I'm putting these up faster now than I think I planned on doing when I first decided to start this project. I never intended these to be anything deep or profound or meaningful; I just wanted a record of my progress somewhere I could look at it. Knowing that anyone could read these is a good way of keeping myself honest. If I don't want people to see it, do I really want to say it, and if I don't want to say it, then should I really be thinking it?

I was driving home from work today, on my way to pick up Jason at work, and I've gotten into the habit of turning off the radio and practicing my voice in the car since there's no-one around to laugh at me when it breaks. My thoughts turned to the events of the previous few days, and then I started talking to myself about the diary and everything that's been going on, and something came to me that put the events of the weekend into a new perspective.

A while back, I had a conversation with someone online that only knew me as Kristina, and at one point the topic turned to history and where we had gone to school and so forth. At the time, I found myself wondering if what I said would give me away, and the whole sensation of fearing discovery came back to me, though from the opposite direction. I actually caught myself being vague about certain areas of my past, and then later found the whole incident rather enlightening.

Only today did I realize how like passing that is.

I want to be recognized as female and treated as such, but at the same time I don't want to give up who I was for who I am. I said on the front page to this site that I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not, no matter how much I may want it. Passing, to a large extent, is the art of bluffing people into thinking that you were born female, and I wasn't. So, while I want to be treated as female, I don't want it to be at the expense of who I am.

I don't want to call gender a trap, but it is, in a way. In order to pass, at some level I'll have to learn how to avoid bringing up who I used to be. How much I have to avoid is dependent on the setting, but the fact that I wasn't born female will eventually come out and the party will be over. I don't want to have to hide that part of my life and pretend that it didn't happen. I'm not going to make up a past I didn't live in order to keep people from knowing who I used to be.

I think part of my frustration right now comes from the fact that society as a whole still attempts to pigeonhole people into exclusive-or categories, and I don't quite fit into either one. More aggravating is the fact that most people, in their attempts to fit me into their world view, will probably put me into the wrong pile.

If someone sirs me and then fixes the mistake later when I offer a polite correction, I can accept that. I can forgive any amount of mistakes made in error, or at least I should be strong enough to do so, even if they do frustrate me. The ones that refuse to recognize me as female, they're the ones that I can live without. They're part of the great unwashed throng of humanity on which I know it's unproductive to waste my emotions.

Besides, as my boyfriend pointed out to me, I'm doing this for me, not for them. They're important, but only to the extent that I grant their importance. I knew this before, but I'm having to relearn it in a new light.