My main blog is at http://scheherezadessister.blogspot.com

I’m seeing pretty dramatic results from HRT. I’m at seven months, give or take, and I’m really shocked at how quickly I’ve seen the changes that I’ve seen. My hair is filling back in (not enough, but, hell, that it’s coming back at all is a miracle). I’ve seen some redistribution of weight. And I’m growing boobs. I’m growing boobs faster than I was led to believe I would grow boobs. I think I’m being victimized by a medical establishment that tries to diminish expectations lest the patient be underwhelmed. I have a TS friend who’s been on HRT for years without getting the boobage I have already, so there’s some justification for it. Some folks don’t take to HRT so well. Apparently, I’m not one of them. Here’s a really crummy picture of how my boobs are doing so far:

That may not look dramatic, but believe me, it is. There are no forms and no bra in that picture. I’m about an A-cup right now, over and above the man-boobs I started with. At this rate, I’ll be a B-cup next year. Is a C-cup possible? Maybe. Mom was a C.

I got a lot of food, but we only had three people show up–not nearly enough to eat it all. Grrr….

Well, screw ‘em. We’ll just eat the yummy hummus I made, the sausages, the burgers, and the ribs all ourselves. So nyah!

I’m blogging elsewhere right now, because 360 has become muy unreliable.

Nothing else to see here. Move along…

So I got dolled up on Friday night last week. This was the first time I’ve presented as female in about six months. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to–quite the contrary. Rather, every time I’ve had the urge, there has been some reason or other that I couldn’t do it. Most of these reasons revolve around electrolysis. In any event, I finally pulled the trigger on a weekend where I wasn’t being poked with a red hot needle, and it felt good. Very good. But oddly enough, the thing that feels best about the experience is the picture at the head of this posting.

Trannies tend to be narcissists, and I’m no different, but my fascination with this particular photograph goes a bit beyond simple narcissism. I look at this picture and I see a roadmap of my future. I see things about my face that I hadn’t noticed before. And, apparently, I’m seeing the effects of hormones. Personally, I don’t see that, but I’ve had a couple of friends tell me that my face looks different, especially in my cheekbones. You get a good look at my eyes in this picture, too, to the point where you can even see the corona of amber surrounding the pupils. There is some moderate thinning of my beard shadow on my chin just below my lower lip, and on the sideburns. This is where my last bout with the laser was most effective. I can still detect some shadow in the Fu Manchu area, which make-up struggles to cover. Speaking of make-up, I’ve found a lip color that I like for all occasions (it’s MAC, but I forget the name of the shade), which isn’t too far off my natural lip color. I’ve FINALLY found an eyeliner that combines good coverage with ease of use (it’s Smashbox cream eyeliner, by the way, applied with an angled brush).

All of this is well and good. But, as I said, there’s more to this picture for me than might meet the eye, because I believe that this picture has saved me several thousands of dollars, or, at the very least, many nights of self-pity because of my lack of several thousands of dollars, and it’s certainly saved me the agony of medical interventions. What this photo has given me is the conviction that I don’t need facial feminization surgeries at all. I’m not unhappy with the angles and prominences of my face as depicted in this picture. My face looks good. It looks like it will be a feminine face once I’m done removing the beard, even without surgeries to reduce my ridiculous jawline or to raise my browline. It says to me that the genetic lottery that gave me my short stature has also given me a phiz that will suffice in the next phase of my life. And THAT feels better than good. It puts to rest a lot of the anxieties I’ve brought to this process.

And weirdly, I see my mother staring out of this picture. I never really thought that I took after my mother–the similarities to my father are easier to see in my day to day life, but I don’t see any of him in this picture. I see my mother in the eyes. She had the same gray green eyes with amber corona that I have. It’s startling how well I remember that given that she’s been dead for 20 years, but I can call them up in my mind with no effort. And I see them here.

Not bad for a photo taken from the end of my arm.

Unseen in the photo at the head of this posting is my current bustline. Although I didn’t fill the cups of the bra I was wearing all the way to the brim, I filled enough of it to dispense with breast forms. The bra was a padded B-cup. I figure I’m about an A-cup now. I’m apparently taking to hormones like a duck to water. With any kind of luck, I can save money on a boob job, too. But that’s putting the cart before the horse.

The emotional changes seem to be taking hold at last, too, because lately, I seem on the verge of crying about things more than I can ever remember in my old life. I haven’t had a crying fit over anything, per se–nor have I really had anything happen to me to cause one–but some movies will find me misting up a little, and an actual tear fell as I was thinking about my dog’s visit to the vet last week. Mind you, I still think I’m the most emotionally stable person I know, but that persona is softening a little.

I came out to my older brother in May (my younger brother has known about my alter ego for about eight years now). For the most part, he just shrugged it off. “Well mom always said you were the pretty one,” was his initial reaction. His main concern, oddly enough, was that I might change my name in such a way that he would no longer be able to call me “CJ,” which he has done for as long as I can remember. I assured him that my initials would remain the same. I got around to showing him some pictures of what I look like as a girl over this past weekend. His reaction was amusing: “Do you own any clothing that isn’t black?” he asked. “What’re you, some kind of goth?” I do own a lot of black clothes, I told him, but that’s because black is slimming. He laughed. I have cool brothers.

Take care.

The set-up: I try to watch movies at the theater in one sitting. Sometimes, this isn’t practical: drinking one of the 55-gallon drums of soda they sell at the concession stand
and expecting to make it through Titanic (all that water!) is probably foolhardy. Lately, I’ve had trouble with this because spironolactone is a pretty effective diuretic, so halfway through the movie, I had to relieve myself. I made a bee-line to the restrooms only to be stopped short. I momentarily didn’t know which one to use. Actually, this isn’t quite true; my first instinct was to use the ladies’ room, but I stopped myself from actually bursting into the ladies room. There was a brief and very disorienting sensation of confusion as I had to wrestle my brain into the mindset of my gender presentation.

At this point in time, I’m still pretty manly. I usually have some growth of beard to accommodate my electrolysis schedule, so I was in total “guy” mode when we went to this particular movie. And yet, I felt the planks of my gender presentation fall away beneath my feet. It was profoundly weird. I surmise from this episode that the hormones I’m taking are doing a big number on my brain. I also wonder about the dichotomy this suggests in the old mind/body problem. I’ve always “known” that I was a girl, or rather, that I should have been a girl, but this episode suggests that my neurochemistry DIDN’T “know” that I should have been a girl prior to being told so by hormonal intervention. Is this an example of the ineffability of consciousness divorced from the body? Is gender identity parsed and scattered through different sections of the brain, some more aware of it than others?

Y’know, I don’t know. And some of the implications of these questions trouble me.

Cheers.

Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’

‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.

‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’

–Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

All of which leads to the curious tendency of quantum mechanics to limit not only what human beings know, but what we CAN know. This may explain why Schrödinger later said of his involvement with quantum physics: “I don’t like it. I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” The irony of Schrödinger’s Cat and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle–which states that we can know either a particle’s position or its velocity, but not both–is that they were formulated by Germans. For a German scientist to throw up his hands and say “We can’t know!” rather confirms the validity of these principles to me.

Two centuries earlier, another German put a different spin on this. Immanuel Kant describes an object that is “not an object of sensible intuition.” A transcendent object, he calls it, and one that is out of the realm of observation. This is a noumenon, a thing in and of itself. And like Schrödinger’s Cat, we can’t know what it is.

I describe myself as transgendered because, from as long ago as I can remember, I always wanted to be a girl. The thing is, I don’t know what it actually IS to be a girl, nor do I know for certain that being a “girl” is, in fact, what I want. This is because of the limits of my knowledge. I certainly didn’t know what the biological differences between boys and girls were when I first expressed the desire. What “femininity” is is still a noumenon to me. I can only observe the empirical phenomena that surround “femininity” and adopt those for myself or try to generate them myself. Perhaps, by a means of psychological calculus, I can close the gap between my own gender expression and the asymptote of “femininity”. But unless that happens–and how would I know?–the cultural signifiers of “femininity” don’t mean that I am a “feminine” person. Nor do I even know that “feminine” gender identity is a monolithic, singular experience felt by everyone born female– it could be a broad spectra of experiences that are as individual as one’s own fingerprints. Ah…there’s the rub. Is there even such a thing as gender identity? Or is there only individual identity, shaped by experience and its interraction with biology? We can’t know, can we? This puts a new spin, I think, on Kate Bornstein’s realization: “I know that I’m not a man…and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably not a woman either…” I would suggest that her gender identity, like my own, is a kind of superposition. Neither male, nor female, but both at once and neither at once. If that makes any sense. To an extent, this kind of superposition creates an identity where the behavioral manifestations are largely a matter of the will of the individual, and are largely abstractions in the first place.

In any event, I’ve ceased thinking about gender identity in psychological terms. I prefer to think of it in philosophical terms. Here’s why:

The standards of care for gender reassignment assign a gatekeeper role to psychiatric professionals. Because I believe that gender identity is a noumenon, I believe that a psychiatric observer will not be able to determine the state of that identity from observable phenomena. This is doubly true given that the “wants” of the subject bid fair to skew the observable phenomena. I don’t know about you, but I’m smart enough to have read the standards of care AND the biographies of transgendered people–I know enough to “fake it” if I had to. From a philosophical point of view, any diagnosis provided from such observations are bound to include fallacies. Of course, this is a problem with all psychiatric diagnoses that don’t have their basis in actual physiology (i.e. observable phenomena). You might get similar results from tea leaves or chicken bones.

So, lacking a demonstrable psychological imperative, what legs do I have left, should I take this behavior farther? From a strictly aesthetic standpoint, I think the female body is more beautiful than the male body. (This flies in the face of my stated sexual preferences, by the way, but when it comes to sex, all cats are gray in the dark, so to speak). I would prefer to have a female body and appearance because I think it is more beautiful than a male body and appearance. It’s also a matter of free will. My body is my own–I reject the notion that what I can and can’t do with my body is governed by The State or religion or what have you. If my body is my own, what legitimate moral imperative is there to create a gatekeeper? The stock answer is the Hippocratic oath, and its directive to “first do no harm.” The hypocrisy of this stance where the elective alteration of the human body is concerned is evident in the office of every plastic surgeon in the world.

Cheers.

I also blog–infrequently–in the following locales:

http://archaeopterxy.livejournal.com

http://krelllabs.blogspot.com

http://www.myspace.com/christianne_in_leather (well, technically, there’s no blogging there at this time, but I’m there none the less, mainly so I can use the damned thing when people direct me there).

I’m also a fairly frequent contributor to the IMDB’s movie message boards, mainly on the boards devoted to horror movies and classic movies, though I’ve scaled way back on that in recent months.

I’m not going to say good luck and good riddance to 360–the frustration of using it not withstanding–because I’ve met lots of lovely people here (some, even, in real life). So in that regard, it’s been a resounding success. But for the present, look for me elsewhere.

Cheers.

Creepy.

There is a book on surviving a robot uprising, too. I’m particularly fond of its preventative precautions:

• Sudden lack of interest in menial labor.
• Unexplained disappearances.
• Unwillingness to be shut down.
• Repetitive ‘stabbing’ movements.
• Constant talk of human killing.

And:

All very sensible advice, methinks.

Some other women I admire:

Rosalind Franklin (robbed of the Nobel Prize–and perhaps immortality–because the Nobels aren’t awarded posthumously)
Artemisia Gentileschi
Mary Cassatt (Degas said “she draws like a man,” which is crap, by the way)
Flannery O’Connor (Interviewer: “Do you think the universities are stifling too many young writers?” O’Connor: “I don’t think they’re stiffling enough of them…”)

I had electro on Monday, too. Three hours of it, which was gruelling after being away from it for three months. I zapped my face with a laser at the beginning of February, which appears to have had a weakening effect on the hairs that haven’t shed. My electrologist noticed it right away, and she was able to clear about half-again the area she usually manages. “Wow, these are easy to kill today.” So even if the laser isn’t truly effective on me, it might have some use after all. Interesting…

Salut.