This evening I posed an interesting question to myself in introducing myself to someone new, someone I hope will become a friend. I asked myself that age old question, "What does it feel like to be a woman"
I started this gender path as Katrina Dawn Stewart on April 10, 2001. Ten years later I am not any closer to an answer for you. Then again, as sure as I am about many things in my "know it all" life, I look back and realize that many things I "knew" at the age of twenty or even thirty are not so certain now. Life is muddy, mucky, dirty, and complex...there are no simple answers and our culture does not really provide the answers though it tries to assert it does.
There is no existential/essential way of being a woman, there is no way of feeling like a man. I know I am me. I know that the path for me to take hormones and become Katy was life changing, upsetting, wrecked my life, destroyed my privilege, and cost me authority and positionality in management where I work. I also know that nothing I could have imagined at the start of April 10, 2010 would have prepared me for where I am ten years later, or where I will be ten years from now.
I feel I am more "woman" now than I personally was then because the slow fires of life seem to have purified me in some ways. I feel I am more authentic as a "woman" now, though ...again...that essential category holds no water, no real value. I am my woman and I claim my identity as a woman as something so unique and special in how I wear this skin that no one else could really know.
It is not the clothes, it is not the breasts - though the perspective of hormones has changed my life in a womanly way in some dramatic ways. It is not the way I talk or the way I act at times - because my brand of femininity is fierce, stubborn, messy, and yet extremely sensitive and caring. I would not go back. In fact, I look forward to more changes on my horizon. At the same time, I regret what has been lost, I mourn for better planning, and I know that no amount of planning would have ever been enough.
Being a woman, like being a man is complicated, complex, and there are no real guidelines. Sure, there are cultural scripts, there are proper ways of living in gender...but those don't reflect who we really are, what we really do at all waking moments. We are each a spark, a flame of uniqueness in the world that adapts culture to us as much as culture adapts us to itself.
I am a woman, but how I have come to my womanhood has been my gendered journey and that is ever evolving, I still wrestle with nightmares, with fears.
I also still have many dreams in which I am a male character. Does that somehow mean I am not a good candidate for surgery, that at some subconcious level I am really a man and not a woman at all? One might argue that. Consider this though, I lived 29 year of my life as a man...those records, memories, and subconscious life...however much I strived to be a woman still were very real man experiences. In other words, I have baggage. I also still wrestle with my own hangup on the male bits I still have. Why can I not accept myself as a woman with these bits. After all, those I love who have the same bits and are women are only women in my eyes. Is it internalized transphobia? Maybe? Perhaps.... Or, is it that for me, for my path, I want that surgery that confirms my gender. In other words, I can accept another's decision one way or another, but for me what is right is to have this surgery.
How can one prove something so personal to a therapist without sounding wishy washy or conflicted? I don't know. I don't know because there are also artificial complications to the matter - costs of surgery, fear of results, fear of the unknown, hope for what will be and realism for what might not be.
Still, having had my orchie in November, I am amazed at some things...I am amazed at how my libido is either gone or changing...how I am not feeling a constant thirst that cannot be quenched and a constant attack of need or desire for sex. I really am calmer in that regard...and there is peace in that. Perhaps there is a lesson therein for the fears and unknowns of my goal?
