The "T" Party.

Ooh, platform heels, yum! Also, slut-boots (well, that's what we call them down here...) and dance shoes (there's probably a more proper name for them, but I mean like the really thin material shoes that are flat and don't rise very high on the heel... I've seen a woman wearing some lovely black ones with a nice black bow on the toes - so cute!).

I don't even know what wedges are, by name at least, though I'm sure I've seen some before. I love pretty much all female-specific shoes, though when it comes to colour and "extras" (like the black bows) then I get a little more picky.

Can't say I've really worn any female shoes (not since trying on mum's heels as a teen) so I don't know about comfort levels. But then, I'm required to wear dress shoes for class, which aren't comfortable, and I find I can put up with the discomfort so I can rock the style. So somehow I think if I found shoes that looked great on me, I'd wear them regardless of comfort levels, at least occasionally.

Oh, this is what a wedge style shoe looks like:
http://www.heels.com/womens-shoes/dilly-dally-black.html

Same here about not having worn female shoes since I was a kid.

Hmm. Wedges look like they'd be good for if I ever want to look like a dominatrix and also be able to keep my balance... cos you know, falling over in heels doesn't look very commanding.

But for day-to-day wear, if my feet are going to be raised at an angle, I'll want proper heels. Possibly not stillettos, due to the fact that they'd get caught in grates and in between bricks and I'd probably fall over a lot... but definitely heels.

When I'm not wearing my dancer shoes, with the little black bows!

*has a cutegasm*

Ha, I think you're going to end up the type of girl that has like a hundred pairs of shoes, each to go with a specific outfit. Though even going beyond practical reasons, I think the clunky style heels look better than the stillettos.

Oh and the only proper foot wear for a dominatrix is stilletto, knee high boots.

But I'd want open-toed shoes for my dominatrixing, to show off my black-painted nails with red Taurus sumbols facing the other person (yes, I'm a Taurus, and yes, I've painted my nails black with red before... well, my fingernails anyway... the trick is using a modelling paintbrush and not the nail-polish applicator thing, which is frankly far too clunky to do anything intricately...) !



And yes, I will most definitely have far too many shoes. The way I see it, if I can afford surgery, I can afford at least 7 pairs of shoes so I don't have to wear the same one more than once a week.

A guy in Bulgaria got a sex change to look like Lady Gaga:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/31/penio-daskalov-bulgarian-_n_701161.html

S/he actually makes for a pretty attractive woman.

The extremely questionable notion of wanting to become Lady Gaga aside...

Isn't stuff like referring to this person as a "he", and writing stuff like "dressed as a woman", and "tricked people into thinking he was a woman" all really bad anti-trans reporting? (I assume she is transgender if she was on a bad reality show living as a woman.)

This person identifies themselves as being not quite a man or a woman (or after the "sex change," which by the way is an archaic and misleading term itself.) I guess calling them "he" isn't really offensive if that's how they think of it. I wouldn't refer to them as a transsexual woman, though, since they aren't identifying as such.

Someone deciding to get a "sex change" just to look like Lady Gaga is probably insane, though. I normally respect anyone's identity, but "Lady Gaga" is not an identity for anybody but Lady Gaga.

Kitty Pryde said:

Isn't stuff like referring to this person as a "he", and writing stuff like "dressed as a woman", and "tricked people into thinking he was a woman" all really bad anti-trans reporting? (I assume she is transgender if she was on a bad reality show living as a woman.)

Click to expand...

This person said they don't completely identify as either a man or woman. So, I think either set of pronouns would work fine in their case. The only bad thing about this article is that it could reinforce the notion of trans people as being something akin to side show freaks. Though since this story will likely vanish from the public mind soon enough, that probably won't happen.

I'd rather be Madonna in the 80s.

Shadow Dragon said:

This person said they don't completely identify as either a man or woman. So, I think either set of pronouns would work fine in their case. The only bad thing about this article is that it could reinforce the notion of trans people as being something akin to side show freaks. Though since this story will likely vanish from the public mind soon enough, that probably won't happen.

Click to expand...

This is actually a big subject of contention in the overall transgender community, actually. There's evidence of a very wide range of gender identities, including identities such as "MtX" and "FtX" (male-to-other and female-to-other.) There's also a handful of people who want hormones and/or surgery but do not identify as different than their assigned-at-birth gender. Most of them are accepted, but then we get some really odd outliers, like the person assigned "white male" at birth who decided that she had "Harry Benjamin Syndrome" (a fictitious condition) and was actually an African-American woman with an intersex condition, despite her parents being white, so she transitioned, changed her apparent race, and claimed she wasn't transsexual.

(EDIT: To be clear, if someone wants to change their apparent race, that's fine. Race is largely a social construction anyway. But she really went crazy with it, and seemed to believe that race was some big neurological trait. I know some people claim that mental sex is a social construct, but there's actual evidence that it's not, for at least some of us. There are lots of transsexual people, and it's a recognized medical issue, but not lots of "transracial" people.)

So we get arguments, because there's a need to be supportive of others, and understand that not everyone is like us. (Most people don't understand trans men and trans women, and we'd rather they not assume that we're just crazy. So it's our obligation not to assume trans other or transitioning genderqueer people are crazy.) We don't want to exclude genderqueer transitioners and the like.

On the other hand, we get people like this person in the story, who represent a tiny minority and are probably mentally ill. Some are very happy to later go on television and claim to represent all of us, and media outlets are happy to report on them for sensationalist reasons. It's cringeworthy and obnoxious. I'm sure this person has some legitimate gender issues, but I'm also pretty sure that none of them require them to try to look just like Lady Gaga. They haven't claimed to represent us all, at least, but many do.

So there's a big debate on how to be inclusive and supportive of the real issues that many of these people have, without also passively letting them define all transsexualism according to their extremely rare experiences. And there's all the usual ugly arguments between people who say, "These people are why cisgender people don't understand, and we should exclude them," and people who reply, "You guys are elitist sellout camp guards!"

Personally, I think the solution is to have better media representations of the majority of trans people. If a lot of trans people are in the public eye, a single person like this will rarely be a large media influence. That way, they can identify how they like but none of us have to worry about people assuming we're all (probably emotionally disturbed) people who apparently transition just to look like our favorite celebrities. (Of course, the reporters might have skewed things to say that.)

Hear hear!

Diana Hignutt said:

Just checking in to see how our T folks are doing? Everybody doing okay, or better? Please let us know....

Click to expand...

Everything's going great for me as far as trans stuff goes! My self-confidence has gone up drastically in the past week, although I'm not sure why. For some reason, I feel safe and optimistic, and am far less self-conscious. I don't seem to get depressed or upset as easily. In fact, the only crying I've done in the last few days has all been about good stuff.

Physically, my hair finally looks okay, and the thinning/receded parts are repaired. (Early male-pattern baldness runs in my family.) My body is also visibily feminizing more and more, and I'm still losing weight. If I work harder at being physically active, I think I have a shot of coming through this looking kinda attractive.

I've been practicing my voice with a spectrogram. It's fun seeing a visual representation of my voice, and I've actually learned to get my average pitch into the female range without multiple tries. I just got my copy of Finding Your Female Voice in the mail today, which seems great so far.

In about a month, a really good friend of mine from overseas is going to get to come visit me and my family for a week. She's also trans, although hasn't been able to start hormones yet, and is kinda like a little sister to me. I'm really looking forward to hanging out with her in person. (Skype is okay, but not the same, obviously.)

Finally, my mom is finally calling me by my female name most of the time, as are some of my female friends. My dad and male friends still aren't, but I'm okay with that for now. I'm also less self-conscious about using my female name, although that might be because I took the stereotypical route and chose a name so close to my original that it's easy to overlook the difference.

My writing has gotten slightly behind, but I expect to catch up within a few days. I'm feeling a bit more confident about that as well. I'm a bit mad at myself for letting myself get behind, considering I already lowered my quota to 1000 words a day, but I think I needed it to handle personal stuff. When I've got too much on my mind, my writing ends up becoming whiny and angsty, and that's not my style.

How have you been, Diana? (I mean, in general, obviously. )

I've been pretty good. I've had a couple of dreams where, in the dream, I was female. Real mood improver that is.

But I've also been a little torn. A guy I know who writes horror said about a month ago that he's looking for a forum where he can get peer-critiques on his horror writing. Obviously, I want to tell him to come to AW, but therein lies the torn aspect. If I tell him about this place, he'll want to know my username, and then he'll probably come to realise I'm trans (I don't hide it on this site) and I'm not sure I really want him to know. I mean, he seems like a nice enough guy, and probably would be nice about it, but nobody I see on a regular basis in real life knows I'm trans...

And I'll be seeing this guy up until the end of next year at the least, because we're doing a course together (which is how I know him).

So I didn't tell him about AW straight away, because I had concerns, and now it's been over a month and if I do decide to mention it, trans issues aside I'm going to have to explain why I didn't mention it sooner...

Gah.

But otherwise I'm doing pretty good. I'm getting to that point where when I look in the mirror, I just see a female face - as in, the eyes, lips, nose... the facial hair (which I hate almost as much as I despise actually shaving) and the Adam's apple sort of are a slap in the face, reminding me that I'm not physically female... but when I look in the mirror, I mostly look at facial expressions, and yeah, I've gotten to that point where I just see female. So that's really a positive.

Also, the medication I'm on for schizophrenia sometimes increases breast tissue. It's been happening with me. I'm still less than an A cup, which suits me fine because I don't want proper breasts until I'm living as a woman, but when I feel them I get a sense of what it might be like to have breasts, because there is some soft mass there, unlike my previously completely flat chest...

/ramble

Oh, and re: that guy who I'm unsure of whether to tell about AW - even if he is fine with my transness, he might tell other people in the class about it, and there are certain people in class who I'm sure WOULDN'T be fine with it...

I think I'm going to come out on the side of not telling him...

Ooh... *looks up Critters*

Cheers!

For those that have transitioned, what made you choose your new name? And for those who haven't, what are some names you're considering and why did you pick them?

Lately, I've been thinking about the whole name issue and I've always loved the name Raine. So if I do change it, that'll be what I chose, but at the same time, I'm kinda used to my name and don't hate it. So I don't know if I really do want to change my name or not.

Diana Hignutt said:

I liked the name Diana. Rebecca is another one I considered, and I do use that occassionally as a literary psuedonym here and there.

If you do transition, SD, will your old name work as a female name? Not that that's mandatory.

Click to expand...

Probably not. It's Kenneth (though I go by Ken like ninety percent of the time). If I do transition though, I'll probably make that my middle name and still let people call me that. Just use the new name when introducing my self to new people.

I have my reasons for wanting to change my name to Cate Black when the time comes (Which are mentioned elsewhere in this thread) but I think at the heart of it, I don't really care what my name will be so long as I'm female.

Right now,, I'm using a female name that sounds very close to my male name. Mainly because someone suggested it and I happen to like the name. A lot of trans women go through more than one name before they settle on one, though, so this might be a temporary one.

I used to think that I wouldn't care about names at all, but the more I transition, the more determined I am to get rid of the old name. I didn't expect that result.