I wouldn't wish days like yesterday on anyone.

I found out first of all from my doctor that there are no endocrinologists in the area that do hormone replacement therapy that take my insurance. This means I have to pay for all of my treatments up front and then hope that I get reimbursed afterwards, which means I have to budget far more than I would like for medical bills that, supposedly, should be the domain of my insurance company. After all, isn't that why we have them?

Next, my passport application has hit another snag. Now they want proof of my surgery. "It doesn't matter what your driver's license says; it's what's between your legs that counts." No, that isn't a direct quote, but that's the essential tone of the letter I received. Thankfully, they also said that if I hadn't had the surgery yet and needed the passport for the surgery, I could submit all of my other docs and a note from my surgeon saying when my surgery is scheduled. It's not a problem, but it is one more delay in getting the damn piece of paper that clears me for overseas travel, and they've flat-out admitted that they've lost my old one so if they don't give me the new one, there's going to be a real problem.

Finally, I contacted my bank to inquire about personal loan interest rates and found out that they don't offer them! They've got home, home improvement, car, et cetera, but nothing that doesn't involve some kind of major capital
purchase, and medical doesn't count. Again, it's not a crisis, but it's a delay in getting things settled and prepared for my trip. A friend of mine has offered to vouch for me to get a Navy Fed account, and according to him they'll give out loans on practically a handshake, so I'm not panicking but I am annoyed.

My weight was back up to 260 yesterday morning, and that always depresses me. I did such a good job of losing the weight, but I did it by punishing myself and generally starving myself, with the help of appetite suppressants which are no longer available over the counter. I even spoke with my doctor about getting back on them, and he just said the prescription strength ones weren't covered by insurance, which prices them out of my range for now.

If all of the above weren't enough, I've been worrying a lot about my finances these days. Trying to schedule a loan from the bank, I've felt increasingly under the microscope to pay off my debts to my credit cards and get back onto an even footing, but... 

... this is where my life gets extremely complex, or at least it feels like it does.

As I have established elsewhere in these writings, I am a very easily dominated person in certain basic ways. I'm very submissive, and I am, by my own admission, too easily influenced by the emotional states of my peers. The idea that one of my friends, someone I trust, being upset or mad at me, or even unhappy if I have the means of "correcting the problem," makes me sick to my stomach. I can take on any depth of self-deprivation if I know (or believe) that doing so will benefit someone close to me. I try to save the universe, and I fail because I don't know how to save myself first, no matter how much Ayn Rand I read.

Is it a fundamental lack of self-esteem? I don't think so. I do think, though, that it's a result of having grown up alone. All through my childhood, I made friends by doing things for them. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspect, is the fear that saying "no" to my compatriots will make them leave me. Jessie suggested it last night, and I denied it then, but looking at it, I suspect it's closer to the truth than I might like to admit.

I'm still afraid of being alone, and I'll hurt myself to make sure I'm not. I don't go in for masochism, but I'll put up with a lot of crap from people that claim to want me around. My first relationship is a good example of this.

The budget, then, is a major source of emotional headache for me. Because I control the purse strings in the family, my job is to say no to the requests of others, and every time I say no my guts clench up and I want to curl up in a corner and die. I'm still trying to win the approval of those from whom I know I don't have anything to prove. I don't make enough money to be able to say yes to everything, but I can't say no without feeling bad, and when it comes to money this is a dangerous game.

---

I'm going to change tacks for a moment, and switch over to a related subject. A few weeks ago, I entered into a dominant/submissive relationship with someone with whom I've grown very close over the years we've known each other. It satiates the screaming demons inside of me, to serve and know that even when I misbehave, my servitude pleases my mistress.

By "mistress", it's pretty clear I don't mean Jessie. Zie knows, zie accepts, zie doesn't understand entirely but zie supports and even encourages it somewhat.

So far, it's only been online, mostly because of the distance between us, but in part because of all of the above factors and because of my own mildly obsessive-compulsive tendencies. I fixate on things very easily, and in something so reality-warping, this would be a very dangerous thing again. I trust my mistress implicitly, even out of scene, not to do anything to hurt me, but she and I both agree that this should not become a relationship that overwhelms or controls either of us. We both have mates outside of it, and we both have lives, and if it ever interferes with either, it should be ended.

Over the weekend, I had the chance to actually play out some small measure of this, with someone not my mistress. Despite my would-be top not being overly skilled or interested in the scene, I still found it very seductive. I feel protected, knowing that at least within the confines of the scene, someone is going to take care of me, and that even if I'm punished it's out of tenderness. I know that to truly be a submissive, one must want what the dominant wants, even if it's self-detrimental, trusting in the top to protect and make safe. 

It's this sense of giving up control that I find so darkly attractive and so dangerous. I already struggle with the fact of being the primary income in my family. My mate, as much as I may love Jessie, is not well-suited to being "in charge". (If zie were, I think zie and I would have entered into that kind of relationship long ago and never regretted it.) The chance to not be in charge is one that I could far too easily accept as proper, and if I were to try I'd likely hurt many more people than just me. 

Having the chance to explore it in person, to actually experience the role of the submissive and then have someone critique me afterwards and give me pointers on how to be a better pet left me breathless and anxious. I walked around with the collar I had been given around my neck for the whole of the weekend and even wore it into the office on Monday as a piece of jewelry before realizing that I had been letting it take over my thoughts and removed it.

There is, I tell myself, a time and a place for everything. However, it's hard to confine an emotion that one would like to feel at all times to a limited set of times and places, even knowing that only by doing so does it become possible to experience it at all.

---

Now to tie these two threads together.

Jessie hasn't worked in eight months. Zie gets up when zie wants, goes to bed when zie wants, knows that the money is there to pay for small indulgences without having to think, has never been denied anything by me, and has, in general, little in the way of responsibility beyond keeping the apartment looking nice. Even that doesn't have to happen if something interrupts, or even if zie just forgets, zie knows I'll be irritated but I won't kick zim out.

In short, zie's been leading the life that I wish I could have, albeit with a bit more freedom than I might necessarily want.

I dumped core last night, telling all of this to Jessie at two in the morning. I've felt that Jessie hadn't taken the job search seriously. I'd had a background nervousness as the sole income earner for a while, but it's been really heavy lately with everything else going on, the times I've spent in the control of someone else putting the times I've
had to be the bitch about money into sharp relief and making me more uncomfortable.

I don't want to give up the satisfaction and happiness I find in servitude, but I need some way of keeping it from becoming an escape mechanism, and the best way I know to do that is to lessen the negative impact everything
else has. The fastest path to that end involves Jessie getting a job so that I don't feel I'm the only one supporting us and thus making all the decisions about where the money goes. It's probably a strange coping mechanism in my head, but it's there and I work with it and I've led a happy life so far, even with all the ups and downs.

Yesterday, I got stuck driving to work. Normally I take the train because it's cheaper, but I missed the 08h19 and the next one would've gotten me in way too late, so I just skipped it and took my car. It was a very strange thing to me, driving to work after three months of taking the train. Once I have a parking permit at work, I'll be doing it daily, but that's two years off and right now it seems like an eternity.

On the way home, an old classic favorite of mine came on the radio. It's by Informtaion Society, but I can never remember the name; I only know it as "Pure Energy" because it has the soundbite of Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock from the Redjack episode of Star Trek (my mother's worse; she could tell you the name and original airdate, as well as who played Kang and the rest of the Klingon crewmembers). I never owned the album, but I have a lot of fond memories of asking Mitchell if I could hear his copy of the tape, even though that was the only song of theirs that I knew or even really remembered.

That set off a chain in my head of other memories, not quite so pleasant. As can be deduced from some of the other contents of this journal, our final words to each other were spoken in pain, or at least mine were. We exchanged email afterwards, but they weren't pleasant or pretty, and in the end I just stopped replying. I did the same thing with my first boyfriend, Rod, and with Efrain.

Talking with Jessie about it, I do it to a lot of people. I have some strange meter in my head that denotes comfort factor around another person. Up to some critical limit, and I have no idea what that limit is, I get standoffish, quiet, and nervous. I expect confrontation and I respond rapidly to it, either by running away or by striking back,
even when the "offense" doesn't warrant it. Past that point, again with no clear idea of what it is, I start dropping all of my internal barriers and baring my soul, often unexpectedly. I think it comes at least in part from the sense that if I have nothing to hide, I have nothing that can be used against me because I have no need to be afraid.

I spent too much of my childhood afraid of myself and who I was, and my fear became my best weapon against me. I allowed myself to be blackmailed and manipulated by others based on the threat of not being my friend. I
tolerated six years of emotional abuse at the hands of someone whose greatest attack was "if you don't do this my way, our relationship is over." I fear being manipulated. I am genuinely afraid of the idea that my will is not my own, which is totally ironic considering how submissive I can be, in and out of the bedroom.

I suspect that the two are related, actually. In scene, I want to escape responsibility. I want to put myself totally into the control of another person. I want to trust and know implicitly that that trust will not be betrayed. I do not want control, authority or rights. I want to be a pet, an animal, a slave. Outside of that environment, I want there to be no hint, no suggestion of lack of control. I want to be in charge and know that I am my own person. Perhaps my fear of loss of control enhances my sexual fantasies of being at the mercy of others. Perhaps my fantasies fuel my need to assert my authority elsewhere. Either way, they're probably linked.

At any rate, I have this limit in my head that, with each person, indicates safety or not. With those I feel safe, I begin dropping my barriers and letting my soul speak for itself. I admit truths about myself that I would never tell other people. I say what comes to my mind. I share myself freely, knowing that I will be protected. Outside of this line, nothing is revealed. I show only as much as I must, and no more.

When I began my transition, I went around and announced what I was doing, what I was planning, telling those in that blessed inner circle that I had finally found myself. A few people offered me unbiased and unquestioning support. Mitchell did not. At no point did he ever say to me, "this isn't you," but he asked me at every turn if I had tried one or another of some set of medical tests. Had I tried testosterone therapy? My
testosterone count after three months of being on an anti-androgen was marked as "above average male". Did I see another therapist who wasn't biased in the direction of sex-therapy? I didn't think I needed a second opinion.

In short, where everyone else close to me had enthusiastically supported me, including Jessie, Mitchell did not. He knew me, he knew how easily I bent to the will of my peers even when I didn't admit or recognize that I
was doing it, he knew I had a number of transsexual friends with whom I had been closely associating, and he knew something of Jessie's own proclivities. I suspect now that he made the logical, if incorrect, conclusion that I was very likely going through a phase because of my current peer group, and that in time things would reassert themselves with a bit of gentle guidance. If not that, then at least he wanted to make damn sure that I really wanted this because of the severity of change I was making to my life. Either way, it was the action of a concerned friend.

Unfortunately, I also knew Mitchell. He was, is and likely forever will be a manipulator. I say this not as a bad thing, but as a statement of fact. He's charming, persuasive and amiable. He's good at convincing others of what he wants to be true, and I have seen him talk people, myself included, into wholehearted belief of events that never happened. I took his lack of instant and unquestioning support, and his constant requests for "more proof", as a refusal to accept me and an attempt to talk me out of my decision, and as has happened so many times before and will likely continue to happen in the future, I felt threatened and my devenses took control. I felt that my trust had been betrayed and that anything was now fair game, and I responded to every comment, no
matter how slight, with self-righteous anger. I drove him away from me because I couldn't feel safe with him as close as he was. 

Looking back, I still can't say that I did anything "wrong," but I'm an expert at bending that word in every possible direction. One of my greatest weapons and flaws is the ability to nitpick into oblivion any statement I can't refute directly. I can sit here and say that to behave towards him as I did was a mistake on my part, and yet I can't say
that it won't happen again. I can't ever say that I would try to do things any differently. This is a part of who I am. If I don't feel safe with someone, I force that person out of my life, either actively or passively. I try to push away people intially, and then once I get close to someone I slowly open myself more and more, and if at any point I hit
resistance, I shut down the relationship cold rather than let it degrade naturally back to the last point of comfort. By that time, my limits have already been crossed, and I don't know how to do otherwise. Over time, my wounds heal and I feel safe in trying again, knowing that up to some limit I won't be hurt, but by that time I may have already done so much damage that there isn't anything left to salvage.

The only thing I know how to say in my own defense is that I'm trying. I'm still learning to accept a lot of the negative side to my nature and learn to compensate for what I can't correct. I may never stop doing this, but I hope that by admitting that I act this way, I'm taking the first steps towards learning how not to drive away the people that I've made uncomfortable by exposing more of myself than is expected. 

Life is a learning process, more than anything else. I'm still alive, so I'm still learning.

Lately, things have been really busy, and so once again I find myself playing massive catch-up. One might think that I'd just say "Okay, plan to update on the nth of every month and be done with the matter" but I never learn, or else I can't remember to do it, or I put it off, or something.

My paperwork is now in the capable hands of Dr. Kunaporn in Thailand, the surgeon with whom I very much hope to have my surgery. I'm officially scheduled for 2002-03-15 to go under the knife, but there are a few details left to determine. It turns out that there're two groups of surgery for what I want done, one for "adequate penile length" and one for "inadequate penile length", and that the cost difference is USD2500. Further, this isn't a pick-and-choose decision; it's actually important how much tissue I have left post-hormonal interference, so I'm going to have to take pictures of myself to send to Dr. Kunaporn so that he can determine if I can get away with the USD7000 option or if I need the USD9500 option. That I won't know for
a while yet.

Also, I've gotten news on my passport application. According to the person with whom I spoke on the phone at the national office, the Houston regional office lost my paperwork and asked me for my birth certificate as a stalling technique. I told her that the birth certificate would take twelve weeks to arrive, which it would according
to the website for Santa Clara county, California. She asked me what I could tell her about my situation since she wasn't sure what to do. I dropped the whole story on her, and she got mad. Not at me, but at the people in Houston, because there's a lot of paperwork I submitted that I can't replace, including my old passport, which was still valid!

If I had taken that old passport with my court orders and the note from Dr. Kunaporn saying why I was leaving the country, I probably would've had no trouble at all. That's the most annoying thing about this whole process. In trying to spare the hassle of invalid paperwork at the airport, I've gotten my critical documents lost.

Well, maybe not lost. The clerk said, after much checking, that the file had been marked with some code that meant, ultimately, that someone had pulled my file and set it aside somwhere on somebody's desk without marking why it had been pulled. There's only one reason that comes to my mind, but if I say it I'll be accused of only having one topic of conversation again.

Someone at the Houston passport agency is supposed to call me today or tomorrow. I hope whomever it is has a very good explanation for what's happened.

It's been two weeks since I've put anything significant in my diary, and a lot has happened in that time, but very little of it seems newsworthy. It all has the feel of "I've already said this."

I think one flaw of keeping a diary is that after a while, everything seems to sound the same. Not having updated my website in a while fails to bother me because I've said it all a hundred times. Jessie accuses me of repeating
myself ad nauseum when I don't watch myself, and I'm sure I've done that on this site without even thinking about it.

Chloe has been here on a visit, and it was wonderful finally seeing face-to-face the wonderful coonie I'd known online. I think it's important to say that she seemed to be in person very much who she is online, which is a rare enough event that I consider it significant. Actually, it's rare for me to meet people who aren't similar to how they portray themselves, but from what I've heard from others, it's unusual.

Jessie and I are in our own apartment again. I had hoped that things would work out with Efrain, but they didn't and the details as to why aren't really important. I still love the cat very much, and I know Jessie does as well and
that feeling is returned, but living together got all of us on each others' nerves after a while, and so it just worked out best to go our separate ways and get two apartments. We're in the same complex, though, so it isn't like
the friendship is over or anything, and we do still all see each other on a regular basis.

It's been almost nine months since Jessie and I have had the chance to be alone with each other, and the first night I spent curled up against Jessie's side, knowing that we were alone together was an indescribable sensation. It wasn't the bed, or the room, or the apartment, but just the knowledge that whatever else happened, I could come home at the end of the day and zie would be there, and that we would be together, and that nothing else had to get in the way. I'm glad I had Randy living with me when she did, and I enjoyed the time we lived at Efrain's, but I'm happy to be in my own apartment again.

Last, and probably most important, I received my psychiatric evaluation in the mail. It really doesn't say anything that I didn't already know, but it "guarantees" that I really do have a female gender identity and that having the operation is probably a good idea. Jessie made a number of jokes upon reading the evaluation that medical science had finally realized what zie could've told them two years ago.

The letter by itself really doesn't mean much. It's important because as far as I know, it's the last piece of paper that I have to have to send to my surgeon to guarantee my surgery next March. Now all I have to do is send it and then put aside the money to pay for it. If I must, I'll take out a loan, but I hope that won't be necessary.

Now it's only a matter of time.

I had a long talk with Efrain last night. Things have been stressed lately, with SGS being on the blink and three of my friends potentially out of work in the near future. It by itself isn't making things problematic; I make enough to cover the three of us in the short-term, though I don't like being the only person employed in the family. Neither do Efrain and Jessie. What it does is contribute enough to the cat's stress levels that little things that would ordinally mean nothing or totally get overlooked become more an an issue than they need to be.

We spent several hours talking yesterday evening, and the details of the conversation aren't realy important, but the gist of it is, I think, quite meaningful. Anger doesn't produce. Hatred doesn't fix anything. Being upset at people and harboring grudges don't solve problems; they only contribute to them.

I've been carrying a few grudges for quite a while now. I'm not proud of them, but at the time I lashed out against people who were once my friends, I thought it was the only way I could get through to them that I thought they were doing the wrong things. It didn't stop them. They had either already stopped on their own, or they weren't going to stop just because I tried to withhold my emotions. I didn't do any good to either of us, to any of us.

Joanne, I'm sorry. I know that saying it doesn't make up for what I did, but I hope that, in saying this here, publicly, as I did before, I can start to undo some of the damage I caused. You didn't deserve what I said, and I've taken down the previous entry and made right what didn't need to be changed.

I can't solve your problems. I'm not here as a crutch or even really a guide. I don't have any wisdom to teach. Anything I could say, you'll either learn on your own or you wouldn't understand anyway. I don't think anyone ever really learns from the mistakes of others. We only repeat them in new and exotic ways. I can't stop you from doing what you think is best, but I want you to know that I believe in you, that I support you in what you're doing
and that I still care about you, even if we may not make the same choices. 

I don't want carbon copies of myself echoing everything I do and turning my life into a Socratic dialogue. The ability to disagree with each other without rejecting each other should be a source of strength, not a sore spot. You must live your own life; no-one else can do it for you. When you chose a course of action I thought foolish, I blew up at you and tried through emotional blackmail to take away from you the one thing I should've recognized and respected as sacred: your right to make your own decisions.

I hope you'll forgive me.

This time, I'm writing while I'm awake enough to do so. Jessie's out cold in the cot next to the bed, and I have no idea how much longer I'm going to be awake. I hate being up at such an odd hour, even on vacation, but this time
I think I've earned it, at least in part.

As expected, the orderlies arrived this morning at nine o'clock, and after much last-minute fiddling I was on the gurney and headed to OR reasonably on time. When I arrived, I got to watch two of the nurses picking the hairs out of my scrotal skin with scalpels while the rest of the staff got me positioned up onto the bed. The anaesthesiologist came in, opened up the tube at my shoulder and begin administering the epidural drip, just like last time.

Then the fun and games began. The nurses realized that, in their initial positioning, I was too high up on the bed for them to be able to get my legs into the stirrups, and so they started trying to shift me down further onto the OR bed to make room. Because of my size and unhelped by the fact that I was already losing control of my legs, they simply hefted and tugged me down the length of the bed. Shortly thereafter, a loud crash brought all motion in the OR to a stop. The epidural needle attachment at my shoulder had fallen to the floor and broken. My epidural was stopped. 

The anaesthesiologist came into the room, took one look at the situation, facepalmed and begin measuring out backup dosages. Mostly not awake still because of the hour and the drugs already in my system, I didn't say anything to him at first, and I guess everyone must've thought they had some time to get started, so they did. Then I shifted my leg once, and then the other. For those of you who've ever had an epidural, or any kind of proper anaesthetic, being able to move your own limbs is a Bad Sign, because it means the nerves there aren't asleep. Since I was able to move my legs, this meant I would feel it when they began trying to do anything to me. I attempted to convey this much, but the OR nursing staff was by now too stressed to pay attention to the patient babbling in some incomprehensible foreign language, and I don't speak a word of Thai, so there was no way for me to get my questions answered.

The first time the suture needle pricked me and I felt it, I hissed. The second time I did it again and they asked me if I was in pain. I said, "A little" and they began hurriedly talking amongst themselves, and then the anaesthesioloist put something into my IV line. By the time it occured to me that it was more anaesthetic, I was unconscious.

Unfortunately, apparently nobody told Jessie that this had happened, and so when they brought me out of surgery, instead of leaving in ICU to recover like last time, they wheeled me back into the hospital room so that Jessie could get the full effect of seeing someone waking up from a drug-induced sleep, including the shakes and the mostly-incoherent babbling of someone complaining about being too cold. Needless to say, my mate was not very happy about this. When I did finally regain consciousness—around 17h—and explained what had happened, zie calmed down a lot, but we were still both rather upset over what had occured.

At least the only thing I really have left is one packing change. I don't even have the vacuum tube any more, just the catheter. Hopefully by next Tuesday the surgeon will change my packing, and then by next Friday I should
be able to start looking at return flights.

I'm glad I came here, but I'm getting more eager to go home every day.

So much has changed, and yet so little feels different.

In the last three weeks, the following has all happened:

1. I moved.
2. I exchanged a roommate for another mate.
3. I rekindled a long-dead friendship.
4. I quit my job at L-3.
5. I signed an offer letter for a new position.
6. I finished my therapy.

And yet, after all this, my life doesn't really seem that different. This is what confuses me the most. Almost everything has been upheaved and reordered, and yet it all feels so natural already that it doesn't seem at times as if there were anything new.

The move had been a long time in the making. Texas simply has never been hospitable to me, but there had always been one reason or another to stay. With the offer of a new job, that reason was gone. The friends I had had there are gone. My parents are moving out of state once my mother graduates. I didn't like the climate. I still have people I know there, but they were too far away to make regular visits practical, and I'll still have the chance to go down there and see them. This way, I don't have to return to Tex-Ass once I'm done.

---

Part of me is sorry to have to have seen Randy leave, but another part is glad she's not living with me any more. When she moved into Jessie's and my apartment back in September of last year, I think we all expected things to
go vastly differently thasn they did. She couldn't get a job with her navy skills because of her psych discharge, which neither of us expected, and then it took her a lot longer to get around to finding a regular job. Then, once
she did, it turned out to be too little too late. She wasn't making enough to make her own rent, and Jessie and I couldn't bring her with us to Pennsylvania.

I say we couldn't. The truth is that we chose not to do so. We could've made room, but she would've likely faced the same problem here, and the apartment into which we moved was smaller than our old one, and already had one occupant, Jessie's and my other mate, Allie. Four people would not have worked in this apartment, and to support herself, she would have needed another roommate with a guaranteed job from day one. That would've meant a fifth person in the apartment designed for two and crowded with three, and it would have been an utterly horrible violation of the lease agreement on top of that.

I did say above that Jessie and I have another mate. Since before my breakup with my previous boyfriend, I had come to the decision/realization/discovery that strict monogamy made very little sense to me. Love, in my opinion, is not a finite resource. I can give all my love to one person and have infinite amounts left over for others. I now have two people with whom I intend to spend my life, and I think we're all three of us the better for it. It does
make sleeping on a queen-size bed together interesting, but that's an easily addressed issue.

A lot of people seem mystified by my having accepted more than one person into my life. I'm confused by the belief that loving one person means not loving anyone else. I've tried to live that way, and I just feel awkward and
uncomfortable when I do. It's like I'm denying what could be for what is, as if having said "I love you" to someone, I'm now committed and can't say it to anyone else unless I qualify it or revoke my having said it to the
first person. It's just... strange.

---

My friendship with Geoff was a surprising one. At one time in the distant past, we had been very close. Not dating-close, but that was probably only for a lack of officiation. I was with Rod at the time, and I'm afraid I had
a serious case of tunnel-vision. My constant comparison of Geoff to my then-boyfriend, in fact, is what mostly led to our break-up, not that I could really blame him for it. At the time, I was utterly mystified at what had happened, but in hindsight it's very clear.

I wasn't expecting to have him back as a friend, ever, but I always did lament the loss of that friendship. We happened to meet, totally by accident, on a common IRC server and began talking. He didn't know who I was; we hadn't spoken since before my transition. When he found out, he was more surprised to find the rumors were true and to hear the story than anything else. We spent six hours, I think, just talking about the intervening years. It felt so surreal, and yet so good. In many ways, it's as if we're both back four years ago, but with the benefit of age and wisdom. It feels good to be able to go back and just talk with him again.

---

Quitting my job was the precursor to the move. For fourteen months, I twiddled my thumbs at L-3 Communications, waiting for them to decide to either give me work or get rid of me. When they hired me, they offered me a development position, but I was never given a line of code to write the entire time I spent there. I was shunted into administration after five months of not doing anything at all, and then transferred from the development group to the support group after another three or four. I told them that's why I quit my last two jobs, but they didn't seem to care.

In addition, ever since I started my transition at L-3, things steadily went downhill. I started out with human resources' full support, but by the end, I could barely get any recognition out of them at all. I was denied access to the women's bathrooms despite repeated promises that this was all just a temporary measure to assuage concerns and that I would be given full access in time. In the end, I stopped caring. They didn't want me using the right facilities; they just wanted me out of their hair. I know that my name was put onto a layoffs list the day after I announced my transition and that only my manager's active arguing had it removed. I think they just wanted me gone but were afraid to fire me for fear of a lawsuit. At any rate, I'm glad I'm out of there.

---

My new job at ISI should be far better. I received absolutely no questions, no comments, no complaints and no inquiries about my gender at all. I was hired as Kristina Davis and there's never been any issue of it. I haven't started my new position yet; that's Monday. However, it can't be anywhere near as bad as my last one. And if it is, I'm now already moved and shouldn't have any problem finding another job.

At this point, having had as many positions as I have, I really don't dread finding a new job. I hate the jobsearch process, but I don't worry about changing positions. I suppose I should; I really would love to find a place at which I could put in five or ten years of solid work experience. I hope that ISI is the place for that. From the interview, it looks like it could be, but that's what I said about L-3.

---

The therapy is really the big one. It's over. I had my last session the Tuesday before I moved. It was very strange in its own way. I wrote a story about how I envisioned the end of therapy, of so many months of ritual, and I was reasonably close but there were no tears. I felt nothing but happiness. I was sad for leaving behind so many people I had come to consider friends, but my therapist said quite honestly some months back that I really didn't need to be in there any more. I was there to complete the forms and get all the letters and make everything
official, but it wasn't really necessary for my well-being.

I do miss them, Lisa and Rustie and Rachel and Janet and Lillith and Brandy. In the short time I was part of their circle, I did grow and learn quite a bit. They even said that they were amazed at how much I had changed in so
short a time. I thought I had everything under control when I started, and yet I continued to grow. It makes me wonder how much more I'll change now that I'm done with that phase of my life.

---

My surgery date is set. My therapy is completed. I'm only waiting on my release letter from my psychiatric evaluation to submit all my paperwork to the surgeon to begin the preparations for my actual trip to Thailand. I'm in a new job, in a new town with lots of friends I've known for years living nearby. I'm in a quiet apartment with both of my mates. It's hard to believe that everything is going so right for once. I'm used to things just not quite working out as I'd planned, and so are both of them. Now, for once, everything looks as if it's going as we had hoped.

I'm certainly going to enjoy it while it lasts.

Today's installment is another episode of too busy living to write about it, so I have a lot to mention.

First and foremost, I've gotten my surgery date confirmed: 2002-03-15. My surgeon, Sanguan Kunaporn, says I should be in Phuket on the 14th. I'm going to try to be there at least a day before that.

Now that the date's set, the fun begins. Emotionally, I believe I'm ready for the surgery. Financially, I haven't a hope in hell of having enough in the bank by that point, so I'm going to likely have to take out a loan to pay for everything. However, I've already figured that into things, and I won't mind it if that's what it takes. I would rather have the operation done and be on the road to recovery and dealing with the financial worries for five years than have to put off the operation until I have the money on hand. 

Second, my psychiatric evaluation is finished, and apparently the doctor that I visited thinks I'm a woman. Imagine my surprise. With that step completed, now all I have left is the operation, which is already scheduled, and the hair removal, which was going to take years anyway.

Speaking of hair removal, I'm likely going to be able to afford my next round of facial zapping with the high-powered laser as soon as my tax return gets back, which was its own party. It turned out that if Jessie and I both filed single, we got back $800 between us (Jessie got $1100 and I owed $300). However, if I filed as head of household and claimed Jessie as a dependant, we got $2000 ($1400 for me and $600 for Jessie). I think you can guess which one we took. It's weird that the numbers should change so drastically by such a minor change in status, but they did, so we're taking advantage of it. I mentioned it to my father and he didn't see anything wrong with the plan, so I went with it. He knows more about this stuff than I do anyway, so I trust his judgment.

I just got back from a trip up to Pennsylvania to visit my other mate and go to some job interviews, and I hope like crazy that I hear something back soon from ISI or the recruiter helping me land that job. I think it was a really
positive meeting with their company, and it sounded like a fun job, not too challenging but enough work to keep me occupied. Further, if I get it, it means that I can pack up and leave Texas that much faster, which is the real reason I went up for the interviews in the first place!

Being around Efrain again was absolutely wonderful, and I miss my kitten a lot. I hate the fact that Jessie and I can't both be up there, and I'm sending Jess to Philadelphia a week from Tuesday which means for some amount of time, until either Jessie or I land a job in the area, I'll be away from both of them. While I'll still have Miranda around down here in Texas, I'm going to be going steadily nuts. However, it's only temporary, and I'll head up to be with my loves by June anyway even if nothing works out, and then I'll get whatever position I can find up there.

It's a bit strange, getting ready to send the person that's helped keep me the most stable away from me. However, I know it's a short-term separation, and soon I'll be back with my mates. Things are going to work out. I believe it

I had another emotional collapse today, getting ready for work. By now one might think that I'd be used to them and they wouldn't happen but they still do, even when I know they're on their way. I even called Jessie into the
bedroom as it was starting so that I wouldn't be alone when it hit. It's eerie, knowing that I'm about to nosedive but that I'm not there yet and that I can feel everything on the way down into depression and be utterly unable to prevent it.

If this is what my father went through with his clinical depression for fifty-three years, it explains a lot about him that I never understood before.

This time was a bit different, though, in that it wasn't totally internal. The Parking Lot is Full, a very odd online
comic strip, runs the gamut from surreal to banal to dark and disturbing. One issue in particular, though, served as the catalyst for my crying jag today.

Looking at it, I can see the humor. I can see why it's supposed to be funny, but all I can feel is this tangled knot of emotion. The expression on the chimp's face is, in Jessie's language, a symbol for all the people who have been hurt and unable to fight back or protect themselves. Children, elderly people, handicapped people, emotionally fragile people, victims of abuse... I could list hundreds of groups, I'm sure. I felt pity for the victims, hatred for the oppressors, helplessness at my inability to help, anger at my helplessness, and probably other things I haven't even followed from there. I felt the desire to pick up that chimp and somehow promise that I would make
it all alright again, that he would never be hurt that way again.

By now, even I was thinking somewhere in the distant, rational corner of my mind, "Kristy, sweety, why in hell are you letting yourself get worked up over a comic strip? It's not real. And yet... as a symbol, it touches chords within me. I've been in the position of having people around me that needed help for whom I could do nothing, sometimes because of the situation, sometimes because I never knew they were hurting. I hate the feeling of helplessness at not being able to help those about whom I care so much.

I got into computer programming because it was a job at which I knew I had some aptitude, and at which I knew I could make money, but in truth even when I started down this road, it wasn't the road I wanted to take. I wanted to be in a field where I could help others, where I could touch others' lives. I've dreamed of being a teacher for years, but I've always put off doing anything about it because I said I needed the time in industry to make the money I'd need to live comfortably while getting my doctorate in computer sciences so I could teach at the university level.

Now I'm wondering, even if it's only in passing, if maybe I'd be happier going into a field like counselling or the like. Part of my problem is that I'd love to be able to help, but there's some part of my mind that wants it to be a labor of love. If I'm taking money for it, suddenly I'm doing it because it's work, not because it's something I enjoy doing, however crazy that sounds. I should love what I do, irrespective of whether I get paid, but there's some part of my mind that says I shouldn't take money for what I do because I enjoy doing it.

It's strange, saying at twenty-six years of age, that I'm not where I want to be in my life, but I've said it of so many other things that this one is hardly surprising, and it's something I've been saying since I was young, really. It's just something that I've always put off and not really actively sought, simply because I thought I had other priorities. I wanted to work in industry first and prove that I could put my skills to use. So far, I haven't done anything in the field that I couldn't have done when I left high school. I just have two more pieces of paper claiming that I know what I'm doing, even if they're not what I want to do.

I think once I have my surgery paid for and my life in order, I should start looking at going back for my doctorate and looking into teaching positions. Maybe I can start at a community college teaching night classes. One of the
other women in my therapy group is a teacher; she may know of some place that's looking.

Yay. New Millennium for real, finally, if you're using the old-fashioned Gregorian calendar, which we all do in our daily living whether we recognize that we do it or not. Even if you use the Common Era trick, you're still using the Gregorian calendar, just not calling it Anno Domini, "Year of our Lord". I've seen a lot of other calendars including the Jewish, Chinese, Mayan, Discordian and Tranquility versions, and they all say the year is something different, but none of them get written on my checks.

New Year's is supposed to be a time of resolutions, but that's to me as silly as presents just for Christmas is. We all walk around saying that we should be nice to each other because it's the holidays, as if we would normally lie, bicker and argue with one another but we won't because it's That Time of the Year. If we really wanted to stick to the changes that we wanted to make in our lives, we would. We shouldn't need the calendar on the wall, as arbitrary as it is, to dictate our actions.

This having been said, I hope you enjoyed whatever festivities in which you participated. Jessie and I went up to visit zir parents in Michigan for the week just prior to Christmas, and then to my parents' apartment the Friday after. As luck had it, most of the people Jessie would have wanted to visit were either just leaving for trips to other parts of the country themselves or wouldn't be arriving until after we'd left, and so we spent most of the
time with Jessie's family or zir friend Greg. Don't get me wrong: Greg's was fun to have around and I enjoy being around Jessie's parents, but I know how much Jessie was hoping to be able to spend more time with zir other friends, and they were all out of town. This just means that next year we have to plan things more than three days in advance, I guess.

More than anything, this time of the year brings about introspection. For me, it's the break between mental semesters. I remember winter break fondly from my university days and the fact that my office shuts down for a week around this time only reinforces old habits. Now's when I would go through all of my old lecture notes and save the ones I thought I'd need for next year, for the classes whose prerequisites I took this semester. Inevitably I'd lose all my old notes and tests and such, but it was the effort of sorting out the baggage from last year and the official cleaning-out of the bookshelf, and of all the other baggage in my life.

Mitchell emailed me about a week ago. It was the sort of email that I guess I should have expected from him, but I'd hoped I had been wrong. In it, he blamed me for the dissolution of the friendship, despite having been the one
to say to me, "Jessie's not welcome in my apartment" even after I said that where Jessie wasn't welcome, I wouldn't go. He then tried to apologize for doing what he thought was right, which annoyed me further. He also wouldn't talk with Jessie about what prompted him to make the decision he did, which frustrated Jessie. In short, if anyone were responsible for our not speaking, I would say it was Mitchell.

In the fact of all of this, though, he stated in his note, "I forgive you for your dropping of our friendship". I'm still not entirely sure what I should make of this. If this is how he views our friendship ending, then I really don't want to make the effort of continuing it. If this is a  misunderstanding on my part of what he said, or his faulty memory at work, then I'd like to try to pick things up again, but I have a hard time believing that this is the case. He's had my phone number. He's had my email address. He could have contacted me at any point, but he never did. I replied to his email and told him all of this. I haven't gotten any further response.

I've been talking with surgeons, finally. I emailed Dr. Kunaporn in Phuket, Thailand, about getting on his waiting list and finding out his criteria for candidacy. I felt like I was back in graduate school, going through my checklist to make sure I could get my degree. At any rate, I'll qualify for everything in August of next year, and so when he said that he had a fifteen-month waiting list, I thought I wouldn't be up for surgery for at least two years: nine until the application and fifteen past that, plus however much longer the list had gotten in that time. However, he told me that I could go ahead and apply to be on his list now and could schedule for March of 2002.

Surgery has always felt like this far-off thing for me. As much as I want it, as desirous as I am of the results of the operation, I think somewhere in the back of my mind, I always held out hopes that one day I'd just wake up and
things would be different. I don't have an actual date, but I've asked Dr. Kunaporn to please list me in his calendar and that I would have the paperwork to him as soon as I got it together. Now I have to worry about all the details of the finances to pay for it, the logistics of going to Thailand for a month to have the operation and recover enough to fly back, the paperwork to make sure I can go where I need to go. I'm actually in preparation to get to the Big Snip, as it were.

It's strange talking about it in terms of something that'll be over in fifteen months. The hair removal almost certainly won't be finished at that point. The likelihood of people suddenly recognizing me as female won't change. I won't have been on hormones long enough to consider breast enlargement if I want, so my visible form won't be any different. It's an on-going process, not one that just stops cold with the surgery. In many ways, I'll forever be
transgendered.

What matters, ultimately, is that I'm happy. Minor emotional wobbles aside, I'm happier now than I have been in a long time.

---

I've been seeing myself as hare a lot lately. It's strange, closing my eyes and seeing what's like a reflection of an idealized form back at me, white fur with black tips to my shorter ears and puffed tail, large feet, dark brown eyes, the lot. I say it's strange, anyway. It never happened before, during the time period to which I lovingly and someone embarrassingly refer as the LoveBear Era. Then again, I think I always knew somewhere under the
surface that LoveBear wasn't really me, that he was a face I put forward to show the world.

I guess what's strange to me is that it's never happened before, and yet been exploring animal spirituality for several years. At least, I've been following friends who've been exploring animal spirituality. In all honesty, I don't think I ever really believed until recently.

It's not that I believe, really. It doesn't work like that for me. Animals do not in and of themselves have mystical connections that in turn make those who follow them act in certain ways. It's more like, we ascribe characteristics to certain animals, and then we say that people who show those characteristics are of the animals whose characteristics they match. It's probably bass-ackwards from how a lot of others approach it, but it works for me. It's my backwards baseball-cap.

At any rate, it's been a reassuring feeling, seeing this image in my head, having the overwhelming sense of looking into a mirror and seeing that face, that form. It's like a vindication, or the first signs of psychosis. Either way, I feel more comfortable with myself as I am now than I ever did during the LoveBear Era, and that's always a step in the right direction.

Every day, I'm more myself. I can't think of anyone I'd rather be.

It's been almost a month since I updated this; you'd think I were losing interest or something. It's more the case that I have all these little things that happen that, when I think I should update my page, don't seem significant enough on their own to warrant a second glance, but taken as a whole represent a lot of activity that I should record somewhere.

My emotions about my job are steadily declining. This is mostly due to two major factors:

First, I have nothing to do all day in my cube. This leads me to feel as if I could be fired at any minute, the instant they realize that I contribute nothing to the company structure. They hired me en masse with a bunch of other people, half of whom they laid off when they realized that they had not enough work for us all. They still don't have enough work for us leftovers, but they don't want to get rid of us 'cause it'd be bad for publicity or something, so I still have my job, but it's only a matter of time before that stops.

Second, the bathroom situation is disintegrating even further. The legal department has ruled that even if I were to internally transfer to a division within the company at which nobody knew of my past, they would feel obligated and compelled to inform human resources of my situation and require me to avoid using the ladies' room until after I had finished my surgery. I consider this a gross invasion of my privacy and I'm trying to get a meeting set up with the legal department to express this to them direction instead of taking out my frustrations on HR, but in light of the other issue mentioned above, pushing my luck with trying to get equal recognition is only hastening my employment demise, so I'm trapped.

The only way I see out of this dual bind is to find another job, and I've been looking heavily for one, but as of yet I've met with remarkably little success. I have a résumé that screams out for an administration job, and I'm trying to get back into development because I don't enjoy being sysadmin work, but nobody wants to believe that I have any development skills because I haven't put them to use since I graduated, my Master's Degree notwithstanding.

So, for now, I've been advised by both of my mates to sit down, stay quiet and keep my muzzle shut about the bathroom issue, so that I can make a clean getaway into another position. I emailed the ACLU, though, a few days ago, and I'm interested in hearing what they have to say about the whole situation.

---

Ryan just came through for a visit, and I always forget how much I miss being around some people until they're not there. I hadn't seen him in nearly six months, and the chance to cuddle with him, to talk with him, to share with him again was wonderful. We watched Being John Malkavich, and I had about the same response to it that I had to Blair Witch Project: it was artistic and technically superior, but not a film I would want to see twice. We ended up staying up for several hours after we'd planned on going to sleep that night, talking about the movie and then related threads in this huge webwork of connections until the sun was coming up and we were yawning every third word.

We watched I Married a Strange Person again, and I'm still in love with Bill Plympton's animation style. I wish I could find that on VHS; I refuse to buy a DVD player until I can get a PS2, 'cause there's no point in me paying for two separate units. I'm not enough of a videophile to care that there're artifacts or bad decoding or whatever it is that's the complaint of the week about why the PS2 is a bad unit to own; my eyesight is so bad I couldn't tell the difference between the digital and tape versions of Toy Story 2 that Jessie insisted were dramatically different in quality. Ryan's computer monitor made a nice substitute TV in the short-term, but I wouldn't want to try to do that too often.

Once again, I managed to miss seeing Network, which is a movie that Ryan's been trying to get me to watch for two years now and that I keep saying I'll see but that I never manage to remember to rent. I finally have a television on which I don't mind sitting down to watch movies, but I never think about going and renting any because I'm forever using it as a monitor to my PSX or Jessie's old Nintendo. I'd hook my Zircon Fairchild up to it, or go and get my Atari 400 back from my father if I thought I could get it back from him. I probably could; he never plays it any more anyway. At some point, I'm going to remember to see this film so I can tell Ryan what I think of it, and I just hope it's worth the hype and the two years of waiting. We differ so greatly on what makes a good movie that I'm almost afraid to see it and ruin the magic.

In the end, I'm so glad he stopped here on his way. It's always nice to have family around, and he's been close to me for a very long time. I'd be lying if I claimed I weren't interested in him, but he's taken and hopelessly homosexual, and thus I'm simply pleased to call him my brother.

---

Speaking of visits, my old roommate from Australia, David Basden, came through here a few weeks ago. After having not seen him in over a year, I found out almost out of nowhere that he was going to be taking a round-the-world trip out of Australia to see the sites and wanted to stop by my apartment. I was pleasantly shocked and said yes almost instantly. Seeing him at the airport and the look of recognition and surprise on his face was worth everything.

It felt to good to be able to reconnect to a piece of my past that I'd thought I'd lost. The last time I'd seen him in person, I was still struggling to hold together the shreds of my identity as a male, to keep a relationship that I
had known for years was doomed to failure but was afraid to leave, to maintain the facade of nothing having changed in the last seven years. Being able to be myself and still have him recognize me for who I was, and who I wanted to be, was a wonderful experience.

There was some bitter in the sweet, but there always is at times like this and I don't regret any of it. I learned a lot about my ex-boyfriend that I wish I had had the courage to face years ago, but I'm glad I learned them. If you're reading this, I want you to know that I forgive you. I should have left you five years before I did, but I forgive you anyway.

It feels so good to be able to say that. 

This situation is becoming ludicrous.

Yesterday evening, I came to work to find a note from my boss that Human Resources had resolved to simply require me to continue using the ladies' restroom. They had no explanation as to why. They had no reasons. They
simply said that I would use the unisex bathroom at work until further notice.

Before I had had my gender legally changed, I agreed that this was a fair compromise and I accepted that I wasn't legally female and thus if the company caught any flak about me using the women's restroom, they could be held accountable. Now, however, I had the law on my side. Now, admittedly, I may have erred in not presenting this fact to HR immediately, but as I didn't think it would change anything since they said they had changed my internal paperwork already, I didn't worry too much about it.

When I heard Human Resources' decision, I sent a rather strongly-worded email to both my manager and my department head telling them that I felt HR's policy was ill-conceived and discriminatory, and that I would be
escalating the issue as high as it took to resolve the matter. I am legally female now, and I deserve the same treatment that other females receive at this company. I told them as much and I asked for the name of the person
that made the decision and the appropriate means of going over whomever's head.

Today, I got a response from the head of my department, telling me that he had passed on my concerns to HR and that he was trying to arrange a face-to-face meeting with them to resolve the issue of bathroom usage. I'm
perfectly amenable to this, but I hope that that department understands I won't consider anything less than being allowed access to the proper restroom. If they want to say "don't use this one; give the people who are uncomfortable a place to go without your presence" then I'll live with it, despite not liking it. Even saying "only use this one women's room" would be an improvement over the current situation.

At any rate, I know my manager and my department head support me in my efforts. I regret things have come to this point, but I don't regret anything I've done along the way.

I also found out last night that my gender had not been corrected on the other internal paperwork; I went to fill out my benefits enrollment form for next year and found that the wrong box was checkmarked. I now feel doubly cheated, because I was under the impression that they would change this before, and now I've learned that they haven't. I may be wrong in this, and if so then they haven't lied to me, but I feel as if they didn't have the decency to fix what they knew would be in my documentation at some point. It's highly frustrating.

I still want to believe that this is a good company marred by a lousy HR department. However, I'm finding it harder and harder to believe that, and despite my positive review last week I have no desire to move to New York. If I continue to pursue that option, it will only be as a means of last resort, if everything falls through with Gary's company. I hope that doesn't happen.

I try very hard not to hate the general populace for its ignorance and blindness, but there are times I fail miserably.

My boss called me into a meeting yesterday. Someone had complained about my using the ladies' room at work. He admitted that he thought it was a stupid complaint but he had to address it. When I first started my transition, I naturally started using the women's bathroom at work as one would have expected, but someone complained and so I was asked to use the unisex restroom at the front of the building, the one reserved for visitors outside the secured area. I guess I should have been fortunate that the bathroom was there, but I was irritated at the inconvenience and what I considered the discrimination. At the time, I was told it was because I wasn't legally female and that if I had been, there would have been no issue. Thus, when I got my gender legally changed, I simply went and began using the appropriate facility. Someone again complained.

Now, I admit that I didn't tell Human Resources about my legal gender change. However, all of my corporate paperwork already said female on it anyway, so I figured the issue was behind me. This was probably a mistake
on my part, but in hindsight it may not have mattered. I found out later that my HR department is horrible, according to my manager and my head of department.

At any rate, they called me in to ask me what I understood of the agreement I had made about the bathroom. I told them that I was legally female now and entitled to use the appropriate facilities. I then handed over my driver's license and waited while they blinked and very rapidly agreed that the thing to do was chastise HR for allowing the complaint to get out of hand like this. However, in the meantime, they asked me to please go back
to using the bathroom up front until they could hammer out something with Human Resources.

It isn't the bathroom that bothers me, really. That's an annoyance, but at least the facility is there and I don't have to use the men's room or something equally dumb. What bothers me is that the complaints are allowed to affect me at all. One person has a problem at my workplace with my transition, and she has the ability to determine where I pee, and possibly more. I can't talk with her, reason with her, or otherwise address her because I'm not supposed to know who it is. Everyone in a position of authority over me thinks it's stupid that I have to go through this, and yet they still put me through it because someone above them doesn't think it's so outrageous.

I am so hoping to get a job at a place where I am simply accepted as female from day one and never have to fight this kind of battle.

Saturday, I realized I'd lost something and I thought I'd left it in my closet, so I decided to straighten all the clutter that I'd let grow in there. Shortly after starting to organize the boxes of junk that I'd stored for no apparent reason, I came across a box of old clothing and such from before I started my transition.

The clothes weren't for what I'd been searching. Honestly, at the time I had other things on my mind, but after a second basket of unwearable and uninteresting attire turned up, I decided that it'd be a good time to sort all that out and do something with it. So, I started the process of collecting all the old clothes that I'd never need again and putting them in a single place.

At first, I only wanted to have them collected so eventually I could do something with them. I wasn't even sure what at the time. Then I realized that there was nothing I could do with them. I've lost so much weight since then that none of it would fit, even if I did abort my transition, which now is unthinkable. So, I decided that it was time to send it all to Goodwill.

Monday, after carrying all the clothes to the recycling store. I left with this strange sense of elation. I'd put another step behind me. For two months, the old work shirts had hung in the back of my closet, skeletons of my former
life. Now they're gone, and I'm free to fill up all that space with clothes for who I really am, that I'll enjoy wearing and that I'll want to wear in public, for the simple joy of being myself and being seen.

I never did find what I was looking for in my closet, though. Now I can't even remember what it was.

This is something that has been ruminating for a while, and I'm still not entirely sure where it's going if anywhere, but it's a thought process that I at least felt was worth sharing in my therapy group, so I suppose I should share it here as well.

Every year for Christmas, my grandmother gives me fifty dollars. She has as long as I can remember. It used to be twenty or ten or five but she's always given me something; never once has she failed to have an envelope waiting for me come the twenty-fifth of December. Not once in my entire life have I written a thank-you note in response.

I never used to think about it. Either I was too busy or it wasn't important to me or I said I would do it and then ever got around to it, but whatever the justification, I simply never did it. Before, this never mattered to me; obviously if it had I would have done something about it. Now, though, I'm a different person from whom I used to be, and I wanted to show that to her. 

The reason that any of this is relevant is that, about two weeks ago, my father asked me what my plans were for Thanksgiving and Christmas because he wanted to arrange to go down and visit my grandmother over whichever
holiday I would be out of pocket.

My father has not told her that I'm transsexual.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue at all. I don't have any sort of regular contact with her. She isn't someone that's part of my life. Yet, she still gives me money every year, and for once in my life I wanted to turn things around and thank her for all the gifts she'd given me. I can't simply not sign the note, but I'm not going to put the old name just for her benefit or my father's. This means either I have to explain in that thank-you note
that she now has a granddaughter, or else she has to be told beforehand, by someone.

I'm sending my parents an email, offering to come with them down to visit my grandmother and talk with her about things if they think that would be a better idea than simply telling her in the note. I have no idea how they
will respond.

I can only hope it's a positive response. Everything so far has been. I don't want to break that trend now.

The strangest things hit me in the strangest ways.

POP! The First Male Pregnancy is a "net art" project created by Virgil Wong, in connection with several other explorations into biotechnology and biology. The site contains a reasonably medically solid, if laymanesque, explanation of how a male could carry a child to term.

I didn't realize, when a friend first pointed out the site to me, that it was actually someone's idea of art. My first reaction was something like, "No, surely I would've heard something more than just that. It would have been a headline somewhere, wouldn't it?" On the other hand, I don't watch television any more because I can't get a decent reception in my apartment and I refuse to pay for cable. I don't read newspapers or follow much in the way of online news sources. My mother probably would've told me if she'd heard anything, but she's going for her doctorate right now and could easily have not heard.

I guess in short, I should've known and even did know from the get-go that it was a hoax, but when I found out for sure, I still started crying.

Becoming a mother is one of my biggest dreams, one that I hope one day I'll have the chance to fulfill. I know that the options of adoption and foster children are always open, and I plan on looking into them once I feel that I could be the sort of parent that any child deserves to have, but my deepest dream is to bear my own children one day.

Right now, that's simply medically impossible. After all is said and done, I will have the appearance I desire, but I won't have the internal structure to compliment it. At the moment, there's just no way to get it, either. My friends have told me that the technology isn't in the too-distant future to allow for it, but it isn't here yet and I have to accept the possibility that it may not happen within my lifetime.

I'm torn between saying that it should be such a little thing, and saying that I know better. Part of me doesn't care, that what truly matters is having things so that they feel right when I make love, that being able to look in the mirror and see the person I know I want to be looking back at me is the crucial factor. Part of me still doesn't know how to accept the fact that, when all is said and done, I won't be a "real woman", that I won't menstruate, can't bear children and will never truly know what it means to be female.

Is "female" truly my goal, though? I said when I started that to be female was the wrong approach, that my drive should be to become myself, and that I should do everything in my power to stop wearing masks and be who I
wanted to be. It just happens that part of who I want to be is a mother, and that's something I can only do through the help of others. 

I know what I want, and I know that I can't have it immediately, but I also know that if I wait, I may get it, so I'm waiting. I've waited this long; I can wait longer.

I swear, there are people who live their entire lives on automatic.

Yesterday morning, I went back to the courthouse and had my gender legally changed. I found out last Wednesday that the judge I had had before, the one who had seemed so nice and polite and concerned, was the one who refuses to sign anyone's gender-change. Going back, all I had to do was get a different judge and it was a matter of five minutes and a few strokes of a pen.

I'm now legally female. It's still a bit mindboggling, both in that it's true and that I had to get a piece of paper to prove it. It seems like such a pointless formality, and yet now I can show off my driver's license to anyone without worrying that they'll notice that little detail. It's comforting that there's nothing left to get in my way beyond the details of surgery and such.

I took my new court papers, ink still wet, with me to the Department of Public Safety to get my driver's license fixed. After standing in line for about an hour, I got to the counter and told the clerk that I needed to have my details updated.

She said, "Oh, did you move?"

I said, "No, I had my gender legally changed."

The woman behind the counter looked at me, looked at the court order, looked back at me, looked at my old driver's license and then looked at the court order again. She got up, picked up my driver's license and court order, and went over to talk to someone. Then she talked with someone else. Then she talked with a third person. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but the gist was obviously along the lines of "what do I do with this" with a smattering of "is this legal" for variety. Everyone with whom she spoke apparently told her the same thing, which she didn't want to hear, because she kept on asking. Finally, after her fourth person, she came back to the counter and started making the changes in the computer.

The actual process, once she started, took less than five minutes, picture and all, though she did insist on three pictures so she could get the worst of the bunch. I think, though, that this is common for drivers' licenses. Anyway, after all was said and done, I paid my ten dollars for the new license. Then, as I was picking up my paperwork, guess what she said to me?

"Have a nice day, sir."

I stared at her in dumbfounded shock. She asked five people in the course of this whole escapade what to do. She had five people tell her to change my driver's license. The court order said "female" on it, and the only thing that had any indication of masculinity at all was the M on my old license and in the computer which was changed. I have breasts sticking out of my sweater, for crying out loud. Yet, despite all of this, what does she say?

"Have a nice day, sir."

I can only imagine that she was running on autopilot. I quite literally stood there in front of her for five seconds, shocked. The whole time, she stared back at me placidly, totally unaware of what she had said. When I finally came to my senses and corrected her, she did apologize, but the fact that it happened at all stunned me.

Are most people this clueless? If so, this would explain why I keep getting mistaken. I seem to find three types of people. The first see exactly what's happening and call me "ma'am". The third see absolutely nothing beyond what's presented, and they also call me "ma'am" It's the group in the middle, the ones who see enough to know what I was but not enough to figure out what I am, that keep getting it wrong.

I hope this third group is not as large as it appears to be.

No matter how far I think I've come, I still have a long way to go.

I have been involved in a friend's play-by-mail now for many years. My method of role-playing has always been to find a character into whose head I could comfortably crawl, and learn over time to respond to things in the
game as the character would, to make my response as the character as close to the charcter's as I could get. I used to use role-playing as a means of escaping reality; now I like to think that I use it as a pleasant diversion,
a positive instead of a negative.

The character that I played, at first, was a model of self, a fifteen-year-old male werebear verging on self-discovery and becoming involved with his first love. I thought at the time that this was a good self-reflection-in-funhouse-mirror, which is the sort of character I play best, because of how I tend to play characters. At first, it was a fun role, and a fitting one, because I thought it was close to who I was.

As time progressed, though, I began to drift away from that mindset. In the past, I know I've said here that I found the idea of bringing my old stories over to my new homepage difficult to accept, because the characters within were no longer people with whom I could empathize. The same happened with the character in this game. At one point, I emailed the gamemaster and said that I didn't think I would be able to continue playing the character.

The gamemaster was extremely sympathetic, and he offered to help me find new life in my character by setting things up so that the character would become female. I said that I wasn't sure if it would work, but I was willing to try and that I didn't want to quit the game. We negotiated a few details and then I left things to his capable hands. 

Shortly thereafter, we set things in motion for the character to make the grand discoveries in her life. Honestly, it wasn't much of a stretch; events had conspired earlier that made things convenient. Role-playing tends, by its nature, to exaggerate events in the real world, and things that could have taken a normal person years to understand happened in a much shorter time within the game.

One of these events was the development of a relationship with another character in the game, a male slightly older than my character. In good melodramatic style, the relationship developed quickly, but not illogically, shared trauma and shared adventure helping grow their closeness. He was among the first of those to find out about her, not the first only because of fear that he would reject her for her announcement.

As things are now, the character is about to have her wishes fulfilled. A mage in the game has undertaken to change her physically from how she is now to who she believes she wishes to be. My character was sent, with her mate, to prepare emotionally and mentally for the change. She worked through a lot of anxiety and fear in her preparation, talking with her mate.

At the end of the last round of emails, her mate proposed to her. 

After responding, I stood and walked away from the computer, thinking about everything that had happened in the game and how it related to my own life, and how I would feel in her situation. It occured to me, after some thinking, that I was envious of her.

No matter what I do, no matter how hard I work, no matter how long I spend trying, I will never truly "be a woman", if only in the sense that my chromosomes will always be male. My body will be virtually indistinguishable
from that of a woman's, but I will never bear my own children. This, more than anything, is what upsets me now.

I remember Lurene as a young child, telling me of her dreams of having children, and how I used to smile and shake my head because I could never see myself as a father. I wish I had had her strength and understanding
then.

I broke down in the shower, sobbing in Jessie's arms. She would have everything I wanted, and I felt so angry and upset and envious that it overwhelmed me. All Jess could do was hold me and wait for it to pass. I hate putting those I love into those kinds of situations, but there are times when I don't know how do to anything else.

I accept that I will never truly have what I want, that I will never get one-hundred percent of what I seek. With work, though, I can have most of it, and that will have to suffice. The only alternative is to have none of it, and that just simply isn't an option.

I'm happy with my path in life, even if it doesn't take me exactly where I want to go. It's the best I can do, and that is all I can ask.