[MaggieL]

I suppose I should say something here, but I'm not really sure where to start. "Dressing goth" and "wearing ponytails" undoubtedly represent rebellion against the norms on some level...but at this point, sneaking up on five years since my gender transition, and three and a half since the reassignment surgery, I'm a little burned out along those lines.

Both my transition and surgery were rather more public than many people in this journey face, since I stayed working at the same job at the same company throughout. So there was a fair amount of social stress involved in that whole thing.

I suppose it would have been a 'way bigger mess had I still been in high school at the time, since the pressure to conform is so much greater then. I do know that my elder daughter has been a lot more comfortable being around me now that she's in college, and in fact her friends seem to find me quaint and vaguely interesting rather than an anathema against nature.

Whatever ostracization I might have experienced at work seems to have been mostly quashed by respect for how good I was at my job...plus a possible fear of a sexual harassment lawsuit, which certainly would at the very least have been breaking new legal ground.

Occasionally, people express respect for "how much courage I must have had", which always leaves me feeling kind of funny. I mean, jumping out of an airplane skydiving takes courage, jumping out of a *burning* airplane only requires a strong motivation to survive, and "Maggie's Excellent Wisconsin Vacation"[1] always seemed to me more like the latter than the former[2]. I guess that deprives me of any claim to the 'moral high ground'; to the extent that this wasn't really a *principled* stand, just a necessary one.

Still, it was a pretty serious leap of faith. I know the "conventional wisdom" is that transsexual women (I'll speak of TS wormen for grammatical convenience) all "always knew they were women" and felt like "women trapped in the body of a man". That level of insight may be more common to folks of later generations, or perhaps those ideas were promulgated from reading Christine Jorgensen's autobiography. All *I* know is that at the beginning it was *far* from clear to me "exactly what was wrong". I certainly didn't want to accept even the possibility much less the fact for a long, long time...mostly because I knew admmitting it would wreak havok on my family. Which it did.

These days I really identify with Ellie Arroway in the movie version of "Contact", first repeating "OK to go!' into the intercom while strapped in that intesely vibrating capsule about to be dropped into a total unknown, and then afterwards standing up in front of a Congressional comittee, bearing witness to experiences she can't even quite *describe*, much less explain or prove, asking the world to accept her account "on faith".

It was a lot like that.

OK, the boys can all un-cross their legs now. :-)

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[1]-The reassignment surgery (That's the P.C. term for "sex-change") was done at a hospital in Wisconsin, where the surgeon practiced. There's about half-a-dozen surgeons who do this work in North America, and maybe three I'd consider seriously. A old friend of mine just had her's done this past Thursday, so I guess this stuff is kind of sitting very close to the surface of my mind today.

[2]-Except that it cost a hell of a lot more...health insurance companies will laugh at you if you seek reimbursement for the $13,000 that this care costs.