I love love love being surrounded by naked women! I am delighted that we have people in Toronto who take it upon themselves to organize these inclusive, lovely events. I wish they happened more often.

My friend S. and I arrived later than I would have liked, but still with three hours of play time remaining in the evening. When we were buzzed through the heavy metal door,  warm moist air flooded across my exposed legs and midriff. A crowd of women, most of whom were wearing underwear of some sort, were dancing on the rec-room-feel carpet just past the entrance. The DJ stood next to the dancers, her gear spread across a crappy wooden table.

S. walked me through the three story Victorian mansion, the humidity collecting on my face, peering into tiny rooms with white-sheeted mattresses jammed inside, listening to the orgasmic ululations of  unseen women having–for example–their g-spots probed in room 444.

Near the top of the building, we stoppedin the BDSM/kink area long enough to line our butts up to join in a group spanking.

Terrified, I watched the domme pounding S’s upturned butt with both closed fists. But when she got to me, her palms opened, and I got a nice slapping without too much pain.

We walked back downstairs, ran into J, who we had been looking for, and circled chairs around a large sand-filled ashtray near the pool. Friends stopped by to chat. I removed my bra to show off my breasts, which are new for 2009, and are insanely small and cute.

Topless, I wandered. Some nice glances drifted my way here and there, but no one walked up and put her lips on mine, which is what I would have needed to get involved. I was too wrapped up in watching it all.

Perhaps 10% of the people were having full-on sex at any given moment. The sounds of women having sex drifted from all directions all night. Threading my way through underwear-clad bodies, I would stumble across women wrapped fervidly around each other, lying on some flat surface, moaning, near the dance floor, or in the hallway, or near the pool. It makes me hot just thinking about it.

Trans women are explicitly included in this event, but that doesn’t mean that we’re particularly involved. I felt less attractive than I had two weeks earlier at Cheery Bomb. People chatted with me, but no strangers were grabbing handfuls of my butt. I shared some looks with a few women, but they amounted to nothing; we always continued on our separate ways, chasing friends through the sex-stained maze.

Towards the end of the evening, J and I collected S from room 444, where a lovely trans guy had been demonstrating the wonders of her g-spot to her. Exhausted, J headed home, and S and I made for the hot tub.

After a few minutes of sitting, smiling, foam building around me, coupled naked bodies writhing and moaning next to me, the people in my end of the tub shifted, and I found my tongue in someone’s mouth.

“I love your piercings,” I said, face beaded with moisture, between gasps.

“I love your muscles,” she replied. I explained that they were owing to yoga. She didn’t seem to care where they came from. We bent in to touch lips again.

When she left the pool 15 minutes later, my evening had taken on a new tone. That one contact–that carrying through of desire into lips on breasts, bodies bumping against other ones in bubbling water–was all I needed to affirm my desirability.

This morning, I awoke a happy woman. Mmmm mmm mmm.

Why? Because when you Google my name, this site is the number one result.

While it’s nice to know that my gender transition hijinx are the most relevant thing being perpetrated by any dee xxxxxxx worldwide, it may be professionally compromising. And, after two years of struggling to become a different sort of person, I am trying to rekindle my professional life, and I need all the help I can get.

The upside of anonymity is carte blanche. Until now, most things I’ve written about here have been relatively family-friendly (though that may not mean they were legal).

No longer! From now on, I will tell the story in words that don’t care whether they can be read by my mother. Fucking shit–this is about to get a whole lot more interesting to read!

I had an amazing time!

Cherry Bomb’s tagline is “dance. sweat. cruise,” and though I’ve been to their events before, I’ve never felt license to take part in any cruising. At first, I was married. Later, I was recognizably trans and hopelessly depressed and awful to be near.

This time, a few months of hormones under my bra strap, and my body sculpted by my overzealous yoga practice, I was definitely in on the crusing. Women were flashing smiles at me. Women–hot women!–were grabbing handfuls of my ass on the dancefloor.

In the end, it climaxed at nothing more than a little necking. I went home alone, feeling stratospheric. I never thought I’d come through transition and wind up showered with kisses on the dancefloor. This feels too good to be true!

There was only one man present: A., a Master’s candidate in fine arts, of Colombian extraction. Someone who should be keenly aware of gender sensitivities, but who was raised in a macho culture.

It was my first clear-cut experience of having a man disempower me while I was working on something. I couldn’t help noticing it, because it was like nothing I ever ran across while I was living as a man. Perhaps I felt subordinated in this way during childhood, but not since.

Neither incident was a big deal. In the first, I was driving a car through a challengingly narrow space between a tree stump and another car. He arrived on the scene when the job was nearly complete, and immediately began giving advice, and attempting to interpose himself, while I and the other two women who were guiding me, were trying to focus carefully on the work at hand. He wouldn’t have stuck his head in the driver’s-side-window while I was inching backwards, two inches away from the other car, to question my driving were I a man–of that I am sure.

Later, he attempted to supplant me in front of the BBQ. I am an excellent cook, but it seems that my grilling credentials have been invalidated by my gender transition.

It’s strange, to finally feel what it’s like on the other side. Other women, trans and non, have warned me what to expect, but it’s still amusing to suddenly be seen as having different capabilities simply because I’ve changed genders. As though the estrogen saps my my skill at piloting a car, or my knowledge of meat grilling, leaving me fit only for the other 98% of the work involved in preparing a meal.

I’m not upset with him. After all, he was just playing out gender roles socially. This is common behaviour. If anything, it validates my womanhood to be inexpliably and baselessly assumed to be inferior. I hate the idea that women are seen to be less capable drivers or inept in front of a gas grill, but at least I know he’s seeing me as a woman.

I was raised believing that gender is a social construct. At some level, I think I was skeptical that the hormones would make me feel better. I was convinced that the effects of the hormones (e.g. fat distribution and skin tone changing) would be therapeutic, but I wasn’t anticipating my brain responding immediately, before the body had any time to show effects, as though I’d fed it intravenous happy juice, but that’s what it did.

I’ve never felt this well in my life. It’s not like I’m floating around on a wondrous pink cloud or anything, but it’s good.

“I have the perfect name. What do you think about Dawn?”

“It’s a very nice name, but it’s not clearly gendered.”

“What do you mean?”

“If someone hears it, over the phone, for example, the name doesn’t tell them your gender. Based on my experience, it’s easier if your name clearly signifies your gender.”

Fast Forward to Today

I was steered away from Dawn, but I didn’t find a satisfying alternative. I didn’t feel comfortable picking a name for myself, so I went nameless for a bit.

I settled on Dee because people, in particular sensitive members of my family, could use D. if they felt more comfortable with it, and it would sound the same.

Regrettably, I forgot about Maxine’s advice to choose a clearly gendered name. I ended up having conversations like this:

“Dean?”

“No! Dee”

“umm, like… just the letter ‘d?’”

“No–like dee double ee!”

“Oh. huh. ok.”

Dean plagued me for months. I grew terrified of the phone itself, because it was the instrument of my being called Dean. Being called a NEW male name that doesn’t even have any claims on me is worse than being told I’ll “always be Derek” (which I don’t mind TOO much). It’s being told “you sound like a man to me.”

I’ve even been called Dean face-to-face. This shocked me, because although you could tell I was trans, you certainly wouldn’t have guessed that I identified as a man. So when I’d say “Dee” to someone, and they’d say “Dean?” back, with an ingratiating smile, I’d lose my mind. I left my brother’s welcome home party over being called Dean.

Before long, I was opening my phone calls like this: “yes, hi, I’ve changed my name and my gender. My new name is Dee . No–not Dean–D-E-E. Yes. And please don’t call me sir. If you could see me, you would know that sir is completely wrong, but you can’t.

“Uh, ok. Does that resolve the issue you’re calling about?”

“No–you called me about my outstanding balance!”

The Dean days are over, I think. Just recently, since the start of this calendar year, people have started to gender me female over the phone.

Goodbye Dean, you superfluous masculine identity. For a while, I worried I might be saddled with you always. I am glad to see you go. Your nasal final consonant borders on silence, and screws up my life.  May I never hear the sound of your name again!

Everyone used to stare, or double-take, or rubber-neck. EVERYONE. For more than two long years.

Until last August–when I deemed it safe enough to come out to my son J., five months after his mother and I separated because of my need to transition–I lived part-time in both genders, and looked like a misfit at all times.

After my epiphany (April 2006), even when I was in “man-mode,” I was wearing women’s clothes, and makeup. I was unwilling to allow my body’s masculinity to remain unchallenged, but still unmistakably phenotypically male. In general, people are upset by overtly femininely attired men, especially when they’re caring for a child. I was upsetting the natural order.

When I was in woman-mode, things were better internally, but I felt forced  to overcompensate. Too much makeup, always a skirt, always carefully put together. I knew that people would see the maleness of my body, and hear the deepness of my voice, so I wanted them to have no question that my goal was to be a woman, even once they clocked me as trans.

In spite of my goal being completely obvious, most people didn’t know how to respond. The clued-in would use female pronouns. The generous, but clueless, would call me things like “friend,” and ignore pronouns. Many would use their language–spoken and body–to convey their insistence that no matter how I looked, I was a man to them.

I worked like crazy on refining my female presentation. I shaved 20 lbs off my frame through yoga. I burned my face with a laser every few weeks. I shaved every piece of me. I bought clothes continuously (at deep discounts, hoping to avoid financial destruction), striving to make up for decades of wardrobe learning in a couple of years. Eventually, I went on hormone therapy.

Then suddenly, sometime over the past month, I crossed over. My face now says woman more than man. My body is skinny. My hair is long and luxuriant. My clothes fit me, and work together. I apply makeup expertly.

In general, people wouldn’t guess I had ever lived as a man.

The friction with the world around me has dissipated. The same clothes that used to train everyone’s eyes on me now attract minimal attention. I get smiles, instead of confused frowns. People call me “miss” instead of “friend.”

The back of my neck is finally relaxed. I no longer continuously fear being taunted, or embarrassed. I no longer need to obsess over how other people see me–over trying to overwrite the effects of the testosterone that ran in my veins for years.

Now that I’m finally out from under that cloud, I can appreciate how difficult a place it was to be. Although I’m confident enough to endure it, I do not enjoy being a freak, and that is how people have been seeing me.

In time, I’m sure that my confidence will rise to a point where I can put the process of being me as I move through life back on autopilot, and turn my attention back to the normal grist of adulthood–career, family, home–and stop re-living an amplified version of teenage angst over not fitting in.

For now I’m just quietly incredulous when I move seamlessly through the world. For someone who has had to release her demons, and then embrace them in this most public of ways, it’s wonderful to to be able to take a walk in their absence.

But it’s true–I just got back from Hawaii, where my family spent two weeks celebrating my parents 40th wedding anniversary. It was booked before financial markets went tits-up, and I suspect it will be the last such family vacation extravaganza.

It was an awesome trip. Hawaii itself is beautiful and very interesting. My family was supportive of my transition to the point where they corrected each other on pronoun slips. I passed, again and again, for sustained periods of time. It felt a bit unreal, since I’m so used to being clocked regularly, but it was good!

It became apparent that I was passing easily when I managed to get through a surfing lesson without being clocked. I am not undetectable; had he been looking for it, our instructor would have noticed, but he didn’t, even while teaching me how to surf for two hours! True, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’ll take what I can get.

I wore my new bathing suit–my one workable suit, the fruit of four hours of horrified glimpses of my body variously skimpily clad–and I was issued a skin-tight rash-guard shirt to wear over the top. Since we were heading into the water, I wore no makeup–no subterfuge apart from some breast-lifting inserts, one of which disconcertingly scooched its way up to my right shoulder at one point. While paddling my surf board through small waves, surrounded by other first-time-surfing morons, I had to surreptitiously reach up and use my hand to squeegee my boob lifter down into the appropriate location.

There was one other compromising moment when one of my testicles escaped the side of my cute little board shorts while I was practicing technique on land. I was standing on the beach, on a surfboard, a woman, and I looked down and spied the awol ball trying to catch some rays. Thankfully, surfer-instrutor-dude’s keen gaze was locked on someone else, and I was able to tuck it away before anyone else noticed. Yick!

We hopped around a little bit on the vacation, visiting three different islands. Although my parents would have preferred something more intrepid, or off the beaten track at least–and we were there to celebrate their love–we spent the final week on Maui, since it was the only place we could rent a house that was big enough to hold all ten of us.

The place was close to the shore, and when the weather and timing were favourable, I had one of the best yoga spots I suspect I will ever find. The photo doesn’t do it justice.

my yoga spot on Maui

Until recently, I had something I called proto-breasts: sensitive nipples topping slightly meaty man-boobs. But they have graduated into full breasthood. They are still the smallest breasts one could possibly imagine, but they are indeed breasts.

I wonder if I’ll draw a lot of hits from teenagers, having mentioned breasts so many times in this post.

Growing new sex parts in your mid-30s is fucking crazy, but that’s not out of line with the rest of my transition. My memories are suspect, since my perception was confined by the twisted aperture of my repression. And my brain is changing as it adjusts to the new hormone balance.  I don’t know what I like. I don’t know who I am. My identity feels paper-thin.

The silence is weird too. My success in becoming a woman is heralded by silence–by invisibility. I was between genders for more than two years, and during that time, the tension between me and the world around me was continuous. Everyone stared, or at least it felt that way. Glances of confusion, disgust, and bewilderment greeted me pretty much everywhere I went. Now, I can move fairly freely, and I’m delighted with that, but not having the constant feedback on the gender thing is disconcerting in a way. I no longer know where I stand in the eyes of others.

It feels more like 2008 is a conveyor belt I’ve been tied to, and Christmas is the ominous machinery chopping away at the end of the line.

This year was the first time I really understood how problematic Christmas can be. Being with family is heavy for me now. It’s not uncomfortable, but it’s challenging. It’s hard to be secure in myself as a woman, sitting amid all these people who related to me as male for more than 30 years before this sudden twist.

But the family unit did well in the test. The closest circle–my ex, my son, and I–got along really well. I think J, my son, was really happy to have everyone together for Christmas. The next level out–my parents and two brothers, a wife, a girlfriend, and my three month old nephew–seems to be rebounding nicely after two years wrestling with my transition, my marriage breaking up, and all the other things that befell it, though they were minor in comparison to someone upping and changing genders without warning.

The BIG family includes my Mom’s seven siblings and their partners and offspring and boyfriends thereof and more. On the heels of the preceding 24 days of December, Christmas dinner for 30 at my aunt & uncle’s place proved too much. I had to take shelter in a darkened room.

I didn’t realize the toll that all the socializing was taking. One has to be on in a new gender. There are so many things that I need to process consciously now–things that most adults handle on autopilot.

Socially, I’m like an adolescent. I don’t know who I am, or how I want to be. Every social situation is pregnant with misunderstanding. But I am an adult, so feeling like a teenager feels like a failure. Sadly, I’m used to feeling like a failure at this point, but I definitely don’t like it!

But I did it. I made it through December, including all the family hooplah last week, as a woman, intact.