Differently Wired

Yes, it's been a long time since the last post. Sorry about that. More about that a bit later.

Meanwhile, in deference to this Thursday's Transgender Day of Visibility on 31 March, I have finally taken a step that I've been thinking about doing for a long time since I became a member of my company's Pride Network committee, and finally came out to my fellow committee members as bi-gender/gender fluid by sharing a version of the picture below on a Teams chat. 

The opportunity came after the end of one our our Pride Network virtual coffee mornings (I prefer real coffee) in which we flagged upcoming event days for the month to the members including TDoV and fielded a bit of discussion about the different descriptions and pronouns within the trans spectrum. (Well-meaning and supportive cis allies have a fear of 'getting it wrong' and being called out/cancelled after reading too many scare stories on social and redtop media. It's such a shame when it really boils down to 'don't ask a trans colleague  or friend something you'd consider intrusive or rude to ask anyone else'.)

Anyway, when we talked afterwards about how the meeting had gone, I got the opportunity that it had never been quite the right moment for before to introduce them to  Susie. (Though I've still to actually tell them her name.)  It's something that had been nagging at me for a while as a feeling of mild imposter syndrome, being a member of a Pride Network intended to encourage to feel safe about being out and open at work and yet not feeling ready to do so myself. It's still only the committee - five other people - so far. Whether and when I extend that wider is another matter, and frankly I don't see how that would make much difference to how I work.

Back to that long gap between posts: 

Can you forget about your transness? 

I don’t think you can stop being trans, or forget that you are trans/bi-gender/fluid/NB or how you think about about yourself.

But it seems that the importance, and the need or even desire to express that part of yourself can wax and wane. 

It’s been  while. Nothing drastic, but between the cold, the weather, various health problems (more L’s than mine, though that's little consolation) and current affairs, the opportunities or indeed enthusiasm for expressing as Susie have drifted into the background. There were even a couple of days when I did have the opportunity of a day to myself, and in the past, in better weather, I would have looked forward to all week as an opportunity to spend the day as Susie and even get out for a couple of hours for a walk. Instead I found that I really couldn’t summon any enthusiasm (or, to be honest, any real desire) for the prospect, or for the hassle of getting changed, and instead spent the day working, reading and picking over the one of the never ending rotation of jigsaw puzzles that have been a constant fixture on the dining room table since lockdown.

These things come and go. It’s hard to think that this is a permanent state of affairs or the ‘new normal’. More, perhaps, a timely and needed respite from the constant background insistence of Susie’s presence that will almost certainly return at some point, when we will have re-engage with that delicate negotiation between desire, need and opportunity. 

[Minor update. In fact, the combination of opportunity, weather and desire have come together on a couple of days in the last month when I decided it would be nice to spend the day, or part of it, as Susie again. I was also working remotely on one of those days, and thought it would be a nice idea to do it in a smart office outfit rather than the usual shabby and shapeless jumper.]

This next bit has lain dormant in my draft box for a while now. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to revive it.

I have been circling back to something I wrote around around the end of last year, in Domestic Bliss?  where I mentioned my reaction to being told in jest that I would make someone a good housewife. (I hoped it was in jest and not a veiled proposal, because the person who said it at the time was hardly a match for George Clooney - nor even, to be honest, for Osgood Fielding III.)

Anyway, it set me to thinking back to other times when my reaction to a comment made me realise that I was wired differently to other boys around me, and I wondered if anyone else had similar memories and might like to share them.

The earliest one I can remember was when I probably 7 or 8 when we were staying at a cousin’s house. For some reason a shared joke (probably rude) between the two of us had set us both off giggling and when this continued through the evening and into dinner the head of the house finally lost patience and exploded that if we continued to behave like silly schoolgirls then perhaps we should be dressed like that and sent to school that way the next day. We shut up, embarrassed and abashed, and the meal continued in silence. Looking back now, I know that the threat almost certainly wouldn’t or couldn’t have been carried out, but at the time it awoke a feeling that must have been dormant for some while: a mixture of fear, shame but also the thrill that it would - could - actually happen. Although not enough to want to test it. Indeed, I’m not even sure even now whether the overriding part of that thrill was the desire to dress or be dressed as a girl or the prospect of humiliation.

The image in my head

 

What was more likely (still weirdly cute, though)

I have to acknowledge that in my private moments that uneasy mixture still remains part of me. Some childhood things never completely go away, although the thrill still get from seeing a box of proper metal Meccano with it brass gears and screws or my abiding love for Milne’s Winnie The Pooh are perhaps a bit more defensible even in my dotage. There have been several other occasions in the intervening years, perhaps for a later post, but that first memory still feels somehow formative.

Meh.

 Saturday was the first time I had an opportunity for Susie time since (counts on fingers) probably the end of last September.

Unfortunately it was a all little bit... meh.

To be fair, it was a something of a last minute opportunity when L checked the weekend weather report and decided that she should chance having another day out on the Saturday. She was also getting a bit stir crazy not having a day out for herself since last year. 

But really, it turned out to be too cold, both outdoors and in, to really enjoy the time as Susie.

The first indication was when I stepped outside for a walk first thing in the morning. I knew it was likely to be cold, but a couple of yards up the road proved the pavements were a lot more icy and treacherous than I expected, despite  wearing a rather more sensible pair of thick soled hiking boots than my normal flats. That curtailed any plans to go for an extended walk in my usual nature reserve or canal path routes. The thought of taking a fall and not being able to get home easily, or worse being stranded while dressed en-femme was off-putting, to say the the least.

Luckily the main roads proved more tractable, so I had to settle for a briefer walk down to the village high street and a stop to get some cash out of the ATM. I had intended to drop into Tesco on the way back, but then discovered I'd forgotten to pack my normal mask and the only one I had with me completely fogged my glasses after two breaths, making it completely impossible to see where I was going. So scratch that as well.

Back home, since we only turn on the heating in the evening when we settle down to eat and watch TV, it was too cold indoors to do much more than stay bundled up in jeans and several layers of woollies and a coat and settle down to read or watch the snooker on TV. Practical but hardly pretty, and to be honest not that far away that it felt much different (apart from the more obvious bulge on my chest) from my normal male outfit of several layers of baggy sweaters for warmth. 

So, all in all a bit meh. It did make me wonder what I was doing, or whether it was even worth all the hassle of getting ready and then having to undo it all later on. 

I suspect Susie is more of a warm weather girl. Or Spring and Autumn at least, apart the height of mid summer, when, like the Wicked Witch of the West, her face is likely to melt and look like a sad panda painted by Salvador Dali or Francis Bacon.

Adventures in portraiture

 While looking up something on Google, I came across a reference to thee work of  Yasumasa Morimura, who Wikipedia describes as a contemporary Japanese ‘performance and appropriation artist’. (I didn’t know that was a thing. “Appropriation artist” sounds more like a euphemism for someone involved in stealing.) And may be, in a way, it is. Morimura’s art consists of transforming himself, using props, costumes, makeup and lighting into facsimiles of iconic and famous artworks and photographs.  

as Monroe

 as Girl with a Peal Earring

as Greta Garbo

You can find a whole lot more of these with a Google image search.

There’s actually a whole internet meme for this which seems to have sprung up in the boredom of lockdown, where people dress up and pose to recreate famous paintings, which you can find here,  here, and here, and even album covers. People can be wonderfully creative sometimes.

Many of these are inspired, and a couple of my favourites are shown below.

Lady with an Ermine

Psyche raiding the fridge/entering Cupid's garden

Anyway, it seemed far too good an idea not to  steal, and already armed with FaceApp (which is a bit of a cheat, I admit), another app called DeepArt Effects and GIMP, I thought I'd have a go myself. At least it would provide some distraction until the next time Susie has a change to come out of lockdown.

(One of the things I've always wanted to do was a double portrait, cis-me and Susie side by side, perhaps on the sofa or some other domestic setting. Sadly, I didn't get to that, and I'm not sure I'm ready to have my undisguised picture up on this blog, so this may have wait until later)

My choices were a little left field from Vermeer, da Vinci and Waterhouse (although I've wanted to be The Lady of  Shallot  since I saw the real painting in the Tate)

Not sure this one works as well as I hoped or intended. The alignment, contrast and matching of colour and lighting (one of the really tricky parts) is a still somewhat off. I'm sure there must be another app for this, but this was best I could do manually.

This one was a little more fun after I'd pulled some strange faces in front of the camera. Perhaps I shouldn't have sucked my cheeks in quite so much. You can compare it to Gil Elvgren's original below.

Shame I couldn't take this one all the way to the outfit (or that décolletage, or even the legs for that matter) but it might be fun to try sometime.

And who doesn't want to be Uma Thurman sometimes?

Shall I throw this open as a challenge? Why not? I don't know if you can include images in Blogger comments (I suspect not), but if you want to have a go and share the results, I'd like to see them. 

Have fun

Susie

Monsoon Sale

While I probably shouldn't be encouraging this in these cash-strapped and financial uncertain times, someone over on my Facebook page mentioned that Moonsoon currently have a sale on. Dresses, coats and tops at half price and in many cases significantly less.

Happy hunting

Art and artifice: The Book of Dolores

I do hope you had a happy Christmas and wish you all best wishes for the New Year.

As usual, I am not able to spend any of the holiday period as Susie. However, given the two alternatives come down to spending Christmas as Susie on my own, or sharing the time with my partner, then the choice becomes a bit of a no-brainer. While I enjoy the time I can spend as Susie when L goes away for a few days, there comes a point when the house starts to feel a bit lonely.

Here's a thing.

I discovered the work of American writer William Vollmann back in the late 1980s via his Pynchonesque debut novel You Bright and Risen Angels and the collection Rainbow Stories. He followed this with a massive and ambitious 'Seven Dreams' book sequence on the history and colonization of the Americas, though my bookshelves suggest I only made it as far as the first volume, The Ice Shirt.

 I'm not sure what prompted me to remember his name and run it past Google the other day, but it turned up a book of his I'd not previously heard of, although it was published back in 2013.

This is The Book of Dolores, a book of paintings, sketches and photographs of Vollmann as his female alter ego, Dolores, who he describes as 'a young woman trapped in this fat, aging male body'. 

Vollmann's interest in cross dressing in the 1980s while researching an Inuit myth in which a brother transforms into a woman, and later writing about cross dressing clubs in in Japan which led to his realisation that "I had always imagined femininity as what you’re born with, what’s between your legs."  "And then I realized: no, it’s a performance. It’s about how you move, all the things you do to get ready."

Vollmann himself started seriously cross dressing as Dolores in 2008, while writing a novel about a Mexican transsexual sex worker of the same name. 

Stephen Burt, who also sometimes presents and writes as his own female persona Stephanie Burt, reviewed Vollmann's book for The New Yorker 

"His Dolores imagines herself as pretty but gets caught up short by her unattractiveness in real life. Yet she doesn’t necessarily look bad, except when she puts on a scowl; she just looks bigger than model-sized, and grown-up." and notes that when speaking of Dolores Volmann "gives her, always, the grammatical third person when he write of her like this. “How many times has Dolores imagined herself to be pretty, only to inspect her portrait with her spectacles on?”'. Burt sees this as a separation of Dolores as a construct, a self-portrayed doll he can control, rather than part of Vollmann's psyche. 

This is all rather  troubling. I'm aware in my own posts and comments that I invariably talk about Susie, my other half, in the third person, as someone separate. This maybe because I nearly always write about Susie when I am back in my male mode. Or maybe it really is that I consider Susie as someone separate and not really a part of me. But that doesn't feel true either. If so, why is she a constant - and sometimes very insistent - presence in my head most of the time - even when I'm asleep? She definitely feels part of me, and an increasingly important part of me at that, if not a fully integrated one in that she lives a separate life and has a separate set of friends than my male half. I rarely if ever think about my male side when I'm Susie, only the other way round, but I wonder if that's down to the fact that circumstances dictate I live 90-95% of the time in male mode.

Joshua Cohen in another review in The Observer notes "The strangest thing about all the Dolores images is that, unlike any images of Mr. Vollmann as a man—as a white male author depicted on book flaps—Dolores is smiling" and wonders of Vollmann has "the idea (which only a man could have) that women should smile, or else he’s truly happier as a she." 

This feels truer. There are a couple of pictures of Susie where I'm looking pensive but mostly she's smiling which is a reflection of how I feel at those times. It's harder to judge in photos of me in male mode since I never take selfies in those periods, and the few I have of me are either official (ID, passport) or social occasions where the smile is expected or forced. I have one, taken by someone else, where the smile is real. This was from a convention where I finally met up with a group of people I had corresponded with for decades but either never met or hadn't seen in many years. It's about the only photo of me after my 40s that doesn't make me cringe.

I can't make up my mind about Vollmann and Dolores. I have to confess  that I've not read the book itself - it's a little hard to find and only seems to be available in the U.S. and only the introductory 20 pages (tellingly titled 'Constructions') are available from the Amazon preview - and my thoughts are based on those reviews I've been able to find. Vollmann himself seems ambivalent, while suggesting Dolores is a part of him rather than merely a dress-up doll and photographic mannequin, "I do not exactly cherish Dolores, who is, after all, an aspect of myself" while others, in particular Stephanie Burt, seem less convinced. 

As Susie, I feel perhaps closer to Burt, who is more comfortable with her female alter-ego, than to Vollmann and Dolores. But Vollmann and I are closer in age and he hits the mark when writes about the self deception  that can happen when making up and adjusting the wig in front of the mirror "perhaps because she is newer.. she appears to be blinder to her faults than I", and then the disappointment of Dolores vainly taking off her glasses (we are both very short sighted) to primp and pose for the camera and then replacing them to examine the result only to find "she did not look as pretty as she felt" and wishing "If only the camera envisioned as she did". 

"To see ourselves as others see us" wrote Burns. But would that be blessing or a curse I wonder? And if we did, would we still have the confidence to venture outdoors in a smart coat and heels again?

I wish you all the best for 2022.

Susie

 

Happy Holidays

The holiday season is almost upon us. 

For some us us who can celebrate and share the time as their preferred/true self with their families and friends it can be a time of joy, but for others who are unable to do so fully it can be a lonely time that hits especially hard.

If you are in the latter camp, my sympathies and especial love and wishes to you all. Although it may come of scant consolation, I know something of how you feel.

 I would happily forgo a raft of presents and treats at Christmas for the one unspoken item that has topped my wish list for the last few years: the chance to spend the day quietly as Susie together with my own partner. Or failing that, opening a present from her that is specifically intended for Susie. I know that won't happen, and that it is unlikely ever to happen, but if Christmas is not about dreams and wishes, what else is it for?

In the event, Susie will remain an unacknowledged and largely unwelcome presence in the background of this relationship over Christmas and the New Year as on any other day, however much I might wish for that situation to change. But I do have the secret satisfaction that one trace of her will be there on the day as, in something that's almost become a tradition, she has done all the present wrapping again this year.

***

I've noticed a couple of people using FaceApp images in their blog posts and I was intrigued to try it out.  As I don't have a smartphone and there isn't a version available for Windows, I ended up downloading the BlueStacks Android emulator on my PC so I could download it and give it a try -or at least the free trial version.

Naturally one of the first filters I tried out was the gender swap option. It's interesting how different FaceApp's female version my normal male self is from my own transformation to Susie. 

(I normally wear glasses, but I'm vain enough to take them off when I'm Susie, at least for photos, although maybe I don't have the right frames. Interesting that FaceApp also thinks I should be a redhead. I'm not even sure how I knew that.)

Then I tried playing with some of the other filters, the most interesting of which was 'age'.

So I now have an idea of what what I might have looked like if I had been the person I wanted to be as teenager.

butter wouldn't melt...

xx Susie

Domestic Bliss?

While giving the bathroom and the stair carpet a thorough clean before my other half* was due back yesterday, I was struck by two thoughts: 'Why is it you never have a maid’s outfit when you really need one?'**, and 'where does all that hair come from'? What remains of my own hair is nowhere near that profuse or long and we haven’t had a cat in many years after our first feline housemate died. 

[* my other half as a couple. My other half is, of course, Susie. Which is useful in shops when I  can say honestly that I am buying something for my other half and not specify which one I mean.]

[** I still haven’t quite laid that particular adolescent fantasy to rest. Sad, isn’t it. ]

But it also sparked one of those curious random flashback memories from my first time living alone.

If you show even a trace of domestic competence as a male, such as cooking, cleaning, washing or mending clothes, have you ever had someone tell you, even in jest, “You would  make someone a good housewife”? And how did it make you feel at the time? 

Times and attitudes, of course, change. That sort of comment would seem out of place now. Nowadays we are probably more likely to regard a man who can’t even boil an egg, or load a dishwasher or a washing machine with scant sympathy or even scorn rather than expect them to know nothing about such things and to rely on or expect a more domestically competent member of the other sex to always do it for them. 

But the memory of this instance, in my case, dates back to the mid 70s, when some people actually regarded Alf Garnett as a role model. It was said, I think, by one of my landlords after I first moved out to live on my own. Or maybe by a flatmate. I’m not sure. I’m not even sure what prompted it. I can’t even remember what I was doing at the time: sweeping the communal stairs or cooking something that didn’t involve merely opening tins or (throwback horror) Pot Noodles.  I certainly wasn’t wearing a pretty floral frock at the time. Or even an apron. (While I grudging acknowledged that side of me existed and had been there for  as long as I could remember, I was trying as hard as I could to ignore it.)

It obviously jostled a nerve, otherwise why would would it have lodged in my memory to reappear many years, decades even, later. How would I have felt about it at the time (or even now)? Defensive perhaps, even secretly smug (my parents both worked; I learned to cook and clean at an early age). Maybe even secretly thrilled at the idea. 

It was that fantasy vision of stereotyped domesticity  that would come back to bite me some years later when my first girlfriend saw me dressed for the first time, ironing a skirt in her parents house that we had moved into to look after for a week when they were away on holiday. My girlfriend knew I dressed. I had already told her in a long heart to heart early in our relationship. She had just never seen it up to that point. She had even suggested I should take advantage of the family home as a safe space away from our prying landlord to relieve my obviously pent-up desire and frustration to dress and live as a woman (but only indoors) for that week. But seeing me, made up, legs shaved, wearing  a blouse, skirt and heels and standing  ironing a blouse, broke something in our relationship. From that point she could no longer see me as a boyfriend. That other image would always stand between us. We survived the week, though I stepped dressing before it finished, but two months later she was gone, leaving an empty bedsit flat when I returned from an overseas business trip. 

My current partner also knows I dress. In fact she knew before we moved in together. She’s never seen me dressed as Susie (although that name came many years later) and has made it clear that she doesn’t want to, or even talk about it. We have a fortuitous arrangement where they are a number of days where she wants to go out alone or with friends and thus give me 'time to myself’. Perhaps not as many as I’d like, or for as long (and for that reason I’m both putting off and dreading retirement, but for how much longer I don’t know). Neither does she really want to know what I do on those days. But we’ve survived thirty years together, which is better odds than I might have expected from past experience.