Top Ten List II

Top Ten Really Nice Things About Being A Transsexual




10: No more pretending to be interested in football, baseball, basketball, hockey or NASCAR.

9: After spending thousands on hair removal, you can save a fortune on razor blades.

8: You're probably tall enough to see over the heads of the crowd at the Liz Phair concert.

7: One word: Pedicure!

6: No more performance anxiety.

5: Walking in heels isn't really as hard as everyone says.

4: Spending hours working on your voice keeps you from wasting time and money on frivolous things like books and movies.

3: When you gain weight, it all goes to your hips.

2: Guys no longer try to crush the bones of your hand when you're introduced.

1: Being called "ma'am".

Top Ten List

The Top Ten Things That Really Suck About Being A Transsexual:



10: It's hard finding really pretty shoes in a size 13.

9: People who knew you before transition can never forget who you used to be.

8: Sitting down talking with other women, there are things they've all been through that you have no memories of and will never be able to share with them: getting pregnant, having your first period, being a boy-crazy adolescent, and so many others.

7: Worrying that some crazy will attack you for using the "wrong" restroom.

6: You'll spend the rest of your life taking estrogen and progesterone and worrying if they'll cause breast cancer.

5: Fearing that a right-wing Christian politico will manage to make everything you've dreamt of and planned for illegal.

4: You never know if you're really "passing" in public places, or if people are just being polite.

3: You can only dance with that small fraction of men who are taller than you.

2: Not being able to say, "When I was a little girl..."

1: I'm never going to meet a guy who's going to take me home to meet his mother or his kids. It sounds silly, but it hurts.

The rotten stuff

Last week I said that I would "write about all the rotten stuff later". Well, it's later.

I've been putting it off because, to be perfectly honest, I don't like crying. I'm getting better about it; I 'm not ashamed of it any more, but I still don't like it. And I know that I'll do plenty of it before this is written.

In most ways, I've been really lucky. My friends and family have been wonderfully supportive, I'm establishing a small group of new friends who have only known me as Annie, and all my experiences in public have been positive ones. But there's one thing that keeps it all from being what it should be, getting in the way and frustrating me at every turn. Money.

Up to now, everything I've done has been relatively inexpensive. Thrift store clothes, makeup from WalMart, and shoes from eBay. A wonderful counselor who works on a sliding scale and charges me whatever I can afford that day. Sometimes that's been nothing.

I've managed to handle paying for hormones, and the cost of the support groups I go to are underwritten by a local organization. I've managed without the expenses of a car, taking the bus wherever I need to go or occasionally calling on friends for rides. I've even done a website tradeout to get my laser hair removal free.

But now I've hit a wall.

I've done just about all I can without a major expenditure of money. All the stuff that's left is incredibly expensive, at least from my perspective. Full Facial Feminization Surgery can cost over $40,000. Even just a nose job and brow lift (both of which I desperately need) is over $6000. Breast implants can add another $5000. And Sexual Reassignment Surgery is over $20,000, even having it done in Thailand. It's more here in the States. Even a bilateral orchiectomy (better known as castration), so I don't have to take testosterone blockers forever, is in the neighborhood of $3000.

Any way I look at it, I need to spend a bare minimum of $30,000. Considering that my after-tax income this year is about $20,000 and my expenses are about $22,000, it's going to be a long time before I can go much farther. And I'm not getting any younger.

I desperately need a better job, but it's hard enough finding work at my age without the extra little complication of having to say, "Oh, yeah, by the way, That's not my legal name yet..." Sometimes it seems hopeless, that I'll be stuck spending the rest of my life in this weird in-between state, unable to go forward and ready to die before going backward.

But I have to have hope. I have to believe that somehow it will work out, that eventually the perfect job will come along, that everything will be okay. It's a matter of either having hope or stepping out in front of a truck.

I just hope it happens in time. I have an image that comes to me every so often that plunges me into the deepest, darkest despair. Sometimes it's a nightmare, other times simply a waking thought.

The image is one of me, many years from now, lying in a hospital bed. The end is near; there's not much time left. My hair has been cut, my makeup taken away, and the doctors and nurses all are calling me "mister" and "he". I try to plead with them, but my voice is too weak to make myself understood. My eyes close, but I can still hear them talking. "What was he trying to tell us?", one of the nurses asks.

The room fades away, and is replaced with an image of my tombstone, with my male name on it. The inscription reads, "He wanted more."

An Update

Okay, here it is: the much anticipated (yeah, right...) update!

Part of the reason I haven't written about what's been going on until now is that most of it has been more of the same: support groups, laser sessions, putting in job applications. There is one interesting development regarding my laser treatments; I'm building a new website for Laser Lovers (the salon I go to), and we've done a tradeout so that I get my sessions for free. That removes a big financial burden, which is a good thing as there have been no developments on the job front.

Website work may be my salvation in the long run; I'm getting a lot of inquiries, and I'm reworking the site for the AIDS PArtnership, Inc. It's strictly volunteer work, but it's a good group and it'll be good on my resume. And they're letting me put a link to my site on it. I met the people involved at a dinner they hold each month; everyone was really friendly and they seem to like what I'm doing so far.

Let's see, what else is going on? Oh, I have a car now... the only problem is that I can't drive it! It was given to me by a friend; her mother was getting a new one, and it was so old that she wouldn't have gotten anything for it in a trade-in. It's an '87 Pontiac.

The thing is, I still have a couple of old tickets on my license that I need to pay off, plus I have to get insurance, and there's a $100 fee to register a car from out of state, in addition to the regular registration and tag costs. It'll be a few more weeks before I can afford all that. In the meantime, It's visiting various friends' driveways, as my park manager (the jerk) won't let me park an untagged vehicle here.

I went to St. Pete Pride last month; it was an amazing event, with some 50,000 peeople attending. Apparently it's the largest Pride event in Florida.

I visited the various booths, hung out with friends, and watched the parade, accumulating a staggering amount of beads in the process. I ended up giving most of them away, keeping just enough to look good hanging from my rearview mirror and obstructing the view out the windshield.

The biggest development of all though is that this week marks the one year anniversary of the time it began to dawn on me that I could really do this. In a couple of weeks, it'll be one year since I first ventured out in public. Damn, I was nervous, but it felt so right that just a couple of weeks later I was emailing for a therapist's appointment to begin hormone therapy.

I guess you could say that my birthday is coming up!

I'm back

Okay, okay... once again, I've gone way too long without posting anything here. I'll do a regular update later, but for right now I want to talk about why I haven't been writing.

First, it's important to understand why I write in the first place. There are really a lot of reasons, of varying importance. I write so that my family & friends around the country can keep up with what's going on with me. I write to share things I've learned and experiences I've had with others who may be facing some of the same issues. Sometimes it's to help me understand something better myself; I've found that writing forces me to think about things and clarify issues in my own mind. Part of it is pure ego gratification; it's nice to think that there are people out there reading, and placing some value on what I'm saying.

And sometimes it's from sheer boredom, the lack of anything else to do.

As I was sitting down to write this, I thought the main reason for such a long lapse was the fact that I've actually been pretty busy. I'm working on a couple of websites, going to several support group meetings, and trying to do some new artwork. I also like going out on weekends, and when you consider that I'm away from home for 12 hours every weekday (2 hours to get to work, 8 1/2 hours at work, and an hour and a half to get home), there really isn't much time left.

But that's not the whole story. I have come to realize that the biggest part of why I wrote in the first place was that I had no life.

When you've lived (mumble mumble) years as I have, hiding your feelings and knowing that the "you" everyone knows is a fake, you don't feel much like getting out among people. And the fact that your few friends are married or in relationships and have lives of their own to live doesn't help matters. You find you'd rather do something at home by yourself anyway... like writing.

The name "Annie Social" was appropriate.

Over the last couple of months, though, as I've come to terms with who I am, I've found that I really like being around people! Imagine my shock and surprise... me, actually getting out and making friends and doing stuff.

I've gotten to know a few people that I can go out with, or just hang around and talk to. Rather than going out somewhere on my own, I can call and say, "Hey, whatcha doing tonight?" Last weekend I spent more than 4 hours with an ex-girlfriend, her aunt and two of her cousins just sitting around the kitchen table, talking about me and them and family and babies and clothes and... well, you get the idea. And there's even a guy I've gone out with a couple of times!

Things haven't been perfect; there have been depressing times, and plenty of obstacles thrown in my path. I'll write about all the rotten stuff later, but right now I'm not complaining.

I guess this is all my longwinded way of saying that the reason I haven't written is that I unexpectedly got a life, and I've been busy living it! Don't worry though; I'm still "Annie Social" enough to lock myself in and put pen to paper. Figuratively, anyway.