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“Ma’am” fallout

Posted on July 11, 2008 by Amber Darlene

Earlier this week, I blogged about getting my first intentional ma’am from a sandwich maker at the local Subway.  The interesting thing is that I wasn’t trying to “pass” at the time.  If you’re interested, you could read about it on my 360 blog, including a picture of me wearing what I wore into the Subway, I had Teresa take the picture when I got home.  (We live in the same house.)

Anyway, this isn’t about that, it’s about the after-effects of it.  It was a simple thing and I got a big kick out of it, after all I was just on my way to a service call on what was supposed to be my day off.  (I gotta tell the boss that he’s cutting into my “girl” time.)   After I left the Subway, I kept looking in the mirror trying to figure out what she saw that caused her to call me ma’am.  The incident kinda freaked me out after a while, I was thinking “have I changed that much already?”

That was just one of the things going through my mind, I had an emotional surge when it occoured to me that she was looking right at me when she said it, and that I actually could be gendered as female.   That’s always been one of my fears, not being able to pass.  It held me up for a long time, and here I passed without even trying!  Very strange!

It must have hit me pretty deep, because when I was doing my service call at a multiplex cinema and had to go to the bathroom, it was a tough decision to go into the men’s room.   I actually felt like I didn’t belong there.   Now lately, I’ve been wearing a hat so no one sees the lack of hair on the top of my head, it’s not very female.

It seems like it was a defining moment for me, it’s really hard to go back to “guy” mode after that, I’m still struggling with it.  I know that my fears have kept me sitting on the “gender fence” for a while now, it’s really getting to be time to move!   The biggest problem I have with that is that I’m so unprepared, having taken a different path to get here.  I’ve never been a public “cross-dresser”, I started HRT with no “public exposure” experience.  Maybe it’s time to get out of my comfort zone.

How did your first real ma’am affect you?  Did it make you crazy and frustrated like it did me?

Filed under: Blogging, Life Experiences, Transgender | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

A Slight Case of Cognitive Dissonance

Posted on May 26, 2008 by dunyazad

My long-suffering significant other and I went to see Iron Man a couple of weeks ago. This, in itself, is not out of the ordinary: we’re movie people, so we see a lot of them. About halfway through the movie, though, I suffered a bit of a blow to my basic epistemology.

The set-up: I try to watch movies at the theater in one sitting. Sometimes, this isn’t practical: drinking one of the 55-gallon drums of soda they sell at the concession stand and expecting to make it through Titanic (all that water!) is probably foolhardy. Lately, I’ve had trouble with this because spironolactone is a pretty effective diuretic, so halfway through the movie, I had to relieve myself. I made a bee-line to the restrooms only to be stopped short. I momentarily didn’t know which one to use. Actually, this isn’t quite true; my first instinct was to use the ladies’ room, but I stopped myself from actually bursting into the ladies room. There was a brief and very disorienting sensation of confusion as I had to wrestle my brain into the mindset of my gender presentation.

At this point in time, I’m still pretty manly. I usually have some growth of beard to accommodate my electrolysis schedule, so I was in total “guy” mode when we went to this particular movie. And yet, I felt the planks of my gender presentation fall away beneath my feet. It was profoundly weird. I surmise from this episode that the hormones I’m taking are doing a big number on my brain. I also wonder about the dichotomy this suggests in the old mind/body problem. I’ve always “known” that I was a girl, or rather, that I should have been a girl, but this episode suggests that my neurochemistry DIDN’T “know” that I should have been a girl prior to being told so by hormonal intervention. Is this an example of the ineffability of consciousness divorced from the body? Is gender identity parsed and scattered through different sections of the brain, some more aware of it than others?

Y’know, I don’t know. And some of the implications of these questions trouble me.

Cheers.

Filed under: Blogging, Life Experiences, Transgender | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »