So, what do you do when your muse decides to take a siesta? You fire up the word processor and just start jabbering away until something clicks.
Here is my current jabbering. I don’t know if this is the beginning of something or if it will end up gathering dust on my head drive. Either way, I am writing. Getting words down on the page as it were, and it’s better than sitting here looking at an empty screen.
It is already the sixth day of November. The sixth day of the National Novel Writing Month challenge and as of this writing I have just over two dozen words written, (which you are currently reading), when I should have nearly twelve thousand words sitting in a file on my computer hard drive.
The problem has been on of focus, of having a clear vision of the story, characters, and plot lines running through a narrative which is interesting and engaging. Instead I find myself constantly distracted by issues in the real world. Not just my various responsibilities as a partner and parent but also as a person.
I suppose if I were what society considers “normal”, I wouldn’t have much to write about. As it happens I do not fit the mold of what is desired as an unremarkable member of my community. You see, the way I understand myself, the way I see things in the mirror, things in regards to how others see me and seek in interact with me are at odds with one another. It is a condition known as “Gender Dysphoria”. In the simplest of terms it means the way I view myself internally does not match with my physical presentation.
This is a condition I have struggled against for most of my life, even in those times when I managed to bury my thoughts and feelings deep enough they became ‘out of sight, out of mind’. As I have found over the past few years, simply explaining or wishing these things to go away, trying to rationalize what seemed to be an irrational feeling, does not make them go away. In truth, all I did was to create a mental caldera which, when it finally erupted nearly destroyed me. When I finally reached a point where I could no longer function as I was, hiding behind a mental and physical mask, I was forced to begin trying to understand not just who I really was, but what as well.
So all of this begs the question, “what is normal and if I am not, then what am I?”
In Western society ‘normal’ is considered to be a heterosexual male or female who, in all ways, sees themselves in a way which assures all of the accepted traits which define one as male or female are present and taken as expected. In other words, you were born and declared “male” by the doctor. You present as a typical male and have a male reproductive system. More, you see and think of yourself as male, preferably one who is sexually attracted to females.
Or you were born and declared “female” by the doctor. You present as a typical female and have a female reproductive system. More, you see and think of yourself as female, preferably one who is sexually attracted to males.
This is known as “the Gender Binary”. This is an accepted version of reality which states humans are either one sex or the other based upon your physical presentation, secondary sexual characteristics, and DNA.
Unfortunately humans and society are never so simple.
Many who may read this are most likely to see things as straight forward in as far as sex, gender, and gender identity are concerned. I suppose this is understandable if you have never had to question such assumptions based on your own personal experience. However, there are those like myself who find it impossible to not delve deeper into the truth behind these assumptions, to in a sense, look behind the curtain and stare to wizard in the eye because the reality we live in is one of shades of grey and nothing is ever as simple as it first appears.
For myself, I have been actively looking into these truths for nearly two years, about as long as I have had my blog, Kira Moore’s Closet up and running. This is a good thing because while those first chaotic weeks have been largely lost to time, I do have a written record of the majority of the roads I have travelled to reach the point where I am now.
For this writing, I feel it is not only useful, but informative to go back to the beginning and look at and talk about how I have evolved personally and in my thoughts and feeling since those first confusing days and posts.
January 20th, 2012
Seeing this date seems sort of surreal. It does truly seems as though more time has passed than this.
So what did I have to say for my first ever post? Well, before I share, understand I was still trying to understand where I fit into the world as I was beginning to understand myself. My mind was running a thousand miles an hour and I had begun to search the internet for information. The first place which seemed logical to stop was with Cross-dressing. Superficially at least this seemed to match with what I was feeling and so I posted this,
“Kira’s Closet is a site about the thoughts, fears, and triumphs of a cross-dresser. I hope to give encouragement to others, to let them know that they are not alone. Please check back regularly for new posts, I will do my best to make regular updates.
Thank you”.
What is important to understand is, the more I learned the quicker I found I was more than what being a Cross-dresser entailed. Let me explain.
First a definition:
“from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike Licensen.
A person who wears clothing his/her society considers only appropriate for a member of the opposite sex.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
n. someone who adopts the dress or manner or sexual role of the opposite sex.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
n. someone who adopts the dress or manner or sexual role of the opposite sex”
At first blush this seemed like the proper place to start my search for understanding… until one looks a little deeper.
The biggest difference and one which jumps out almost immediately is the way someone who is a Cross-dresser sees themselves as opposed to a Transsexual.
For one thing, cross-dressers in general think of themselves as male. Meaning their gender identity is male which matches with their assigned birth sex. A Transsexual sees themselves as the opposite sex from what they were assigned at birth. Someone born male has a gender identity of female and vise versa. I knew one some level I really never thought of myself as a male. I found the assigned gender roles, mannerisms, and assumptions given to males left me feeling confused and more than a little dirty. It’s still difficult to really explain these feelings in a way which would make sense to someone who has never had them. Much like trying to explain classical music to someone who is deaf or the awe felt looking at the Grand Canyon to someone who is blind.
It may be possible to share some of the depth of feelings and understandings, but it can never be fully understood on the same level as personal experience.
There were other aspects of cross-dressing which didn’t align with my own feelings and sense of self. Yes, there were some similarities, but there were too many differences to ignore.
So if I wasn’t a cross-dresser, then what was I?
Total word count: 1249
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