Keep throwing the dice...

“Addiction has been characterised as a chronic relapsing condition with a spontaneous remission rate of around five percent per annum, regardless of external intervention.”

Vailllant, G.E, quoted by Ben Goldacre in I think you’ll find it’s more complicated than that. (2014, Fourth Estate).

The road not taken

Have you ever made a decision, or shied away from one, that you have regretted the rest of your life?

Thirty years ago I was given the perfect opportunity to discover the person I wanted to be. Unfortunately it came at exactly the wrong time. Through a combination of cowardice and self-hatred, I rejected it at the time, and what I lost has haunted me more and more over the years.

In December ‘83, my first serious head-over-heels in-love relationship ended horribly when my girlfriend finally decided that she couldn’t live with someone who wanted to cross-dress and moved out while I was away abroad on a business trip. I rather went to pieces. To cap it all, my landlady decided this was her opportunity to ask me to leave and gave me notice to be gone by the New Year. All in all, it was a pretty miserable Christmas.

I moved into a flat that might best be described as a half-way house for trans-people. It was accepting, private, and, I thought, the perfect place to sort myself out. I could be who I wanted and no-one would judge me. I overlooked the fact that I was my own worst judge. I was a freak and a failure. The thought of dressing would bring back the memory of those devastating last months of our relationship when despite all our promises, everything went rapidly downhill. And so I chickened out. I threw or locked away my femme clothes. For the next five years that I remained there I stayed resolutely in male mode, while trying to quash the fantasies in my head. I even entered into a rebound relationship, largely platonic, with one of the T-girls there, a confident, striking redhead (I used to help her dye it every month). I helped out with the domestic chores: shopping, cooking, cleaning. When someone commented once that I would make someone a nice housewife, I brushed it off with a glib reply, but secretly I realised I so wanted that.

During that time, there were frequent visitors and parties. I particularly remember one young TV in her late teens or twenties who borrowed my room to change and then sat shyly in a print dress and blonde wig though the evening. I was desperately torn between wanting to put my arm around her and to be her.

Then, as things do, that period came to an end. Relationships started to get a bit strained and it was time to move on. This time it was largely my decision; I had already met L and we had an offer of somewhere else to move into.

For a long time after, when I thought back on that place, I thought about it as a refuge, a place to hide and put myself back together. In recent years, as I start to worry about the future, and what it is I really want when I will no longer be able to distract myself with work, I have started to regret it more and more as a missed opportunity to find out who I really wanted to be.

Covering your tracks or: how I learned to stop worrying and love Google Blogger.

Well OK, maybe love isn't quite the word for Blogger and Google+. They can still be irritating and contrary at times.

Before I came out online and started blogging as Susie I used to be super cautious about hiding my internet history. I would select anonymous browsing and use privacy and proxy sites like SearchPage and DuckDuckGo for trans and CD related searches, and be careful to delete my browser history afterwards.

Since I started blogging as Susie I have become a lot less paranoid (complete anonymity is a little self-defeating in a blog site, after all.)  If you're hosting your blog with Google it seems a little self-defeating to try and mask your presence from them. You just need to learn to sup with a long spoon. 
I still log out and clean up after each session, but that's more to do with good housekeeping now than worry that anyone might find out where I've been. It's also a good thing to do for other reasons,  and I'd recommend that  you read Eli Pariser'sThe Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You.

Mind you, before I discovered the blogs and people I'm currently following as Susie it was probably wise to be careful, since searches for terms like crossdressing could often bring back a lot of stuff you really wouldn't want on your PC.  It's a weird world out there.

I was searching for something  but for a long time I didn't really know what I was looking for. Support, someone I could talk to, fellow travelers, even friends. I think I've found them now.

I also found that once I'd given Susie a name and an online identity, most of the sites I used to visit no longer seemed relevant. There's only so many Tumblr sites you can see before they all begin to look the same (and might as well be, given the amount of re-posting), and even the handful of stories on FictionMania that were functionally literate seemed to tread the same tired old stereotyped fantasies. Not that I have entirely put childish things behind me: As I wrote a while back, in Outed again, there's still a part of wanting to be Susie that seems to pander to those same stereotype gender roles (and I suspect might be behind L's reluctance to meet her), which still troubles me.
Perhaps I should give her time. She's barely two months old after all.

I hate it when this happens

I had another chance to be Susie for a few hours yesterday.
I was hoping to paint my nails, and then I caught a nail and it tore off  while I was out shopping.
It rather took the shine off the idea.
I wouldn't mind so much if was on my fretting hand.

Boy Meets Girl - BBC transgender romcom

Just a quick heads up for a new BBC series, Boy Meets Girl, which starts next week (Thursday Sept 3rd).

Described as a transgender sitcom, it actually stars a  transgender actress, Rebecca Root, in the lead role.

"And about time", writes Paris Lees in this Guardian article.

You can also read interviews with Root about the series and transgender roles in film and television  in the Guardian and in the Radio Times.

Outed again.

I may have just inadvertently outed myself in a comment to  Lynn on her post at yatgb.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/the-c-word about a recent episode of Radio 4’s Late Night Woman's Hour titled Reclaiming the Nerdiverse: the wilder side of fanfic.  This was a fascinating, and sometime racy discussion of how female writers and fans are happily redefining and reinventing gender roles, for themselves and of established sf characters. So racy, in fact, that the BBC has flagged a parental warning on this episode's podcast.

Time to come clean.

           “My name is Susie and I am a science fiction fan.”

There, I’ve said it.  If that doesn’t bring a horde of local villagers rushing to storm Sometime Towers with burning pitchforks, then nothing will.

I’ve been in fandom far longer than I’ve been Susie, over 25 years now, although the germ of both those twin obsessions goes back much further, probably to when I was around 9 or 10, which seems to be a particularly formative time.

And it’s probably not a coincidence. Science fiction has a long history, going back to at least the 50s, of exploring sex and gender alternatives. Maybe it even offered some hope that things could change. If God didn’t answer my prayers that I could wake and be a girl then maybe science one day could. Bron, in Samuel Delany’s Triton, could change sex in an afternoon. The inhabitants of Winter in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness could be either male or female. More confusingly and thrillingly, characters in Theodore Surgeon’s Venus Plus X and John Varley’s The Barbie Murders elected to a sexless androgyny, neither male nor female, and somehow both.

As I wrote in my comment, sf fandom is probably one of the most LGBT friendly communities I know of. Had I actually come out as Susie (as a number of my friends there have come out as gay or transgender during that period) I don’t think anyone would have turned a hair, or been anything other than accepting and supporting. That acceptance of who you were or wanted to be among friends was and remains a large part of its appeal. There are a surprising number of trans fans and writers for such a small community, who feel no need to hide or apologise for who they are.

But what also struck me when I started blogging as Susie was that suddenly found myself in a very familiar place. Over the years, I gradually settled comfortably into fanzine fandom as my preferred area, and the mixture of the anecdotal, the humorous and the confessional that I discovered in writing and responding to fanzines I found all over again in a number of TG blogs. It was like coming home to a different place.

The Beeb followed that Woman’s Hour post discussed above with another program on gender and identity in the most recent episode of their Futureproofing series (first broadcast last Wednesday and available on iPlayer here:  Futureproofing: Identity.

Presenters Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson explored the idea that in the digital age, things like gender, sexuality and identity will become increasingly a matter of choice rather than something imposed on us by social and biological constraints. It’s already happening (this blog community being a prime example). There are now apparently some 50 different gender choices in Facebook.

But, as Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah of NY University argues towards the end of the program, one of the other things we do when we choose our own identity is also to choose a set of constraints. In choosing to be X, we chose the particular constraints and obligations that identity will operate under, different, perhaps, from the ones we were handed by the accident of birth and upbringing. 

In fact, I wonder how much it isn’t the other way around. Did I choose to be Susie, or did I invent Susie because I wanted to be subject to those constraints (clothes, appearance, fantasies) implied by her identity, rather than those of maleness? How much is this a free choice rather than a rejection, flight or escape? I don’t know. 

And it troubles me in another way. I like to think of myself as a feminist, or at least a supporter and fellow traveler. And yet being Susie, and cross-dressing, is often about embracing the same stereotypes that feminists have been fighting against since the sixties. I wonder if there will ever come a point where I feel comfortable as Susie even when I’m not dressed in overtly female clothes? I think that may be a long way to go, but it might be something worth aiming for.

A good day

Yesterday was a good day. In fact it's a been a good week all told.
L was away for the day and warned in advance what time she would be back (she was late - she's always late).
I did an early shop and trawl of the local charity shops in man mode. I was rootling around in a box of odds and sods and found a white box. When I looked inside there was an ash blonde bob wig inside. The box was marked at £3.45 (!) so there was no way it wasn't coming home with me.
And Friday I left work a bit earlier than normal which gave me an hour to trawl the shops before they closed. I was hoping to find a pair a flats, but nothing approaching my size (instead I found a pair of black flats, size 8, in Sainsbury of all places). But browsing the racks in Helen Douglas  house I found a white peplum dress marked at a fiver. No way was that not coming home either.
I don't have a problem buying female clothes as a male. I realised a long time ago that most assistants really don't care or pay much attention, and attempted excuses that you're buying for someone else (who just happens to be your size) are likely to be pretty transparent. A sale is a sale. If there is private gossip in the local charity shops that I'm the guy who sometimes buys women's clothes, then I've not heard it, and frankly I no longer care.
The weekend before that I ventured into town - again looking for some more comfortable flats - and instead found a stunning red peplum dress. (Are you beginning to detect a pattern here?) It's a bit short (mid thigh) and racy and not something you'd go to the shops in, but who says we have to practical and sensible all the time. It's also rather low in the back. I really ought to get a backless bra or one of those multiway things, as I have no natural assets up top. I must have a look on amazon.

I've noticed I go through cyclic clothing obsessions, often based on something I've noticed other women wearing that has struck me as particularly stylish or attractive. A while ago it was cowl neck sweaters and sweater dresses (I would still love to find one in soft white wool), then it was shrugs. I don't know where the peplum thing started, but it crystallised with the girl on the bus on the way in to work. I usually sit behind her, and noticed after a couple of week that she had a set of around seven or eight very stylish  jackets and tops that she would cycle through. One of those was a white zip front peplum jacket (she has another in orange and another in a nice floral design) that I would be tempted to mug her for if it wasn't at least a size too small and she didn't look so good in it.

So anyway, home again, home again, with whole day to myself, a couple of new outfits and a new wig to try out. Can a day get better?
Weirdly though, while I spent most of the day catching up on Susie's blogs (I have my first ever comment. Yay! Thank you Lynne) I settled for a rather more restrained black top and leggings with a pair of low(ish) heels.

Even having to change back, scrub my face off and tidy everything away by mid-evening when I expected L to return, to have her turn up over an hour later, didn't manage to kill my mood.