Originally Posted by
Annabelle Larousse
Hi, Guys and Girls!
I know I’ve been posting a lot lately. These last few months have been a real rush for me. All sorts of thoughts and feelings rising to the top, things I’ve never wanted to confront before, and now everything’s hitting me all at once, and I’m not sure what to do with it. So I’ve just told myself, Well, I’ll post it. Maybe it’ll strike a chord with somebody, maybe it won’t. In any case, when people are tired of me, my threads will just slide down the list with no reply, and that will tell me I’m past my sell-by date.
What got to me this morning was this: I’d washed out a few items last night and hung them on the horse to dry. I happened to glance at them this morning, and I realized that there wasn’t a single male garment on the horse. As a matter of fact, I’ve been washing very little male clothing of late. I had to laugh. “If anybody could see this horse, they’d assume there’s a woman occupying this flat, and a fairly frilly one at that. But no, it’s just me—your friendly, neighbourhood tranny.”
I also realized that I wasn’t ashamed of the fact. It’s odd. We may believe that thinking is one thing and feeling is another, whereas in fact the two are often a blend. You may have certain ideas in your mind, but how they impact on you depends on the emotional content they carry. I’ve always known I was a CDer, and that knowledge always occasioned a lot of guilt and shame. Now I confront that knowledge, and the guilt and shame are nowhere to be found. They’ve scurried off into some dark, little corner to hide.
I was looking at my clothes on the horse, and I was a bit baffled. I was asking myself, “Why? Why did I ever feel any guilt or shame?”
Yes, yes, I know: there’s male and there’s female, and you’re supposed to be one or the other, and if you’re not, then. . . then. . . Well, then, a lot of people will tell you you’re supposed to be ashamed of yourself. But why?
Think about a child who’s born to parents of different races. She’s a blend who perhaps will not look much like either of her parents. Is that something to be ashamed of? (Yes, yes, I know, there are people who will say that it is, but not our sort of people.)
And there were times, and those times are not completely past, when the notion of two people of different social classes marrying was not well received. But love is love, and it transcends class and race and a lot of other things. So how can there be any shame there?
And so if someone is a blend of male and female, or if someone appears to be on one side of the divide when in fact they’re on the other, is there anything there that should occasion any guilt or shame? I understand that most people would reply, “Plenty!” I understand the concept. But the emotional baggage that the concept used to carry is now gone from my awareness.
I understand that cisgender people don’t have the transgender experience. Thus they may not be equipped to come to the transgender awareness that this is a thing that simply is and need not carry any emotional baggage with it, unless we choose to load it with that baggage. As with a racially-mixed child, the notion that there is a flaw in my heritage no longer has any emotional impact on me.
The danger for me at this point, I think, is that I may get lost in the celebrated Pink Fog. In a way, I’m leaving some people behind—the cisgender people who live all around me. My thinking and feeling, having for so long been bogged down in the Mire of Guilt and Shame, have suddenly freed themselves and raced off down the road. But my cisgender fellow-citizens have never had any reason to embark on that journey.
So how do I face them? On what terms do I deal with them? They know nothing of me but the image I’ve always shown them. They’ve never known the old Annabelle who was always fearfully lurking below the surface. So they certainly won’t know how to deal with the New and Improved Annabelle. They won’t have a clue where she suddenly sprang from. And most of them won’t want to know anything about her.
There have been a couple of threads on this forum recently that led two or three members that I know of saying that they don’t get out in public partly because they don’t want to impose on others. That is, we TG’s make other people uncomfortable, and these members feel that they should avoid upsetting them. This I understand, and in the debate as to whether CDers owe it to themselves or to their fellow CDers to get out in public, I’m firmly in the camp that declares that each person has the absolute right to choose for him or herself for whatever reasons they may have.
Yet this is where I’ve left the cisgender community behind. I can no longer comprehend why I should upset them. Yes, yes, intellectually I grasp the concept. Intellectually, I understand why I would upset them. But emotionally I can no longer grasp it. It astonishes me to think that so many people in this town that I’ve lived in for many years now, who know me well, maybe even like and respect me, would now regard me as a freak or a pervert if I acquainted them with the real me.
I don’t feel like a freak or a pervert. For a long time I did. Now I feel free. Now I feel nice. I’m beginning to feel at peace. I like Annabelle. I like her a lot better than that other person I was trying to force myself to be. And emotionally I’m having a hard time remembering that not everybody else would like her.
Best wishes, Me
If you don't like the way I'm livin', you just leave this long haired country girl alone:
