Are You Exchanging One Prison For Another?

[Sally]

OK, What do I mean by exchanging one prison for another?

I have lived my entire life pretending to be male - I was trapped, imprisoned in my own body and a character of my own making to fit the design that others had for my life.

Now we tend to try to learn new mannerisms, train our voices and start to 'act' like someone else's notion of who we are as the opposite sex.

I have been watching women more intently now than ever and they no longer do all of those things that we are trying to do the men don't either for all of you FTMs.

So it seems that we are tunneling through the wall of our cell and into the cell next door - not much of an improvement.

I have decided to just relax and not think about how to act at all and I have been able to pass much easier because of not working so hard and while posing as masculine I am not thought of as a very masculine man at all and that is just fine with me.

My point is - I have all of the necessary female traits stored in my female brain so if I just relax and let them flow I pass like a dream - it worked in Memphis and I was only on month 2 of my HRT.

So I am not spending a lot of time working on my 'new' act, I am just being myself and that is good enough for me.

So before you tunnel through that cell wall, make sure that you are tunneling to the outside and not just into another cell.

The whole point is to be free not just into a better cell.

Love ya,

Sally

[Guest Pól]

I'd agree -- In my experience, once you relax, you tend to pass a lot better.

That said, it's worth spending some time observing and assessing. Sometimes there are little things that you're already doing that you can tweak to make much more effective. But as long as you're not obsessively doing it, it's not another cell, like.

[Guest ChalenAustin]

This kinda goes back to the grassroots of transitioning.

We are or at least should not be transitioning into mere members of the opposite sex- you should be transitioning into our true selves- stereotypical mannerisms and less stereotypical ones.

Our goal is to "blend" into society to an extent but you should really aim to be the individuals we truly are.

Whether thats considered masculine or femmine for that sex should not matter so much.

By stressing over trying to blend in we can very easily begin to lose ourselves and then we would be in one prison straight from another!

Me- I'M A JAILBIRD BREAKIN' FREE BABY!

[Guest Nigh]

I'm sorry, but I don't get what you mean. The whole point of transitioning is to become yourself, not to try and become someone else. Granted, there are those who may feel obligated to go to the extremes of blue or pink, but they are generally those who still haven't really "found" themselves, and will eventually become more comfortable in there new skin as time goes by.

I probably missed your point altogether, but its been a long, cold day.

[Guest Victoriaf]

I agree with you completely, I think that alot of people in transition are to focused on behaviours that were at one time idealized and by doing so we are just putting on an act like we have had to do for most of our life. I, likeyou think that once you relax we become the person that we are ment to be. Ifor one donot entend like i did at one point to become the Idealized woman. I will become the lady that I am.

Now if that would only work with my voice.

Huggs

Victoria

[Guest Katrina Reann]

Sally, those are some of the wisest words I have ever heard and I for one needed to hear them....Thank You!!...Huggsss Katrina

[Guest Donna Jean]

Way cool, Sally....

You know, I am a woman....

I don't want to become a caricature of a woman...

I pass the best when I just go with the flow..be myself and not affect a phony presence.

I don't want to act or look like a drag queen..(easy folks. Generally, drag queens dress in a female gender role, often exaggerating certain characteristics(such as make-up and eyelashes) for comic, dramatic or satirical effect. )

How right you are Sally...tunneling from one cell to the next...Going from what society wants you to act like in one gender to what it expects of you in the other.....

No thanks!

Donna Jean

[Guest Elizabeth K]

Sage advice from all - let it go - you automatically are what you are! And yes - you can watch - but that is secondary. We become 14 year old girls on HRT. And 14 year old girls do a lot of observation - but they are still girls when it comes down to basics. That's what we are!

Lizzy

[Guest sarah f]

Dee Jay you definately passed more than you wanted when you took your car to the shop. It ended up making you pay more money. I guess you have taken Sallys words to heart already.

Love,

Sarah F

[Guest i is Sam :-)]

I think perhaps the benefit to trying to learn the mannerisms etc. is to some extend to reproduce what you'd have learned during childhood, and to get yourself to a point where when you relax you still default to something more gender correct. SO really it's a case of learning by going over the top first and then you'll find your natural balance and that will be the real you. What you don't want to do tho is to feel like you must always live up to this non-existent ideal of masculinity/femininity. Which I think was sally's point. Transition is all about becoming who you always wanted to be, and that's unlikely to be the polar opposite of who you currently are/were.

[Guest Isobelle Fox]

I think of transition in comparitively negative terms, and my perspective is strongly shared by my counselor. For example: after spending decades playing boy/ man, transition is more about relinquishing the habits and modes of behavior that I acuired during that time. Its more about _unlearning_ things. And the trick is to be able to recognize the depth of the facade.

It also helps to remember something that my counselor is fond of saying over and over and over: feminine and female are not necissarily the same thing. Don't get them confused.

I have found, without a doubt, that the less I try these days to conciously "pass," the more often people tend to acknowledge me with female pronouns. For a while it was very gratifying, but also very mystifying and frustrating. What was I doing wrong the rest of the time?! And then I realized, the harder I "try" to be myself, the less like myself I am.

Its a hard habit to break though. Transsexuals often live a life of mimicry. To some extent its a survival instinct, and many of us don't even realise we are doing it for a very long time. I expect that it is therefore something that most of us cannot just turn off when we finally get tired of playing the role we have been stuck in for so long.

There are certainly elements of social interaction that can and should be learned. What amounts to feminine at a given time and in a given culture is a good thing to know, and for a lot of us, there is probably a great deal of catharsis in partaking of it.

But transition shouldn't be an act.

I honestly wish I looked more like a cisgendered female. I sincerely wish that I was called ma'am more often than sir. But the thing thats turned out to be the most important for me is the way I feel these days, just having the cage door opened, just being able to breathe, just having some confidence and self respect for the first time. And those things are not part of an act and cannot be taken away from me by someone recognizing me as physically male.

Just take off the mask and be yourself.

[Guest Donna Jean]

I think of transition in comparitively negative terms, and my perspective is strongly shared by my counselor. For example: after spending decades playing boy/ man, transition is more about relinquishing the habits and modes of behavior that I acuired during that time. Its more about _unlearning_ things. And the trick is to be able to recognize the depth of the facade.

Just take off the mask and be yourself.

That's it! You hit it right, squarely on the head!

I was always a woman in this body...so I learned coping defenses...

Male gestures, posturing, sitting splayed legged, the look, the grunt...All of that was LEARNED...not natural!

So, when I gave it all up...people would say.."Donna Jean, I see that you've been working on your female mannerisms!"...

NO! I NEVER DO....

It's all natural to me now...it was all of the things that I hid for all of those years.

I'm allowed to be me now...I don't HAVE to practice anything....It's just me!

Donna Jean

[Guest April63]

People always do better when relaxed than stressed.

[Guest NatashaJade]

This made me think of Nora at the end of Ibsen's A Doll's House. She escapes Torvald's prison, but we never know quote what it is she is escaping to. John Guare imagines she keeps escaping from one prison only to find herself in another and then another...that there is no getting around the fact that we are confined by what society has deemed for us in one way or another.

So we escape from the prison of our birth only to find ourselves in the prison of our gender (as is often the case as we try to conform to how we think we need to be to "pass" because that is often the be all and end all of the transition). Or perhaps we are in the prison of the label we accept, being trans means this or that and we are this or that as a result. As we allow ourselves to be labeled or allow ourselves to conform, we are walking out of one prison into another.

But I will say this. You don't have to be trans to experience this. Cisgendered people are all prisoners of expected behavior. We probably know this more than any of them. Can we choose not to be prisoners? Can we, like Nora, walk out the door and, hopefully, find ourselves liberated from what we are supposed to be or do? I am sure it is possible. It requires a lot of bravery because it is hard to stand outside of things, to be outside of things and not mind what anyone says or thinks about you. Being a prisoner is sometimes choosing the path of least resistance. As the country songs say, freedom isn't free (or is freedom just another word for nothing left to lose?).

luv

Gin

[Guest CharlieRose]

So we escape from the prison of our birth only to find ourselves in the prison of our gender (as is often the case as we try to conform to how we think we need to be to "pass" because that is often the be all and end all of the transition). Or perhaps we are in the prison of the label we accept, being trans means this or that and we are this or that as a result. As we allow ourselves to be labeled or allow ourselves to conform, we are walking out of one prison into another.

But I will say this. You don't have to be trans to experience this. Cisgendered people are all prisoners of expected behavior. We probably know this more than any of them. Can we choose not to be prisoners? Can we, like Nora, walk out the door and, hopefully, find ourselves liberated from what we are supposed to be or do? I am sure it is possible. It requires a lot of bravery because it is hard to stand outside of things, to be outside of things and not mind what anyone says or thinks about you. Being a prisoner is sometimes choosing the path of least resistance. As the country songs say, freedom isn't free (or is freedom just another word for nothing left to lose?).

luv

Gin

It's difficult for transpeople to get out of a gender "prison" because we are held to much much higher standards than cissexual people. For example, a lot of people think that transwomen are only attracted to men, so if there's one who's attracted to women, it's taken as a sign that she's "really" a man. But a cissexual lesbian, no matter how butch, would be considered by the same people a woman. Perhaps an eccentric or misguided one, but even the most homo/transphobic person would still say they're a woman. Same thing with wearing makeup. Some people (heck, some *therapists!*) don't consider a transwoman a woman unless she wears a ton of makeup. But cissexual women can go without makeup all the time, and while some close to them, relatives for instance, might criticize them, for it, they'll never say that they're really a man because of it. Our gender identities are already so vulnerable, it's frightening for us to do anything outside of our gender norms because we feel it'll be used even more to tear down our gender.

Which is stupid. Hiding the feminine aspects of myself to make sure everyone thinks I'm a man is completely nonsensical, for many reasons:

#1 : Some ignorant people or conscious idiots will think of me a woman no matter what, so it'd be a waste of energy to try convincing them.

#2 : The loving, caring people in my life will think of me as a man or do their best to treat me as a man no matter how feminine I am. (Yes, it's true! It's most obvious with the people I've met after I transitioned, but even a bunch of people who knew me before can make sense of it just fine.)

#3 : As was previously mentioned, the point of transitioning is to be yourself. Faking mannerisms and interests is only going to bring you the same misery you were trying to leave. Transitioning isn't just about realizing who you are, it's about loving who you are, coming to terms with it and embracing it, living it!

[Guest ~Brenda~]

Indeed Sally,

One must be careful not to fall from one stereotype to another. I have seen it time and time again. Simply put, be yourself. I know it sounds trite, but it is true. Transitioning is deeper than moving from one gender to another. Tranistioning means becoming yourself.

Brenda

[Guest Isobelle Fox]

What an amazingly enlightening and healthy conversation to be having, and what an incredibly well spoken and thoughtful group of people to be having it with.

I really believe that these are very important issues for trans people to think about and understand.

"Success" in transition, which in my mind equates with being comfortable enough in various aspects of our lives to be productive people who are capable of happiness, really rests on this fulcrum: knowing the difference between the artificial roles and expectations of society and who and what we are. Its about meeting a fundamental need in our own natures, not about conforming to an unrealistic ideal in order to fit into a cliche'. If you are lucky enough to have both, good for you, but thats not always the case.

Gin's analysis really hits home with me. Its a good elaboration of the idea and there are some really good questions in there. I am particulary fond of the reference to our tendency not only to conform to our desired social role as male or female by possibly emulating people's supposed expectations of those roles, but also of the idea that we sometimes fall into the trap of being "trans" and all of the baggage that comes with that role as well.

Its all definitely worth thinking about.

[Sally]

Well, it looks as though my little outline here provided a little food for thought, the very reason that I didn't go into a great deal of detail in the opening post as I already knew my opinion.

We are not trapped into any gender roles anymore, look around and see all of the teenagers and try to determine from more than twenty feet away which are girls and which are boys - it is not that easy anymore because the lines are getting blurred - we are the ones holding ourselves to these higher standards - passing is not as important as it used to be - people are evolving slowly and becoming more accepting - do not let yourself think for one minute that anyone is really concerned about very many people beyond their immediate family and small group of friends everyone else is but a shadow that passes by a ghost causing only a brief shiver and then gone.

We impose all of these 'higher standards' on ourselves - relax, be the person you were born to be and don't spend so much time 'acting' like some stereotype or idealized man or woman - we transition to free ourselves from the prison of having to be someone else - why do we allow ourselves to become another character to play?

Fear is insidious, it makes us do things we do not want to do and miss doing things that we do want to - fear is the enemy, not society.

Fear has dominated my life and controlled my actions for long enough - I have made my first moves to change that and I will continue until I have control over my life again.

Some fear is well grounded but some is just paranoia - determine which it is realistically and then act accordingly.

Donna Jean and I have discussed the feminine gestures and realized that while neither one of us has been practicing any they are just showing up for me even in male mode - I have caught myself pointing to a dryer in a sort of Vanna White motion and just hoped that the customer didn't make that connection.

Be yourself - that is why we go through all of the therapy, the HRT and the SRS - to be ourselves so let's do just that - no more acting - freedom, the glorious freedom of being yourself!

Love ya,

Sally

[Guest ChalenAustin]

Ahmen!

[Guest viv]

Yes Sally,like Katrina ,totally agree with you . A lot of traits are there ,,,I feel

that way too. I love to shop , love clothes , shoes and makeup <<getting there

So sure , dont chase shadows . I have always been convinced if you asked 1000 women

whats it like to be a woman you would get 1000 different opinions on the theme.

My plan is to totally alienate myself from" traditional "mens stuff and let my idea

of womanhood and Estrogen settle in to my life ,,,you know??? hope this makes

sense . luv,viv

[Guest Jean Davis]

Sally, honey

I'm tunneling right through the wall under the window.

Though all I got to dig with is a plastic spoon.

So it's going to take a while.

But I'm a patient woman.

LUV

Jean

[Guest Lizzie McTrucker]

Very interesting and thought-provoking!

Btw, the grass is greener in this cell than the cell I just came from.

and it tastes better too.