I suppose it should be indicative of something that it's fully three weeks into the new year before I posted anything. What, I don't know, but I'm sure it must mean something.

At this point, I now have the traveller's cheques to pay for the operation in my possession. The tickets are booked, and my passport is ready. Wrong, but ready. I still have to prod Jessie into getting zir passport finished,
and at this point we're probably going to have to pay an expediting service or a fee or something, but we're out of time otherwise. After that, I still have to get all my monthly-bill people aware of the fact that I'm going to
miss March and possibly April and find out if there's anything I can do about that fact.

Once that's done, all I need to do is pack. That, I think, is going to end up being the hardest part of the preparation.

I'd be lying if I said I weren't nervous. I'm actually scared out of my wits. So many thing could go wrong, from a botch-job to not getting off the table, but all I can do is focus on the fact that the odds are in my favor and that once I'm healed and everything is said and done I'll be closer to having the body that I want. Some things I'll never get, and others will take more time, but the worst of it will be over.

That sort of leads into the next question. At that point, once the surgery is done, am I really still in transition? At what point, if any, do I stop being "transsexual"? I still talk about my experiences, and I have a lot of friends who knew me before, but as far as everyone's concerned, I'm just another woman. There's no question at work, at home, out in public. The few people who address me wrong usually end up red-faced for it as soon as they realize. When does the mantle of "transsexual" get dropped? 

In the strictly clinical sense, it never does, of course. I will forever have the underlying body of a male, surgically and chemically altered to appear female, but I don't have the Curse, I can't bear children and my genes are standard male genes. However, none of those things matter in the realm of social contact, or should. None of those things matter at home, in bed, with friends, in public, at the mall, wherever. The realm in which the fact that
all is not as it seems is frighteningly small and insignificant in comparison with the rest of my life. Why, then, persisit in holding to the label?

In some ways, it's a point of perverse pride. I've succeeded so far beyond my wildest dreams that I've now got people making snide comments about "those freaks" in my presence and never realizing the irony unless I point it out to them. Ultimately, if every person made it as well as I did or better, nobody would know we existed except for the brief time during which we actively changed from one state to another. Success means invisibility, and I'm not sure I like that fact.

I think I'd be far more open about my own state of being if I felt that in opening up to others, I'd be treated as I wished to be treated and not how I would have been treated before I began. There's still a lot of stigma attached to this, stigma I endured and overcame, but that should still have never have been there in the first place. It's a trap: to end the battles for others, I have to agree to fight other battles myself. The question is not why must we fight, but who fights and for what. 

It's a problem for which I don't yet have a solution.