Postcards from Italy…lakeside seats from this trans woman’s life

My Dear Readers…

I am living a small version of domestic bliss.  The shores of the Lakes in Northern Italy are home for now.  The views are incredible.  My garden is wild and overflowing with flowers of every kind.  The fruit trees have given their bounty and there is now a frenzy of late-fruiting plums.  I’m very partial to damsons, as they make exquisite jam.  

I’m eating Stanley plums right now, freshly picked.  Warm from the sun, with their thick, dusky blue-black skin and translucent yellow flesh, succulent and luscious, dripping with juice.  I have much to do in the garden, and this garden will be a part of my future.

There are few places on this earth that are more glorious to behold this time of year…

Domestic Bliss

I have started tracking my behaviour and mood in a period tracking app.  You might ask yourself what a trans-woman is doing when she doesn’t bleed.  The female body is more in tune with the earth’s magnetic energy and its cycles. While some people would deny such sensibility to a trans woman, I know what I feel.  Is what I feel the same as what a natal woman feels?  Who knows?  Does a natal woman know what another natal woman feels.  Who knows?  What I know is what it felt like to be me as a male-bodied, male-brained person.  What I feel now is indescribably different.

I fit me in a way that I have never experienced before.  I fit into the world this way too.  I don’t feel disconnected from myself or from anyone else.

So while I track my moods and behaviours, whether I am horny, whether I have a compulsive urge to clean, I realise that doing such a thing is so far from my version of a male experience.  For the past three days I have been compulsively cleaning my house from top to bottom.  It’s a big house, so it is taking me a while.

Boy me made a lot of beer.  Girl me is getting to drink them.  Boy and girl me makes kombucha for gut health—because a happy gut is the key to everything.  But one of the bottles exploded as I was opening it and boy did the contents decorate my nice white walls.  The floor.  Paintings in the dining room.  And I couldn’t get it out.  Compulsive cleaning now includes going through the house with a paint pail and roller, and getting every nick, scuff, finger mark, patch, hole, whatever.  Spackle and spatula too.  I am quite the handy-girl.

My aunt, god rest her soul, used to say of her daughter (who was AMAB), “it is so convenient having a woman in the house who will also clean the gutters.”  You see, us trans gals can do it all.  Plus we look hot in coveralls and with a utility belt.  In fact, work gear and sweat are sexy.

Physical Fitness

I keep whingeing about how I’ve gained so much weight on progesterone.  There is a certain pudginess which I made various excuses about…like it was too cold over the winter.  But those are gone and I am attacking my well-being with fury.  To remind myself of what it is like to carry an extra 20 pounds around when I am running, I put 20 pounds of weights in a backpack to do squats and to just putter around, so my body knows what it is up against.

Lady me has a harder time exercising—as in, it is just harder.  I run almost every day, and have been doing so since 2018.  My time has slowed by 90 seconds per km.  I measure this because when I run, I try to get my heart rate into a particular zone…not to high, but high enough.  Between 130 and 160 bpm.  For me to run as fast as I did as a male, I have to push my heart rate above these levels, like to 180 bpm.  I don’t like it to be that high, especially for such long stretches.  I couldn’t run, however, the distances I ran just a year and a bit ago.  I am much less strong.

A woman needs to work much, much harder to stay in place physically.  My desired stasis point is still 20 pounds away (but that is because I tightened the target to my long-term goal).  I can get there by fasting, but I need to get there by habit.  By finding the equilibrium of lifestyle.

Food and Cooking

I am going through a creative wave.  Dreaming up recipes for a book and finding that they are coming out almost perfectly each time.

I do still love a good roast duck, or a million other things.  But I am eating almost exclusively vegan.  And I am learning how to cook this way.  I am also trying to work out baking without gluten, sugar, dairy or eggs and to still achieve something divine.

A friend told me I was a Buddhatarian, a term I really like.  You eat what’s given you.  That’s what being a slave is too.  Only I think that Buddhists might be treated better.  I am slave who enjoys being treated well.

My Body

I have been writing quite a bit about my changing my body.  My exercise obsession has a lot to do with it, but so does transition.  Apart from wanting to be lissom, a waif, being super-fit is a part of my version of femininity.  Powerful and strong.  A lioness.  A ballerina-giraffe.  An impossibility. 

My Mind

I feel a sense of calm and settled-ness.  My life is a mess in so many ways, and yet I don’t feel it.  I am in a general state of bliss.  Everything is going to work out fine.

The Operation

I have been given a date.  Suddenly, my general fear of wondering when on earth this was going to happen, just lifted.  I don’t know how I am going to pay for it yet.  I am trying to find insurance, but so far, that is proving difficult.  I may have to move to California to get it.  That is where my surgeon is.  My preferred surgeon.  I am on the list of another one who used to be my first choice, but after speaking with this one a few times, I am more comfortable with the outcomes, process…and above all, I have a date.

One member of my family can’t take it.  My step-mother.  “Why?” she keeps asking.  I mean really?  I am not going through all that I am going through to be stuck in this half-way house.  For me, transition is both process and destination.  Knowing that the process won’t stop even after surgery is wonderful and delicious, not upsetting.  I have this incredible new life to live.

My children are terrified.  They are afraid I will die or be forever incontinent.  I try not to dwell on those outcomes.  Death is exceedingly rare, incontinence, well, I don’t think that this baby would much care for it.  That was always one of my no-go zones.  Other bad things happen, like no sensation.  And of course, the healing process takes forever.  Six months without swimming.  Almost that long without serious exercise.  No sex for 3 months.  Like, who am I kidding.  Hey, a girl can hope.

Sex

I’m not getting any.  But I have a date with an FSSW coming, and that carries me forward.  And you know what, I find it very fulfilling.  It is intimate.  Very.  And in a way, it is perfect.  Both of us really try to please the other person, which is kind of cute.  And both of us at least act as if we are teenagers, coming together all nervous and stuff, innocent.  It is also incredibly reassuring for me as my body changes.  To be with a stunning woman and be naked, accepted, not judged…and unlike with a BDSM partner, it is all about mutual touch.

Letting go of cock-centricity is a joyful process.

Tucking

I never used to be obsessed with this.  But I am now.  I can’t remember a day when I didn’t tuck.  It has become a part of me.  I’ve gotten quite good at it.  I even run this way.  My little shorts look much cuter without that pesky you-know-what.

Divorce

This is not over.  I don’t know where we are.  It just sucks and is wasteful and destructive.  My kids are fed up.  I am fed up.  I can be optimistic that it will end soon, but that might be just a dream.  We shall see.

Work

My wife wants our business.  She has already fired me.  She can do that because slave me gave her all control.  The courts, however, won’t just let her take it.  But in the meantime, she has all the money and I have none.  And I am in this weird Kafka-esque purgatory, where if I find work, make money, they use it against me…because even though she now has 80% of our assets, all of our business interests and the cash flow that comes with it, she still has the gall to ask me to pay for her upkeep.  One judge has ruled in my favour.  As she said, “your wife has more assets, more savings, controls your business, and has equally good or better employment prospects.”  Unfortunately, this is a multi-jurisdiction battle, so we will see what other judges say when the time comes.

I was put forward for a board position by the founder of a charity.  It is a topic very dear to my heart.  It is an international woman’s charity.  Two of the sitting board members have come out in direct opposition to my candidacy, so it will go to a vote, but given their opposition, it is almost certain that my nomination will fail.  Never let it be said that a trans person has equal chances.  The plus side is that they have been totally open with me about it.  And in that sense, I would much rather know.  After all, I can’t change being trans.

That’s it my friends.  Blessings to you.