Deanna's Quest

Two thousand and eleven is no more and we all just recently welcomed in two thousand and twelve. Some have predicted that the world will end before this year retires. Some believe that life as we know it will undergo some kind of grand shift. For me, two thousand and eleven was the beginning of such a dramatic and life altering shift that will forever change who I am, not only externally to the world, but internally as well. I have seen and felt so many amazing things this past year that I would never have expected to be possible way back in two thousand and ten. I have had so many wonderful and beautiful people crowd around me, embrace me, love me and welcome me into the world that has always seemed to be so alien to me. I am amazed that so many of these people have been standing by the wayside waiting for me to open my eyes and truly see what a wonder it is to be genuinely myself. Whether they have waited for days, months, a few short years, or since my earliest childhood, they have been there. Some had temporarily drifted away, assuming me to be lost to them. Perhaps there was some hope in their hearts that I would someday break out of the internal prison that I had built for myself, perhaps my reaching out to them after many parted years with my deepest secret finally revealed and curiosity to discover who I am becoming pulled them back. For what ever your reasons for being here to share in my quest to discover myself and the world around me, I truly love that you are here.

I find myself counting my blessings every day. But what holds for two thousand and twelve? What new wonders and adventures await me? We shall certainly discover them as they come. One thing I can be certain of, I will not be alone. The year has already shown me an enormous range of emotions that have taken me throughout a vast canvas that had, in the past been composed of muted shades of gray, and are now composed of a vibrant rainbow from deep and mournful and painful to vast pinnacles of elation. Such range had always escaped my narrow range of emotions in the past.

I am entering this new phase of my life with excitement and wonder and a wholly renewed sense of enthusiasm and energy. It is the year for my business to finally flourish and blossom – yes, my creativity is feeling newly kindled. I feel that opportunities are about to be presented to me that have previously eluded my attention – very little to do with economic anemia, but almost entirely to do with personal apathy and distraction. I still need to share so much of what has gone on in my life these past several months of absence. And I will promise to make an effort to create some semblance of a timeline, or sequence of events (what I can remember). There has been much goings on, a good bit of comings as well. Ups and downs have often made me wonder at this new roller coaster I have found myself on.

Just wanted y’all to know that I am still around. Be back after this short commercial break…

This past week has been very eventful and emotional for me – in both really good and really heartbreaking and maybe a bit in between. One of the biggest things that has happened for me was that I finally got my name change done. This past tuesday I had my hearing and in spite of the people meandering in up to an hour late for the hearing and all of the various drama bits, my part went amazingly smooth and reasonably uneventful. I can now honestly and truthfully and legally say my name is Deanna. That old name will be fading away into the distant past of my life, like highway roadkill in the rear-view mirror. Bye bye, you have served me reasonably/acceptably well all these years, but now it is time to go. As a result of the bozo dramas and a temperamental and indecisive GPS, I got to my therapy appointment more than 45 minutes late. Fortunately, Kristine had kept her schedule open for me. I was so happy and so happy that she is my therapist. I can’t say enough about her, she has helped me come so much further than I think would be otherwise possible.

Well, I ended up having a great session and beamed and bubbled and glowed all through the hour. Brought up a lot of stuff. Not anywhere near as much as will be talked about in the coming weeks and months – more on that. Therapy was followed up with a trip to the DDS. No, not the dentist. Here in Georgia it is the Department of Driver Services (DMV in most places). They do a great job of hiding this stupid building. Took me a few minutes of driving up and down the street looking for a building other than the hotel across the street. Once I finally found it and walked in, told them I was there for a name change, they gave me the form to fill out and a number and not an eyelash was batted. Filled the forms out. For the question: Sex:  Male or Female? I of course checked Female (yes I still have that S*&T dangling between my legs, but I am Female) and hoped they would just go with it. Wishful thinking. I heard the wait was 45 minutes to an hour, so I settled in with my usual people watching. I was only there about 15 minutes when I see my number flashing for window #7. WOW that was fast! The young lady probably took a look at me and said to herself, ‘here comes another one’. Hey, if I can’t laugh at myself, then why is life worthwhile?  She looked everything over, typed in all of the information, scribbled out the Female and put a firm check next to Male (biiitch). Oh well. Picture taken – a little less poofy and frizzy than the pictures I got a few days earlier. Now the license part is done and for some reason GA has regressed over the years since I moved here. In the past they took your picture and everything, printed out the license – the real one – and you were on your way. Now, they take your picture, make you wait another 15 minutes, while they print out a paper temporary license and tell you to wait about 2 weeks for the new one to arrive. WTF‽

I had some time to kill after getting my license and my support group meeting, so I decided to reply to my [big] sister’s email. She hadn’t heard from me in a bit and was checking in on me. Twenty years of no communication and since I came out to her a few weeks ago, now she is checking up on me. LOL So, I replied back that I had just gotten the name change and license taken care of and a few bits about what else has been happening. Since Tuesday (2 days ago) we have exchanged about 15 pages worth of emails back and forth. WOW! She has been doing an awesome job of filling a LOT of blanks in my life that I was clueless of or just have no memories of. So much of what she has written has had me in tears and feeling so bad for her and my brother both. I haven’t mentioned this before, but in the past month or so, my therapist and I have been talking a lot about my quite likelihood of having some form/degree of Asperger’s Syndrome, an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. This has resulted in my having had a very hard time with social interactions and understand people as well as myself to a large degree. Telling my sister about this, cleared up and explained so much about my life to her. She has filled in so many details of my youth that I had only heard stories about – highly edited stories. I guess she is younger than I always thought she was. I had always thought she was 5 or 6 years older than me, but I just found out this afternoon that she is less than 4 years older. Way to go Donna, shattering my entire perspective on history. LOL

I now have so much stuff to process and see if I can piece together, or extract some distantly mislaid memories and see if can’t construct some kind of identity with my youth. I had mentioned to Donna that my memories of my first 10 years are just made up of tiny little fragments and snippets, there is no real timeline, there are no happy memories, I have almost no recall of her in my life. Evidently, she played a much bigger role than I ever knew and I am so sorry that I can’t remember any of that. From the memories that I do have of her, I can recall admiring her, she was always very pretty in my eyes, she was so much older than I and seemed to be so much more ummm… a person, than I was or could ever hope to be. I can remember as she was entering her teen years, puberty and such, and starting to blossom I was wishing so much that I could  be like her. I guess my highly sterilized and narrow viewpoint of who my sister was was far less perfect than I had ever known. But in my eyes, she was and still is, my big sister and a woman I can only hope to someday look half as good as or be half as wonderful. I can not wait until I get to see her in person, after many, many years and give her a big hug. I also can’t wait to see my brother again and maybe finally after all of these years the 3D’s can become a family. So much time has been lost.

A Picture Says a Thousand Words…

Or maybe a thousand words leads to a picture. Since I started thinking about starting this journal I had struggled with whether to post pictures of my transition or not. I also struggled with whether to make it more an accounting and documenting of my transition, i.e. today I went to the park and saw a bird. Then I… or if I wanted it to be something deeper than that, more experiential and maybe philosophical, a journal of my thoughts and feelings and my perceptions of this process that we call transitioning. I have never really settled on an answer to that and have still contemplated it. I have pretty much just stuck with the more cerebral approach and trying to keep it from becoming personal – putting a face to it. Maybe a big part of that had to do with my low self image and self esteem. That must be fading as I am getting more and more comfortable with being out and being my self. With that in mind, I am going to post a picture of myself, now that I am talking more about specific experiences and more personal emotions, it only seems fitting to place a face to the evolving personality.

This is me relaxing in a park in Atlanta on a hot summer day

This is me relaxing in the park in Atlanta on a hot summer day

Thanks to my wonderful friend Anni for taking the picture and for making me smile. There are so few pictures that have been taken of me over the years that I don’t totally hate, just looking at myself. Perhaps that is because I hate seeing the guy in the frame and know that it just is not me and I hate that. This is one of the only pictures I have that I can actually look at and not see HIM in it. I’m still not passing worth a damn, I get male pronouns more than the female, but I am feeling so much more comfortable and confident, so I just ignore the references. And in the defense of others, most people honestly don’t know how to respond to transsexuals. They perceive a guy in a dress and know that they are trans or cross-dresser or transvestite or a freak or drag queen or something, but they don’t know the proper terminology, because they were never told, we aren’t that common – yet – that people generally know how to respond. So they respond as natural. Who they see first is usually how they will respond, or not use any gender title. You can usually tell if someone is deliberately and viciously using the wrong pronoun or a more derogatory term and if it is just out of ignorance or by mistake, I will usually forgive or overlook it and just move on. That is usually my experience and have yet to get any negative reactions. I’m lucky I guess.

That is about where I am today. I am just so grateful that I have my siblings back in my life and so happy that they have not abandoned me. Now after almost 50 years I can finally get to know them and love them. That makes me happy.

Growing up transgender in the 60′s, in a rather conservative, strict family, and as a Reformed Presbyterian (to this day, I have no idea what we were reforming) was pretty difficult and lonely. I guess I had always felt a bit disconnected from everyone around me. I never really understood them and they seemed to not really understand me. I think because of this, I never really seemed to know how to interact with others. This included my own family.

As I was growing up and becoming more aware that I was different and as I started to have these strange feelings about how I felt, well, wrong, I became more withdrawn, more introverted, shyer. My mom loves to tell everyone the story of how I had to repeat Kindergarten.

Doesn’t she realize how embarrassing it is to repeat Kindergarten?

Well, I’m not going to go into all of the details that led up to my being held back, but the short of it is that for that entire first year in this class, I did not say one single word in that school. Not a peep! Looking at the whole back story and all of the sub-plots that played into the decision to keep me back, it would seem that any of these would be sufficient to keep me there. However, looking back at it, from nearly 45 years into the future and remembering little tiny snippets from that year, I know that even at the tender age of 5 I knew that I somehow didn’t fit in. No, I wasn’t one of those lucky (or unlucky) kids that knew she was born into the wrong body at that young age. It would take a while longer for me to start suspecting something along those lines.

As I grew into my young adolescence, things started becoming even more confusing for me. For some reason by the age of 8 or 9 I started becoming more and more drawn to, or obsessed with, the fact that my sister and mother dressed very differently than I did. The way they looked seemed to be more desirable to me than the ugly and uncomfortable clothes that I had to wear, the ones that were like my brother’s. In fact sometimes they were the very same clothes my brother wore. Being 11 months older than me, I often got to wear what he had just barely outgrew, or we would just have the same clothes (I don’t really remember any more than I hated those clothes – it was the 60′s after all). It got to the point that I would start looking through the laundry and pondering the contents, wondering at how much softer and nicer those things were.

What are you doing?

That was the question I got when my mom came home, unexpectedly early, the first time I tried on a pair of red cotton panties (honestly not sure if they were my mom’s or sister’s). I replied that I didn’t know. Which was a perfectly honest answer, because I had no clue beyond it just felt right. How long have you been doing this? Well being the first time actually wearing them, I answered honestly. At that point, mom told me not to ever let her catch me doing that again. She never has to this day.

From that time on, things really began to get difficult inside my head, I was confused about why I felt so strongly compelled to wear girl’s/women’s clothing. According to everything everyone told me, I was a boy and boys don’t do that. Now it would be a number of years later before I would get to see for certain why exactly everyone told me I was a boy and not a girl. Up till that day of reckoning, I had held out some kind of hope that I might yet become a girl. That thought nagged at me for decades. I knew that I wanted to be a girl and not a boy, but I also knew instinctively that I needed to keep that a secret, because no one would understand and I didn’t want to end up locked away in a mental hospital or worse. I had to keep this secret to myself. I had to also try to learn why I was this freak. As time went on, I became very quiet and withdrawn, I had very few friends growing up, I really could not relate to my brother or my sister or my mother even. As I got older and was expected to participate in conversations with other people, I tended to just sit on the sidelines and try to become invisible. I spent all of this time sitting there listening to everything I could hear. I was trying to understand the dynamics of conversation, what people said and talked about and tried to figure out why they talked about what they were talking about. Adults were always more interesting to listen to than the kids my age. I was expected to play with the other boys and do boy things, which never felt right to me.

Girl Friends

I had always had a much easier time relating to and understanding girls. I had friends who were girls, of course they never knew my secret – no one did. I think the girls always felt something about me was different than the other boys, I was easier to understand and I seemed to understand them and was more interested in what they were doing than I was in the boys activities. But as I got to that age when boys were supposed to become interested in girls and chasing them, dating them, I retreated further and further into my shell, building stronger defenses to keep my secret hidden away, even so far as trying to keep it away from myself. I am and always have been attracted to girls/women, but it had always gone far beyond what I knew the other guys felt. I also become paralyzingly shy around the girls that I was interested in. I could not ask them out, I had no idea how to ask a girl out, it also didn’t feel right to. I made hundreds of attempts at asking out those I was attracted to and every single last one of them turned me down. Yeah, a few of them just laughed in my face or looked me up and down with a disgusted look on their face like I had just asked them to do something extremely offensive. But, by far, I would get the your a nice guy, I just want to be friends, you’ll make some girl a perfect husband someday, but not me, or any of a hundred variations on that theme. It wouldn’t be until I was 42 that I would finally have a date – she asked me out. We dated for less than a month before she broke it off because she believed I was gay. I wasn’t (exactly), I still had no idea that I was a transsexual lesbian, so I guess she was half right.

What is this Transalienation?

Oh, right, that is where I was going… A lot of us who grew up as transsexuals or transgender (I guess) and never really understood what our problem was till later in life, seem to have this feeling of being alienated or isolated within ourselves. We seem to know that something is wrong and that it is something that is not the kind of thing you talk to people about, because it is just that wrong. It seems as though there is no one in our lives who appear to feel the same way, therefore we are ‘freakish’, wrong in some way. I have had many friends over the years that would ask me if I was an alien. They were apparently serious. They knew that I was nothing like anyone else they had ever met and could not understand me at all and I really had no capacity to really understand them to any degree – I had to be an alien. I had been asked that enough times that I had begun to wonder if in fact I was an alien.

Two of the people I should have understood best and who should have been able to understand me, were the two people that I alienated myself from the most. I’m referring to my own flesh and blood, my brother and sister. Granted my sister is six years older than me, so growing up she was into infinitely different things than I was supposed to be. But my brother was less than a year different, though to look at us together you would think we were entirely different beings. As the years drifted past, we drifted further apart. My brother and I have scarcely talked in the past 30 years. If we see each other once a year at this point in life, that is a big deal. The last time I saw him was last October – he was working here in Atlanta and I got to talk to him a few minutes. My sister on the other hand, it has been perhaps 20 years since I have ‘spoken’ to her. Even the times I spent at her house on holidays and such, I rarely ever spoke – unless it was to answer a question or maybe even ask one. I was never comfortable around them.

Hopefully that is now in the past, or will soon be. This week, I got up the nerve and the inspiration to write each of them a letter. I let them each know a little bit of the pain I have been going through and some glimpse into why they have not been able to know me. The short of that is that I didn’t know who I was. To be honest I had no idea what to expect from either of them, I fully deserved to be ignored and laughed at. But, I was optimistic and hopeful that perhaps now I would be able to allow my siblings to finally get to know me and me to know them. I fully expected to not hear from them for a week or more, if ever. I fully expected them to talk to one another to figure out how to respond. I can honestly say that I didn’t expect either of them to reply within a day and to do so with such beautifully written responses. Both letters brought me to tears. I was so moved and felt a little ashamed that I let the better part of 49 years go by without being able to know them. Hopefully now, I can make amends to that and finally share my SELF with them. Of course I’m sure neither of them would have ever thought that they would all of a sudden have a 49-year-old baby sister. HAHA!

The first step has been made. First contact. Now it is up to me to keep them in the loop, not shrink away into the corner and expect them to come to me. I am so happy right now and feel so blessed to have found my siblings to be warm and loving people after so long. I love you D & D. <3