Clothing, cross dressing, me as a guy,

Recently I have been thinking more and more about my guy self. I've kind of lost touch with him.
Actually practically none of my friends I see regularly ever knew me as anyone other than Natalie.

In a sense that is the point of transitioning, right?

As a teenager I used to day dream about moving to some distant city and starting my life over again as female, passing so well that no one knew about my former life, no one even able to imagine me as the guy I had once been.

I'm kind of there. Well, I'm very open about being trans. Being trans is such a part of who I am that I don't know that I could ever deny that part of me and feel whole and complete.

Being trans is something that sometimes I hate and sometimes I think is pretty cool, but it is always there. It always has been there. One thing I realized about myself when I finally was capable of transitioning is that I have no idea what it is like to be cis-gendered. I can't look back to a time when I was happy with being a "boy" or when my penis seemed right and normal.

There's a tendency to look back on life and divide it into when I was a "straight" man and when all that went away.

In another sense I really was a straight man, or rather, my queer experience is very much a trans experience not a gay experience. I liked girls and all the guys I knew liked girls and basically that made me "normal."

Never mind my secret stash of women's clothing that I purged frequently enough to convince myself it wasn't something inherent to my nature.

In another sense I was very much like a cross-dresser.

Which gives me this weird relationship with cross-dressers. For me it was never about the clothing. I dressed to give myself a feeling of having the body that I instinctively knew I should have. It wasn't about expressing my feminine side, but then again, that is what clothing is all about. Of course I express femininity with how I dress. It's why I'm not butch, it's why I want to look cute in everything I wear, and why I'm not going to wear unfitted baggy t-shirts and trucker caps.

Then again, why do I prefer aquas, and purples, and pinks? Why do I prefer silver over gold?

Clothing is such a unique part of being human. We use clothing to communicate who we are, culturally, physically, our personalities. Clothing and body adornment is intrinsic to being human.

I just have a more complicated relationship with it than most.

I am much more aware of using it to express gender than most people are.

Actually I am much more aware of expressing gender period. I know how men stand, I know how men move, I know how men communicate and I can usually distinguish between a male brain and a female brain.

That's why I usually recognize FTM's, why it can actually be difficult for me to call a femme closeted FTM "she" even when they look and act almost perfectly like women. And why even the butchest lesbian who isn't trans doesn't seem trans to me.

Which brings me back to my guy self. He caused me to have a lot of problems, and usually I only seemed male to people in kind of a superficial sense, but as far as impersonation goes my male self was pretty flawless.

And on a deeper level, it was me. I was the same person I am now reacting to the circumstance I found myself in. I am female and always have been, but I found myself in circumstances that required me to act like and insomuch as was possible think like a male and from a male perspective. Partially that came down to survival.

I don't think I am capable of doing it any more. Whatever I had that allowed me be seen as a man I've lost. I could probably still "pass" as a man at a glance but I wouldn't hold up to any scrutiny. Even before, I came across as "possibly queer," now I would probably come across as so unbelievably queer that no one would buy me as a man for long.

Something I've noticed but I doubt most cis people have, is that when you try to imagine a really butch cis-gendered lesbian as a man, and look at her performance of gender not her physical features, you would actually consider her to be a really, really effeminate gay guy, let's say "OMG! Flamer!"

That is what I think I've lost. Even the most masculine woman still uses her body language and expressions to  communicate that she is a woman. The reality is, though this really makes some people uncomfortable, the difference between a male and female body is really really small. It's small enough, that we need to communicate to others constantly whether we are male or female.

With really subtle, unconscious things, that can't be faked entirely.

That's why I came across as weird as a guy but I don't come across as weird as a girl. Plus whatever ability I had to fake those subconscious actions I don't have any more. It's been almost two years since I even tried.

But that's the other thing. I know who I am as a woman. I know what type of woman I am, I know what I like and what I don't like. I know that anything I do or say is feminine because I am feminine. As a guy it honestly was a wild guess at appropriating masculinity. Or rather let's say a very informed guess. I studied how men acted and how people reacted. My gendered presentation was very learned, very informed, and very intentional.

So given that what I remember about being a guy the most was my constant struggle with trying to pass as a cisgendered guy, I don't really know how I came across to other people. Except that I did come across as masculine, I think, or masculine enough.

And more and more I am valuing the friends I still have who knew me as a guy. The ones with whom I let down my guard, and who weren't particularly surprised when I came out as a transitioning transsexual.

"I kinda figured," or "now you make sense." types of reactions.

Still of all the millions of different ways to be a guy, what type of guy was I?

I'm writing an autobiographical memoir and it's actually really emotionally draining. I've been taking a bit of a break from it. It's had me thinking about my life and my experiences as a "man." and really judging from pretty much all my sexual encounters there is something about the way people related to me that isn't any different from how they relate to me now.

I was the guy other guys would ask when they wanted to figure out what a girl was thinking. I was the guy girls felt comfortable changing in front of and confiding in. I was the guy that (like, I was told, I am as a girl) people felt like they needed to protect. I can only say that I have this really strong feminine spirit that my body could never really conceal.

Anyway. This blog entry was ranty, but hopefully a little interesting.