addendum
Mind blown.
Cancer is giving me the sex change I always wanted but which the world would refuse to give. Even today the level of BS you have to go through would stop me. Asking me to pass for male without changing the physical sex markers is just ridiculous. I'm very female. It's like that person I know in town who flips between male and female depending on if he's dealing with his income or his social life. He's got such heavily masculinized features he can only come out looking like a man in woman's dress. Even if he took hormones he'd still be too big, too coarse, and too heavy featured to pass. So he's both. He has an alter ego, the night when he can really be himself and if he's around nice, sweet people who get him, they'll go along with it and treat him like a gorgeous girl. the only time he gets any dysphoria then, is when he checks his makeup in the mirror. so then he can truly just be the person he feels to be, express his most proud and natural self.
I could certainly go around in drag, even demand that people constantly check their pronouns. change my name. change my ID. The laws of this country allow that. I can walk into men's rooms in skinny jeans and pull an STP device out at the urinal. What would they think then? Lady boy? Transgender woman. Of course. They'd think I was a transman. What would they say and do? Well they would either ignore me and avoid me or bully me, eh? But I'd have to give up the mane of golden hair I've put so much of my heart into.
I love my girlfriend's hair (she's my physical body, in case you missed that) more than anything else about her. I don't like her genitals at all but I do not want to part with her hair. I cried when I thought chemo would take my hair. I imagine myself as a long haired hippy in the future if I did transition. But just now this mind blowing thought came along. Chemo may yet take away my hair. In fact, especially so if my tits go. They like to give you a course of cancer specific chemo along with your amputations. Breast cancer chemo and lung cancer chemo are the hair stealers. you really can't expect to get back the hair you had. Especially, in my case, with no estrogen. So cancer has taken my ovaries and womb, and good riddance. I wanted them gone in my 20s. I even wrote an article about it to a women's magazine. I have a copy of it in my files. it's not online anymore I don't think. Cancer could and might take my breasts, giving me, finally, freedom from those wobbles. I was always so grateful they were small, till I got fat and then I hated those milk bags depending from my chest like globules of interference. Hated. Hated the sight, the feel, the intrusion, the strapping needed for sheer comfort. as much as I ever hated that nasty stinky oyster in my crotch.
That's one I think about too. How much I hate female genitals but love and adore the sight of all other things female. Not on me, understand, but on another (or in the mirror, I can disassociate enough for that and it gave me a lot of company.) So I figured, hey, I must be gay, and worked hard at enjoying men. I mean, I liked them to hang out with. I could get into sex if I stepped vicariously into his role, and I did. it always fell flat, eventually, because I didn't get turned on to look at him and it just kind of got dull. Worse yet, if I got a little fat, and I always did when I was feeling happy in a new relationship, the mirror woman stopped turning me on. In the really love cases vs the "friends with benefits" relationships, the man eventually clued in that I wasn't being turned on by him. I didn't want to watch a strip tease, maybe? Or he caught me stealing glances in the mirror? Or he noticed something else? who cares. It failed. I came across as fake to some of them and now maybe I get why. I've been so confused for so long about that one. how did that person get me so wrong? They felt my gender issue too, but for them, it translated as some vague sense of artificiality or self obsession. My actions weren't as important as this instinctive sense, as they usually aren't. I mean, you know, the person you're looking at is offering you something of value and you say no purely because something about that person was off. The act was one of generosity or caring, but your sense of them override the real-world evidence they offered.
I know why. Assholes study nice people so they can copy them. they'll invest quite a lot of nice time or money being good to you to rope you in. So the primary defense is to trust that unformed sense of unease or uncertainty.
Yeah, so cancer is at least jump starting a transition. I just have to navigate the events ahead of me with extreme care, consideration, and love and compassion for the man who's been here with me through this dark time and come so far from who he was when we met. I dunno, he might find someone else he'd rather be with and move away, and that's okay too. I would be hurt if he's looking, but not if she just kind of filtered her way into our lives and became his woman. Actually, in fact, I'd be happy to join a bigamous relationship as one of her two husbands and I wouldn't even require sex from her, just to enjoy the fruits of her gender the same as he. or I could leave them together and go my way. As a man I really know I wouldn't have anywhere near the kind of trouble getting work. That's been the biggest handicap of my life, the inability to find work. I have said it again and again, it's because my body is female. Even before the dialog about gender dysphoria existed, I phased it exactly that way. I have time and again been denied employment for my gender and that in spite of laws against such discrimination. You can make the laws, but enforcement is a whole other ball of wax and unless the job situation is very well ordered and documented, forget it. Especially when the primary problem is you can't get the training in the first place. I remember applying to a class on wood working. The two people out of the whole field of applicants who were denied were the only two women, in a time of rampant affirmative action. One of us was even a racial minority!!!! We saw it. We fumed. We were helpless to fix it and had no idea how anyway. We did go to the office of the tech school to complain but came off being treated as whiners and there just wasn't anyone in my social world either who supported my outrage. I remember the time in the carpenter's union when I wanted to be a carpenter. The only work they had was hard physical work that required the strength of someone who'd gone through male puberty and I just wasn't quite there. I know now I could have gotten there in a week or two, but those men weren't going to wait on me they might a skinny young man with equally eager intentions. I dropped out of that one too. Remember now, I still have estrogen coursing through my body, PMS every month, I'm impoverished and feeling like a failure, riddled with insecurity and being told constantly how to make myself better by everyone around me. That's a lot of stress to carry. Plus I was managing my own household, paying rent and utilities from my meager welfare check, cleaning and cooking for myself, doing the yard work, the repair work (I rented such cheap dives I had to do my own fixit work or live with disrepair,) and any mechanic work too. I didn't have a car. didn't have disposable income. Coudln't afford new clothes or many thrift store ones. Saved up to buy steel toed boots, I did. I was very cute in my boyish clothes. Men on a hot day, they take off their shirts and let the breeze dry the sweat of their chests. I do that and I can be arrested and most surely will be the recipient of salacious expressions from one or more males in the region. I have tits. They have dicks. Please, cancer, take my tits too?
So if cancer takes my tits, my ovaries and my hair, and menopause gives me masculine characteristics, can I just go ahead and accept it when people "mistake" me for male, and go along with it and encourage it and tell them my name is Yan and I'm pleased to meet you ma'am? if it happened that way, would Dan just adapt to his new wife and giggle behind his hand as he finds out people think we're roommates or maybe a gay couple and nobody cares?
I'd still love to keep him along. He's a friend, and a family member and an obligation all rolled into one. I care about him enough too to want to see him happy. Call it a fraternal love. I think he loves me more like a sibling too, or his mom or something. Not really sure. He isn't one to chew on his feelings or ponder his motivations or even recognize his own behaviours. He's a bit like a pet that way. Just a lot more clever and useful than other species, and far more capable of coping with the human world on his own if he must. But here's the thing, he doesn't cope. He can focus and get his act together, but then he needs a reason to keep it together, because it's goddamn hard and unnatural for him and for anyone it's damned hard to do it on your own. It takes two people to keep the job and the home together and functioning properly. Whether they split both, merge both, share both, assign one to each or pay someone to do one of them, it takes two people. Throw in a little dysfunction or a lack of aptitude for one of those roles, and a solo person is fucked. I was fucked for income, he would fall apart living alone. He never does it for long. He's done it briefly setting up a homestead and spent most of that doing the setup. Soon's the work was done he got restless, found someone to come be part of his scene, and put up with abuse to not be alone.
I guess if it happens gradually enough and naturally enough he'd rather adapt than start all over with a new person or face the rest of his life alone. I sure would, but facing my life alone is not as horrible for me. I could find work as a nomadic man, I believe it. Really believe it. I've seen job opportunities that say I could. I just wasn't able to take them because I was neither nomad nor male. Jobs I'd like, because I like that sort of thing, like digging holes, picking crops (I don't like hoeing rows that much but they hire women for that one), driving long distances, figuring out a machine, making things out of materials, mucking out stalls, swinging a pick, using shop tools. god I love all those things. All boy jobs. All the kind of work you pick up temporarily and in different locations. So yeah, i could go it alone as I've done a bunch of times. But so much easier to do with a friend at your side, committed to making success together and sharing it. It's not about sex or romance, you see, an old marriage. You are sold into thinking you should want those things, and you can see how nice it could be, but it's not your priority anymore. You just want a comfortable friend you're allowed to live with and not get teased or otherwise bullied over it. Even loving your dog too much could get a person harassed in my time. "did you see that? she kisses her dog on the lips! Ewwww!" "Heh, he loves that dog a little too much, know what I mean? Hey maybe we should call the spca and get her rescued, know what I mean? Hey Mister, are you a dog fucker? heheheheeheeh!" Yep. that's what people were like. I remember it too well. You can even see it on vintage footage from movies and television if you watch for it. It was often used as the motivation for psychotic characters becoming crazy! Yet it still didn't occur to anyone to put a lid on it. Not until those two boys shot up their highschool in the late 90s. Klebold and Harris. They gave their life and the lives of their schoolmates as sacrifices to bullying, to force the dialog and create the change we see now. I know they were vilified, I heard it, but to me, they were heroes. those kids they shot, they were the same kids of my own high school who supported the torture even when they didn't do it personally. I know, I know, one or two kids there managed to "pass" as normal without feeling okay about my bullying but let's face it, just 3 "normals" choosing to stand in front of me and scold my bully, then being kind to me on a daily basis, would have solved the problem permanently. Just three. I'm dead sure of it. If they were the "popular" girls. But no. they giggled behind their hands and talked about it to each other. so yeah, they were worthy sacrifices to this terrible scourge that has killed so many bright, fascinating, entertaining, and creative people for so long. bullying kills. The victims killed back. I am not sorry.
Damn I rambled right into another topic and damned myself thereby for all eternity. Anyone who felt sympathy for me till now has snorted in disgust. I sure hope if you know me personally, that I'm dead when you read this.
Cancer is giving me the sex change I always wanted but which the world would refuse to give. Even today the level of BS you have to go through would stop me. Asking me to pass for male without changing the physical sex markers is just ridiculous. I'm very female. It's like that person I know in town who flips between male and female depending on if he's dealing with his income or his social life. He's got such heavily masculinized features he can only come out looking like a man in woman's dress. Even if he took hormones he'd still be too big, too coarse, and too heavy featured to pass. So he's both. He has an alter ego, the night when he can really be himself and if he's around nice, sweet people who get him, they'll go along with it and treat him like a gorgeous girl. the only time he gets any dysphoria then, is when he checks his makeup in the mirror. so then he can truly just be the person he feels to be, express his most proud and natural self.
I could certainly go around in drag, even demand that people constantly check their pronouns. change my name. change my ID. The laws of this country allow that. I can walk into men's rooms in skinny jeans and pull an STP device out at the urinal. What would they think then? Lady boy? Transgender woman. Of course. They'd think I was a transman. What would they say and do? Well they would either ignore me and avoid me or bully me, eh? But I'd have to give up the mane of golden hair I've put so much of my heart into.
I love my girlfriend's hair (she's my physical body, in case you missed that) more than anything else about her. I don't like her genitals at all but I do not want to part with her hair. I cried when I thought chemo would take my hair. I imagine myself as a long haired hippy in the future if I did transition. But just now this mind blowing thought came along. Chemo may yet take away my hair. In fact, especially so if my tits go. They like to give you a course of cancer specific chemo along with your amputations. Breast cancer chemo and lung cancer chemo are the hair stealers. you really can't expect to get back the hair you had. Especially, in my case, with no estrogen. So cancer has taken my ovaries and womb, and good riddance. I wanted them gone in my 20s. I even wrote an article about it to a women's magazine. I have a copy of it in my files. it's not online anymore I don't think. Cancer could and might take my breasts, giving me, finally, freedom from those wobbles. I was always so grateful they were small, till I got fat and then I hated those milk bags depending from my chest like globules of interference. Hated. Hated the sight, the feel, the intrusion, the strapping needed for sheer comfort. as much as I ever hated that nasty stinky oyster in my crotch.
That's one I think about too. How much I hate female genitals but love and adore the sight of all other things female. Not on me, understand, but on another (or in the mirror, I can disassociate enough for that and it gave me a lot of company.) So I figured, hey, I must be gay, and worked hard at enjoying men. I mean, I liked them to hang out with. I could get into sex if I stepped vicariously into his role, and I did. it always fell flat, eventually, because I didn't get turned on to look at him and it just kind of got dull. Worse yet, if I got a little fat, and I always did when I was feeling happy in a new relationship, the mirror woman stopped turning me on. In the really love cases vs the "friends with benefits" relationships, the man eventually clued in that I wasn't being turned on by him. I didn't want to watch a strip tease, maybe? Or he caught me stealing glances in the mirror? Or he noticed something else? who cares. It failed. I came across as fake to some of them and now maybe I get why. I've been so confused for so long about that one. how did that person get me so wrong? They felt my gender issue too, but for them, it translated as some vague sense of artificiality or self obsession. My actions weren't as important as this instinctive sense, as they usually aren't. I mean, you know, the person you're looking at is offering you something of value and you say no purely because something about that person was off. The act was one of generosity or caring, but your sense of them override the real-world evidence they offered.
I know why. Assholes study nice people so they can copy them. they'll invest quite a lot of nice time or money being good to you to rope you in. So the primary defense is to trust that unformed sense of unease or uncertainty.
Yeah, so cancer is at least jump starting a transition. I just have to navigate the events ahead of me with extreme care, consideration, and love and compassion for the man who's been here with me through this dark time and come so far from who he was when we met. I dunno, he might find someone else he'd rather be with and move away, and that's okay too. I would be hurt if he's looking, but not if she just kind of filtered her way into our lives and became his woman. Actually, in fact, I'd be happy to join a bigamous relationship as one of her two husbands and I wouldn't even require sex from her, just to enjoy the fruits of her gender the same as he. or I could leave them together and go my way. As a man I really know I wouldn't have anywhere near the kind of trouble getting work. That's been the biggest handicap of my life, the inability to find work. I have said it again and again, it's because my body is female. Even before the dialog about gender dysphoria existed, I phased it exactly that way. I have time and again been denied employment for my gender and that in spite of laws against such discrimination. You can make the laws, but enforcement is a whole other ball of wax and unless the job situation is very well ordered and documented, forget it. Especially when the primary problem is you can't get the training in the first place. I remember applying to a class on wood working. The two people out of the whole field of applicants who were denied were the only two women, in a time of rampant affirmative action. One of us was even a racial minority!!!! We saw it. We fumed. We were helpless to fix it and had no idea how anyway. We did go to the office of the tech school to complain but came off being treated as whiners and there just wasn't anyone in my social world either who supported my outrage. I remember the time in the carpenter's union when I wanted to be a carpenter. The only work they had was hard physical work that required the strength of someone who'd gone through male puberty and I just wasn't quite there. I know now I could have gotten there in a week or two, but those men weren't going to wait on me they might a skinny young man with equally eager intentions. I dropped out of that one too. Remember now, I still have estrogen coursing through my body, PMS every month, I'm impoverished and feeling like a failure, riddled with insecurity and being told constantly how to make myself better by everyone around me. That's a lot of stress to carry. Plus I was managing my own household, paying rent and utilities from my meager welfare check, cleaning and cooking for myself, doing the yard work, the repair work (I rented such cheap dives I had to do my own fixit work or live with disrepair,) and any mechanic work too. I didn't have a car. didn't have disposable income. Coudln't afford new clothes or many thrift store ones. Saved up to buy steel toed boots, I did. I was very cute in my boyish clothes. Men on a hot day, they take off their shirts and let the breeze dry the sweat of their chests. I do that and I can be arrested and most surely will be the recipient of salacious expressions from one or more males in the region. I have tits. They have dicks. Please, cancer, take my tits too?
So if cancer takes my tits, my ovaries and my hair, and menopause gives me masculine characteristics, can I just go ahead and accept it when people "mistake" me for male, and go along with it and encourage it and tell them my name is Yan and I'm pleased to meet you ma'am? if it happened that way, would Dan just adapt to his new wife and giggle behind his hand as he finds out people think we're roommates or maybe a gay couple and nobody cares?
I'd still love to keep him along. He's a friend, and a family member and an obligation all rolled into one. I care about him enough too to want to see him happy. Call it a fraternal love. I think he loves me more like a sibling too, or his mom or something. Not really sure. He isn't one to chew on his feelings or ponder his motivations or even recognize his own behaviours. He's a bit like a pet that way. Just a lot more clever and useful than other species, and far more capable of coping with the human world on his own if he must. But here's the thing, he doesn't cope. He can focus and get his act together, but then he needs a reason to keep it together, because it's goddamn hard and unnatural for him and for anyone it's damned hard to do it on your own. It takes two people to keep the job and the home together and functioning properly. Whether they split both, merge both, share both, assign one to each or pay someone to do one of them, it takes two people. Throw in a little dysfunction or a lack of aptitude for one of those roles, and a solo person is fucked. I was fucked for income, he would fall apart living alone. He never does it for long. He's done it briefly setting up a homestead and spent most of that doing the setup. Soon's the work was done he got restless, found someone to come be part of his scene, and put up with abuse to not be alone.
I guess if it happens gradually enough and naturally enough he'd rather adapt than start all over with a new person or face the rest of his life alone. I sure would, but facing my life alone is not as horrible for me. I could find work as a nomadic man, I believe it. Really believe it. I've seen job opportunities that say I could. I just wasn't able to take them because I was neither nomad nor male. Jobs I'd like, because I like that sort of thing, like digging holes, picking crops (I don't like hoeing rows that much but they hire women for that one), driving long distances, figuring out a machine, making things out of materials, mucking out stalls, swinging a pick, using shop tools. god I love all those things. All boy jobs. All the kind of work you pick up temporarily and in different locations. So yeah, i could go it alone as I've done a bunch of times. But so much easier to do with a friend at your side, committed to making success together and sharing it. It's not about sex or romance, you see, an old marriage. You are sold into thinking you should want those things, and you can see how nice it could be, but it's not your priority anymore. You just want a comfortable friend you're allowed to live with and not get teased or otherwise bullied over it. Even loving your dog too much could get a person harassed in my time. "did you see that? she kisses her dog on the lips! Ewwww!" "Heh, he loves that dog a little too much, know what I mean? Hey maybe we should call the spca and get her rescued, know what I mean? Hey Mister, are you a dog fucker? heheheheeheeh!" Yep. that's what people were like. I remember it too well. You can even see it on vintage footage from movies and television if you watch for it. It was often used as the motivation for psychotic characters becoming crazy! Yet it still didn't occur to anyone to put a lid on it. Not until those two boys shot up their highschool in the late 90s. Klebold and Harris. They gave their life and the lives of their schoolmates as sacrifices to bullying, to force the dialog and create the change we see now. I know they were vilified, I heard it, but to me, they were heroes. those kids they shot, they were the same kids of my own high school who supported the torture even when they didn't do it personally. I know, I know, one or two kids there managed to "pass" as normal without feeling okay about my bullying but let's face it, just 3 "normals" choosing to stand in front of me and scold my bully, then being kind to me on a daily basis, would have solved the problem permanently. Just three. I'm dead sure of it. If they were the "popular" girls. But no. they giggled behind their hands and talked about it to each other. so yeah, they were worthy sacrifices to this terrible scourge that has killed so many bright, fascinating, entertaining, and creative people for so long. bullying kills. The victims killed back. I am not sorry.
Damn I rambled right into another topic and damned myself thereby for all eternity. Anyone who felt sympathy for me till now has snorted in disgust. I sure hope if you know me personally, that I'm dead when you read this.