This week on the Ceri's Anxieties Show

[ceri]

Saturday I'm going to a party, assuming no health crisis or anything like that. First one I've been to in, hmm, must be about six years now, since I hadn't been to one for a while before descending into my long slump. I am such a bundle of nerves about it, on two different vectors.

There's my health concerns. For those of you I've only met recently, I've got a trashed immune system, and respond with sort of mega-allergic complications to all kinds of common environmental things—orris root (the base of most perfumes), dry cleaning chemicals, soil molds, you name it. So being out in a crowd means a day or more of prep work with extra immune-boosting supplements and stuff, and planning a day or more recovery time afterward, and also being prepared for an acute episode while out. Fortunately the hostess has known me for a good long while now, and is used to dealing with medical weirdos besides me. So the circumstances are about as good as they reasonably can be, with understanding hostess and people I'll be happy to visit with, many of whom also have experiencing dealing either specifically with my complications or with others like them.

It's still stressful, the waiting and wondering.

And now there's the trans matter on top of that. I'm out to a few folks who'll be there, but not to most, and I feel in such a horribly awkward limbo. Never mind passing, I couldn't even be a competent cross-dresser now. Nothing to wear, no experience wearing it, no clue about doing almost anything in my presentation. Right now trans is in my heart and not much of anywhere else. I feel like a fake going and coming, knowing I'm not what I seem, unable to seem what I am. I'm very grateful for all the friends, new and old, willing to believe me. The day when it won't have to be taken on faith seems so far off.

Comments

[onomasticator]

I feel like a fake going and coming, knowing I'm not what I seem, unable to seem what I am.

So here's FWIW. I read this journal. I read the things you write under your birth name in various fora. By my recollection, you and I first corresponded in late 2001 or early 2002. As far as I am concerned, you sound exactly like you here. The same authorial voice animated by the same intellect and conscience. There is an unbroken integrity of presence.

I'm not going to say anything stupid like "there's a true you Beyond Gender." That's not the point. As I understand it from your writing, trans-womanhood is something you realize about yourself, not something you decide. So you're who you've always been, and you sound like you've always sounded, which is admirable, sincere, humble and concerned with being the best person possible. Entering the land of unprovable hypotheticals, I think that if I had somehow across this journal on my own, I would have, sooner or later, recognized the voice.

There's nothing fake in that. Just as, to get all Marshall Rogers on you a second, there's nothing fake about Bruce Wayne OR Batman in that interpretation. Whom you are out to is presently a work in progress because life is a work in progress. But under any name you choose to go by for however long, you're the genuine article and people are lucky to know you.

[ceri]

I feel more secure about my personality than my identity, if that distinction makes sense to someone outside my head. I don't think there's a self beyond gender, but that parts of me are besides gender in being fundamental.