Sunday, 15th July, 2007

Reprincess

photo tranny weddingdress

Yeah — she's none-the wiser. And she still has her passport, so all is good.

Let's Recap

tranny memories relationships family

It's been an odd couple of days here, Chez Moi. What was looking like a weekend of Scripty Fun™ involving some serious prim-work towards a mahoosive Scalextrix set in the sky, turned into a frantic tidy-up and a 400 mile drive.

It started off with an unexpected text message from my mother ... "need help. passport stolen. stuck in luton. can u drive me to stranraer?"

(Yes, my mother texts like a teenager )

After an almost obligatory "Shit, I was having fun there", followed by a "God, my family. What is it with us, important documents, and getting stuck in London?", the realisation and panic started to set in. Essentially, my mother was on a train to Lancaster, intent on staying the night, and needing to be driven up to the ferry the next day.

Not, obviously, a massive chore in itself — especially for someone like me who loves driving. No, the massive chore would be running around the house making sure that every single unexplainable item of transvestism was out of view.

...

It's worth, I feel, considering some of the comments on some recent photos of mine, just recapping on where I am in relation to the whole 'tranny' thingy¹. I delude myself sometimes that visitors here take the time to plod through the various "about me" posts, to find out exactly what's going on on these pages. I suspect though, that the truth lies more in the direction of there being to much stuff all over the internets to read, and that no-one has the time to trawl through five years of gumpf just to find out what a thirty-five year old tranny thinks about herself.

So...

Firstly, I really don't have a preference as to what people call me. Some people know me as "Siobhan", some as "Kisa", some as "Graham". Some people call me "Oi! Curran!". Others "that drunk".

Aside from "that drunk", I honestly don't mind. I have long believed that if I try to 'enforce' some kind of naming convention on myself, it would be unfair on the people who know me, and dictate an uneasy frame of reference for myself. It stems back to a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago, where she got into a right tizz because she'd called me "Graham" when I was frocked-up one night, and I realised that I didn't want people to feel uncomfortable with what I did — or rather, I didn't want my crossdressing to put anyone in an awkward position.

She knew me as "Graham", so that's what she called me. Some people only know me as "Siobhan", and the last thing I want is to enforce some kind of mental gymnastics wherein everyone has to remember what to call me depending on my 'attire'.

(As a result, I get called "Siobhan" at the checkout in Sainsburys. Remind me to tell that story some time...)

Secondly, despite all the recent hoohah and discussion about 'labels', I'm much more inclined to refer to myself as a "tranny" (or, less frequently these days for some reason, "trannie") than try and attach the word "transgender" to myself. The reasons why I don huge frocks stem much more from childhood sexual discovery than they do from any self-identification with the "feminine".

I wouldn't want to deny that possibility — for myself, and (more importantly) other people — but I find that my crossdressing is a much more 'superficial' thing than an existence somewhere between "boy" and "girl". I do it because (a) I think I look good, and (b) it makes me horny.

(Sometimes)

I think that somewhere, buried deep in my psychological make-up (ho ho), there's something that makes me 'different', and the visible expression of that is "me in a dress" — but I find it very difficult to attribute that "something" to a fluidity of gender.

Thirdly, I'm rather "out". Pretty much all of my friends know that I'm a tranny, as do about 90% of my work colleagues (thanks to a spectacular verbal blunder by my boss, amongst other things ). Also, (thanks to another spectacular verbal blunder by someone who isn't my boss) the entire body of graduating students this year know "what I get up to at the weekends".

On the internets, I like to feel that I'm pretty unashamedly out about the things I like to wear. I get the impression that there's a large body of 'Web 2.0' people with a vague notion that somewhere, skirting (ho ho) around the edges of interestingness, there's a chap in a ballgown. And in virtual spaces, there's absolutely no confusion about whether or not Kisa is a guy.

Outside of my 'comfort zone' though, I'm a little more cagey about being open about my crossdressing. I don't (for example) parade around Lancaster in high heels — not because I'd be ashamed to, just because I don't want to get my head kicked in.

Equally, apart from a couple of exceptions, within the larger academic community I don't start conversations with the words "Hi, I'm a crossdressing art lecturer". I don't mind people finding out, but I find things go a lot smoother if they discover it for themselves through some Googling or profile-reading.

Family-wise though (and this is the point that this entire rambley-post has been trying to get to) my brother and sister know, but no-one else does, and I go to enormous lengths to maintain that status quo.

There are two reasons for this, I guess — firstly, we're not an especially close family — emotionally or spatially. I see my parents about once a year, so it's not the case that coming out to them would make any sort of difference to my day-to-day life. The frantic deprincessing the other day was a freak occurance — not something I have to do every week (for example). And whilst I think it's important for others (like Becky for example) to be able to talk to their parents openly about who/what they are, for me it's not an issue. In fact, there are a bazillion things my Mum and Dad don't know about me — my penchant for big frocks and fun with boys is only the tip of the iceberg.

The other reason I don't want them to know, is because They Would Not Approve™. My mother (as I must have written about before) is overtly religious — she's some kind of 'lay preacher' (or something — I'm never sure exactly), and the reason she was in Luton in the first place was because she was about to head off on a missionary trip to Romania.

"Those new-fangled homosexuals" are frowned upon in our household (there was tutting when my brother announced that they were calling my nephew "Oscar" because of "literary connections"), and while I admit that yes, I could embark on some kind of 'edumacational mission' to convince them that everything is groovy these days, I really don't think (a) I'd succeed, or (b) it would be worth it.

Maybe I'm a chicken. Maybe all my "let's change the world!" rhetoric is rendered meaningless by my unwilling to start at home. Maybe the vast majority of my frustrations about being a lot more public would vanish if I didn't have the "but my parents might find out" objections.

But I think that some decisions are very private, and we have to afford ourselves the right to define our comfort zones — even if it means that we can't quite live up to our own expectations.

...

Aside from all of that though, on the drive back from Stranraer, I took a bit of a detour.

When I was a kid, every year we used to spend most of the summer holidays making an enormous trek around England. We'd get the ferry from Belfast to Scotland, and drive round everyone that my parents knew over here.

I have, of course, made the trip along the A75 myself in the years since, and it always confused me why I never saw some of the places that I remembered from my childhood.

One in particular stood out — a little 'animal centre' next to a reservoir, that we used to stop at — usually because one of us needed a wee.

The reason I remember it so well, is because I have a physical reminder of it on my leg, in the shape of a large scar. One year (I forget which) I was playing on the shore of the reservoir, tripped over something, and gashed my leg open on what I remembered to be a piece of glass, but apparently was a flint or something.

And the reason I never see it when I'm making the run back to Ireland is not because they've built some bypasses, it's because for the past seventeen years, I've been going the wrong way.

"Oh, we always take the route through the mountains," my mother informed me as I was hurtling through Newton Stewart — a little too fast for the spacesaver tyre that I haven't gotten around to replacing yet.

So, on the way home, I pulled off the A75 and decided to take a trip through my childhood, which is what this picture was all about...

It was odd, sitting there, rolling some fags, looking at the scar on my leg, contemplating the fact that it's been at least twenty-five years since I'd been there. I could almost picture the young version of me, crying my eyes out as my parents tried to stop the flow of blood from my leg.

And I wanted to go up to him, and tell him "honestly mate, that's the least of your worries".

¹ I know what you're thinking BTW. You're thinking "Hold on Siobhan, today's Monday no? Shouldn't you have 'turned the page'?", to which I'd reply "Yup, but I'd quite like to have a big picture of me looking pretty in a wedding dress at the top of my blog for a little bit longer", and then stick my tongue out.

I had never found the time to read back all through your blog

That's understandable — there is rather a lot of it

(@self — redo the CSS on that page)

I have, elsewhere today, been talking about the ideas of communities and blogs — specifically the very intentional thing I'm trying to do here of mixing as many different 'audiences' together as possible. I think, sometimes, that the frustrations that I sometimes feel whenever I feel 'misconstrued' in some way, are probably because I take things for granted, and don't always take the time to periodically set out where I'm coming from.

I guess (perhaps) that that's what the About Page is for, and I should be a bit more specific about things on it

Heh heh I should write a "let's recap" for how my blog works as well, perhaps