Club Stealth

I went out clubbing last Friday.
It's been a while since I got out to go dancing and I really needed to go out and free myself to some hard electro and trance.  Jochen Miller did not disappoint.
I fact, the whole night was awesome.
A friend had given me this awesome, super sexy kinda metallic black dress with zipper all the way up the front and rouched panels that was clingy enough to give even me cleavage.
The overall effect was hot.

Actually, truth be told, I was a little nervous that I'd overdone it.
The more time I spend getting ready, the more I find myself feeling that I must look "tans" when I'm done.  Too much time spent on tiny details will do that to you.
 Anyway, we were running late by that point so I was heading out the door one way or another.

Now I will say, for most of my life I have had pretty bad social anxiety, going out clubbing was always a huge internal struggle for me.  It's gotten much better since I started transition though, but this night still had a lingering edge to it.  It was part of the reason I was running late, and it was there when I got to the club.  Not to bad though, have a drink and onto the dance floor.
Basically, I danced for a while, getting used to the 5" stiletto heels, and feeling a little self conscious due to my anxiety and, well, I'm 6'4" in these heels and dressed like there's a good chance I work in the adult entertainment industry.
Time for a little more liquid courage so I head back to the bar and, I get bought a drink.
This has never happened before.  I mean sure friends have bought me drinks, but not the random dude at the bar scenario.
I like it.
Dude is pretty cool, we chat for a minute and then he goes back to the dance floor.
He will later come back for his "drinks worth" by grinding on me until I'm forced to leave the dance floor and hide for a while, but whatever.
Drink or no, that fact that he gets creepy later on be damned, at the time this really did make my night.
This probably seems a bit egotistical to write about, and perhaps it doesn't make much sense to my cis readers, but that was kind of a huge deal for me.
See, one of the problems with being trans is, I DO feel validated by things like this.
Things that conform to sexist stereotypes that my well-versed-in-feminism female friends may role their eyes at, I kinda like because I NEVER EXPERIENCED all that growing up.  This shit is still pretty shiny and new.  Hell, being the victim sexism feels validating in a fucked up way.
And I get it.
I get how problematic that can be for some people, but you know what, until society as a whole accepts my gender identity, I'm going to get my validation where I can because dammit, no one can internally validate the way trans people are expected to.

So happily validated a(t least in my outward appearance), and drink in hand, i head back to the dance floor.
Long story short, I had a bloody brilliant time.  I got hit on all night, got bought drinks, had my personal space violated, made out with a random cute guy (and managed not to give him my number) didn't get wasted, didn't get read, and went home with the lovely people I came with to....continue having an awesome night.
I've been feeling high about it ever since.
That nagging doubt about my appearance, at least for the time being, has been swept completely away and I've been loving the person I see in the mirror.

And I've been thinking.

I've been thinking a lot about the fact I could have very easily gone home with any of a half dozen different guys that night, and if I had, I might very well be dead right now.
That's a potential danger for any girl who goes home with a random guy from the club, but for trans girls, the ratio for

awesome-1-night-stand : OMG-regret : rape : dead

is tilted very far to the right.
I've never thought much about the idea of Stealth before.  I tend to hang out with friends who all know I'm trans, or date online where I can put that out there ahead of time and not worry about it.
Stealth has been something that other people do.
Until the other night.
Because why on earth would I want to put my self at risk of violence in a club?  Or at the very least at risk of having a table full of guys pointing and snickering all evening, just because dude wanted to buy me a drink?
As much as I enjoyed the attention, as much as it's still making me feel good about myself right now, I also recognize that rape culture endangers me even more* than it does cis women because IT is the single biggest reason that the "deceitful tranny" narrative exists.

"I buy you a drink, you owe me sex" can turn nasty for any girl.
Add to that sense of entitlement, the idea that my private medical history is some devious web of deceit spun to trick drinks out of horny entitled guys, and that "fuck you, you bitch" becomes "I'm going to fucking kill you you fagot"

Hell, this might still come back to bite me as it is.  It's not as if there aren't people at the club who know I'm trans.  I may run into that guy I kissed on another night and someone may say something and I could find myself in an unpleasant situation.  That much of a risk I'm willing to take, but no one night stands for me.

It doesn't matter how lucky I am in my physical appearance, how well I "pass" (horrid term) Certain situations will never allow me the same freedoms as cis-gendered people experience.

Oh well, I'm still fucking awesome.

*Statistically 1 in 5 cis-women are victims of rape/sexual assault.  The figure for trans-women is 50%.
1 in 4 trans women are victims of physical assault and we are 1000 times more likely to be murdered than cis-gendered women. 

Puzzle me this..

Just when you start to think life is going in one direction, it isn't
At some time in this crazy journey I think we all reach a point where our future starts to become visible to us on the horizon.
While some of us seem to know, with a single minded conviction what it is we want to do from a very young age, others, myself included, take longer to figure things out.
I guess I was 22 when I first started to get an inkling of what "my future" looked like.
I was going to study fashion design.  It was the first point in my life when I felt like I had something of a career plan.
Within two years I'd be married, and then start my own business.
in 2011 I realized I was going to become a parent.
This is what I mean be seeing your future on the horizon.
It felt good, it felt like I'd arrived somewhere, or at least would be soon.
it's easy and comforting to know where you're going.  It can make up for a lot of things that perhaps seemed more important when you had less direction.
Things like, oh, I don't know, one's gender identity.

We humans are big on confirmation bias.

It's what our brains like to do.  We come up with a story we like and we just make all the pieces fit.
Having a vision of your future is like finding the box lid to the puzzle you're working on.  Finally you can see where all the bits are meant to go.
Never mind the fact that you're pulling puzzle pieces from a pot that contains ALL the pieces from every puzzle ever made.
Never mind the fact you picked up the box lid off a stack of thousands or others.
The important thing is that you have a lid, and you have pieces, and you know what to do.
You're going to make them fit.

Photo via Christop Brooks-Booth 

For the last few years I had been drawing pieces from the pot and for the life of me, I couldn't find them in the picture.  So I set them aside and drew more, and more, and more.
To be honest I'd been building a stack of these other pieces behind me for 32 years and I don't know what happened exactly to may me look around and see that the pieces that didn't fit with my box lid now outnumbered the ones that did but there it was.
Almost a year ago now, in August sunshine, I started looking through all those puzzle sections and began to find that a lot of them fit together, more than I'd assembled in my other puzzle.

The thing is, most puzzles look pretty similar, so I could see that these new sections I was assembling
could work with what I'd built.  I just needed to find a new lid to go by.

And now I'm going to break with this puzzle analogy and say.

Everything in my life has changed to a greater or lesser extent in the space of one year.
I think part of what make those of us who are Trans* so damn scary to some people is that our existing casts doubt on a lot of the experiences people take for granted.
I can honestly say there is not a single part of my life experience that has been untouched by transition.

I think differently.
I feel differently.
My likes and dislikes have changed in ways I didn't expect.
The world sees me differently, and I see it differently.
Whatever part of myself I thought constituted me before I began transition, I was wrong.
I no longer have any assumptions that any part of me is immutable, essential or in any way core to my being.
My relationships with friends and family have changed.  Mostly for the better, but often in unexpected ways.
Those things that looked like my future on the horizon, all of them have gone or changed to such a degree that I can no longer see what my future looks like.
I am no longer married.
I no longer own my own business.
I no longer see my daughter every day.
My life looks very, very different from a year ago, and even from three months ago.
I'm realizing that I don't even know if I want to continue working in the fashion industry.
While that future vision was built piece by piece over a lifetime until I was comfortably ensconced in predictability, it has been swept away almost wholly and in a few months.  I don't have anything fixed in my future after my trip to Korea.
2014, like most of this year, is a land of wild untamed possibility.
It's both liberating and scary as all get out.

I was thinking, back last year before I came out as trans, about how different our experience of time is when we are children compared to when we're adults.
I am a child again.  I feel like I have lived lifetimes in the last year.  That's the beauty of this.  To get to come into each day with eyes of wonder.
But I'm not a child and I need to make my own way in this world and that means having some sort o a plan.
But what?
I have almost too many choices, and I can't guarantee that what sounds like a good direction right now will still feel like such a great decision in a few months or a year.
Honestly, I want to get paid to be me.  Being me is too interesting right now to want to spend much time doing anything else, and unlike almost everything else, it's one of the few things tat I'm confidant I'll still enjoy doing a year from now.
Where is the line between narcissism and authenticity exactly?
I want to work in a think tank.
Somewhere I can explore the weird leaps of understanding my brain makes constantly.
Or perhaps in marketing, which is a splendid mix of psychology and applied statistics.
I'm also finding myself drawn porn, although I suspect I'm a little old for the industry at this point. Whatever, I'm enjoying being unashamed of myself for the first time in my life and I want to put out all out there.  I've always been an exhibitionist at heart, but you can't exhibit what your not.  That's called acting.
Maybe I can just find a way to make money being me.  There are more than a few people who've turned blogs and you tube channels into careers.
I'm open to any and all suggestions folks.
Throw your box lids this way.

Indecision R I - micro post.

Oh goodness, where to begin!
There's so much to write about and I have no idea how many posts to make it into, soooooooo,
I'll start with a list here and see where we end up.

• The mirrors inheritance Part 2. - There's lots to be said here, but I'm not ready to start unpacking it this morning.

• Clubbing as a girl - This is a "life is good" post, with thoughts on being "stealth", the risks of being trans etc. attached.

• Change of status - I'm getting a new drivers license, new social security card, and I updated my insurance info.  I'm also getting divorced, stepping away from my business and learning to accept that my role as a parent looks very different to what I had expected.

• Choices Choices - What am I doing with my life?  I'm at the biggest intersection I've ever been at and I don't know which road I want to take.  Should I continue with fashion design?  Become an adult actress?  Get into marketing?  There are just so many choices!!!

OK, errands to do so I'll have to come back and write a real post this afternoon.
In the meanwhile, feel free to comment on which of the above you'd like to see me write on first.

K, TnX, Bai!!!