Andie’s Place observations of gender dysphoria and beyond

What a funny old week. It’s included sharing breakup experience and asparagus with one of my dearest friends, to lunch with my PSO (previously significant other)* to discuss divorce settlements, to a very quick offer on selling our house, and the decision to move towards or into the big city (not London, for those of you outside the UK!). All topped with the euphoria of a visit to Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic and the go-ahead for prescription hormones (no more illicit drugs!) and a surgical consultation in September. That makes for a pretty good week for me. I’ve never doubted the way things will go. I have achieved closure on the marriage, the house has to be sold, I have a new future that deserves a new location, and of course I wasn’t really likely to be told I was making all this gender stuff up, or that I wasn’t ready to complete. But when the pieces continue to fall into place, well that’s still very nice.

It’s funny, I find myself at the most odd times and places suddenly yearning to be ‘put right’, and this was the final door opening on all that. I had hardly dare believe …

Part of my upbringing was not to count chickens before they’re hatched, and yet there is also the need to believe in what you want or you may never get close enough to grasp it. Do things have to fall into your lap? Of course not, and if you don’t imagine what you want, you may not recognise it when it arrives. I’m done with counting chickens, but I do intend to keep my eggs warm and listen to what’s going on inside more carefully. I will nurture what I want out of life now, because I’m no longer afraid to believe my life is my own.

And yet I still have fears: what if I miss the opportunities I am looking for? Someone who may want to be my companion/partner? A better job? The right place to live? The social or creative group that may further change my life for the better? Sometimes the right intention spoken at the wrong time is fraught with undoing itself (Unspoken, a poem), and sometimes the ‘I shall never …’ is turned on its head. We just aren’t always ready for the right thing, and have to live in trust with simple awareness for when we are, or someone else is.

And here is a footnote on fears. At my gender clinic appointment this week I was asked about the social impact of my transition, and I have got off almost scot free, and can’t even remember my last public transphobic experience. I just said it was because I had absolute confidence in myself, which to a degree is true: people notice self-assured people a whole lot less than those who seem uncertain of themselves. Then Jane Fae managed somehow to get a really good article on the reality of what it means to be transsexual, into the Daily Mail this week. It reminded me just how lucky I have been so far, and that where I live may be kinder than where I intend to go.

And as I came home this afternoon, the taxi driver who lives in this block was fixing his brakes, with a friend outside: two blokes, car in bits, having fun. He’s wished me a good morning before, but today I just guessed that when he looked at me driving in, and leant down for a confidential word with his pal, who then turned to look, perhaps he wasn’t saying ‘there’s that attractive lady from upstairs’.

But then he doesn’t know how happy I am to find myself ready for the next part of this adventure as the real me.

* I coin this because I am constantly confusing myself over whether to say wife, or ex, or ex-to-be, or partner, depending on company.