I had a friend online today mention the word ‘lifestyle.’ I read a number of transitioning blogs as well as stuff about transitioning to try and mentally prepare myself as much as possible. I don’t think that there is anything that can, but there are a few stories that tend to stand out in my mind. One of the first blogs that I read on a regular basis was by a woman who I started really reading about the time that they got a facial feminization surgery. Eventually, I followed their online journey until they went to the Suporn Clinic out in Thailand to complete the sexual reassignment surgery. As many of us do, she had a wife and children. The wife had started talking again to a guy that the wife knew in high school.
They fell back in love and wound up getting married. Here’s the deal though. They wanted the returning woman from the Suporn Clinic to take care of the kids on the honeymoon. The alternate catch is they decided that inviting the woman whose blog I was following (that fathered the children) to the wedding to be a ‘distraction.’ This was after she had gotten excited, picked out a dress and everything,. So, they actually went from the wedding to the house of someone that they had not invited to the wedding in order to drop off the kids before whisking off to a honeymoon. Really? Is that the way that you treat …anyone? With many people after the surgery (or as far as they go to be comfortable ) is completed, there is often a feeling of what now? This gets back to the whole term of ‘lifestyle.’
I was reading recently about a friend’s blog on here where there was a bisexual man who regularly dressed in women’s clothes. They married another bisexual woman who was initially very understanding. Before the transition to female, everyone loved this person. After she was fully female, then the old crowd ( including the bisexual wife) kind of flittered away. No one could really feel out why there had been such a seismic shift in a situation where everyone had been very supportive, tolerant, and loving towards this person previously (and now shunned them.)
On this, I got to thinking about quite a bit about what had actually changed. There is absolutely nothing threatening to anyone about a gay man who regularly wears women clothes. Women are free to hang out because he has no interest in them sexually. They can pick out clothes, do make-up, and never have to worry about the one thing that this all gets down too. Competition. Women are raised almost since birth to be competitive with other women. It may not seem like a big shift from a gay or bisexual man in a dress to an actual woman however to other women, this change can occur on a Richter scale. It is one thing to watch a gay man in a dress flirt with other gay men or bisexual women. If you are a woman and not interested in gay men or bisexual woman, then the parameters are clearly defined. Also, it is all the benefits of friendship with out any of the drawbacks that often occur in female friendships. Once, that gay or bisexual man in a dress becomes another woman, then all of the sudden the same rules apply to this woman that apply to every other woman. You may have loved her as a homosexual or bisexual cross dresser, but may not even know them or trust them as a woman. In a way, it is the best validation that you can get that you are actually now female in the eyes of other women.
The other issue with the term lifestyle is the unfortunate side effect of the transitioner perhaps enjoying the ‘lifestyle’ aspect of it too much. Rightly or wrongly, we live in a world dominated by a twenty four hour news cycle. If we are also honest, attention is a bit of an aphrodisiac. When in a transitioning ‘lifestyle,’ their can be a lot of wanted as well as unwanted attention. You can actually get used to that. It is like a drug. After everything is over, you can find yourself needing it. The thing is that the mind wants to achieve a certain level of equilibrium. I have seen “Changed from man to woman” be told as part of a person’s life story as breathlessly as “Moved from Indiana to Iowa.” It was just something that kind of happened. People generally will naturally drift to focusing back on their own lives once yours has finally been ‘sorted out.’
In short, congratulations, you have achieved your goal. You are now the gender that you always knew you were and people accept you. Wonderful, isn’t it? The trouble sometimes is that the process of transitioning is exactly what gave you that feeling of attention that you on some level needed. Transitioned means that the ‘transitioning lifestyle (if you got into it as such)’ is now over.
In short, I have seen people unable to adequately deal with the ‘lack of turbulence and drama’ in their lives. It is like a drug that they have to recover from. I read a blog once from a woman that was entitled “READ THIS BEFORE YOU TRANSITION!!!” Basically once they had the sexual reassignment surgery, they went off on the community for encouraging them to transition in the first place. Specifically, they considered being a woman absolutely useless because they had failed to achieve a clitoral orgasm and men had apparently been enjoying them. I read the blog several times and wondered more of the exact circumstances of everything. For instance, they admitted at one point that wearing women’s clothes gave them a sexual thrill in ‘the beginning.’ I am guessing after the hormone replacement therapy, that ‘thrill’ sort of wore off. They said that they wished they had been encouraged to explore their femininity in other ways than becoming a woman. Part of me wondered if they had cut corners or said what they believed needed to be heard in order to achieve a result. There is nothing at all wrong with being a transvestite, That is different than actually being a transsexual. A sexual thrill from wearing women’s clothing would seem to be the textbook definition of being a transvestite. That particular thrill is hard (excuse the pun) to achieve after hormone replacement therapy and impossible to achieve after the sexual reassignment.
The whole thing made me wonder if I was even reading a true account. If achieving an orgasm as a woman was your entire reasoning and you consider being a woman to be useless after not achieving orgasm, then there is an excellent possibility that you never had the slightest inclination as what ‘being a woman’ meant in the first place. I read the blog first nearly seven years ago and thought about its ‘warning’ ever since. It is like the claim that a Genie ‘twists’ your wish. This is person to whom the Genie said “OK, you’re now a woman” and they were left living out a wish that they did not understand in the first place. As I have mentioned before, The Genie merely grants the wish. They provided the service. They do not take responsibility for ensuring your everlasting happiness as a result of the wish that you made.
I have worked for internet service providers. You merely make sure that the internet is active in a person’s home. Ideally, the customers now believe that you are responsible for their router, wireless, and well as their computer and every other device in their home properly getting internet. It is amazing how quickly people will give up any sense of personal responsibility on anything. If you ask them to do something over the phone, it is a relief because now you are immediately responsible for seemingly everything that happens after you give that instruction.
People love to be on the last end of any circuit of responsibility. It is like the wide receiver position in football. The level of personal responsibility in that position boils down to next to nothing. They catch a ball and run a pre prescribed route. They are quick to point out that they did not call the play. They did not throw the ball. They merely had to be in the right place at the right time and had to rely on everyone else to get them to the completion of a successful play. If anything goes bad, then it is the quarterback’s interception or a quarterback’s completion percentage that is affected. It was every last year or the year before that a wide receiver for the Buffalo Bills dropped a ball and clearly messed up. Later on, he tweeted “Why you got to do me this way, God?” It makes you wonder when personal responsibility is accepted anymore.
Again, I am not any kind of activist, I don’t really plan on starting to be one. I want to transition. I want to be a woman. That will not make me any kind of expert on gender issues. That will not make me a critic who sees gender in everything. At least, I don’t think that I will. I want to get to the other side, then I want to be forgotten about as far as it ever happening. There fore, I don’t think I will be using the term lifestyle unless I get impossibility turned on to Dominant/submissive relationships. Trust me, they use that word with pride all the time.
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The main thing is not to get trapped on mountaintops. You’ll freeze to death or wither away trying to re-capture it. When the apostles saw ghosts on the mountaintop, they wanted to live there forever. Jesus encouraged them to come down from the mountaintop. I worked in the Philippines on a corporate account for a while. I was provided with all my needs and seen as a rich important American. It last a few months. It got addictive. I was sad when I had to go home and just be me. It took a while to adjust. Through that experience, I feel like I learned a lot about having to let things go or forget about them all together in order to just move on. I don’t know what my transition experience will be like, but I certainly do not want it to be a ‘lifestyle.’ I want it to be a journey and not simply a stop. Again, no real answers.
Hopefully, till tomorrow.