Wednesday, 19th January, 2005

It's Not Easy, Sometimes, Being a Transvestite

I do worry, sometimes, what your average blogger makes of this to be honest. I think sometimes, that I've got kinda complacent in my little TG world, floating around, making headways here and there, sticking my nose into things that maybe people don't want me to. But nonetheless, it's always in the safey of a world in which the norm is for a guy to wear a dress.

So, it's been a bit odd really, for the past few weeks, to expose myself to the outside world. In some ways, it's been mildly amusing, to see the oh-so-obvious "I'm just passing through trying to get me some credits" brigade. But it's nice, also, to see some people come here through curiosity, and maybe stay for a bit.

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I dunno. I'm always reticent to claim that the trannie side of me is the most interesting. I'd like to think that maybe, some of the other stuff I do — my coding, my photography, my inane ranting about the state of (a) driving, and (b) young people these days, has something to interest an accidental visitor.

What I guess I'm trying to say, is that I don't feel that I should, in any way, apologise for being a transvestite. Despite my worries about flaunting myself online like this, it's not (as it first might seem) a reprehensible act, that should be shyed away from.

One thing that's always been stuck at the back of my head in any rant I've ever had, is that, for me, being a trannie is something I'm deeply, deeply proud of.

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And with that, I'm going to bed. Tomorrow maybe, I'll try and code something that will ping Technorati. Tonight though, I'm just going to sit here, in panties, feeling good about myself

And yous can all fuck off

Of Spides and MIllies

(I didn't actually mean for everyone to "fuck off" BTW — I meant it metaphorically)

Having a little bit of fun this morning, lying in bed, contemplating getting up. I stumbled upon the BBC 's Language Lab — in particular, the Word Map section.

Basically, it seems they're trying to build up an idea of various different regional dialects, and, what with me being from Belfast, I thought I'd help (I am very helpful sometimes) (honestly).

One of the questions caught my eye though:

Young person in cheap trendy clothes and jewellery

Now, I figure I know where this is going . There is a word spreading across the UK at the moment, popularised by a particular website: "chav"

I believe that "chav" is part of a specific local dialect — although I'm not quite sure where from. I'm pretty sure that all over the country, each region has its own version of "chav" — but "chav" seems to be the one that's becoming the most prevalent in speech.

These days, for example, I have a propensity to call them "scratters", but where I grew up, we called them something completely different.

(I'm pretty sure about the female version here, can I just say? But I'm not sure about the male version. I think it was my brother who first explained the term to me — and it's quite possible that he made it up. But anyway... )

When I was young, I called "Young women in cheap trendy clothes and jewellery" millies and "Young men in cheap trendy clothes and jewellery" spides

"Millies" is just a derogatory term, I guess. The funniest part of it was seeing young women in the centre of Belfast screaming "Ahm nat ah mulleee!" in a particularly millie-like way. But the "spides"?

According to my brother, it was because of their gestures as they beckoned you to have a fight with them. Try and picture a young man, in a tracksuit, calling at you, arms outstretched with his two middle fingers of each hand touching his palms repeatedly.

Now picture a young Peter Parker doing exactly the same thing.

See? "Spides"

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The 'word map' thing I linked to just there is quite interesting. The bizzaro-Flash interface is a bit irritating (or maybe my G3 iBook just ain't up to it ) — a bit "interactive for the sake of it" if you ask me.

The most interesting section, to me at least, is the "In and Out" one — because I've been living in Lancashire for (yikes) about 15 years now, most of the words that make up my dialect come from this area. I've lost a lot of my original vocabulary. So I'm unsure whether or not to fill in what I call things now, as opposed to what I would have called them if I'd never left Belfast

toilet

Um, "bog" surely?

narrow walkway alongside buildings

"Ginnel"

to rain lightly

"Drizzling"

to rain heavily

That's easy: "pissing it down"

running water smaller than a river

"Brook"?

main room of house (with TV)

"Living room" (Although now, with the way I have my house these days, that would be either [a] "downstairs" or [b] "bedroom" )

long soft seat in main room

"Sofa"?

I guess my dialect isn't really that interesting. I was though, rather pleased when it told me that I was the first person to suggest "wee'un" as a term for "baby"

Oh, well said honey

So you get comments from women like this: "I don't have a problem with men crossdressing in the privacy of their own homes, but I'd feel uneasy if a TV was standing next to me in the supermarket and getting off on the thrill of it."

Aye, there's the rub. The public perception of crossdressers as a bunch of salivating five-finger-shufflers with their faces buried in silk.

I find, sometimes, when I tell people that I'm a trannie, or when someone stumbles on this site by accident, that this is the image they have in their head. You can see their expression go all confused as they try and scrub the mental image of me doing unspeakable things out of their minds.

I suppose, that this is the driving goal of the transgender movement at the moment — sometimes expressed as "acceptance" (although I have issues with that word).

I do think though, that one of the biggest problems we have as a community, is the debate that surrounds the issue of crossdressing-arousal. I've seen it quite a few times crop up in The Angels and on Roses, where someone declares that we should make a stand against the idea that we're all a bunch of perverts who get off on what we do.

I agree, of course, but the danger, I feel, is that we exclude that side of things completely — we insist that it isn't an issue, and I worry that the Straight World doesn't take us seriously because of it.

I'm not explaining that very well am I?

OK, try again...

I may be perfectly normal and not a maniac (although I think you should check with Kath as to the "perfectly normal bit") — but I do get turned on by wearing women's clothes. (I'm also bisexual, but let's not get into nit-picking) Not all the time, just some of the time. The reasons I dress the way I do are multiple and complex — but I can't deny that sex is part of the cause.

The problem with sissyslut69 and her ilk, is that they take what most people would consider a private thing, into a public domain. It's inappropriate, it's intrusive, it's invasive.

I'm trying to think of an analogy here ... Imagine if you were talking to a friend in a bus queue, about — I dunno — Kylie's latest single. And some guy came up and interrupted your conversation by telling you all of his masturbatory fantasies that involved Kylie.

There's nothing wrong with fantasising about Kylie — it's just you wouldn't do it in public

But I don't think that some people seem to realise that the Internet is public. I can see how it's easy to forget that the other people's names and words that appear on their screen are real people, and that the things they say have an impact beyond their bedrooms.

I suppose it would be interesting to see the differences between a post on a forum from someone sat on their own at home, and a post from the same person, sat in an Internet Cafe. I imagine that the presence of other people around them would have some influence on the way that they perceived the environemnt in which they were writing.

Does that make sense?

What I'm trying to get at is several things:

(1) I don't want people to flinch the moment they see the word "crossdresser" at the top of this page. I am many things — not least of which is a transvestite — but I don't always talk about dresses and makeup, and I want to be taken seriously, despite any stereotypes that might exist.

(2) I want our community to recognise that there is, for some of us, a sexual element in what we do

(3) I want those of us who use the Internet to get off on to realise that their actions have far-reaching consequences, and that by selfishly being public about things that should really stay out of the public eye, they're perpetuating a perception of us that is damaging. Whilst I think that it's wrong to say that no trannie has sex as their motives, I think it's equally wrong to say that all of us do.

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D'ya wanna know what sparked all this off in my head last night?

I got into a short (very short) blog-comment discussion with Neil Turner about the UK pricing of the new Mac Mini last night, and I noticed that he'd had a quick peek at what I'd written yesterday.

I dunno why, I just got the mental image of the poor guy suddenly wishing he hadn't clicked on the link — and it bothered me.

And made me worry that the whole world was laughing behind my back.

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Neil, if you're reading this, you still haven't told me why you only get £20 discount

And there's context to it, too. No matter what I'm wearing in a supermarket queue, I'm not going to be thinking about sex. I'm going to be thinking about murdering the person in front of me who's paying for their entire weekly shop in 1p pieces.

Or the person who's got 11 items in the ten-items-or-less queue?

I agree whole-heartedly. Especially with what you're saying about 'context'. Crossdressing fulfils many roles in my life, sexual, comforting, subversive, ego-boosting...

That's how I feel — it's the outside world that makes it difficult to be TV, not the TV-ness itself.

It's also ourselves that make life difficult — not always intentionally. Kath is (quite rightly too) often annoyed by the assumption that a lot of us make, that women can be defined by their clothes.

I also think we do ourselves no favours in terms of gathering support from other communities, especially when I see a lot of us insisting, quite vehemently, that they're not gay — as if gay is a bad thing.

And don't get me started on the "I'm a lesbian trapped inside a man's body" routine

Hence the pen name

D'ya know what? Sometimes I worry that people can trace who I actually am, through what I write here. I worry that someone might find out my real name. I'd like to be able to join the two names up — to link from one to the other (this is what I was ranting about back at the start of December when I was talking about my research ideas), but you're right. Pen names are still needed.

Having said that, I'm quite chuffed with my nomme de plume — I just hope the real Siobhan Curran doesn't mind

If TVs took a 15% pay cut and experienced institutionalised sexism all day every day to help them express their feminine sides, that'd be more impressive

Ah — now that's exactly it. I was reading somewhere (it wasn't a trannie forum, somewhere else...) someone trying to argue that feminism had "nowhere left to go" — "equality has been reached"...

Which is, of course, utter nonsense. I don't think that we're in a position to empathise with women, but we should most definately show support — rather than assuming that we have any idea of what it's like for women today.

Incidentally, have you read My Husband Betty by Helen Boyd?

Some of it, yes. I lent it to Kath, and haven't got round to asking if I can borrow it back yet. It is, an interesting read — the bits I managed to skim through on a flight home from New York certainly got me thinking. I think it was in that book that the idea that we might be pissing off the gay community was first suggested to me. S'funny how some things don't ever occur to you, until someone says it out loud.

I'm too much of a wuss to want to be a pioneer.

Unfortunately, so am I. I'd love to be strong enough to start going out there (and I don't mean in the street, I mean in the wider context of the web for a start) and not worry about things — but I'm an inherently worrying kinda gal.

And I really don't want my parents to know

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k14...

people not only flout it but try and get you to be just like them! Tell you all you ever didn't want to kow about their religon and get you to join. I think tranny's should start doing that.

No! The last thing we need is more trannies! Dammit, I want to be special!

Is my formatting breaking up there BTW?

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The generation before us didn't have the internet, and the world was a considerably less safe place for GBLT people than it is today. There's a long way to go, sure, but we've got it easy compared to the people who came before us.

This is true — but, as with a lot of struggles in the past (take feminism for example) there is a tendancy for public to assume that because things are either (a) nearly right, or (b) all right in their own back yard, then everything is fine, and the campaigns can stop.

Just because these boundaries are, arguably, already being mismanaged by certain aspects of the religious community should possibly be better reason to get it right.

Interestingly, I've always insisted that transvestism is all about blurring boundaries. I'm not disagreeing with you babe — it's just sparked off an idea in my head that I must come back to one day...

o the women who aren't comfortable thinking of themselves as sexual beings also have problems thinking of men as sexual beings?

Oh I pretty sure about it. But I think that must be a minority.

There's always that cliché/urban myth that gets bandied around — "men think about sex every 6 seconds" — I think it's more likely that pretty much all of us think about sex all the time, but that's not to say we're thinking about having sex — just that sex is a very common thought at the back of all our minds. Even those of us who spend each day denying it

"I don't care what you want to talk about, my immediate sexual needs are more important."

Exactly Which takes me back to what I was saying about some people not quite getting that the internet is public. I'm sure everyone knows it's public — what I mean is that they don't quite equate words on a screen as having come from living, breathing, people. And therefore don't regard them as as important as themselves.

There's a comment in my guestbook that reads something like "You're hot. Let's fuck". It's such a strange comment (especially in relation to everything else on that page — which are on the whole all lovely), I have wondered for ages exactly what was going through the guy's mind as he wrote it.

I think the anonymity of the Internet, combined with the false-name, secretive world of (some) transvestites, can perhaps lead you to think that nothing that's said online really matters.

Maybe the TVs immediately fall asleep after posting

LOL!

They scare me.

They scare me too darling

if TVs weren't in stealth mode, people would get used to it and would stop noticing,

Well, yes and no I don't think it's a positive thing for people to not notice us

My friend Natalie puts it a rather nice way:

When being an out-there-and-swishing transvestite we remove ourselves and those we meet from the ordinary and the everyday. At it’s best, and a good example was the Hen Party Siobhan and I enthralled the last time we were wandering through the Village, people respond well to this sense of being taken out of themselves. It’s like wandering though a familiar place and meeting some fabulous and mythological creature. At it’s worst, those who respond badly are having exactly the same experience! Between you and me, I’d rather have the experience of being a ‘fabulous and mythological creature’ than the thin pleasures of thinking, “Hee, hee, nobody knows!” but it’s a matter of personal taste

I think being noticed is great — as long as it's being noticed in a good way: "Hey, there's a man in a dress, and he looks fantastic!"

I'd agree with you on acceptance: part of the definition is "Favourable reception; approval".

It's just a semantic argument that I've touched on a couple of times. The word "acceptance", to me anyway, seems to imply some sort of begrudging "oh all right" kind of reaction.

I don't want 'acceptance', I want to be celebrated

I don't spend much time celebrating the people sitting around me on the bus, for example

Yes, but how many people sitting around you on the bus are challending the conventions of gender, at the same time as looking fabulous?!