Hey, Arcade Fire is really good.

Eek! It's almost midnight and I just realized I hadn't written a post for today.

I've been looking all over my place for more CDs for my Christmas project and not finding them. ADD sucks.

I've always been obsessed with women's bodies. I'd stare at them openly while my guts tied themselves in knots with desire. I thought it was sexual desire. I thought I was attracted to women.

I wasn't.

But gender dysphoria is physically and emotionally loud, and it drowned my sexuality out. I thought I was a heterosexual male. I pursued women. Occasionally there'd be a relationship. In bed I'd merge with my lover and imagine that her body was mine, thatI was the one getting fucked. Then I'd wonder why I was so unsatisfied, why my desire was completely untouched, as painful as ever.

I had few relationships. The droughts between lasted two years, four years, six years. The last one ended a little more than ten years ago.

Everyone perceived me as gay, of course. My friends would hint that there was something I needed to deal with. The guys at school laughed when they saw me holding hands with a girl. Straight co-workers were careful not to get too friendly.

And I was attracted to men. I just couldn't feel it. One time, in my early 30s, I got naked with a gay male friend. I'd never been so hard in my life. I freaked out before we could have sex. I didn't understand, didn't want to understand, what was scaring me, what further issue, so big and frightening, had been buried and broken loose. Didn't ask the question, if it wasn't sexual desire that tortured me every day, what was it?

Instead I lived in a fantasy world where I was always a woman. And I knew better than to take daydreams seriously. 

Once I realized that I was transsexual, I recognized what my desire was. In fact, the two processes were identical. But it wasn't until I started hormones in late '07, with the inner thaw, the uncanny process of self-discovery, they bring, that I mentally separated my sexuality from my other desires and perceived it for what it was. I was attracted to men, and always had been. I wanted cock. At night, I'd close my eyes and become Annabel Chong spread-eagled on her crazy porn altar. My feminized body stirred with a new sensuality.

I'd liked the idea of being lesbian. It was a standing refutation of the dumb stereotype that transwomen changed their sex because that made it easier to get guys. Now I became fascinated by the bad girls in my support group, the chicks who dressed sexy and hung out in bars. I decided they were the coolest people in the world. My new role models.

So far it's all been fantasy. I've yet to have sex with a guy. I'm old, and out of shape, and pretty bad at the woman thing, but that's not really it. I've been hesitant about my transition, and no more so than with this. It's scary. I don't know what to do, and so many bad things can happen. In a sense I'm a virgin, a frightened virgin.

But I'm going to do it.

So to celebrate finishing the first week of OBloPoMo, I will have an anxiety attack and crawl under my shell.

I'm not sure why I'm a wreck, actually. The apartment was freezing when I got up, and that physical discomfort, that feeling of exposure, somehow seeped through me and became my emotional, psychological state as well. In other words, a day when I wanted to stay in bed under my blanket.

Today I planned to start writing about sex, so that may be it. Or just a growing conviction that I'm doing the whole Livejournal thing wrong. A growing conviction that I'm doing everything wrong.

Thursday night I got home from two days in the city, and I've been in male mode since. The two days were only supposed to be one day. I took the train down the Hudson early Wednesday evening to go to my support group. Afterwards I hung out in the diner and then in the bar, dancing to the jukebox with a bunch of other transwomen. The next day, Thursday, I had an appointment at Callen-Lorde and had promised Alison Grillo I would come to her show at a comedy club. I meant to take the train back that night, and come down again the next day, but when Alison offered to let me crash at her place that made a lot more sense.

Thursday I wrote my post, "A Place at the Cool Table," in a spiral notebook at a Starbuck's on First Avenue and typed it into LJ through Alison's computer. Wandering around Manhattan in female mode for two days got weird. On the way to the club, Alison and I stopped for a slice of pizza, and a ciswoman waiting for an order couldn't stop staring at me. Strangely, that didn't bother me. Then, the club was nearly empty, fewer than twenty people, so there was no hiding from comedians working the room. Inevitably one schmuck with a mike got around to me. He pointed at me and said, "What's up with all that hair?"

"I'm supposed to be a girl," I said. "I'm changing my sex."

He mumbled something about how that was okay and stumbled back into his act.

That didn't bother me either.

The weirdest thing is, I was becoming more female in my own mind. It came out in my voice and my body language, or so it seemed to me. Riding the subway, my reflection in the window, pale and blurry, looked like a woman. I began to like what I saw.

So maybe the present bummer is compensation -- punishment, really -- inflicted on me by my psychic economy, the bust following a boom. Whatever it is, I ended up writing a post in spite of it, so, anyway, I'm hopeful.

My family had a summer house. I was reminded of it recently when a big chunk of a toenail broke off. I've been letting the coppery nailpolish wear off my feet since the weather turned too cold for open-toed shoes, and the worn flecks of metallic glitter still on the pearlescent grey nail made it look exactly like a sand dollar. Immediately, unexpectedly, I flashed back on the hours I used to spend wandering alone on the beach.

I didn't have dolls, of course. My father always had time to police my activites for signs of femininity. I wasn't allowed to play with G.I. Joe or Major Matt Mason or anything else that struck him as a doll. I'd have to visit my friends for that. None of them had this problem. Then again, they were boys. I did once buy some alien figurines, but as soon as my parents thought my childish attention had moved on to something else they disappeared. I remember one time I and a friend were playing with them, and the door to my room cracked open so my father could make an inspection. When he saw us, he snarled, "You're playing with dolls!," with all the scorn and contempt he could muster, as if to shame us out of it. My friend could only look at me with a face that said, What the fuck?

But I was an imaginative girl, so I got to play with dolls anyway. On the beach I looked for especially flat, round pebbles. I had a set, all different sizes and colors. I used a magic marker to bring them to life, drawing little eye dots, like smiley faces without the mouth, and giving each an identifying mark, like a green line around the circumference, so I could keep track of their names and identities. One was named Sasha, just like the Brat.

I'd play with them in the sandy backyard. I was very afraid of losing one. They blended in so well that I might forget one, and it would be reclaimed by the landscape that had given it to me. So I played under a specter of loss and sadness, navigating the tensions between letting them loose enough to do things but not so loose they broke away to leave me forever. When it was time to go back in, I'd always have the feeling I had forgotten one. I never did, though.

I just realized, the obverse of "trannyboy" is "cissyboy."

I didn't mean to leave you in suspense. It just worked out that way. The last time I wrote about the 'mones, I was stuck on the starter dose long after I was supposed to go up to the full one, and my heart was beating irregularly. But just a few weeks after I wrote that entry, the cardiologist put me on a beta blocker and my heart was fine. Then, after the usual two-month wait to see him, my doctor at Callen-Lorde wrote out the script for me to go all the way.

I had a further request. They'd prescribed my mones in pill form due to my history of depression. Mones amp out your emotions, the bad ones as well as the good ones. Swallowing a small dose twice a day instead of shooting a big one every two weeks levels out the amount in your body and helps minimize the effect. Well, fuck that. I wanted to be hardcore. I told the doctor I wanted to start injecting.

My doctor was cool. He said okay.

The first few times I had to visit the clinic. At first a nurse hit me up, but then I was doing it under the nurse's guidance, and now I'm doing it at home. Swab my thigh with alcohol, stick the disposable needle through the top of the little bottle, draw out a CC of the clear fluid, forty milligrams of estradiol valerate, and inject it into the muscle. Within minutes I'm awash in femininity. I can feel it. It's a trip, a peaceful ocean of cool but warm liquid that I can drift in for a few hours like a smooth-skinned, big-breasted mermaid.

Yes, if something bums me out, the unhappiness is piercing. It's unpredictable, so I'm always a little scared when I shoot up. For a while I even did it just before I went to sleep to avoid the risk. But not for long, because the high outweighs the low. I never feel more like a woman.

I'm pulling myself out of my two-month-old depression. Last week I went down to a Thanksgiving dinner some transwomen from my support group organized at an Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights. Then, last night, I went to the group itself, the weekly feminine spectrum drop-in group at the GLBT center in Manhattan, for the first time since the hiatus from late July to early October.

The dinner was great. Anything other than me sitting in my apartment trying to pretend it wasn't a holiday would have been great. Even Jackson Heights was great. I'd never been there, and didn't know what to expect. Maybe I'd end up the star of next year's Transgender Day of Remembrance. But I descended from the 7 line into a sort of Little India, crowded streets aglow with endless picture windows full of saris and gold jewelry and Bollywood videos, each as bright and colorful as a pile of Christmas presents. The girl who picked the location, a female-identified genderqueer named Kalani, explained that she liked Jackson Height because it was the most diverse county in the United States. The dinner was great, too, once you got used to having goat curry instead of turkey for Thanksgiving. There were nine of us, eventually. People drifted in over a couple of hours. Our hostess was last, having gone to pick up a girl in Atlantic City. We got periodic cell phone updates, such as "We're in Newark!" She's recently switched over from her male name to Angelique, making her the fifth Angelique in our group. If I ever do a Things Transgender Women Like blog, I'll have to include "The name 'Angelique'" right in between "Butterfly tattoos" and "Alcoholism." Her passenger had a great early-'60s Ronnie Spector look going on. The funny thing is, she didn't know who Ronnie Spector was, having been born around 1986, and her mind was blown when someone downloaded a video of "Be My Baby."

The group itself was somber. The subject was jobs. A pretty 23-year-old who had been outed and then fired from her job as a hot waitress at a cheesy restaurant, was putting together a discrimination lawsuit. The lawyers she'd talked to had been pessimistic that she could prove anything, but she was still hopeful. She vowed not to settle out of court because the principle of trans equality was more important than money.

Going to group after four months, the longest I'd ever been away, was strange. Old friends were glad to see me and wanted to know what I'd been doing. But the turnover is high, and most of the people were strangers. The group had a new room on the third floor due to an increase in size to at least forty, a high-ceilinged, auditorium-like space where the quieter people were impossible to hear.

Afterwards, a couple dozen of us drifted over to the diner, and I got bummed out. The scene there is like a high school cafeteria. All the foxy, passy chicks segregate themselves in a big circular table, the cool table, where they ignore everybody else. There are further gradations. I ended up sitting with a couple of old friends who I'd socialized with during the week. The two places to my right were empty, their seats carried off to make extra places at the cool table. The seat to my left had a coat hanging on the back, but it was empty too, its occupant having table-hopped elsewhere for the entire meal. These were the only empty seats. Meanwhile, in the nearest booth, people were squeezed in three to a side. I thought of shelling the cool table with sugar packets. I had a perfect shot. I toyed with a packet all night but wussed out. Now I regret it. It would have made a perfect ending to this post.

The sick thing is, all the things I'd have to do to be accepted at the cool table, like get FFS, develop a passable female voice, and lose ninety pounds, are all things I want to do. Would I sit there? You bet.

I got a jacket last night. I looked in Target and Burlington Coat Factory, hoping to find a pink parka big enough to fit me. Right away I found an XXL, but when I tried it on it was like trying to fit into a doggie sweater. I did eventually find one. It's not ideal, because it has these goofy white streamlined shapes on it (it's a "snowboard jacket"), and because I couldn't actually close it over my belly, although I'm sure I could if I really wanted to.

So, yeah, now I can go to the meeting tonight with pride.

Last night I stopped at the Poughkeepsie Galleria and bought a pair of boots. First I looked in Payless, but they didn't have anything in size 12, as usual. It's rare that anyone does. So I went a few stores down to Torrid, a chain store for large-sized women where I've bought almost all my previous clothes. They were the obvious first choice, but I'd been hoping to avoid them because I was presenting male, just as I'd been presenting male on all my previous visits, and I was embarrassed. I'm usually embarrassed when I walk around presenting female, but it's just the opposite whenever I'm doing something transgender-related. Then, being female makes me feel, I dunno, legitimate. Entitled. Not a pathetic closet case.

But there were just two young women on duty who recognized me from previous visits and seemed genuinely glad to see me, so I felt okay. I didn't like any of the boots on display, but when I asked if they had anything else, they did, a cute pair of puffy, Ugged-out black boots with a fluffy black fringe, which I took.

I still need a properly feminizing jacket, but I'm almost ready to present female again.

See, I didn't start until last summer, and gave it up when the cold weather moved in. Except for a few experiments with my mom's clothes when I was a kid, the first time I ever dressed female was on May 2, for the Transgender Prom at the GLBT center in New York, a story in itself. After that was successful, I wanted more, even though the friend who'd helped me get dressed and made-up didn't want to help me again. I'd take my workboots off and put on flip-flops, put on my hoop earrings, and untie my ponytail and let my hair fall around my face. One night, when I had put myself back together to go home, one of my friends, an old crossdresser named Ashley, cried, "Why'd you do that? You looked perfectly fine." She insisted I could pass just as I'd been. I'm not sure that this was true, but it was exactly what I needed to hear. The next week I stuffed my backpack with my black leggings from the prom and a new top I'd bought, and, breaking the center's rules, changed in a stall in the bathroom before the meeting. Usually after a meeting, those who can go out to a nearby diner to hang out, and it can be pretty late when we break up. This time, it was so late, and I was so tired, that I decided not to change back, but just took the train back upstate as I was.

Everything went fine.

Next week I got dressed at home. In the train. I hunched over and hid behind my hair and a pair of sunglasses. When the conductor reached me, he pondered me for a minute and then said I should yell for him if there was any trouble, a real confidence-builder. But everything else went okay, just a few glares and a few big smiles of amusement, and it became a routine, presenting female whenever I went down to the city. I bought some cute wedgies, jeans, more tops.

Up here, though, I kept putting it off. I just couldn't face people I knew with the presentation I had. For example, I don't have any female voice at all. I don't even try, just usingm ,n my regular male voice in a quiter, more meliflous way. And I can't do makeup. I'd give myself clownish bushy eyebrows with an eyebrow pencil, and then try to apply eyeliner and mascara. Most of it would end up a runny mess in the hollows under my eyes, so that I looked like a George A, Romero zombie. Eventually I gave up and just used powder and lipstick, the two things I could manage. Forget about passing.

The thing is, I'm old, fifty one. Most women learn to use makeup when they're young and their minds are absorbent. Every time I try to learn, I can feel my mental intakes blocked by all the crud clogging them up. And I hate to practice. I've never touched my makeup except when I had to use it to go out. If I had a young, fresh face I could play with makeup in the mirror for hours, but looking at the face I've got is hell. The lines, the puffy fat, the incipient jowls. It's depressing. Just doing the little I do is painful.

So I promise myself that I'll study makeup online and practice, and don't do it. I spend three hundred dollars on a voice workshop down in the city and get depressed and don't go. And every day I promise myself I'll exercise and diet and lose weight.

Why don't I do these things? I've figured it out. It's because I don't have to. They're not a problem when I present male; even my big belly is relatively okay under my loose male shirts. As long as presenting male is an option, I can keep putting them off.

I've got to take away that option.

I have to live full time as a woman.

Only them will I be motivated to learn the skills I need, just to put a stop to my daily humilations. Only then will I exercise and lose weight, because I'm in agony over my appearence. I'm not ready, but I'll never be ready.

Another of my friends in the group, Evie, once said, "Everyone has to do their tranny time." It's the truth.

I got the idea for 0BloPoMo from something called NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Participants in NaNoWriMo write a certain amount each day so that by the end of November they have accumulated fifty thousand words. I didn't realize that at first, though, since I wasn't clear on what "Nanowrimo" stood for. The "nano" suggested something small, as in "nanoparticle," and "wrimo" made me think of "writing mo'." I pictured a website where you typed a daily quota of words in a window. If you reached your daily wordcount, you'd be rewarded by seeing your name on that day's list of successful members, or maybe there'd be a little animated "you did it!" cartoon. Something to provide a little structure and token motivation to would-be writers. A place where daunting projects could be broken down into little doable pieces.

It was much simpler than that, of course. My imagination is overactive and has a way of tearing off on a wild flight with incomplete or mistaken information. But it started me thinking.

I wanted to get my LJ blog going again. It had felt so good to be writing in public about being transsexual, and I know posting regularly is the only way to attract LJ friends and their ego-boosting comments. What had happened was, I had to move at the end of March, an ordeal that turned my life upside down and left me exhausted, flopped out in my new bedroom like a castaway on a beach, surrounded by cardboard boxes of wreckage. My March post had been long and ambitious, and took several days to write, which was pleasant enough since it was a way to avoid working on the move. The April post would have been even longer, more complicated, and more personally revealing still, and I had a whole lot of excuses to put off writing it, like not being connected to the internet for a month. And of course, the later it got, the less urgent it became.

I need to forget all the expectations I've created for myself and just write some fucking posts. Hence, 0BloPoMo, or 0uish Blog Posting Month. 0BloPoMo is simple. I write a post every day for a month. Anything counts, even a dull exercise in meta like this. But I can't help feeling that the first real post will be tomorrow's. I'm never satisfied. Never.

Blogspot has this thing where they give you wacky questions for your profile page, and I would usually squeeze a post out of them. One time, near Halloween, the question was, What did you dream when you ate a spider while sleeping? So I wrote this:

Candy from a Spider

Eagerly, I emptied my trick or treat bag on the kitchen table. Some of the candy moved -- candy worms inching, candy bugs scurrying, candy bats circling my head. Others performed in place -- laughing candy gremlins, candy fireflies flashing different colors for each flavor, candy pumpkins that expanded in the fresh air.

A candy spider lept from the bag to the tabletop to the wall. When it found a nice clean corner, the spider would spin candy webs until it was empty. Those were the best.

I caught a bat with my thumb and forefinger and placed it on my tongue. The bats would be beautiful in the holo, but up close they were just noisy blurs that threatened to get stuck in my hair.

I smiled at Mom's aircam, which had followed me all night.

The spider had finished a web. I leaned over and wound it up with a finger, careful to leave the spider. As I sucked on it, sweetness sparkled in my mouth like candles of flavor in a dark cave.

More candy struggled out of the pile to show off. Dancing candy mushrooms, jumping candy toads, a candy preying mantis that caught other candy so that they hopped around inside its transparent body.

A second web was done. Absently, I pulled it loose and savored it.

Still more candy appeared. Candy ghosts, drifting wisps of sugar with cartoon eyes. Hooting candy owls, slinking candy black cats. It was tempting, but I knew better than to eat too much. Besides, it seemed a waste to eat it now instead of later when it had all run down.

When I sucked on the third web, something crunched in my mouth. The spider. I hadn't been paying attention. The spider was edible, but I felt a pang of loss at the thought of all the webs I wouldn't get to eat.

A bad taste spread from the crunchy bits of spider. Chemicals for making the webs? I was puzzled, then alarmed. It almost tasted like a real --

I was happy. It was late December, and I was on my way to my feminine spectrum group, the last meeting of the year. In my backpack were Christmas presents for my friends who were going to be there, a surprise. Best of all, I was stopping at my clinic an hour earlier, at 6:30, to see my doctor and get my dose of female hormones raised to their full level.

How to explain 'mones to someone who hasn't taken them, who's been on the right ones since birth? It's like trying to describe acid. That's a good comparison, actually. When I'd taken my first dose of 'mones a couple of months earlier, in late October, it had taken just that long to rock my world, half an hour to forty-five minutes. My senses were altered, especially taste and touch, my thinking changed. The difference was, for the first time in my life I felt normal. Comfortable in my body. At peace with myself.

My body had been waiting for the 'mones. It drank them in like desert sand absorbs water, and it wanted more.

The meeting went well until the doctor checked my pulse. He frowned and checked it again. Something was wrong. He rushed off while I took off my shirt so two nurses could paste electrodes to my chest. The EKG confirmed it. Cardiac arhythmia. My heart was skipping beats.

I expected to be rushed off in an ambulance for some grisly surgery I couldn't afford, but no, when the doctor finally sat down with me to explain what it all meant, he said I just had to see a cardiologist soon. And, of course, he had to be sure my 'mones weren't involved before he could raise my dose.

By the time I got out the group was over, but my friends were meeting in a nearby diner. I told them the news, we talked about what would probably happen and the changes in my diet and lifestyle I'd have to make, and they cheered me up until I was happy again.

One morning in early January I went to the hospital. The cardiologist said the arrhythmia was something I could live with, but she wanted to know what was causing it, to make sure it wasn't a symptom or precursor of something dangerous. She scheduled me for an echo sonogram.

So one morning in late January I went back. A technician rammed a probe against my chest while, on a monitor, my heart quivered in grainy black-and-white, valves gulping like some frantic undersea creature. It did no good. My heart was so jumpy, my system so noisy that my cardiologist couldn't tell what was going on. She scheduled me for a stress test.

So one morning in early February I went back. I couldn't drink caffeine or eat before the test, and the test somehow lasted all day. Most of the time I seem to have been sitting in various small waiting areas trying to read a book and waiting for the next stage of the process. A technician hit me up with a radioactive isotope and I lay down on a platform which lifted me face-to-face with the blank metal of the nuclear camera, a large machine that hummed and slowly moved around me to somehow capture images as the gamma rays lit up my heart. Then, in another room, another technician attached various sensors and set me to walking on a treadmill until I was exhausted. I got hit with more isotope and sent back to the camera. It did no good. My cardiologist still couldn't make out what was going on though the noise of my system. She scheduled me for a MRI. She also asked me to wait in an empty office. We needed to talk.

Soon she sat down with me. She understood how important the 'mones were, and I could tell she had really thought about it and hated having to say what she was going to tell me. But, there was still too much noise in my system. We had to reduce it. I would start taking a beta blocker, and I would stop taking the 'mones.

This was something I'd been dreading since before I started, a medical problem that would get my 'mones yanked. It had happened to someone I knew. Well, this was temporary, probably.

Once I left the hospital and got some food and coffee and started thinking again, I decided I should have said, "I've got to run this past my doctor" instead of "yes." I called him when I got home. That is, I left voicemail and he would get back to me by the end of the week. I hoped he'd tell me I shouldn't do it, or didn't have to. I wanted to stay on the 'mones.

I talked about it in my group. They were emphatic. I had to stop, my health took priority over anything else, I was fortunate to have such a diligent doctor. They were so convincing that the next morning I didn't take my dose.

The first day was okay. The second day I never got out of bed. I wrapped myself in the blanket, stripped clean of physical comfort and peace of mind. The return of the old bodily sensations, the old mental universe, was like a sudden illness. Soon I was swamped by depression.

The next day I started taking the 'mones again.

I called my cardiologist to tell her what had happened. I heard rings, beeps, sounds of connections being made and broken, shrill, jarring noises like erupting car alarms, all ending with a recorded message telling me to hang up and try again. The same thing kept happening. I couldn't reach her. I was going to be in trouble at our next meeting.

My doctor called back. Yes, I could stop taking the 'mones, though the request struck him as odd. However, I had to be careful and take a couple of weeks to slowly withdraw from the actual estrogen before I slowly withdrew from the testoterone blocker.

Oh.

I still couldn't do it, though. The experience had been too intense.

I'm a timid, fearful person, but I had to stand up for my decision, as little as I wanted to. I have to trust my inner experiences. They are real even if other people can't verify them and assure me I am right. I would handcuff myself to a desk and yell that I would rather die than accept a future without female hormones.

So one morning in late February I went back. Full of dread, I told my cardiologist I had tried to comply with her order but couldn't, then braced myself for her reaction.

Sure, she said, that would be okay.

I was happy.

I love my budding breasts. I love it when you can see them through my t-shirt, when I'm wearing a color other than my usual black. I love it when my nipples are erect, making little buttons of light and shadow that you can see a mile away. I love it when they jiggle. I want everyone to notice them wherever I go.

The thing is, I'm still supposed to be a guy.

I'm safe for now. I'm still overweight. I still have man-boobs to go with my big protruding belly. You can see how my breasts have enlarged them and changed their shape, especially when I take my shirt off, but that's easy to overlook. I'm dieting, though, and they're still growing, the nipples raw and sore, and I'm not even on a full dose of hormones yet. Eventually they'll be obvious.

I can't wait.

I'm sure sanity will prevail and I'll figure out some way to bind them or otherwise hide them. Right now, though, they're just like this blog, the first writing I've ever done about my being a transsexual. I should be scared. Maybe I shouldn't be doing it at all, since nobody knows except a couple of doctors and the few transwomen I've met in the last year. Instead the thought of it makes me happy, bouyant, excited. In the midst of February, a warm sweet breeze from a future Spring.

Will I keep up my journal? I've never kept up before. I'll write a few posts and lose interest, bummed out by the lack of response and cornered by my reveal-nothing persona. Then again, I've never written about something that's rattling around in my head, louder and louder, more and more urgent, until I'm so crazy the condition of my mind gives me anxiety attacks whenever I think about it. So I expect I'll keep writing. I have to.

If not, I'll still have my tits.