Longer update tomorrow, on the 2 month mark on T, I promise. Still. I knew my voice had changed again, but damn, this is bizarre. So, so cool.

Here's me at six weeks on T!

Fairly reliably gendered male by strangers, now. It's a huge shift, that started just about two weeks ago, now.

I just got back from a trip to Baltimore to see my love, which was delightful, and healing, and so very comforting. So, I have a couple of gender-related tales from the road for you.

We went road tripping to Philadelphia (yay! I got to accompany Hanne on part of her book tour!), and stopped somewhere in Delaware for gas station treats and beverages, and to trade off driving duty. The woman behind the counter referred to the both of us as "ladies", and then looked at me again and apologized all over the place for calling me a lady. Thus marks the first time someone has apologized to me for gendering me female. It has been at least a month since someone has apologized for gendering me male. I told her, "Don't worry, I get that sometimes," which gave me a fit of the internal giggles.

Airport security was interesting. On the way there, the person checking my bags was only checking boarding passes, but looked at the name on mine and got a befuddled look on her face, and asked to see my ID. She still looked befuddled, but after a few looks back and forth between me and my photo, she just took my bags. The person whose job it is to check tickets and ID took a long time trying to sort it out, and I said "Yes, it really is me," and she let me go. I figured if she needed to know anything further, she could ask.

On the way home, the ticket-checking agent got a very strange look on her face and kept looking from ticket, to license, to me, to ticket, to license to me, and her expression was so priceless I started laughing, and said "Yep, that is really me."

She laughed back at me. "Lisa? Your name is really Lisa?"

I laughed again. "Yep. My legal name is Lisa, but I'm having that changed soon."

She said "Whatever makes you happy," and sent me on my way. I am fairly sure, actually, that she simply took me as male through the entire interaction. A guy with a fairly silly name for a guy, yes, but a guy. Sitting there, holding my driver's license in her hand, with "Lisa Marie" as the name on it, and an "F" gender marker -- scrutinizing it for signs of ticket fraud or anything -- and she still took me as male.

It delighted me, I must say.

Oh, also? Definite whiskers. Yep. Upper lip and chin. German Beard Competition, here I come!

This is getting impressive. You can really see the facial changes in the last week or so. Getting read as male nearly always among strangers, these days.

One of the good things about transitioning to male, is that the wardrobe awkwardness is not a big thing. Guys dress badly, routinely.

So I went for a run in the woods today, on purpose instead of because I absolutely had to after work one day. So I dressed for it. This involved wearing shorts, outside of the house, for the first time in a decade or more. Awesome.

It also involved socks, visible, because, you know, shorts. I spent a few minutes thinking like this: "Ok, I don't have any long gym socks to wear with my high tops. I can't wear the short ones, that would hurt. But ... black work socks, with high tops and shorts? Won't that look a little funny?"

And it occurred to me, "Oh. I'm a guy. Who gives a shit?"

Good, good run, it was.

It is amazing how many things are daily necessities, now, that don't ever show up on my official to-do list. Such as:

* Obtain, cook, eat, and clean up after vast amounts of food, several times a day. (I have not been a "three meals a day" person since I stopped cooking for others).
* Move. I need to move. Official work-outs, non-official work-outs, runs through the forest, bouncing in place, sudden and vigorous walks, sudden and vigorous sprints. Good thing I'm almost always in my high top chucks.
* What's a socially polite way of saying "jerking off"? Yeah, insert polite phrase here. Definitely going through puberty, yes I am.

I am a typical academic, in that I am used to paying attention to my physical body when I can, and ignoring it when I get too busy. Not any more. If I don't take care of the above three things on a regular basis, bad things happen. Particularly, I get either depressed and overcome by a feeling of malaise, or I get really god damned irritable. When I say (out loud or to myself) "Oh for FUCK'S SAKE!" more than three times in an hour, that's a pretty good sign that I need to get out of the chair I'm sitting in and go run, or at least do a few push-ups. And get some damned protein into my body. I have the above three on a mental to-do list, and try to make sure I take care of things before I leave the house in the morning; if I can only get to two out of three, I know where I'm going to be struggling throughout a work-day.

Also, add to the list:

* Emotional processing from this huge change that I'm undergoing, complete with facing down internal dragons and demons, and processing social interactions, both among strangers (and how they're reading me on a day to day basis), and friends and family and colleagues and acquaintances who know I'm trans.
* Gender 101 and Trans 101 for a wide variety of people.
* Inspect my physical self regularly for any further changes (ooo, is the leg hair getting thicker? is my voice changing more yet? how 'bout them shoulders, eh?).

And really, it's a wonder I'm able to get anything else done, aside from this transition. Seriously.

I know I did vids yesterday, but I wanted to keep up with the picture project, and haven't done one in a week now. So, here you go! Here's four weeks on T!



Taught my last classes of the semester today, got my final exams ready to roll. I'm feeling pretty damned good about life right now. Grading hell week, but at the end of it, I get to go see my sweet Hanne.

Four weeks on T! That means you get a video! What the hell, have two! The second one is just for fun -- a voice change comparison.

( Videos under here )

Wasn't that fun?

I'm beginning to be read as male a lot more frequently. Went out yesterday, first to the Inman Park Festival, then to a concert at Eddie's Attic, and was called "sir" by nearly everyone who gendered me -- people selling me stuff, people asking to borrow a light, the guy who sold me my ticket to the concert (who then got quite a shock when he subsequently ID'd me). I notice that guys at the festival ask me for stuff a lot more readily than they used to -- where did I get the water, where did I get the gyro, can they bum a light. I would sometimes get this when I was read as female, but less frequently, and it usually came with "Excuse me, but..." This was just "Hey, where's the gyro shack?" sorts of stuff.

The one person who did gender me female was the woman who sat down next to me at the concert. We chatted for a couple of hours, and it was bizarre to me, after being called "sir" all day that she would automatically assume I was female. After the concert, when I stood up, she became flabbergasted, and could not take her eyes off my torso, and the conversation ended quite awkwardly. You know, binder, good fitting T-shirt, and broad shoulders -- yeah, I have a very male torso. I have no idea what she thought of it all. It was actually quite fun, shaking up her assumptions that way.

I've noticed that the more my body and face and voice change, the more I *like* them ... which is huge. I never have, you know, not once, in my entire life, or at least, not since I hit puberty the first time. The disconnect I've always felt between the person I feel I am and the person I see in the mirror is going away, and it is so, so good. Of course, it makes the female elements of my anatomy all the more troublesome by comparison - like when you buy a new couch, and you suddenly realize all the rest of your furniture sucks -- but one thing at a time, not every damned thing at once, right?

Don't really have an update for you, partly because, well, not much is happening -- just hanging in there, getting used to the changes, figuring out how to cope with the sudden onset of extreme ADHD for a solid 48 hours every week, and ... trying to slog my way through the end of the semester.

Graded for hours today, trying to keep caught up before the onslaught of finals hit next week, and I'm going out for beers tonight, because I need a work break.

But! I have a photo for you! My nose is slightly different! You are most likely bored of all of these photos! Thus I shall put this one behind a cut, for once! KTHNXBYE!

( Read more... )