The Woman Within

A question was raised the other day by a transgender woman whose wife asked her why she wanted to be a woman? Guys, she said, have it so much easier in society it seems than women. She wondered if the choices we were making to be the women we felt we were inside made life easier for us given the challenges we had to face... My answer... Guys perhaps do have it easier in regards to presentation. They certainly don't seem to have to worry about the makeup and the hair, the clothing and the accessories quite so much as the women. They seem to receive less societal judgment and bias which makes things a bit easier. With all of this in mind, I used to question my own identity and my desires to be the woman I am inside. Understanding the additional tedium involved with being a woman and understanding that I had created a successful life as a male did not make the logic more understandable. The choices in life to be who I am inside do not make life easier except internally. To NOT be th...

A series of recent events has left me feeling alone inside - as if my years in childhood were spent with another set of parents than I see today. Life was simpler when I was young... simpler because I could not see beyond the simple eyes of a child. Simpler because I felt my parents truly loved and understood me. As an adult now, the veil of naivety has become tattered with holes and the windows into their souls and there intentions I could now see. How earth shatteringly sad it was over the past few years to have become enlightened to this dark side and to see through the thin veil which my mind's own eye created in defense for them. Where do I start in all of this? It was a life of lies and deceit - by my own parents - to protect themselves and to shine in a trail of deceits and fabrications. As a child, I always wondered why my sister held a different last name than I. When I asked my sister, she said simply that she liked that name and when I asked my mother she told me sim...

When things get seriously wrong and my obnoxious humor can no longer provide a band-aid of comedic relief to mask what ails me, I tend to withdraw and pull back into my hole where I am safe to deal alone with the daemons which plague my sentient and sub-conscious mind. For what I face is what I seriously hoped I would not, but knew deep within that I would have to come to terms with at some point. The realm of playtime has pretty much ended as I had unwittingly foreseen. Dressing up to go out has not lost it's luster but its meaning has changed. I'm not dressing up any longer to admire how I look in the mirror and enjoy some time as my feminine self. I'm finding now, it to be the necessary step in allowing me to be who I am inside and to relate to the world as I know who I am. The peace inside of being myself clashes with an ever increasing ferocity with the polarity of who I am not when I have to go back to play the male role. The relief of stress I felt when present...

We just finished off a week with my wife's nephew, who stayed with us and enjoyed some of the offerings that we could share with him in our beautiful state. Although I had to work during the weekdays for the fact that with this corporate takeover I was relieved of all of my vacation time, Joanne was able to spend time with him during the day. Evenings and weekends we packed full of swimming, hiking, biking, kayaking and all sorts of adventures. I found that although I tried to take time away from my gender dysphoria in this way, it still haunted my inner being and I still would find myself breaking down at quiet times during the workday at home. It's the stress... the accumulation from so many sources... Mom is out of the hospital and doing somewhat better after taking a spill down the stairs... but her memory is still, if even more so, failing her after this event. It bothers me greatly to see an independent woman become so dependent upon my dad now - and my dad will not ...

It's late evening and I'm home alone. Joanne is staying at her mother's house and I'm half dressed in the quiescent solitude enfemme and staring at the reflection in the mirror of the boygirl looking back at me. Half of my beard has disappeared at this point thanks to a combination of laser and electrolysis treatments. My longer fingernails and shaved arms look feminine now and my hair is growing out to longer lengths. I am thinking how I am looking forward to getting out on Saturday enfemme again but also at the lie I am living each and every day. I do it to hold together the life I have allowed to be created around me. It's the life I live based upon the expectations that others have come to expect of me. I worked to please my parents and my friends and my co-workers and my managers and my in-laws and now my wife. I've always wanted to be what everyone hoped and now has come to expect me to be. I've spent my life trying to please others and in so ...

I haven't blogged in a while. It's mostly been just the normal happenstances of life lately post Be-ALL although yesterday was a wonderful day in a number of ways. I had another session with my therapist in the afternoon. My earlier ones with her had been enHomme as I would see her and then head over to my electrologist for some clean-up. This time however, I did see her enfemme for the first time. Nothing extraordinary, just some jeans, a casual blouse and my very comfortable sketchers for shoes. She seemed quite pleasantly surprised and indisputably in something of a bit of sensory overload taking this all in. I owe this to the variance in presentation between my gorilla presentation prior to electro in male mode and my "cleaned up" self. The session was good and she seemed to note continually over the course of our discussion how naturally feminine my behavioral mannerisms were. To this I simply noted that I was not cognizant of my actively attempting any such beha...

This past weekend 5/15-16 was a wonderful experience as Joanne and I were able to meet up with so many of our friends at once! Since Marsha and Sue were coming up from New Jersey and Connecticut respectively, and a bunch of our other friends were coming from Massachusetts, we thought to all stay at a hotel in a location central to everyone. We arrived at the hotel about 3pm and quickly readied ourselves. Joanne set up the dining room table in our two bedroom suite with an array of place settings for doing a Mary Kay makeover which she and I were hosting. I spent the better part of two hours helping her set the table, getting the food I had prepared the day before ready and getting my makeup on. Stacie showed up first - around 5pm to get dressed and ready and then everyone else filtered in after that. We had Sheila, Lida, Sarah, Marsha, Sue, Kelly, Helen (The Mary Kay Director coaching Joanne), Joanne and myself crammed into what was rapidly becoming a very *small* suite! Joanne pro...