like playing this sort of in between worlds role that I have of being able to be a boy but also being girly when I feel like it. But as I started writing this I'm really thinking about it and I'm hard pressed to come up with an example of something that I particularly love about being a man, where I can say "Well I'm glad I'm a man because it means...." To be blunt the only thing that I can really come up with is that I do enjoy having sex with women as a man. Other than that the only real benefit to being a man is that I do receive societal privilege as a man, which is an external thing and not my mental state.
But I can't say I particularly hate being male either. I hear of some TS folks who look at their body and feel miserable and I can't say that I feel that way. Having breasts would be amazing, but not having breasts isn't a source of true suffering for me. I don't feel driven to have a vagina instead of a penis. I do have body issues, I definitely feel like my shape and my figure get in the way of presenting how I wish I looked but is that gender specific? There are women who have more masculine bodies than I do and men whose bodies are much more feminine (Andrej Pejic, hello!) And the truth is that if I transitioned, the hormones would move my fat deposits around a bit and make me curvier but my basic bone structure would be the same. I'll still be 6'1", and with size 11 feet with broad shoulders. The only thing Hormone Replacement Therapy would really do is prevent the further masculinization of my body as I grow older, which is something that concerns me at times.
So where does that leave me? I guess all I can do for now is to keep going on the way I have been, continue to push the limits of androgyny, and see if maybe my happiness doesn't actually require being on either end of the gender binary but finding my own home somewhere in the middle. Am I man, a woman, or just Rye? Ultimately I don't believe right now that I will ever transition, but I am much more willing to consider the option than I ever have been before.
