His Majesty has seen the wisdom of granting me a new passport.  It will be my last with “sex” listed as “M”.

An apology to men.  A love letter to women.  And all my heart to my trans sisters and brothers, and all Queer people everywhere, no matter how.

I just received my new passport, in what I shall call “Brexit Blue”, a throwback to the way things were.  And perhaps the colour of our passports may be the most substantive legacy of Brexit…Brits have asserted their desire to stand apart, and now we have the document to prove it.

The photo I have used is a “good” one, taken a few days prior to taking my first guided set of hormones.  Armed with a formal diagnosis of “gender dysphoria”, still classed as a mental illness in most countries, it is the last self-portrait of me as a “man”.  I don’t know a trans person who doesn’t bridle at the classification of dysphoria as a mental illness, but there you have it.  After all, there is “nothing wrong with me.”

Ahem.  Yes there is.  But the way the statement feels, and the reason that we bridle and chafe at the characterisation, is that the diagnosis of mental illness is the word “mental”.  According to my lawyer, bless her, I am ‘one of the most sane, grounded people’ she has ever met [and yes, she knows I am a slave].  There are most definitely times when that assertion seems utterly preposterous (my sanity).  Utterly.  But in this (dysphoria( regard, it is not one of them.

My ‘choice’ to step into the gender I want to embody is one taken with every ounce of sanity that I have ever had or ever will.  And the decision comes back to me daily with reinforcement of why this is the right path.  It is about backing up belief and conviction with action.  It is about spiritual, personal, and political self-expression.  I reject the world order in the form of patriarchy so fundamentally that I am “disfiguring” my body to prove it.  

It isn’t all storm und drang, though.  It is also beauty.  It is born from a desire to love the female, to love it so much as I always have done, that the wistful sorrow that has existed since the arrival of conscious thought, can be made manifest, turned to good, and that this sorrow becomes a part of my joy.  It will be all the more poignant for it.  The times we laugh hardest are when we are teetering on the edge of tears of genuine sorrow, just as we cry hardest when the laughter is there too…it is the contrast which intensifies.  And it may seem strange, but I cannot imagine any more powerful way to be alive, alive to myself, to the world, to everything around me, than to take this step.  This life-affirming step.  Yes, I am prepared to suffer.  I am prepared to mutilate my body, to open up a forever-more pelvic wound, to lose my work, to lose family and friends, to do it all if I have to, in order to come out the other side in congruence with how I wish to be.  And however much this feels natural to me will be just so much of an “extra”.

I recognise that my body is now in “freak” status.  Pugnacious and gravity-defying titties on a skinny male frame that now has growing thickness in butt and thighs, and with exercise, a rather perky posterior.  But I am not a teenager, so no matter the bliss it feels, life’s accumulated experiences are all too evident.  

I so understand the desire to “pass”, and why so many trans-women subject themselves to extensive and painful cosmetic surgery (I am not referring to vaginoplasty—the creation of a neo-vagina, which is motivated by something very different).  We want to look less freak.  Blessings to my sisters who have transitioned at a young enough age for male puberty to not have ruined your chances to integrate into the way that society is and has been.

But this is an external force.  We have to look a certain way because of social influence, not because our biological mistake includes “passing” or complying with a certain aesthetic.  I chafe against this feeling.  I am transitioning now because it was the only time it was possible.  That’s life.  The way my life has been.  In my family context it was not acceptable to be trans.  In my social context, because I didn’t have the sense, the strength, the knowledge, to create a different one, or even the exposure, I simply floated along the river of life.  A mix of events and life experiences, many of which are documented here, created an opening for this beautiful efflorescence to burst through, and so it did, and here I am.

For someone like me, even with the most talented surgeons in the world, passing shall forever remain an impossible target.  That’s why I don’t have it as a goal.  I would rather bend society to seeing freaks like me with kind and sweet eyes than to force myself into conforming to a binary standard of beauty.  I am striking.  You cannot enter a room with me in it and not notice me, either as a man or a woman.  As an ugly duckling in youth, the passage to swan was very clearly felt, in part awkwardness, a not-quite-believing, but life accumulates reinforcement and we eventually believe.  This is even more true now than before.  As a 6’ 4” trans woman, I stand out.  It is likely I will have some form of surgery to my face, but I worry a lot about changing its character, or taking it from its current beauty…the “what if” shall only be to achieve more female balance in my features.

If you could feel the way I feel when I look out of my eyes, taking for granted what the ‘she’ of me actually looks like in her spiritual mind, then you would know me.  I know what I look like—and I am not talking about when you meet me in person, but what I look like to myself when I am not looking in the mirror.  This ‘she’ that I imagine as I look out from these eyes of mine onto the world around me, is exactly how I deeply feel that the world sees me.  And bringing that physical reality into alignment with what I feel is my energetic reality, is the primary goal of this work.  

I grew up a freak.  I was called a freak even when I did my best to present a simulacrum of maleness.  I don’t know if anyone sensed that I was transgender, and that was the source of my freak flag, but it was clear to me, and the contortions that I made to experience “trans” pleasures without giving up my own confidences, were rife.  Small nods here and there: clothes, music choices, likes…cumulatively the signs were obvious, but on their own, I was able to plausibly deny.  Was I a ‘freak’?  Maybe…after all, when someone throws mud at you, some of it always sticks.  When lot’s of people throw mud, more of it sticks.

In my case, being a ‘freak’ and being labelled as one made me want to fight.  Not confrontational fighting, but patient, long, slow-burning, life commitment fighting.  What do I mean by that?  Patience.  More importantly, a kind of defiance that said, ‘whatever you are, whatever you do, I will do better’.  And as I still know many of my tormentors—thanks FB—I know that I have succeeded in most ways.  Some of them are better off than I am.  Probably all of them, because I am broke.  But I don’t feel like it.  I “retired” two decades ago.  Okay, I got fired, but it was not because I did a bad job, but rather because I got in the face of the owner and founder and boss I worked with.  It came with a generous departure gift which I used to start a business [and which my wife has now seized.  Shit happens].

I actually don’t care much about any of it.  My family and friends are pro-actively calling me all the time now, just to see how I am, because I think that anyone who is going through what I am going through, knows that it isn’t easy.  I hope my wife is enjoying herself.  Hiya Sweetie…you can read this sentence and not be cursed.  The rest, however, wallow in the karma of being a boundary-violator…. Yes, all, my readership is expanding in the most interesting ways.  But how you discover things matters as much as the discovery itself.

I appreciate the calls of friends and family more than you can imagine.  As someone who has lived aloof from all emotions, a function of ADD, yes, but even more, that the hyper-sensitivity that ADD people have leads to my core wound, my gender, a kind of turbo-charged identity crisis.  Had to keep that well sealed up.  And because in our messed-up society, sex and sexuality are mistakenly construed with gender, there could be no getting in.  Talk about “hard to get”.

It is possible that I was never emotionally available to anyone.  Ever.  Once I discovered that my mother was not safe, that was it.  I think I could probably hear my father yelling in the womb, taste mommy’s stress through the umbilical cord.  Is that why when ex-Mistress touched me that first time after working me over with her fists, her hands so much that I could only think of how it must have hurt her hands, and I was just fine, just fine and then she stopped, and I was caught in stillness as if in a stuffy room in summer, bathed in light, no air, and then she placed a hand on my belly just below the belly button, and from every corner of me, including parts that were not embodied, rose to the surface and let out a collective whelp, which merged into a steady, wracking sludge of sobs…

After, she said, “I’d like you to look into somatic therapy.”  Yes Mistress.  I did.  Have done.  Ever since.  And am qualifying too.  The mystery of that moment has changed my life.  A gift.  From you to me.  Whether known or not.  One I shall carry forever.  Gracias, de mi Corazón.

And where does this get me?  Stepping into being trans in the best way that I can, in all my messy, emotionally compromised, sexual and a-sexual, kink-fested glory.  I know my purpose.  I no longer feel any hesitation to announce it, to live it, to prove it.

Star Child is back.  I am puzzled, but I don’t care.  It is fun to be with her.  I guess she feels the same.  Is that enough?  Probably.  And what of the legacy of male-female friendships?  Always so complicated after puberty…because of attraction, agendas, etc?  The difficulty is that even as I come closer to being a woman myself, I still carry woman-love with me.  The true gut punch of the bathroom and locker-room debate is that someone like me would want access to such a space in order to ogle or be in breach.  Ugh.  And I am sure it is true, that the fear is legitimate, because men will do just about anything.  Many men.  Not just bad apples.

I am not a man.  Yes, I have the bits.  But chemically I am most definitely not male.  My brain is being permanently re-wired.  And as my doctor has said, “you do realise that this is a commitment to be medicated for the rest of your life?”  He was referring to oestrogen.  Yes, I do.  And anyway, I won’t have the bits for long.  But you know what?  Even as a “male” I was not a male.  And I don’t mean in the sense of what most transgender women describe as dysphoria, the feeling that they were females trapped in male bodies.  No.  What I mean is that my commitment to not be male, or at minimum, ‘not like men’, has been something I have worn consciously at least since I was four years old.  The playground as metaphor for life is a good learning tool, for the good bits and the hard ones too.

And I know why I want a vagina so badly.  Yes, there are the physical reasons.  There is also the rejection of masculinity.  I have rejected my own masculinity so much that I will follow through on the ultimate sacrifice, and move from chemical castration to physical castration, and more importantly, forge a new beginning from it.  And my quest for the right surgeon to do this is going deeper and deeper.  And one day this will form a series of posts…as I search for a surgeon who knows what a clitoris really is and is willing to try to build me one.  Because I want to get off.  I want to have so many orgasms in this body of mine that I can’t walk, can’t speak, and dream of being just a puddle of spent desire.

What does all of this mean? I am getting the most delicious long goodbye from my male self. He is still there, just fading out, fading back in time, fading back to the essential me that he was when I was little, innocent, without guile. But the building blocks of him, his potential as a human, his constancy, morality, creativity, and resilience, are still with me, supporting me, they have just moved inside, become structural…and my physical form, my energetic form, my expression is becoming more balanced. And this desire to not fit in, to be accepting of my own “freak” is to envisage a society where all freaks are welcome, where being Queer is no better or worse than anything else. When Pride is not an act of defiance, but is something we can call have, well, that kind of world is more accessible when I don’t seek to blend in, but to stand out in all my freakish glory, whether anyone likes it or not.

Happy Sunday.