Threads of Gender

If you’re not living on the edge, you might as well be dead, you might as well be in a hospital on life support. We see the blobby beasts meander around us with no meaning, no fright, no purpose, no dreams, no fight, no light in their eyes, no courage, no life.

Holy Cleavage Batman! Hormones work!

They’re not going to do any new pellets for me, because my estrogen levels are pretty high. We might not need them for months, which is fine with me. My Estrodial levels are about twice what the average woman has, but this was on purpose to feminize my mind and body. My Testosterone levels are kind of low, which I didn’t expect because I take exogenous T.

The great part about this Doctor and her office was that they did a full health profile for me. I really, really need to focus on my health in 2013. 2012: my year of epic stress took a mighty toll on my body. Also, I’m not looking out for myself when I bitch and moan about the last year or so. I got worked up earlier, and I don’t know if that is the appropriate response. It’s really hard not to fight and get angry, but the effects of stress hormones can be deleterious to overall health. I’ve been so tired and depressed lately. I’ve felt so defeated, but I think it’s a very vicious cycle: get stressed, get depressed, get stressed…

Relax, relax, relax. Enjoy what Portland has to offer. Make new friends. Write music and perform. Clean my room (lol). Mellow out.

The Trans-Warrior in me wants to fight, but we have to be careful we don’t lose things in the battle.

Here’s to a trans-formative 2013 :)

I’m proud of what I did fighting for my kids. I have that fight with me for the rest of my life. Anyone who thinks any differently can suck it. I’m also proud to be transgender. You leeches and haters can’t steal my pride. Yeah, life is hard, but I’m winning, my way. Fuck!!! You people can really go back to the level of Hell from which you crawled. I’m talented, and I’m going to show all of the pathetic haters how wrong they were. Oh, and my kids will love me. Get it? End of story. You can play this little charade of hiding reality, but it won’t last forever. They’ll see what everyone I love can see: the horrible, awful nature of their “protectors.” Oh, and do you remember how much kids like me? Remember that part? It didn’t go away. All I’ll have to show them is what a real role model looks like, and there won’t even be a contest.

You’ve taken everything from me that you can take. You’ve rigged the courts. You’ve invented lie after lie to shield yourself and your clan from reality. You can’t shut me up. This is about my kids. I win. I won.

I have to get back to work now to pay all of their bills so that they can grow up smart and aware and able to judge for themselves. Oh, I also have to get back to writing my music with all of this beautiful material to work with.

Bye :D

Can I just fast forward through the awful times to the great and glorious future? Can I leave this life’s little lot and jump to a better time? Can I type without being spied upon? Can I move forward without being financially penalized by spiteful divorce? Maybe I’m asking you, the people I used to know. I know you read this. Some of you do at work, some at home.

In some twisted way, I think the logic goes make it so terrible for me so that you don’t have to see me to confront your own sins and natures. I’m a magical mirror on the wall. Who is the most awful of them all?

Can I just Fast Forward?

Long Monday. I’m still adjusting from staying up way too late on Friday into Saturday. Does this mean I’m getting old? Nah, never!

Cool! :D

I think the transgender community is seriously lacking in humor. That is all.

So someone the other night was not happy with me for various reasons. She leaned in my car as I was leaving an establishment and asked “Is your name Abbie or Edward?”

Now this is pretty much the most lazy, uncreative transphobic comment that I can think of. Come on now! At least have some creativity. I rank this one a 2 of 10 on the scale of good burns. I just wanted to leave, so I didn’t really care to respond.

Today, I had a jerkstore moment (Seinfeld), and was thinking of ways to have replied to her, so let’s go.

1. I don’t know, are you a bigot or a homophobe?

2. You are so clever! I like you. You’re trying so hard! I’m rooting for you. Come back with some good material, and you’ll get a gold star!

3. It’s Abbie, but I guess it could be Edward if you’re into that.

4. Are you trying to feel superior to me? How’s that working out for you? Hmm? Cause I’m not really buying into the condescension.

5. Yes, I’m team Edward, but no, my name is Abbie. Oh and I hate Jacob!

6. My middle name is Kathryn. Edward Kathryn is kind of crazy like you, but I like to live in the sane world.

7. [Confused tilted head stare like a dog] Errr?

8. I’m actually from the planet Zebulon, and we’re invading! So, my actual name is Abward, but I go with Abbie.

9. Excuse me miss, do you have any Grey Poupon?

10. Blow a kiss and wink and then stare without blinking.

Anyone else got any?

This has been one hell of a move. I’m beyond stressed out, and I’m just focusing on one day at a time. It’s just such a psychic hurricane to relocate by yourself. Here’s to adventure! I guess…

I kind of hate the blogs I followed, so I unfollowed them all, and I’m just following people that have liked my posts or whom I’ve liked. I hope this makes me look at my Tumblr more often.

But I made the decision to stop fighting and move to Portland. I have to remember to cry. There’s no hiding these emotions.

Transpiration

Now that’s a funny word. It’s defined as The process of giving off vapor containing water and waste products, especially through the stomata on leaves or the pores of the skin. Transpiration. The prefix trans can be used to create all kinds of neologisms that can serve the most artistic intent such as with the word Transamerica. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I like the word transpiration. It kind of sums up how I’m feeling these days.

Well, I’m feeling better. And I’m letting better grow in the sunshine of a new locale. I feel freed from the awful, dank and lonely life of what I left behind. I’ve made the steps I knew I had to take, and I’ve stumbled up to good old Oregon. With my cat, my wits, and my fabulous relatives, I’m just about settled in my new home in the city.


I definitely went through a full transpiration of the soul before I moved here. Waste products were flying left and right. I let it all go down to only the essentials. But I made it through the lean times, and I’m reporting from the other side of the ravine, so to speak. So, we go on, I suppose.

I’m completely clueless as to what life will throw next, but that’s not a problem.Life is coming at me, and I haven’t fallen down yet. I feel very American tonight. Maybe America needs a little transpiration.




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So I moved to Portland! I made it! It was a long week and a half. I’m not fully moved into my new place, but I’m staying in my grandparents’ cabin in the woods. It’s an amazing house, and Portland just feels and smells so much better than LA. I can breathe here. I was stressed the hell out up until yesterday, but things are looking good to get fully settled this weekend. Much cosmic love to all who helped me move!

Abbie

If you can’t do something brave, be stupid and do it anyway.

Goodbye to the city where I molted. The city wherein I found a little spot, to open up my little box of treasures kept since youth. The city where my inner light was manifest. Please city, watch over my little ones. Keep them warm till I return.

Veil
The veil has been lifted; the curse is no more. Swinging swords like a blind pinata abuser, didn’t hit a thing, but the message is there. Leave me alone. Live your life. I’m on the high road. You’re not. I just want to climb this mountain in peace. Pulling chains has made me strong. Now I have to stop hunching and smile.

Cryptic eh? Yeah, I’m mostly talking to myself. Someone’s gotta read this thing.

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The Thing in the Box
   I had this image in my head before I transitioned of switching to another track on a railroad. It was a perfect metaphor at the time for someone desperately in need of a good metaphor. Life was actually sort of better then. I was Cis-male, or some approximation of it, and I had a really good job, which I still do. I was still married, and that’s another story, but it was a relationship. I had one beautiful son, with blond hair, who had the best temperament of any child; I really fell in love with that child. I had another boy on the way, and I hope, hope, hope to fall in love with him, but very sadly, I haven’t yet. I lived in a very nice neighborhood with what I thought were very nice people. The weather of this town is probably some of the best weather in the country. It’s like one big country club.

  However, as this new paragraph forebodes, all was not what it seemed. I was a recovering alcoholic, which I think is a wonderful thing to acknowledge. I don’t see any stigma in it. Let me digress.

   Alcohol and I are not meant to be together. I really do get sick when I drink it now. It’s the weirdest thing, somewhat like an allergy. It’s a bit of a blessing though, because I can drink, and my first time drinking as a 17 year old transgender female in a male role was a revelation. It took away the terror of life. Life at that time was not just wrong; it was cosmically wrong. Life had this Twilight Zone kind of feel to it.

   And this developed into all kinds of complications, so to speak, that Alcohol made go away for a little while. It was really too effective, and it probably warped my brain a little. I’m not really AA, but a component of their literature says from experience, that there is a point of no return in an Alcoholic, where the impulse to drink and the general interaction with it becomes negative. So, it’s pretty logical. I can deal with it. Just imagine that you are doing something repeatedly that really just brings you down, but you have this incredible impulse to keep doing it. I think in some ways, Alcohol is a zero-sum experience. It takes away your problems and then it creates problems equal to what it gave you. It’s like a Monkey’s Paw, sneaky little bastard.

   So, there were chinks in the armor.  life wasn’t over the top horrible. But, there was a hole. There was a problem I couldn’t solve. There was something that all of my resources could not decipher. It’s like my 5 year old brain had locked away my gender with a strong encryption key. It took me 25 years to decipher it! But when I did decipher it, Pandora’s Box’s contents erupted out. Another metaphor. They were handy.

   So you have a lifelong quest to be something that you’re not, but you create this alter ego, essentially, to just survive, but you still haven’t figured out the quest thing, so you create relationships to survive, and you buy into the life. And then you realize that the answer to the question was so shocking, that you would have to give up your entire life as you knew it to fulfill the thing inside the box, so to speak…

   I’m sure that people looked at me as though I was completely out of my head crazy when I said I was going to transition. That was a very, very hard decision to come to terms with. I say come to terms with because I really didn’t decide to become fully transgender; it decided on me. How could I go against this? And that is the terribly difficult thing about the whole transaction that is hardest to communicate. I’m going to reach out to my transgender brothers and sisters in the void and say, “how do you describe that moment and how powerful it is?” It borders on religious, or maybe it is, even if you’re an Atheist, most people can accept that people have these intense religious experiences. But it’s incredibly difficult to communicate.

   I can imagine people were thinking, look at your privileged life. What is wrong with you? Then they’re like ewwww why that??  I interacted with those people who were asking those questions for a little while. But they were giving me the most awful arguments and were so just plain out of touch with reality that I quickly found allies and worked on building those relationships. Maybe I should have been a better salesman, but the situation was so awful that I don’t know if I could have done any better.

   So, now I’m trying to switch tracks like I planned, and I’m moving. Steps in the right direction. Breaking free of all of the vines and chains that would seek to not let me grow was really difficult. But I think I’m getting to that new track, or maybe I’m on it now. I’m looking forward. I’ve been tripped so many times this year, that I’ve spent more time on the ground than upright. Aw-ful. Yeah, call me a whiner. I don’t care at this point. What I’ve learned is that people have far more allegiance to class than to any sense of integrity. Acceptance. People want it.

   And to close this thought, I have integrity. The thing that I found in the box in my heart when I was still male was so beautiful, mind-blowingly beautiful, that I would have been the biggest phony on the planet to pretend it didn’t exist. And, I have to be honest. I get to wear that beauty on the outside now. So, if you can’t see it, that’s your problem, because most people can see it, and so they can understand what I saw. When I found the thing that I found in the box in my heart when I was still male.

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When you call me Mark, it is such an awful thing to do. You’re disrespecting me as a woman. You’re essentially saying that I’m not the person I think I am, and I’m making a fool out of myself. People sometimes call me Mark, but very, very rarely, and they always quickly apologize because they are decent people. When you call me that name, you’re making a judgment about me and my decision to treat my condition. Because it is a condition. And it should be a respected part of me. My older brother has Diabetes Type I. So he is insulin dependent, and has to take shots to stay alive. I too have a condition known as gender dysphoria. Gender Dysphoria is a treatable condition, and when treated effectively it has a very high success rate for basically going into remission. The problem is fixed, and the patient is no longer considered to be ill of any sort. The DSM V which is still in process, will replace Gender Identity Disorder (GID) with Gender Dysphoria. This is akin to the removal of homosexuality as a disorder from the manual in the nineteen seventies. We as a community have come so far. We are people that have struggled our entire lifetimes just to try and fit in when we basically can’t. You don’t know what it was like growing up this way. It’s a bizarre and really quite awful experience. I never could fit in with the male culture, because a part of my brain is wired to be female. I tried. I tried really hard to be a good student and overcome it, and I did pretty well. I did really well as a child until the age of about 13 when I started puberty. At that point there was a division between my brain and my outward appearance which was starting to be dictated by increased Testosterone. This started the most uncomfortable and stressful years of my life. I tried to deal with this awfulness as well as I could. What would you do in that situation? It’s really, really difficult. I had to bury that part of me from birth to thirteen, so I wouldn’t be called a faggot or queer or some other innuendo. I won’t go into too much detail, but I’ll just say that dealing with this condition untreated that long was a very dark time for me.

So when I went through the proper mental health channels and dug into what was making me feel the way I felt, I realized that I was transgender. It’s something that many thousands of people have also acknowledged throughout the country with great success. There are so many successful transgender women and men that are able to lead extremely productive and positive lives. Our treatment works. It makes us whole. It saves us from a life that was unlivable. It’s so unlivable that 41% of transgender people attempt suicide in their lifetimes. Compare this to the suicide rate for people who are not transgender which very close to 1% of people. This is an epidemic condition that needs to be focused on to make sure that these kids don’t commit suicide.

This makes me very emotional to talk about, because I talk to these kids, and they are struggling. They are kicked out of their homes for this condition. They are made to feel inferior because they have this condition. Almost all transgender people have been made to feel inferior for some portion of their lives. One of the amazing things of writing a blog is that I get to meet some of these kids and listen to them and do my best to help bring down the horrible statistics. I care about my community, and I work to make it better. It’s getting better, and it will get better with each passing year.

So I have a condition, just like diabetes that needs treatment, that is a respected condition by The American Psychiatric Association, and yet I and we basically have to face a tidal wave of bigotry and Patriarchal nonsense just to attempt to treat our condition. It’s laughably awful. It makes no sense, and it’s a side effect of Religious mores from thousands of years ago. It’s so stupid, and all of my family and friends that support me know this and acknowledge that there is a serious problem with this country and discrimination.

So when you call me Mark, you deeply offend me, and you offend the people that support me. They know that you use language like this to belittle me and make me feel stupid. You want me to feel like an idiot that is making a stupid decision. You are judging me, and you have no grounds to judge me on. Seriously, what is your argument? That I don’t look female enough? OK Let me ask genetic women what they think about a woman that would judge and exclude women because they don’t look feminine enough. I wonder what they would say about someone like that. I’m a woman, and I have women friends and do woman things. It’s all very…normal. But you still can’t accept me as legitimately female. I actually find that mentality to be disturbing for various reasons. but you can have your opinion if you want it.

I live in a world where people are judged by what they do. I do my best to look at the character of a person and judge that part over appearance. Who the hell cares about appearance to that degree? That’s why I’m leaving LA, because LA allows people to be superficial and fake.

I’m proud of who I am, and who I’ve become. I have deep pride in myself. I’ve struggled, and I’ve survived. And yet, I’ve thrived too. I’m doing well. But, there has been the silly issue of me not seeing my children for 9 months or getting a picture for 9 months. This, to put it mildly, has been a big stress in my life. I’ve had to deal with this, and cry through this, and ask god why this was happening to me. I’ve cried so many times for my children. It’s deep inside me that I have to see them. I’m bonded to them, and I have to fight for them every day. I pay for their child support, child care, and I support their mother with Spousal Support. I pay for their health insurance. Last year, I was unable to claim either of them on my taxes because their mother had already filed and used both deductions herself. There was no split or even an agreement. It was just done. And I had to deal with it.

So I dealt with all of these expenses while learning how to be female at breakneck pace and while keeping my job so as to support my children that I didn’t even see. I do this, and I do it well, and I respect myself as a professional person. My work has been over the top supportive of my transition. They basically cheered me on. It was and is really special, and it’s a true gift to work there. I love my job, and I’m committed to it. I’m committed to my career. And this is what I am and what defines me, not that I am tall or don’t look feminine enough or whatever part of my anatomy that doesn’t compare with the “standard” of femininity.

Seriously. Who cares? I’m so happy where I am now. I’m thriving, and meeting new people, and I’m learning how to be a normal, rather happy individual, something that did not really seem possible before I acknowledged my condition and had the strength to do something about it. And I was scared, really scared about what the hell was going to happen, because I had to do it to have a chance at living. I wasn’t living; I was just trying to survive. Now I get to live.

That’s all. Just please give me a little decency when you talk to me. I’m working really hard at this. I’m fighting. But it’s hard.