What does it feel like to be a woman?

     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?

Wayne Christian and his Senate Bill

For context, please go here:
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-legislature/82nd-legislative-session/video-pansexual-amendment-debate/

"While you were sleeping last night, State Rep. Wayne Christian, R-Center, resurrected an amendment to SB 1 that would ban colleges from using state funds or university facilities for gender and sexuality centers. This is a must watch series of videos!!"






  I would like to take a few moments of your time to set the record queer and correct:
While I was growing up my mother often told me that "I didn't understand, I didn't have the whole story" when quite often with my dragon heart and genius mind I often saw the complex mess of life more clearly than many.

Of course in his testimony Wayne Christian took things out of context. So, let me please try to attempt to put them in context.

The questions he read off from a handout (from UT) were most likely a visualization, guided thinking technique often used to create empathy and understanding for what another goes through. One takes a predominant audience identity and questions it in the same vein that LGBT identities are questioned every day.This creates a cognitive dissonance and dissociation that can be used to highlight how others feel.

As a sidenote, I find it interesting that the honorable Wayne Christian could not speak his own gender identity.

The video taken from Texas A&M's Cay Crowe presentation....ooooh, where do I begin.

1. The student who took this video violated the sanctity of a safe space in the same manner of those people who videotape visitors to planned parenthood. This student took a sacred trust and betrayed his/her fellow aggies and the environment created
2. The student violated copyright law by not getting permission to tape and rebroadcast
3. The student created terror by posting to YouTube showing he could get into a sacred space of fellow students and reveal to public what was private. Safe spaces are not safe when people feel that their identities, what they are learning, etc will be broadcast to the whole world
4. And finally, Cay Crow did this safe sex presentation free of charge as a service to students before break. In my mind it is better to teach a student how to operate heavy machinery (ie anal sex) instead of just letting them go at it without any guidance. We know students are going to have sex, we know they are going to have all different kinds of sex, the best method for their own safety, the safety of their partners, and the safety of all of us (STI's to name just one effect), is to give them practical, sound, safer methods of doing what they are going to do in the healthiest methods possible.

So, it is late....but my brain was burning as Wayne Christian used that crap out of context.

And with that I have to applaud Lowell Kane and the Texas A&M GLBT Resource Center for all they do to provide safe and nurturing environments to students that I love and care for so very much.

I may work in the community, and not at A&M. I may not experience some of the fallout of this first hand. But, my roots in this community have grown deep. My love of TAMU's potential has always been strong and the antics of Wayne Christian and also what has been going on here at A&M are sad, abhorrent, and have lighted my ire.

Wayne wants equal treatment. Lifting up diversity is not a zero sum game honorable lawmaker. When GLBT students get something, it does not automatically take away from straight students who are reinforced with heterosexual teaching, training, reference, and health care centered on them and their "lifestyle" every single hour or every single day.

When are we going to stop this damn debate that by thinking of others we somehow hurt those who are in the majority.

Depressed - beauty demons sitting on my heart

     This morning I looked through some pictures of myself at the 2nd annual Austin Harvey Milk Commemorative March. True, I chose not to wear makeup, still pictures - any pictures lately spin me into a confidence down spiral.
http://www.farrisfoto.com/GetEqual/HarveyMilkConferenceAndMarch/index.html

Here is what I see when I look at these pictures. A passionate, angry woman with hair that seems to move on its own because of the goddess aura surrounding her. A woman who is fat, doesn't have a very pretty face (and having a pretty face means a whole lot to me), and whose hair is stringy, old, grey and belongs in a horror flick.

Robin looks at me and tries to comfort me by saying that I have just as beautiful a face as they day we met.
Sweet, nice, and helpful....something I will remember and cling to as a totem as I try to claw my way out of this dark place.

Still, I see a woman who is not as pretty as someone like Nikki Araguz and who has over the years gained an ever expanding girth.

I hope that yoga will help with the girth. The reality is that I eat too many sweets and have little self control. The yoga is better for the stress detox and the alignment of my body and soul...peace within rather than with easy, rapid weight loss.

Can I hold on long enough for the yoga to be of weight loss benefit.
Can I stop thinking of myself as this ugly old woman whose angry all the time.....

I don't know, this hole I fall into seems to be a cyclical one.


Much love, to a day or moment soon out of this darkness to a sunlit, cool beach.