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.

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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.