I've had to say my goodbye's at D+X again and that always sucks. It sucks more each time because it feels like a character flaw. Like, I was just over here (at the Mask's blog) singing the praises of being here (at D+X), saying come over and be like me and play like me and celebrate your feminine self like me... oh and by the way I'm not always able to celebrate that side of myself or even feel that side of myself.
So... instead of sulking about it or turning my back on it and waiting for this non feminine time to pass, lets take a longer look at this and see what I can uncover.
I've talked quite a bit about what Caitlyn is to me. She's my feminine side. She's my self. She's me. She's my sexuality. She's my sensuality. She's a part of me. I've often had a fear that she's a personality... as in one of multiple personalities. It would be an odd presentation as I'm aware of her even as she is present, but it could still be that. And these times where I can't feel her or 'contact' her actually kind of fits into that psychological condition. But I don't think this is a break like that.
I do, however, think she's a bigger part of a coping mechanism. I had a bit of a conversation with someone at D+X, and they mentioned that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if Caitlyn were to go away permanently. That for me, being a man in mind and body would be more beneficial overall. And I can't fault them for thinking that. Let's face it, for as much as society is being as open and accepting of non heterosexual people, there are people that still don't accept homosexual people let alone people somewhere in-between heterosexual and homosexual. And if I accept that Caitlyn is a part of me and is attracted to men... then I'm somewhere along that path but not at either end of that spectrum. I'm not hetero, I'm not homo, I'm not bi... I'm one of those strange words that make straight laced small town people squirm n their pews. Gender fluid? Pansexual?
Let's come back to that.
I've had a bit of a time explaining to some people on what I mean when I say that she's gone. I don't just mean that I've lost touch with my feminine side. I HAVE lost touch with my feminine side. I feel less 'girly'. But last year I talked about Caitlyn's selections in music (how she set me free), and how it was getting more and more different than my selection in music. Well.... I listen to 'her' music which is mixed right into the rest of 'my' music and I don't like it. I don't exactly hate it... a lot of it is decent music... but I skip right past it as it doesn't do enough for me to warrant listening to the whole song.
But she's more than music. Caitlyn has worked her way into just about every part of my life. She's even worked her way into my hair style. This might come across as very weird, but she affects how I wear my beard. I have a goatee. If it didn't curl up on itself, it would be about 6 inches long. I've mentioned it here before, I started growing it out because it simply looks better than my baby shaped chin (errr... my chin is shaped like a baby's chin... not that my chin is shaped like a baby!). At the end of the day, it's hair on my chin though and it doesn't require more styling than that. But with Caitlyn taking a bigger part of my life, I've added a specific beard wash shampoo and conditioner, as well as a beard balm. I don't wash and condition it every day as that would be over washing it, but I do wash and condition it regularly. I apply the balm to it every day though as it makes it easier to style and reduces/eliminates the split ends. To style it, I have a brush that gets the hairs all running in the same direction and then a comb to actually style it. Since Caitlyn has left me.... I've washed the beard with regular shampoo a few times and used the balm every few days. I use the comb to get the knots out, but otherwise just run my fingers through it to get it more or less straight. It's chin hair and doesn't need to look 'stylish'.
With my tax returns this year, I decided to buy a new bed and desk. I bought one of those 'bed in a box' things that don't require a box spring. And it's wonderful. I sleep so much better. The desk replacement was just because the laminate was coming off my old one and it was getting that tacky/sticky feeling where my arms rest on it. It didn't need to be anything fancy as I'm the only one that sees it. But I DID get something fancy. It looks like an old piece from a barn. Rough sawn oak with wrought iron legs and shelves. Instead of a desk that would cost me $150 or $200 it cost me $400. I also replaced my comforter as I got a new bed....my old one worked fine but it was a plain blue old one and I bought a fancy designer one. Josie by Natori. It looks like this:
Umm... yeah. It's a little bright. A little saturated. But I mean, it's not overtly feminine, right? Just because it's by a designer called Jogie by Natori doesn't mean it's for women.... oh wait... here's the page showing it off when it was brand new: http://josiegirlblog.com/2014/08/13/josie-bedding/
And just in case they take that page down, heres the text from it:
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As the Josie Girl, I am so excited to about the recent launch of Josie Bedding! Natori has done its own bedding for the past several years, but now it is Josie‘s turn to shine. And it is sooooo coooool and soooooo fun! Boho! Bold! Bright! Color! Comfort! Divine!
BRIGHT. BOLD. BOHO.
EMBODY ECLECTIC CHIC IN YOUR BEDROOM WITH NEW JOSIE BEDDING.
Bam.
Remember I wrote about the Hollywood Boho print this past Spring? Well now, ladies, you can get matching sheets with the pjs. And it even comes in a mini-set. This comforter set is the comforter and two pillow shams. Of course, you can get extra fun pillows, too! OBVI.
A whole lot of fun on the bed
texture, color, and feel
I particularly love this long pillow — the shape, the colors, and the print. And a good price, too.
Goes with ANY DECOR!
palette of paisleys, florals and stripes
Whole shabang! Makes any day seem bright and fresh.
lime and orange
Reading on the Josie Bedding. Meta. Josie girl, Josie bedding. Just need Josie pjs on, and that would be a WHOLE LOTTA Josie.
Aren’t you excited about this bedding collection? I like it for myself NOW but I would have died for it when in college. It is the perfect get-up for a college dorm room. Or family house….And there is another print, too! Love times two.
Anika Yael Natori, aka, The Josie Girl
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Understand, I didn't see any of that before I bought it. I just liked the design of it and thought it would look nice. So my selection led me to something that would look good in a college girl dorm room. I picked out the 'Josie girl look'. Just try and tell me that I'm not feeling feminine when I'm feeling Caitlyn.
And now that Caitlyn is gone? Yeah, I look at that blanket and wonder what the fuck I was thinking. It's not that it looks bad... but it's obviously, overtly, feminine. I mean... not a little bit. A LOT!
The longer I've had Caitlyn in my life, the more comfortable I've become with her. The more comfortable I became AS her. The more comfortable I was BEING her. I didn't struggle with letting her into my thoughts, and didn't force her into a box that would only exist in sexual fantasies or capping or with 'her' friends or with role playing. When I had 'her' thoughts while driving or at work or with 'my' friends... I let them happen. I shared those thoughts with others. Oh, I wouldn't exactly declare them as coming from my feminine alter self... but I knew where they were coming from.
And only now when that side of me is just completely gone does it become clear how much of me is part of that.
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I want to write this out as a single stream of consciousness, but it's getting late, so I'm going to sign off now. But I'm going to come back. Maybe I'll edit this back together and just have it as one piece, but I don't know if I'll be able to pick it up and continue it as one piece. If not, I'll leave this 'break' in so that you'll understand why teh tone changed suddenly.
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So, as far as I see it, that leaves me with two big questions: 1) What is Caitlyn. 2) Why does she come and go like she does.
What is Caitlyn. Is she just the feminine side of myself? If so, that second question becomes so much bigger, but let's deal with that when we get to the second question. If she's my feminine side, it means I'm not fully accepting of her. I mean, if I were she'd just be 'me'. I wouldn't think of her thoughts as 'her thoughts' right? I'd think of them as 'my thoughts' and I'd just accept that I'm not as masculine as I once thought I was. That would be a change... I never gave it a lot of extra thought before, but I always considered myself masculine. I was a boy, a young man, and then a man. There was no question or concern or reason to think it out. It just was. Questioning that would have been like questioning the color blue. But it's not like I have never gone through a change like that before. I was a studious person in high school... then I became a carefree college student. I was a carefree photographer for a long time, then I became a studious nursing student, and now find myself a mix of serious and playful nurse (serious to my patients, playful to my coworkers and colleagues). And it's not like I was always purely 100% masculine... as I've talked about in the past, I started reading TG fiction when I was a young adult. Accepting a less than masculine self isn't that far off.
Is she a mental self defense mechanism? I'm surrounded by people that are less than sexually open. Remember the 'bathroom' bills going around a few years back? Well that was considered a closed subject because it was simple... don't do it. You don't need men that are confused about their sexuality going into the women's room. Case closed, let's go get some ice cream. That's the type of mentality I grew up in and the type of people I live my life with. My close friends aren't that way, but most of my family is. What if there's a part of me that's like that and I'm struggling against my own desires. I mean, let's say I'm actually trans-gendered, but my own bigotry is getting in the way. So I separate those feelings into a different personality.
Is she the real me? Maybe that last bit is true, but what I've considered to be the 'real' me is the actual mental self defense mechanism. There's a big part of me that's both a people pleaser and a confrontation avoider. I can put up a fight if I need to and I don't always try to please everybody... but I'm most often trying to please somebody. And I often do things because it's easier to just do the thing than have an argument about doing said thing. So put those things together in the environment I'm in... and wouldn't those personality traits make me 'act' like a masculine boy and a masculine young man, and a masculine man. Wouldn't it also keep me from dating? Not dating would be the greatest problem avoider if at my deepest core I'm not interested in having a long term relationship with a woman as a man.
Now, considering that she is real, and that she does come and go, I think those are the three real possibilities. She's just the feminine side of myself, she's a defense mechanism that let's me play as a woman without letting me think I actually am one, or she is the real me and I'm a defense mechanism that let's me play as a man without letting me thing I'm actually a woman. I don't think it's the last one as that's honestly too deeply soul crushing. I think I'd have had far bigger mental breaks. I've dealt with patients with deep seated mental problems and they can manifest themselves in many many ways, but it's a rare case that someone can 'hide' themselves like that for that long without having a near psychotic break at one point or another. And the worst I've experienced is a suicidal attempt in my teens, and several bouts of depression. And the bouts of depression have been easily cared for on a low dose of an anti anxiety medication (that's right, not even a true anti-depression medication, just an anti-anxiety medication!).
If I take that one away, that leaves her as my feminine side or as a defense mechanism. And especially now, without having any feeling from her, I can't really side one way or the other. So before I go further, let's look deeper at why she comes and goes.
Why does Caitlyn come and go like she does? I said earlier that it's problematic if she's just my feminine self because that means there's a part of me that's fighting against her. That's rejecting her. If that's true, why?
Big Old Blank Space
Yeah... so I wrote all the above between the 13th and the 14th. It's now the 19th. I stopped when it started to just get too heavy. When I started to get to close to the point where I needed to admit that I needed therapy. I was either hiding my femininity from myself or I was hiding my own bigotry from myself.
Maybe one of those two things are true. And maybe therapy would be helpful. But I'm just not ready to go that far yet. I'm not ready to share this in great detail with my friends and family, so I'm certainly not ready to share it with a stranger.
So that leaves me with the unfortunate here and now; here and now I'm going to simply turn my back and stop thinking about it. Yup... I don't like doing that, but it's what I'm going to do. Maybe at some later time, I'll come back to this conversation topic and write out more. But for now, I'm just not going to explore that side any further. But as I re-read this a bit more, I realize I left a "Let's come back to that." up there... so I guess let's go back to that.
I was talking about gender and gender identity. Let's get some things out of the way. I believe that there is gender biology, physiology, identity, and attraction. All of these things work together but are not combined and together. Let's go over them and use a 'normal' heterosexual man as an example.
His gender biology is that of a man. His DNA says he is a man.
His gender physiology is that of a man. He has a penis, he has no (or very minimal) breasts, he has broader shoulders, hair on his chest and face, and all the secondary sexual characteristics that come with masculinity.
His gender identity is that of a man. He thinks of himself as a man.
Gender attraction is a little harder to write simply, but he is a 'normal' man and heterosexual so he is attracted to the opposite sex and is therefore attracted to women. He sees a woman and is sexually turned on. He sees a man and is not turned on.
Those are all fairly straight forward. I'm afraid most people think that those things all go hand in hand. That the DNA of being male means that the physiology, identity, and sexual attraction go together and if any of them are out of sync with a 'normal' heterosexual man that he is 'broken' in some way.
Let me say right here that I disagree with that. I think these things are related, but not linked together. They can move independently of each other. I think the easiest to understand is sexual attraction. Let's face it, most people that come to this blog, got here because of my "Caitlyn's Masks" blog where I made transgender porn... er.. erotica.... er... art. I think most people, even if they aren't attracted to those of the same sex, can accept homosexuality. So they can accept that gender attraction is not linked to gender biology. Just because you have an x and a y chromosome doesn't mean you have to be attracted to women. You can be attracted to men, or women, or both. That's just the way it is.
So if we accept that, then we should be able to accept that gender physiology and gender identity can be separate from gender biology as well. Admittedly separating biology and physiology is a bit more problematic. If everything works out correctly, biology should lead to physiology matching. But we're clever humans and we can change that in many different ways. We can surgically change a lot of things. We can manipulate hormones and those hormones can manipulate a lot of other things. We can even remove organs that create hormones, further changing things. So, while biology and physiology match when everything is 'normal', we don't have to leave those things to nature.
And then there's the one that confuses most people. Gender identity. And that's the one that gets me the most. A man is a man. A woman is a woman. Being attracted to men or women doesn't change either of those facts. A man attracted to men is a man the same way a man attracted women is a man. He thinks of himself as a man and is therefore a man on this inside. Now their mannerisms and vocalizations sometimes even outward presentations may have feminine characteristics, but they still think of themselves as men, so they are men.
This is the defining difference in a trans gendered person. They may have a man's biology, a man's physiology, and may be attracted to women... but they identify as a woman. Having a man's body feels wrong to them, and they don't feel right in their own skin. This isn't just some crackpot theory, this is the work of some of the finest minds in mental health today. There is a lot of therapy that can help people suffering from gender identity disorder, but ultimately the best fix for that problem is to change their body to match their mind.
Just imagine how far someone is going to have to go to mentally accept that, if they can't already accept that someone's gender attraction isn't locked into their gender biology. That someone can be attracted to someone of the same gender. If they can't accept that, they are no where near being able to accept someone that identify's as a different gender. And while I don't accept their willful ignorance as an excuse, it does make you understand how vehement they are as they fight against equal rights for transgender people. They simply see a perverted sick person who is as likely to hurt their children or other people as they are to leave other people alone. They can't accept that that transgendered person just wants to live a normal life and are trying very hard to work toward making themselves as 'normal' on the outside as they already feel on the inside.
Now when I broke off from my conversation and said I'm come back to it, it's because the part of the conversation I wanted to return to needed all of that build up. No, I didn't just want to give a lesson on gender biology, physiology, identity, and attraction. Here's what I wanted to talk about. What if gender identity isn't a black and white issue?
Gender biology really is a binary state. It's 0 or 1. Male or Female. There are the cases where the DNA has been messed up and there are 'hermaphrodites', but more often than not those are males with female parts. Seriously, they aren't 'both' genders at once. If they aren't sterile, they are producing sperm, and aren't capable of carrying a child. But take attraction; we've accepted heterosexual as 'normal' since time's beginning. Most learned people have accepted homosexuality as normal for a very long time. And many people have accepted bisexuality for quite some time as a normal part of the sexuality attraction spectrum. We're only in the beginning stages of accepting gender identity as something separate from biology, but so far as I've read or seen, we still look at it as male or female.
What if it's not just one or the other? What if there are in between stages?
In other words... what if I'm not abnormal in my 'feminine' feelings? You see, what leads me to a lot of my problems when I try to tap all this down into a nice and tidy nursing diagnosis (or a medical style diagnosis), I come to a problem when it comes to gender identity. You see, I've never felt wrong in my skin. I've always identified as a man. I've never looked at my penis and thought that it was the wrong thing between my legs.
Now before any of you start with your "Now wait a damned minute, there was that time that you said..." yeah yeah yeah.. I've had PLENTY of sexual fantasies of being a woman. Of having breasts and having a vagina and being penetrated there. But more often than not, my sexual fantasies in that realm involve things AROUND being a woman. Like being forced into a gender change, or cross dressing against my will and having to present myself as a woman, or being changed into a woman but going through some kind of trial to get my masculinity back.
See the difference? Those fantasies aren't about me wanting to be a woman, they're about a power play with sexual overtones. Yeah, they're heavily misogynistic and that's it's own level of problematic for someone that would like to think of himself as a feminist, but they don't come from a desire of being a woman. The closest I ever get is when I'm feeling particularly romantic toward Sean. I'll have sexual fantasies about being with him and when I'm having those fantasies, I'm fully 'Caitlyn'. I'm a woman with her man and we're making love.
Now I can stand by both of these statements; I don't have any problem thinking of myself as a man and have no problem with my body being that of a man AND I often think of myself as a woman and feel fully feminine when I do.
Those are both true.
So if gender identity is binary, and I don't have a problem with my body, then I must identify myself as a man, and therefore thinking of myself as Caitlyn is a problem. Right? That's where I get into trouble. And that's where I start wondering if gender identity is maybe more fluid than just 'man' and 'woman'. Maybe it can be "mostly man and completely physically man, but a big side of woman psychologically and sometimes entirely woman but only mentally".
And then we're back to the beginning.... what exactly is Caitlyn. Why does she leave? Maybe the next decade I'll get around to finding answers to that.
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