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.

I found out this morning that one of the members of my therapy group died some time in the previous week. That's all that anyone knows so far. I had an email from my therapist in my inbox when I checked it this morning.

Right now, I'm in a very odd mood as a result. I feel as if I should be more upset than I am, and that in and of itself is bothersome. I considered her a friend, and yet we weren't really that close and had little in common. We
knew each other through therapy, and not really beyond it. I enjoyed the time I spent with her outside of therapy, but it honestly wasn't much, and it wasn't over a long period of time.

I'm upset that it happened. Don't get me wrong in this. I wish desparately that she weren't dead. However, she is, and I can't change that fact. I can, at most, wonder what happened and if there were anything I could have done
differently. Nothing I say will alter the irrevocable fact of her death. 

What bothers me now, honestly, is the idea that I will be considered heartless or cold by those others in the therapy group because I am not  distraught by her passing. I spent quite a bit of time this morning talking with Jess about it, actually. I got told that I've got no reason to worry and that the fact that I'm concerned about it shows that I'm not as callous as I fear I may seem, but it's still a bit distressing. My current therapy group was to end this net week, and I wanted it to end on a positive note, but I fear that any chance of that is gone.

I hate it when events are genuinely beyond my control.

---

I still have no news about New York. The human resources director of that office said that she'd pass my information to the manager who expressed interest in my résumé today, but so far I've heard nothing. I hope I hear something tomorrow. I'm feeling antsy. 

I spent the weekend down in Austin visiting friends of mine and Jess's there. Having lived in the city, going back always makes me a bit nostalgic, and right now with the intent to move but the lack of concrete plans to do so, I always feel a bit like it might be the last chance I get to be there. I hate feeling like I have to move, but everyone with whom I've spoken admits that until and unless the Supreme Court reverses the Littleton case's current decision, there's no reason for them to try to talk me out of moving. 

I remember being in a long-distance relationship at one point, and putting off everything in my life because of the idea that "someday" I'd be moving and that there was no point to doing things, because I'd just have to do them all again when I went overseas, and so I never did them. In the end, I lost six years to procrastination. 

I don't consider what I did at the time a mistake, and yet I can't help but wonder if I'm doing the same thing, pinning hopes on "someday." I certainly haven't let it stop me from doing things. I'm going up to bring Randy down to Texas in three weeks. Jess is still looking for jobs in the area. I'm still going to work every day. I just hope I don't have to wait too long before I can start making concrete plans.

I really hate it when events are beyond my control, and not being able to plan for my own future makes me feel like that's how things are.

In redesigning the site, I had to go back and reread, from the beginning, everything I've written here since I started this project. It's not something that I do regularly, but in this case I'm kind of glad I did.

It's been almost a month since I've posted anything, and a great deal has happened in that time. All of it has been small movements, and yet when put together, it's representative of a lot of progress.

I'm not one for naked self-adulation, but I've changed a lot in the last six months, if not in terms of desire, then at least in terms of self-esteem and confidence that I'll be able to survive in my new life. I remember at one point being so scared of what I thought I was, where I thought I had to go. I knew what I needed to do, but I couldn't face it. Now, I've embraced it. I am Kristina Davis, moreso than I was ever the person I used to try to be.

Last Thursday, I decided I had waited long enough and I went back to my doctor's to have the bloodwork done so that I could have my hormone dosage increased. This prompted a lovely battle with my insurance company. it's become very commonplace for insurance companies to flat-refuse to cover any procedures that are classified as sex-change related. They don't have any valid reason for it; they just don't. However, they will all make a big
point of saying that they'll cover any medically necessary procedure.

What happens when you have a sex-changed related procedure that's medically necessary? I asked my insurance company this very question, and they refused to answer. They simply reiterated their two positions about half a dozen times. In the end, I told my doctor that my insurance company didn't know what they were doing or whether they would pay for it, and she offered to run it through their system and then just charge me if they wouldn't pay.I accepted, and I haven't paid since. It's been two weeks, so I'm of the opinion that the matter's settled.

I think I know why they say they won't cover it, when they really will. Saying that they won't stops about ninety percent of the people from even asking, because the book says they won't. Rejecting the initial attempts to have the insurance company pay will stop ninety percent of the people who ask. But if you're one of those one percent of the people who pester them and get nasty, they'll buckle because they'd rather pay for one percent of the treatments than risk facing a lawsuit and being forced to pay for one-hundred percent.

At any rate, my bloodwork came back to me on Monday, and my doctor called me to give me the results. After three months of being on estrogen and an androgen blocker, my estrogen levels are about where they should be for a woman my age, but my testosterone is about what one could expect in a rampagingly priapric nineteen-year-old male. Needless to say, this is why the hormones have felt like they've done very little so far. My dosages have all been doubled, and we'll see what that does.

The process of transferring to New York is proceeding apace. I sent a note on Monday to the HR manager there and found out that there are openings for which one manager thinks I'd be well-qualified, but she's been so swamped with work that she's been too busy to contact me, and this week she's been on vacation recovering from her overwork! They're like FlashNet, so understaffed that they can't take the time to train anyone. I hope when I get there I won't need too much of a learning curve.

Also, I've taken the matter of development of things into my own hands, so to speak. Having read several articles on Body Modification E-Zine about vacuum pumping, and having spoken with someone who succeeded in inducing permanent changes in breast size with this method, I've invested in a breast pump. I'm doing this with a healthy skepticism, but I'm willing to try it. If it works, wonderful. If it doesn't, I'm only out the funds and the time, which I don't mind.

I'm still making progress, but it's slow. Measureable, but slow.

One might think that, with all that's happened in the last few days, I would have been more actively editing my diary, adding to it as things have happened. I'm not disillusioned with the project, but in a strange way, the things that have happened have somehow failed to feel genuinely significant.

I went Monday to have my name and gender legally changed. I arrived at the courthouse at 07h00, well before anything opened, and I had a lot of waiting around to do before I could start anything. I had a few pieces of my paperwork out of place, but I was all set to see the judge at 09h30 and have my new identity intact by 10h00.

It didn't work that way.

To give a brief sidebar to this discussion, let me point you to the Christie Lee Littleton Homepage. To summate, some time back in Houston, Christie Lee Littleton's husband died of medical malpractice, and Littleton sued her doctor for wrongful death. Their defense had nothing to do with the details of the case. They relied entirely on the fact that Christie Lee Littleton was a post-operative transsexual and that, because she was born male, her marriage to her husband was illegal and thus she had no right to sue.

The trial court sided with the defense, the appellate court agreed and the Texas Supreme Court refused to review the case.

In short, transsexuals in the state of Texas are now recognized only as being of their sex at birth. When I went before the judge, he very apologetically crossed out the line of the Order Granting Change of Name of Adult that said that I was female. I did show him my therapist's letter requesting the change, but he said his hands were tied by a higher court and a lack of any hard law to point to the contrary.

Four state workers said the same thing at the Department of Public Safety when I went to get my driver's license changed on Tuesday.

This puts me, and every other transsexual in the state, in an odd predicament. I now legally have a feminine name and am presenting full-time as a woman, but all of my documentation still has the old sex on it, which means that if
I do ever have to use it for anything, I open myself up for questions and the like. The questions don't bother me, but it makes "living full-time in the chosen gender," one of the requirements of the real-life test I've supposedly started, very difficult.

Come to think of it, I have started it, haven't I? Last Friday, my human resources department held a meeting with my coworkers and a counselor and explained my situation to them all. I've been dressing for work now for three days, and every comment I've gotten has been positive. I don't think there's anyone left in my life that doesn't know. A few people at work have had trouble adjusting to the new pronouns, but they've gotten my name right
at least. 

At any rate, the whole matter of the courts and my legal gender have escalated something that had been reviewed once before. Jess and I have often talked about moving out of Texas; the weather here is extremely inhospitable and the people in general only slightly less so. When two of my closest friends detached from me emotionally, we decided that it was time to start looking at moving. With this recent development in the legal system, it's almost
certainly time to move.

I've contacted the head of Human Resources for my company's New York office. They've got some positions open for which I almost certainly qualify, and I've given her my resume. She said she'd contact me later this week or early next to let me know how things look. My HR department here is talking with the insurance company to see if they'll cover my hormones and bloodwork and such for transition, but I won't know more about that for a few days. Right now, I'm just biding my time, waiting to hear back about all the questions I've asked.

I once described this sort of situation as "living in a holding pattern." I'm not losing any ground, but I'm not getting anywhere, either. I'm just... waiting, watching and learning. I did it once for six years, and I hated it. I hope I don't have to do it too long now. 

It's been almost a month since I've updated this, and while I can't say a lot has happened, enough has to warrant a rather large update. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this discussion, but I'll figure it out by the time I get there.

The situation at work is holding steady, I suppose. The person in HR with whom I've been working at furthering my transition there was out of the office through Thursday the day before I went on vacation last week, and so unless he scheduled and held a meeting with my higher-ups without me, nothing more has been done about that. If he did, that would be fine as well, but they'll probably have waited for me to return. The idea of going back to work, and not being myself there... I've honestly dreaded returning to work, especially after this last vacation.

That brings me to the major topic of this post: my vacation. On 5 July, Jess and I took off for Chicago to spend four days with a group of our friends from the Transformation Story Archive. We've both been connected to it now for at least three years, and that's actually where the two of us met, so we'd been waiting eagerly for this year's gathering. 

When I went to last year's Bash, it was in the guise of the person that, back then, I still thought I was. I actually served as the minister for two friends' wedding and spent three days in close proximity with several dozen people that all knew me under my old identity. Over the last year, I'd shed that skin and now had to face most of them again as myself. I was a bit nervous, but very quickly I learned I had no reason to worry.

The engine on one of the planes on the way to Chicago clunked disturbingly as we taxied for take-off, so we had to change planes and arrived at the hotel for the Bash two hours behind schedule. We looked around for everyone that was supposed to be there, but everyone was apparently out to dinner. About midnight, we decided to go to bed, and that was when everyone for whom we had been looking earlier decided to come by our room and see if we were there. It was almost Murphian in timing; I was very amused.

The next day was the opening ceremony, such as it was, and we gathered in the conference room. We did a round of introductions, and as everyone was rattling off names and reasons for coming, I wondered at first what I would say. In the end, there was only one thing to say: "My name is Kristina Davis, and I'm responsible for bringing Mao to the Bash." 

Here, I should digress a moment and talk about Mao. Mao is.. well, it's an evil game. I would explain the rules, but that's against the rules. I can say that much, at least. If you've never played, I highly recommend it. The only real way to learn is to play. If you do a websearch for it, you'll find several rulesets for Mao, which I consider a violation of the rules. At any rate, I brought two decks of cards to last year's Bash and approximately two
dozen people at various times spent some amount of time in the basement of Phil's apartment playing this game. We developed something of a reputation, as did the game, for being very very evil.

Needless to say, my introduction received a round of applause and catcalls from various audience members.

From there... I could go into detail but the truth is that what I remember most is not any given event but the general feeling of the Bash itself. I made a character for a Justifiers game but ended up not playing in the game
itself, going to dinner with my sister Joanne and her boyfriend Mike instead. I helped host a screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show and managed to get the police called on us, though we had finished and left by the time they arrived. I ate out far too much and had a wonderful time with all of my friends. I brought several games that never got played and kept talking about scheduling a time to play them that never happened. One of Jess's
friends came down from Michigan and the two of them got a chance to talk for a while.

Ultimately, I got exactly what I wanted. Shortly before I left, one of the girls in my therapy group asked, as a general question, what we would each consider "freedom" or "success". What was it that we wanted out of transition? I said, at the time, that what I wanted was for everyone around me to know the truth and treat me as I wanted to be treated anyway, as a woman.

This is precisely what I got at the Bash.

Several people apparently all told Jess how much more natural, how much happier I appeared than last year. Everyone called me Kris or Kristy. The one person who used my old online name apologized as soon as I asked him not to do so, and he had no problems adjusting. Everyone had their pronouns right. One person who had expressed concerns before about my ability to pass pulled me aside and told me how good I looked and that all of his fears were gone, having seen me in person. 

I don't think I could've asked for more.

Coming home was painful. I didn't want to leave. I have a few close friends in Dallas, but not nearly so many as I had there. I think we all wished we lived closer and that the Bash and other trips weren't our only means of seeing each other. It makes the get-togethers special, but in the end I think we'd all rather live closer to each other than we do. 

I can't wait to go back next year.

Today's update comes as a case of too busy living life to talk about it.

My sister Jennifer was here visiting for the last week, and it was wonderful. I don't really have many friends now in the area, and the chance to see another person who knows and totally accepts what's going on was great. She was only able to stay a week, but those seven days were a vacation for everyone, even if I did have to go to work the whole time.

The chance to go and visit friends is the sort of thing I really miss with all of this, really. One of my fondest memories of the time I spent in Perth is of going out to see other people. I have a lot of friends down there that I hardly ever see. I keep in touch with some of them online, but I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to meet them
face-to-face again. That I do miss, and Jason understands; he talks the same way about Ann Arbor.

I have too many friends scattered too far across too many continents, I'm afraid. I would love it if, one day, we could all find a way to gather in one place somewhere and make a little bubble away from the rest of the world. Even if we all had jobs and lives and requirements to leave it occasionally, we would all come home to the same place.

I realize it's a nice dream but unlikely to become real. That doesn't mean I'm not going to work towards it happening.

---

This section was going to be a rant against the general apathy and blindness of humanity and an ardent cry wishing that people would take the time to look at things for a moment. It's... turned into something else and I'm not sure what, yet.

I have gone places dressed in a nice blouse and skirt, freshly shaven in all the important places, wearing a bit of cosmetics, eyebrows plucked, voice carefully controlled, in short having handled every detail that I could think to handle, passed over a credit card with my new name on it and had a salesclerk say, "thank you, sir".

If it were malice, I could fight it, but it's not. It's apathy. They don't even look at the card, most of them. They just see the height and the flat chest and they try to ignore everything else, or else they just don't see it at all. However, when I try to correct them, I feel like it's not going to do any good.

I said when I started that I wasn't going to lie and claim that I was never male. Nobody would believe that. What bothers me is the number of people who can't be bothered to look beyond the fact that I'm flat-chested and unusually tall and assume that I'm male despite my presentation. 

I know some of the girls in my therapy group who have gotten breastforms. I always said before that I didn't want to do that, that it would feel like lying if I wore them, trying to actively sway people's perceptions of me. However, isn't that what I do when I wear certain outfits as opposed to others? Isn't that the main reason I wear foundation, to hide the telltale sign of shadow? I already take certain steps to push the needle off of androgyny and further towards the feminine end of the scale. Why have I resisted that step?

I think in part it's because I've felt that it would be money wasted. One day, I will have my own and I won't have to fake them. I know in part it's because I'm still having to shave my chest and that's disheartening. Also, there's the frustration factor of having to take that step. It isn't enough, most of the time, to wear a skirt or a dress or cosmetics to get recognized. At the point that I feel like I'm doing it not for myself but for others, then I'm doing it for the wrong reasons.

I would be doing it for myself, though. Right now, every time I go somewhere and someone calls me "sir", I flinch and get upset, even if just a little bit. If someone takes my credit card and doesn't even see that the name on it is clearly a female name, it bothers me. If breastforms will sway the common herd into treating me how I wish to be treated, maybe I should consider getting a pair.

I think what bothers me is the same thing that prompted me to start therapy in the first place. I'd know, under the clothing, that they're fake. It wouldn't be me, it'd be something put there to convince other people what's there. That's ultimately the determinant. They wouldn't be me. I can live with my body for now because I know I'm changing it. I can live with being flat-chested and mistaken for male because one day I won't be.

I just wish it wouldn't take so long.

Yesterday, I decided that I was going to fold my old homepage into this one. I've been trying to integrate my old identity into my new one, and that site is really one of the last artifacts up from my old name that remains online.

I started, as I thought was best, by going through and editing all of the HTML so the style of the pages would match the rest of my new site. I found that I wasn't such a good coder then, though, so I had a lot of code buried
in the pages themselves that I needed to change. Quite innocently, I started going through and fixing things.

Then I started reading what I had written.

This is where things got a bit strange. You see, on one of the writing forums of which I'm a member, there are a lot of shared settings in which many authors will all write stories, and it's very common in those settings to pattern many or all of the main characters on the authors themselves. Thus, a good number of the stories on my homepage all feature me.

The only catch is that they're not me. They're the person that I tried very hard to be, and for a while believed I could be for the rest of my life. I spent a lot of energy writing those stories almost as a subconscious reinforcement of the mask I wore. There I was, immortalized on paper, so to speak. I even wrote stories about my ex-boyfriend, before he asked me not to include him any more.

Reading back over what I had written, and who I had tried to be, I felt the distinct embarrassment that people get when their parents show off baby photos of them to others.

I couldn't very well say that the stories were never written. Too many people have seen them, and they would know even if I disavowed any memory of them. Yet, it didn't feel right to include them in my current homepage. They're a snapshot of the past, in the same way that my high school graduation photo and my driver's licence picture are. They were all things I believed were once true, and in that I stand by them, but they aren't true now. They aren't me now.

When I started this transition, I did so with the statement that I would never try to hide who I was, but that I wouldn't let that person dominate my life. I would learn from my past, but I wouldn't live there. As such, I'm not going to take down my old homepage, but I'm not going to update it any longer, and the stories that were there will remain there.

I am a work forever in progress, and those stories are, to a great extent, a snapshot of a history I outgrew.

Yikes. There's something to be said for being too busy living life to talk about it, but this is a bit excessive.

Over the weekend after losing my friend of six years, I decided that nothing was holding me back except my own concerns and I decided to proceed with hormones. After talking with a few friends, I decided that the way to go was through an endocrinologist that specialized in such things. It would seem to be the best choice, neh? Doing this required getting a referral from my primary-care physician, since I've got to deal with managed care.

Last Monday, I went and saw my new doctor about getting a referral to see an endocrinologist. She gave me the referral without any problems. Then I spent two days finding out that there are no endocrinologists around that will take my insurance who do hormone replacement therapy. In a fit of desparation, I called my doctor back and found out that she's had several other patients who have all done HRT through her directly, without an endocrinologist, one of whom who had even gone through the final surgery itself.

Now, the hitch is that she's tried to get insurance to cover her patients' lab work and such for this sort of treatment, and they just won't. I don't know why they won't; they claim it's unnecessary treatment. They obviously
don't have anyone who's been through the experience themselves. At any rate, she said that I'd have to pay for the expenses out of my own wallet. At that point, I asked her if this sort of thing would be covered if I'd been born a woman. She said it'd be considered a standard medical procedure so yes it would.

At that point, the plan crystalized. I'd been planning to move forward with hormones and then transition at work once I started to show. However, doing it that way would be several hundred dollars out of my pocket. Instead, I
planned to transition at work first, change my name legally and start my real-life test. After that, as a legal female, the insurance company would have to pay for my treatment. In theory.

I'd like to move to Theory; everything works there.

At any rate, my doctor put me on a "starter" prescription of estradiol 1mg once a day and spironolactone 50mg twice a day. She said in about three months or so, she'll do the baseline and prescribe something stronger.

It's a slow start, but it's a start, and it'll be much faster soon.

Today I think I had what has to have been the least painful separation in my life.

For some time now, two of my friends and I, along with a few others with whom I'm only mildly acquainted, had been meeting regularly for a regularly scheduled role-playing session. I've been role-playing, in various forms, most of my life. In fact, one of the first clues that something in my life needed addressing was the simple fact that my female characters outnumbered my male ones nine-to-one and always felt more comfortable. At any rate, though, tonight was supposed to be a game night, so I called to make sure that the game was still supposed to run tonight.

Now, I feel it only fair to mention first that, prior to a month ago, the two abovementioned friends were the only real ties to Texas I had. I didn't want to leave them behind. I knew I could find a job anywhere, and I knew that I could find professionals in the fields in which I needed them to help me through my transition, but I didn't want to lose these two friendships, both of which had lasted over six years, one of which had lasted sixteen.

The one that had lasted sixteen ended, more or less, two weeks ago.

Tonight, the other asked, in the tone of a concerned friend, "Look, could you please not wear a dress when you come over any more? I get very distracted, and honestly it's somewhat disturbing to me."

Now, I'm usually very easy-going, but I'm also trying to learn to live my life by my standards and my rules. I asked him if he would ask the same of the other woman in the group. He said he wouldn't have to do so. I asked
why it was an issue. He said it was just the way he was raised, and that the blouse-and-jeans were fine but that the dresses and skirts bothered him. We spent a few minutes beating around the verbal bush, and ultimately
he admitted that he just wasn't dealing with my transition well and that he had in his mind a set image of me as who I used to be and that he had no interest or, so he claimed, capacity to change it.

This is where we hit our impasse. If he had said, "I'm having trouble adjusting to your changes, please give me some time," I could've said no problem and been as accomodating as possible. What he said, though, was basically that he wasn't interested in trying and wanted me to change my behavior to accomodate him. I explained in careful, simple language why, if I had to put on a certain outfit, or even avoid putting on a certain
outfit, whenever I wanted to interact with him, then I was faking reality for someone else's benefit, and that I couldn't in good conscience do that.

He said in response that he understood my position but that he didn't feel it fair to claim that he could improve when he didn't think it possible and that he didn't think it fair that I force him to be uncomfortable. I agreed but said that the only means of guaranteeing that neither of us felt uncomfortable in each other's presence, if all these facts were immutably true, was to stop interacting with each other.

At that, he got very quiet and said he was only being honest. I said I knew that and that I respected him for it. I do, actually. I respect him greatly for refusing to lie to me and telling me a truth he didn't think I wanted to hear. I also respect him for standing by his beliefs. I don't agree with his beliefs, but they're not mind to make. The conversation ended quickly from there. He wished me luck in my future endeavors and I said that any
time he felt ready and willing to attempt to face his limitation, I would be available. I made sure he had my phone number and my e-mail address, and then we said our goodbyes and ended the call.

Only afterwards, sitting in an IHOP with Jason, did I realize that, now, I really have no ties left to Texas. My parents are here, but they'll be moving when my mother finishes her degree and won't even be here to hold me. I have a few other friends, but I see them so infrequently that they don't really count as a motivation. I have the job, but that's something I could get anywhere. I have the professional relationships, but I could rekindle them with others. In short, after my endocrinologist's appointment in July, I have no reason to stay in Texas, and many reasons to leave.

I think it's time I spoke with my therapist about getting my name-and-gender letter and starting my real-life test. I've got nothing holding me back now.

Today's entry promises to be a hodge-podge of thoughts. My mind's been all over the map today.

Last night, I officially acquired my hormone letter and found out that there's a third document in the path, a request for gender change. Apparently, this is the piece of paper to take to get my driver's licence to read "female". I didn't know about that one until recently; I had thought before that that couldn't be done until much later, or was just done on an ad hoc basis.

I may need that letter sooner than later, though. I had a job interview on Monday with another company at which I both requested a twenty percent raise over my current salary and told the interviewer that I would be coming to
work as myself. He didn't seem to bat an eyelash over either one. In fact, he seemed more bothered by the salary requirement than the dress code. I have a followup interview with them at the end of next week some time. I have no idea how that will go, but I plan to be myself for the interview and see what transpires from there.

I made my appointments both to get my referral and to see an endocrinologist today from work. If I had known that I could make the appointment without having the letter, I would've started a week ago trying to arrange it. As it is, I won't be able to go until July. This is mildly disappointing, because Jason and I are going to a get-together with some friends in Chicago around July 4, and I had hoped that I could have started hormones by the time of
the event, which will henceforth be called the Bash, as it's known to its participants. My appointment's on the twelfth. It's a bit disappointing, but not as much as frustrating that I have to wait so long.

Then, to wrap off today, on the way home from work, I heard a radio commercial for a news broatcast that set my mind in motion. The story itself didn't have anything to do with the subsequent memories, but the graphic imagery described provoked a bit of nausea and sympathy pains, and that's what brought back the past.

When I was young, very young, before I learned to present a different face to everyone and pretend to be people I wasn't to get along, I hated watching scary movies. I didn't enjoy them at all. I used to have nightmares if I tried to watch them. One of my friends, in fact the one who recently asked me to remove all references from my site, took it on as a task to "cure" me of this. In fact, this person took it on as a task to "cure" me of many things, the list of which would be longer than I care to remember.

Now, twenty years later, as I begin to unlearn all of the unnecessary add-ons to my life, I wonder how much of what I presented to the world is a result of that person's actions. At the time, I saw that person as a savior, a path
that wasn't my father's. On the other hand, I didn't have many friends as a child and this was well before I had learned to be my own person. I became very co-dependent on the few friends I had and was easily manipulated by them. The fear of losing them as friends and being alone let them talk me into doing a lot of things that I would never have done on my own. 

I wonder, honestly, how much of the false faces I tried to wear for so long are a result of that manipulation, not just by that one person but by the people I considered my friend who, for the most part, were really just interested in me because I let myself be manipulated by them. Was this person a friend? Yes. This does not change the fact that this person spent a lot of time bending me, ostensibly for my own good. Now, I can't look
back and say that it was. 

What matters now, though, is moving forward, not dwelling on the past. I enjoy reflecting on it, but I can't live there.

Today, I had what is likely to be the first of odd encounters until such time as I'm totally through the process. It shouldn't have been so totally unexpected, but it caught me thoroughly off-guard.

I ran into my cubemate from work today at the mall.

Now, this wouldn't normally be an issue. Running into someone from work while away from it is something that most people would probably consider a nifty coincidence. However, at the time, it was more like finding one's pastor at the corner pub and not being Irish Catholic. As I noted above, I should've expected that eventually it would happen, but for some reason I just sort of lived off in my own little bubble somewhere, that "work" was this isolated segment of my life into which I occasionally had to foray in order to keep making money so that I could pay for everything else.

The exchange itself was brief. He nodded and said, "Oh, hi," as I walked past; I nodded and said hello back. I suppose the blouse and jeans I had on could be mistaken for androgynous-enough clothing. Considering I still
get sirred on a regular basis, it's almost certain he didn't think anything of it, though I'll find on Monday.

The funny thing, now, is that about a minute after I walked past, the first thing I thought was, "At least I wasn't wearing a skirt!" Ten seconds after that, I realized how ludicrous that sounded. My letter of approval for hormones is written. I'm making the appointment on Monday to see my doctor and get a referral to an endrocrinologist. I'll be full-timing within a few months, and barring someone giving me double my current salaryto move I'll be dressing as myself at work soon enough. He's going to see me in skirts eventually, so would've been wrong with him seeing me in one today?

I think there, again, it was the shock value. I just wasn't mentally prepared to tell him. I got my new credit card, with my real name on it, and there've been a few places where I was hesitant to use it in case someone that's known me for a while asked questions while I wasn't ready to answer them. They're all people who'd eventually find out, but I haven't always been in a mood to answer questions. I'm not really trying to hide anything, but I'm also not going around and waving it under people's noses either. I'm just trying to be myself.

In hindsight, I almost wish that I had been wearing something more obviously feminine. I probably would've been in a bigger state of shock right now, but it would've been one less person to have to tell when the time comes to be myself at work. It would've made that hurdle one notch easier. I'll still jump it when the time comes, but it'd look less imposing.

As usual, I'm late in putting this on the page. The events detailed here happened two or three days ago, but I guess when I'm living my life, I have no time to talk about it. Now that I'm at a lax moment, I can spare a few
minutes to type this into the computer.

This one is actually two events combined, one of which is new, the other of which is just proof of an earlier concept. Both, however, are important, and I'm very glad they happened.

First, I got my new Visa today, one with my real name on it. Officially, the bank that gave it to me doesn't know it's "mine"; they just know that there're two cards attached to this account, and that someone named Kristina R. Davis is now authorized to use that number. I wouldn't think they'd care even if they did, though. I'm not using the card for fraudulent purposes; it's my name, so why would I want to start my new life with a bad credit rating? At any rate, I'd been waiting for this card for over a month, and so when it arrived I went on a bit of Retail Therapy,
which turned out to be a good thing for my spirits.

All of my friends have warned me of the evils of credit cards. I've seen the damage that they can do to people. I have a debit card, and it boggles a lot of my friends' minds that I could prefer spending money I don't have to money that I know is mine. To start, I get bonus points towards my preferred airline with my credit card; I don't get that with my debit card. Second, I don't let balances accumulate; I pay everything off every month and so there's never an interest fee. Third, I don't carry any cards with an annual fee, so I have all the benefits and none of the hassle. I do know that I have to budget myself, and I do, but that's not as much of a hassle as long as I keep current with my bills. The one thing my debit card does that my credit card won't is not charge me fees at ATMs and reimburse me third-party charges at them, so it does have its uses.

Second, related to the first, is an incident that happened Thursday night. I had picked Jason up from work, and we had decided to stop at Starbucks on the way home for coffee. Normally, I would prefer not to frequent such
places, but there are no independent coffeehouses within reasonable driving distance of our apartment, so for coffee it's Starbucks or do-it-yourself, which would mean buying equipment for which we don't have the room right now.

This particular Starbucks is one of those conglomerate stores that has a Barnes and Noble and a Software Etc. attached to it, or maybe it's attached to them, or perhaps they were all just squished together by Dobbs or
something. At any rate, before we got coffee, we decided to look in the software store, and of course being computer junkies that we both are, we found things that we wanted to get. So, without really thinking about it too
much, we picked up our purchases, we went to the counter, and I plopped my shiny new Visa soen on the counter.

The counterclerk diligently rang up the purchases, glanced at the card and looked up at me with placid, cow-in-front-of-steamroller eyes and said, "And could I see your driver's licence?"

Now, I am not an unsavvy shopper. I do know that a few places require a secondary form of identification to help guard against credit card fraud, and I applaud them this action. However, it never occured to me that I would be caught flatfooted like this. My new card is wonderful because I can sign my real name to things. However, I have nothing else that matches it, and so I literally didn't know what to do. I said something mumbled
about not having it handy, and the guy looked at me with that too-bad-not expression and said, "I'm sorry, but I have to see your licence; it's company policy."

At this point, Jason stepped up and, in a calm manner, said, "Let me set this straight. Her driver's licence doesn't match. The state won't recognize it yet, but that is her legal name."

At this, the counterdrone, his manager, and I were all sort of startled into silence for about two seconds, and then this incredible warmth ran through me as the salesclerk fumbled a bit and looked helplessly at his boss. The boss looked at me, then at the card, then at the total, and he shrugged and said, "Alright, just match the signature to the card's."

They matched, of course, though my hand was shaking a bit from excitement. 

Later, Jason said to me he was really excited to see me using my new card. He said it didn't and shouldn't matter how I was dressed or that I hadn't shaved since that morning, that the important thing was that that was the name I wanted to use and that was how I wanted to be addressed and that others should have the decency and courtesy to do so. I felt validated. I felt vindicated. He said to them what I lacked the courage to say at the
moment I needed to say it. 

I felt loved and protected. It's the most wonderful feeling in the world.

Today, I made my first real work faux pas. This being Monday, I spent the last few days out enjoying myself, and last night I finally got around to repainting my nails; I hadn't in weeks and they were getting cracked and chipped. I found a lovely shade of purple, nice and reflective, and it matches one of my outfits perfectly.

I forgot to remove it before work.

Now, I've had my ears pierced. I carry a purse. I've styled my hair a bit differently. Nobody's commented on any of those. Someone, however, noticed the polish and asked me about it. I was caught totally flatfooted. I had honestly forgotten about it, until he called my attention to it with a stare and a comment on the order of, "Whoa, dude, what's with your nails?"

I just said I'd forgotten to remove the polish from them, which was true, and he didn't press things any further, but it was kind of a telling point for me. I had completely forgotten that I'd had it on. I don't even think about cosmetics or things as something I have to remove at the end of the weekend. The discord between who I am and who I have to try to be for work is getting harder to manage.

Thankfully, I don't really have an act through which I'm expected to perform, unless you count the bathroom situation and having my old name on the cubicle wall. The head of Human Resources knows, but I haven't done anything to further things beyond that yet. His response was positive, but I'm admittedly still nervous about it. I work for a military subcontractor, and as such I'm not sure how receptive the personnel will be. I'm not going to let them stop me from being myself, but I'd like to minimize the problems, both to myself and those around me.

---

Here, my mind slipped a gear.

Someone very close to me has started hormones, and I'm very happy for her and I wanted to take the time here to say how glad I was that she was finally officially on that road, and that I was a bit envious of her, even though I'll be starting myself soon. I wanted to gush about things for a bit and say how proud I was of her.

Only after I thought about it for a few moments did I realize she might not want her name here in that context.

It has nothing to do with not wanting to be mentioned here. Far from it; I know she wouldn't mind me talking about her. I know she reads these pages and I know she'll read this when she gets the chance. It's that I have no
right to say things like that. It simply isn't my story to tell.

When I start them, I'll babble incessantly about them, I'm sure. It's going to make work that much more interesting for a while until I get used to them. That's me, though. I almost talked about someone else, and that's kind of overstepping a line somewhere, I'm sure, especially without her prior consent.

I don't even really think she'd mind people knowing that she had, but it's an odd thing, really, for people in our situation. There's a constant war between wanting people to treat us as we wish to be treated, and admitting
that we weren't born that way. Society still very much sees sex as an either-or proposition, and any attempt to blur the distinctions or cross the line between them is met with hostility, antipathy and resistence. Some people are incredibly supportive, like my parents have been, but most just don't understand and aren't really capable of understanding.

The person about whom I've wanted to gush happily here stands a wonderful chance of never being questioned about her past. Saying here that she started hormones would be an indicator, to someone who knew how to read
what was written, that all was not as it seemed, and while I don't mind if people know about me, it isn't my right to put her in that position.

So, why then am I talking about myself in such detail? I've thought about it a lot, actually. It would seem that if the ultimate goal is to never raise questions, then talking about the very subject that people don't understand doesn't make much sense, does it? Or does it?

I make a very poor liar. It makes me feel sick to my stomach. Ideally, what I'd like is for people to know my past and treat me how I wish to be treated anyway. I want it to be a nonissue. I think it's a quixotic goal, but it's the only one I could try to achieve in good conscience. Time will tell if it's achievable. I hope it is.

So much has happened in the last week. I should post these as they happen, but life is what happens while one makes other plans. Today I decided to finally sit down and cover everything. My life feels like it's moving forward
again.

First, and foremost, Jason proposed to me.

I'm going to put that one in a paragraph by itself, because it deserves it. I was in an emotional slump, and he and I had been cuddling. I said I was upset about how long it would take for me to get where I'm going, and he said to me, out of the blue, "Kristy, I'll be here until you get rid of me, hon. I'll be here however long it takes, and beyond, because I want to be with you." He looked a bit sheepish then, and he smiled and added, "I can't give you a ring, love. Just a promise to stand by you as long as you want me here."

I started crying on his shoulder at that point. It just felt so incredibly good, hearing him say that and knowing how much I meant to him, for him to say that to me. The actual question itself, much more in his style, came almost as an afterthought to that, but those were the important words. 

I said yes.

Right now, we can't legally do anything. It'll be a few years before any ceremony we could perform would be recognized, but that's not important. What's important, to me, is that there is someone in my life that accepts me for who I am and understands who I wish I to be, and is willing to stay with me through all of the trials ahead and beyond.

Having a family is the most wonderful feeling. After my last boyfriend, I thought I would never really feel part of that. I thought I had it with him, but I didn't, I don't get close to people easily; I have a few people with whom I'm very close and then a wide group of acquaintences, but not many "casual friends". Now, though, I have it again, and this time I know it's for who I am and not just who I think he wants me to be.

My life just continues to get better, the more myself I become.

---

Most of the rest are best addressed as side notes to the above. My therapist cleared me for hormones last Saturday. Hopefully it won't take her as long to get my recommendation letter for that as long as it took for her to get my walking letter. If it does, however, it's not really too much of a big deal; I have to wait for my new healthcare card from my insurance provider to arrive before I could schedule an appointment with the doctor she
recommended.

Jason also met my therapist, finally, and they seemed to hit it off really well, which I think is a good thing. We went in to talk about sex, because that's been something of a delicate situation, as I'm sure you could guess. Right now, I fluctuate between wanting the contact and intimacy and frustration and unhappiness at the end results of same. I enjoy it right up until the moment I think about what I'm doing, or what I've just done, and then suddenly I just feel awkward and uncomfortable. My therapist made some suggestions, and they've helped though it'll be a long time before those feelings go away.

I went back for my next laser treatment on my face, and I did my neck at the same time. I feel like a lobster right now but I've got aloe vera gel to put on it and that takes a lot of the stinging out of it. Hopefully I should only need one more round on my face, maybe two on my neck, and then I won't have any more problems there. It's too early to tell but I have high hopes. I just wish it weren't so expensive, but it's worth every penny.

My life is proceeding apace, ever improving.

Yesterday was a roller coaster.

To start, I had my first group therapy session. At the moment, there are four of us, but that number will probably change over time. I'm actually the youngest, though I'm not the earliest in the process so far. I actually learned a lot, with one group member who's been on hormones for a while now telling us about what it's like. She didn't really say anything that I hadn't already known, but it was good to hear it confirmed from someone else.

At the end of the session, my therapist gave me my walking letter. As Jason described it, it's my doctor's note saying, "Please excuse Kristina from being male". I liked that description a lot and so I'm keeping it, even if it isn't totally accurate. Actually, it's a note explaining that I'm currently in therapy for gender dysphoria and should be given all the rights and priviledges accorded any other female. Basically, it's a safeguard against people getting frustrated about me being in the ladies' room.

I came home from that on an emotional cloud, feeling wonderful. Jason and I sat around the apartment for a while, then we decided to go out to Souper Salad for early dinner. Here, I have to pause and say how much I like this place. It's cheap, filling and I can have the all-you-can-eat without feeling like I've blown my diet. The waitstaff knows us there; we go in about once a week, maybe twice.

Last night was supposed to be a role-playing game session with some of our friends, but after we ate we had a few hours to kill and so Jason and I decided that we could go out to one of the malls in the area that he hadn't
really seen yet. It was kind of a drive but we'd have lots of time there. 

Now, here let me interject that I've been out dressed before. I'm more or less fulltiming on the weekends. I'd never been out as dressed as yesterday, but I've had on skirts, blouses, femme-cut jeans, heels, cosmetics, what have you. I've been to restaurants, clubs, coffeehouses, out with friends, other malls, out to the movies, generally wherever. Sure, I've had people turn and stare, I've had people comment behind my back, and I've had people act surprised. They've always been the exception, though, and not the rule.

Last night, I felt like I was on display. I think literally half the people in the mall stopped what they were doing as I walked past to look, and I heard a lot more behind my back than I normally do. I don't think I was doing anything different, really. I just chalked it up to the mall itself. Fortunately, there isn't much at that mall that would require me to go back to it.

As we were leaving, though, someone took it upon himself to shout something from the window of his truck as he was driving past. He was technically accurate but factually incomplete. However, it put me in a very strange mood. I wasn't upset. I was frustrated and disappointed. It was the sort of misconception that I would have loved to correct, only I know that the type of person who yelled such a thing wouldn't have listened to reason.

The whole experience, actually, was like that. Anyone there could have said something to me and I would have gladly explained, but nobody wanted to know. All they knew was that something outside their realm of experience had made itself known, and they saw fit to point and stare and laugh. It wasn't that they did it. Other people have done that. It was the sheer number of people doing it, this time.

Jason and I tried to go to the game last night, but that didn't go so well. I was in an off mood, Jason wasn't much better and Mitch wasn't being very helpful. Things went from strained to patently absurd in about an hour and
Jason and I bowed out of it after that. When we got home, we got a hot shower and I pored over the events of the day and ended up ranting at him in the shower about everything.

I do plan on going back to that mall, dressed, partially because I haven't picked the Lane Bryant there clean yet, but also admittedly because I want the peace of mind knowing that I didn't let the negative experience ruin my enjoyment of the mall. I'm not going to let other people control my life. If I choose not to go there because there's nothing there I need or want, that's one thing. I'm not going to let my decision be based on the reactions of others.