What does 2024 have in store for me?  Why is becoming a dominatrix the key to everything?

Can anyone escape the grip of the male gaze?

When I set my intentions in 2022 for this 2023, I got most of it right.  I missed out on the ‘lot’s of sex’ part, but considering that I came from a marriage which had 15 straight years of no sexual contact of any kind, and that I am only ever a very reluctant masturbator, pretty much anything is a monster improvement.

As I contemplate all of the crazy shit that happened to me in 2023, how much I have grown, how much my life has changed, I can only think that it was a momentous, watershed year.  But I suspect that whatever happened over the past year, it will be dwarfed by what lies ahead.

These are my expectations for 2024

I will be divorced.  This is of monumental importance.  For as long as that business remains open, there is open business.  Specifically, I have no idea what assets I will be left with.  At this rate, it could be nothing.  I may be losing in the financial stakes, and that may make my future life more difficult, but on balance, I don’t think I really care.  Here’s why.

I have sucked at the art of cleaning house.  Literally and figuratively.  Two years ago, my then domme pointed this out to me, and told me to focus on tying up loose ends.  At the time it related to property investments all over the place, literally the world.  Ironically, although I managed to dispose of one property, I promptly bought two more, bringing a whole new set of problems.

Meanwhile, my wife “stole” one and sold it without disclosing, pocketed the money, and appears to have gotten away with it.  For the others, she has either seized them or succeeded in putting them out of my reach.  It would be a perverse irony if tying up loose ends as my domme envisaged came to pass simply because I lost everything.

One of the consequences of losing my business to my wife has been cash flow.  I no longer have any.  Another consequence is that my real estate development business is frozen because part of the terms of the divorce process is that I not take steps to dispose of assets.  That’s okay in the short term, because anything turned into cash seems to end up in her pocket anyway—or at least not in mine.

I face being made homeless.  This is an awful prospect.  For me, for my children.  It also has a silver lining.  The last time I moved happened so fast during late COVID that we had no time to throw anything out.  Everything went with us.  The sclerosis of stuff in the basement and in storage is enough to crush me.  I have been slowly picking my way through it all and throwing it out.  This process will accelerate over the coming month as I anticipate getting kicked out.  That’s a big silver lining.

What else, I’ve been chucking my men’s clothes in waves.  Letting go of it has been intensely cathartic each time.  Every few months I end up with piles of things I put back because I think I might still wear it.  This has worked out well for relatives who have been able to enjoy the beautiful men’s clothes that I no longer need.  But the pace is accelerating, and this brings a strange relief of its own.

Plus, my ass is a lot bigger now than it was when I started this process, so some women’s clothes no longer fit…and I also bought some mistakes, so those are going too.

Being Human

I can’t help but take pleasure in something else.  I know that it is important that our children have a beautiful relationship with their mother and with their father.  I try, but at times struggle to not express how I really feel about my soon-to-be-ex-wife.  It is hard not to.  But I also discover that she is committing a massive act of self-harm in her relationship with our children.

And while theoretical me is sorry for her, actual me feels okay that she has already lost.  She might have gained material wealth, and indeed her outsized share of the spoils of our life together seems to mean that she has won.  But for every penny that she gets beyond the typical 50%, for every lie she tells to get it, my children see it.  And they have begun to see her for it.

I guess it is far better for them to open their own eyes than for me to do it.  And I am glad that it is her own action which helps them to see.  I am sorry for them that she is not the honest person that I had always thought I was married to, but I am happy that I am getting divorced from a bully and a thief, and I am glad that they can see it for themselves without having to hear it from me.

In a nutshell, I will be divorced, and almost completely rid of a person who I have come to despise.  Hooray for 2024.

I can’t remember if I ever shared on this blog my recurring nightmares which began in the early years of our relationship: that she straddle me and with her powerful thighs pin my arms to my sides, and then smother me until I died with a pillow.  I shared this with her once, and it became a source of amusement for her.  That should have been a warning sign!  It could have also become the foundation of some frisky kink.  Oh well.

This was founded in reality and she did have really strong thighs.  When we first started dating and still had sex and I held out hope that kinky play might be a part of our dynamic, she would on occasion scissor me and squeeze the life out of my chest with those legs and laugh and tease me while she did it.  Somehow sharing with her that I was submissive made her lose interest in it.  Such a shame, as she would have made an incredible Domme, but I think she was so torn by her own sexuality, that suppressing these feelings in her had to include me.

I am reminded of the truism that in divorce it is almost always the woman who is elated and the man who struggles to find joy.  I know from what she looks like and from what my children relay that she is rapidly becoming consumed by her own rage.  In the meantime, I get to spank men!  But get this, my wife is filled with rage at me, and humiliation, because she is afraid of how masculine she is.  My appearance as female has threatened her sense of self to her core.  I feel sorry that she chose a trans woman as her anchor of masculinity.  That was a dangerous proposition from the start.

Another likely outcome

I have boundless faith in my ability to bounce back, to create a new narrative, and to find the energy and path to succeed.  I always have.  This stems from not fearing hard work and was born from the legacy of divorce in my own household.  My mother forged my birth certificate so I could get a job when I was still under the minimum age for non-farm work.  I worked all the way through school, all through university, sometimes with several jobs, and worked almost 24/7 to pay may way through college, holding several jobs.

I’ve also lived in my car on occasion in life.  Not something I am proud of, but something that I did because I didn’t have a choice, and didn’t lament it, just figured out how to work with it until I got back on my feet.

So come for me my wife with everything you’ve got.  I’ve already won.

Gender transition and a Sex Change

We don’t call ourselves transsexuals anymore, because that term got contaminated by the connection to mental illness.  I am still blown away, however, by the statistic that only 18% of trans women have sexual reassignment surgery (ie. that you change your genitals to match your gender).  Why?  For most it is economic and a question of access.  For others, there is fear.  And for some others, it doesn’t feel necessary.  Given the very small numbers of transgender people who actually identify as non-binary (1%), it cannot be driven by the % of people who think they are neither sex or both.

But I love this, and cannot wait to change my sex.  I cannot wait to get into the tangled bureaucracy of changing all of my gender markers, all of my legal documents, and erasing my existence as a male from the public eye.  While I do this, I do not erase it from my private life.  I have begun creating a “scrapbook” of sorts, a collection of memories of male me.  I have hung a few pictures of me in my life in my house, something I never did before.

I used to hate to look in the mirror.  To see myself.  Even when I could objectively see that there was a gorgeous man there, I almost didn’t exist even in my own house, and certainly not in my reflection.  Today, my relationship to those pictures is one of merciful love.  I still remember what he felt like, what he felt like to live as something other than what he yearned to be.

The domme who cracked me open criticized me for always wanting something more.  Yes, Miss, yes, but now I am living what that more is.  To have an aching chasm inside of you because you don’t accept yourself…there is no other way to describe it than as a bottomless pit.

Yet out of this emptiness has emerged the beautiful that I am finding inside of me, and who is increasingly the person I am on the outside.  I look at the pictures of me as a man with my children, or on my own, or as a little boy, and I can feel him and love him and cherish him in ways that he could never do for himself.  And yes, in a way, we are two people.  He is almost dead now, and this allows me to love him.  It took me to make this path mine for this to happen.

Even if I began taking hormones in 2022, the first six months seem so innocent in retrospect.  My body changed so much more in 2023.  I grew breasts, my entire body was tattooed by an artist who adorned my flesh with an allegory of my transition.  My brain changed radically.  I discovered what a hole my life had without ballet.  I had my first whole body orgasms.  I made so many new friends.  I discovered how to self-regulate with providers, finding that friendship and love and SW are not incompatible.  I have begun to find my own path into SW.

I have chosen a new name, or rather, my children have helped me choose my new name.  This has been such a blessed gift to me.  I named them; they named me; and my wife continues to purposefully mis-gender me to them, even when they tell her not to.  I love it.  All of it.

Over pre-Christmas dinner with the Reflexologist, a lovely and divine and curious and fun human who I had not seen for several weeks because of both of our crazy fall schedules, she noted what I have been feeling. Somehow the pace of change in me has accelerated, and that I come across more female.  She ascribed it to attitude.  That the energy that emanates from me has no ambiguity or self-doubt in it any longer…that I am not gently exploring where I land, that I have become a woman.  I feel this and believe it to be true.  

My rational mind decided when I came out, “if you are going to be a woman, then you should have no fear to be one.”  That dealt with “silly” and “small” things which should not be small at all, but such is social shame for this path, that just going out dressed in women’s clothes, or buying them, is something which is scary.  But already then, right at the very beginning, there were the indulgent smiles of the women I encountered shopping who might be enlisted to help me figure out what colours looked good or bad, what shapes, whether something was flattering or not.  What that meant was a kind of positive reinforcement and what so few of my trans sisters realise—that if you are inhabiting your trans-ness without shame, that people will support you and not challenge you.  

Shit, I think most people realise just how monumentally challenging what we do really is.  And the irony is that you don’t win a prize for it.  You just get to survive.  But I’ll take it.  Because this is its own prize, and greater than any other.  To be trans is a gift.  It doesn’t always feel like it, and it never did before coming out, but now that I have, I own it, and owning it is what it takes to receive it, to receive what the world really had for me from the get go.

When the 12 young women who were filled with friendship and chatter asked me to take their photo, capturing forever their joy and a moment in their lives where they celebrated it, took a moment to say to me, “we are all your sisters,” and to have all turned to me and smiled, not knowing me, knowing anything about me, even knowing that I was trans and not just wearing a costume, but seeing me, seeing me in that space, owning my space, owning me, I felt this joy ripple through me that comes from the depths of the universe.  To be seen like that.  Oh!

When two siblings fly half the way around the world to be with me to stand in support and show solidarity, knowing that I face eviction, knowing that my kids are gone over the break with their mother, and letting me cook for them, and just falling into the rhythm of my life, visiting me for the first time since we lived together as teenagers, holy shit, that’s finding out that the universe really does have your back.  And they kept thanking me for my hospitality and I kept thanking them and telling them how touched I was that they came, that they would do that…

And I think of the beautiful lesson I learned from the young woman who asked me to tie her up, and spent two days in my arms, in an erotic embrace of rope bondage, sensuality, and submission.  This could have never happened to me were I still a man.  She felt safe with me because I am not a man anymore.  I don’t say that I put out a different energy, even if it might be true, because I don’t feel that I was ever a predator, that I ever had ill intention in me, that I would ever done anything other than care for her while she was in my care.  But what is different is that she allowed it, nay, she sought it out.

I learned this from the women who had befriended me at a music festival over several days at a music festival.  Complete strangers with whom I had fun, and who felt comfortable enough in the company of a complete stranger, a trans woman, to get so stunningly drunk that I had to carry both of them (separately), to hold their hair while they vomited, and made sure they were safe.  And neither stayed embarrassed after, seeing that I don’t tease, but just tend, and that I was grateful for their trust.

I get to live these experiences with total beauty.

And yes, I tell myself that I had access to my emotions as a man.  That I was a crier.  That I cried at sad movies, or that I could make myself cry by simply thinking sad or scary things that might befall my kids or happen to an animal I loved or a wife that I loved.  And I could say that oestrogen is not all that different.  But I know that’s not true.  I cry all the time now.  Not in a hopeless wailing way, but in a way that has all my emotions much closer to the surface, elated, not-elated, sad, joyful, tearful.  And this too is an enormous blessing.  It is so unbelievably freeing.

In 2024 I will have a vagina.  I hope I am amongst the 80% that does not have serious complications.  I hope don’t need revision surgeries.  But it is an undeniably serious operation.  The approach I am taking is two operations, which would take somewhere between 10-12 hours, but because there will be two surgeons working in tandem, the time is likely to be 4-5 hours.  This is good, as each hour under anaesthesia is another week of healing they say.

I can contemplate being fully healed and able to swim by the time summer rolls around.  To lie on the beach in a bikini for the first time in my life with no extra bits, everything where it should be, I know that I will feel as if have arrived.

The Role of the Male Gaze for this Trans-Lesbian

I guess that there is scope for a word like ‘transbian’ meaning a trans woman who has a sexual preference for women.  Lesbianism is a kind of label which I hope someday feels right for me, but ATM feels just a bit distant.  My feelings will change post-op, post-healing, and once I am in such a relationship.  I believe they will.

Even though I don’t see men, am not attracted to men, for some reason I need them to be attracted to me.  To me as a woman.  Why do I need this validation?  I enjoyed the feeling of a man’s hands on my body on the dancefloor one night.  I was pleased that his girlfriend pulled them away and told him off.  I am glad another man didn’t touch my breasts because his girlfriend saw what he was about to do and stopped him.  I am glad that he wanted to.

When I went out for the evening to a BDSM club and spent it with The Companion dominating men, it became very clear to me just how important it was to have men on their knees for me.  I have no intention of letting them touch me, but knowing they want me is very powerful.

It’s very different than female desire.  Maybe because I have only ever been with women.  Maybe it is because I have only ever really experienced female desire, at least the wanted kind (ie. I exclude the small number of predatory men who preyed on me).  But what do I really think it is?  It validates me as a woman.  I have a lot of problems with that statement.  A lot.

Political me screams.  Sexual me also screams, because why would you want a man to desire you knowing that you have not intention to reciprocate.  I will have to ask my lesbian friends whether they ever feel this.  For trans me, it tells me that I “pass” enough…even if I don’t look like a woman in many ways, that what they see is still a woman.  And that matters.  It seems kind of messed up, but I accept it for the time being.

And l look forward to discovering how to receive that male energy, to work with it, and to heal myself with it, and to have a positive impact on the men’s lives who fall under my spell.  And I don’t mean the men who fetishize trans women.

So, when I contemplate what lies ahead in 2024, I see that I will become the woman that I was meant to be.  I know too that my transition will take the rest of my life, but the steps which fall into place in the next months, set the context for everything which follows.

And where does this all point?  All of it?  Community.  I could never be in community with anyone because I wasn’t present with myself.  The person any of us are has a great deal to do with how others respond to us or perceive us.  This is my life now, and the greatest reason why it is so filled with joy despite all the bad things which are happening to me from a financial and professional standpoint.

To a fabulous 2024!