27
2012Secrecy Downside
In my last post, I described how the shroud of secrecy surrounding our separate female lives can work to our advantage as well as how it might mislead us as to its potential.
Let me take a moment to comment on one negative aspect of our secret lives.
Having a separate persona with no family or past or whatever, is great for protecting the emerging t-girl as she finds her legs, so to speak.
However, it turns her into a paper doll – a two-dimensional person.
No one can really get to know someone who doesn’t really exist.
As I have gone ever further in this lifestyle, I have run up against this limitation and find it quite frustrating not to be able to connect on any real level with many of my friends.
We can all have a great time together, but when the person is nothing but the girl she puts on now and again, there is never any more.
And, sometimes, where she is willing to offer her male self in the bargain, to be a real person, it is not someone I bargained for – he is often either too similar to her in his femininity (have I mentioned my lack of attraction to effeminate men?), or too different in his personality that it is not the person with whom I connected.
Oftentimes, she became a girl because she didn’t really like him either…
(more next time…)
Andie Davidson
Isn’t it all about the difference between being and doing? Is what you “do” in putting on a female persona in any sense a denial of what you are? Who are you doing it for? To attract others, to send a message, or to be fully yourself?
How might you best be able to draw together everything you like most about your self-expression, and stop expressing what you don’t like, without regret? What would that look like, and if it is good, are you rather afraid that it might be too indeterminate for others?
cdjanie
I hasten to point out that this post is not so much about me as a phenomenon I have encountered. But even then, I doubt that the feminine persona is denial of what that person is but rather an acceptance. The problem comes in relating to people through just part of oneself, or relating to just part of other people. That can get awkward or frustrating.
It can be about the difference between being and doing, but I think that the problem affects those who “are” as well, if they have secrets that hold them back. In my case, I believe I am very nearly where I want to be in terms of what my best self-expression would look like, but practical considerations (as well as a few nagging doubts) keep secrets in my life.
You ask interesting questions – not sure of their relevance to this post, but interesting nonetheless. I am Janie because it feels wonderful to just be that way, and because it seems to have made me a more successful and motivated person. I think what you see is my version of my best self-expression. Drawing everything together into a single persona, if that is what you are asking, would likely be too indeterminate for me; it is not a worry about the opinion of others.
Ashley
You said:
“I am Janie because it feels wonderful to just be that way, and because it seems to have made me a more successful and motivated person. I think what you see is my version of my best self-expression. Drawing everything together into a single persona,..”
.
Which seems to indicate that Janie is your true self, your complete self. If this is so, then you should begin to let the others in your life know her as well. Even the ones that don’t know her now. Don’t hide her as you’re only deceiving those who don’t know her.
If Janie draws everthing together then isn’t that a clue as to your destiny?
cdjanie
Ashley,
I may have given you the wrong impression; the key words come after the ellipsis you inserted. I was telling Andie that my best self-expression is to keep the male and female aspects of myself distinct.
shantown
I think the frustration you talk about is very widespread, universal perhaps. My lifestyle is nowhere near yours, but I get terribly frustrated at not being able to connect more on “any real level”. I want people to connect with, and relate to, ME….SHANNON. Not party with me, go clubbing with me, go to bed with me (welllllll….??? 🙂 ). Just plain ole relate to me. Why….because it is ME…not something I do, not something I put on. IMHO, meaningful interpersonal relationships are the fuel that power life. Without them a life goes nowhere. Friends that are FRIENDS, for the good and bad times, whose company one can enjoy, whatever the occasion. That is so very hard to find, especially when we hold back or hide a part of ourselves.
Okay …sorta got on a rant there. Sorry!
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
🙂
Andie Davidson
This is where I am too Shannon. It was very hard as I moved into my female identity, to have to be a man just to get on with things without complications. Or when being my proper self just made conversation hard like it wasn’t “real” but put on. Now I am who I am, as I am, and it works just fine, because there is no uncertainty, and I have friends in a way that I never had before. Wonderfully ordinary … and no secret life any more. 🙂
cyrsti
All of us are so different but so similar.
I started keeping my two genders so separate. I think I was afraid not to. What if I went to the girl side and couldn’t get back?
Quickly the public made my choice for me, the more I interacted the more I had to “invent” a female life.
Then I found myself getting caught in little white lies about where I lived worked etc. I hated it and then started to merge my two lives.
Of course I used discretion…never quite telling peeps where I really was from the profession I was in.
Bottom line is the more I let my girl live, the more she wanted!
A Transgenderist Egalitarian
I think that’s called the ‘slippry slope’. Much like the body will build a tolerance to intoxicants, requiring ever increasing dosages to satisfy the growing addiction, cross dressing, like other fetishes, tends to grow ever more “adventuresome”, demanding ever greater commitment to achieve the “high”.
cdjanie
Cyrsti, you’ve touched on an aspect I think I have overlooked, and that is the male side as a safety valve or lifesaver in case the girl thing didn’t work out. Hmm… interesting…
FYI
“The transvestitic urge (fetishistic or transsexual) contains an element of addiction. Larger “doses” may be required for certain individuals as time goes on. Therein may lie a “progressive” nature of TVism in some instances. If untreated and uncontrolled, “dressing” may be desired more and more frequently and even the idea of physical changes through hormone treatment or through an operation may be gaining ground…” -Dr. Harry Benjamin, (1966)
Andie Davidson
Well, that was 1966 – from someone who maybe did a lot of good at the time, but never knew gender dysphoria from the inside. Many transsexuals only come to understand their real circumstances through a period of “cross-dressing”, and it isn’t increasing addiction to a fetish, but a giving in to something inevitable but very ordinary. I am not a post-addiction fetishist, but I did go through keeping the safety of the male persona on my way to being a woman.
Ashley
If a CD is “addicted” then any peoson who does it enough will also become addicted But it isn’t addictive unless there’s a need for the psyche. So the “slippery slope” isn’t slippery unless the brain is wired for it. In the 2 years prior to my transition, I can only remember dressing a handfull of times. But in my deepest heart I knew I was female.
Transgenderist Egalitarian
So here we have those attemptng to self justify their own personal predilictitions by denying the value of a respected study of 152 individuals over a 10 year period when compared to their own personal anecdotal account. Hmmmm…..