12:12, 31/08/2009

Unpurge (engendering euphoria)

↑ "my mug, my pins, my claws": self-portraits, August 30 2009

I've decided that there are far too many ordinary, ugly or just badly photographed pictures of myself in my flickr photostream, so I'm going to go through them ruthlessly and cull everything over a year or so old except for a few of my own faves.

Now before anyone gets carried away, this isn't a purge.

It's primarily an aesthetic decision. As I said, there's a lot of accumulated dross in there. Overposting, repetiton, out of focus self-timer shots, under / overexposure rescued for the sake of narcissitic impulses. I guess I overpost because of the vanity-anxiety complex I described a few weeks ago that afflicts me and many other transgendered people I think.

So it's just a correction. Not a purge. For the unitiated "purging" is a condition where transvestites will rid themselves of the clothes and other trappings of our habit in a misguided atempt to "get over it". Being a reaction formed from guilt, It almost always fails. And if there's one thing I never feel about trannying, it's guilt. Not now, not ever.

Range-finding

I've only ever purged once, and that was way back when I was 17, I think - I forget exactly. I spent a whole long summer living almost full time "as a girl" while my parents were away in Japan with a dying relative.

The day before they flew back, I destroyed everything, in a rather grandiose and dramatic teenage way, by lighting a huge bonfire in the garden. And I really mean dramatic and teenage - I actually tore the pages out of my journal one by one and threw them on the flames.

Even then, I was thinking, "what the fuck are you doing? You don't mean this," and I didn't. I was dressing again in a couple of days.

Within a year, I'd moved out and was starting to transition. But that's another story entirely.

(I wrote a short story very loosely based on the events of that summer. It's here if you want to read it.)

The point is that those types of extreme reaction are not normal in my tranny "make-up". Perhaps I was troubled at the time, that I should deny my transdom, then polarize into the opposite direction and start to transition so soon afterwards.

But hey, I was a teenager. I was allowed to be a bit fucked up.

And the truth was, I soon after stopped transitioning when I realised my path lay somewhere in between, where I was happy with myself as a non specifically transgendered person.

And here I am still, right now.

Mix and match

See, what I think is that I, like many of us, inhabit some sort of gender continuum that I'm very content to slide along - sometimes I feel intensely feminine, and at other times rather blokey. It doesn't change who I think I am. In fact it defines who I am, this shifting gender identity.

The gender positions that I adopt are part of myself. And I don't feel shame, guilt, or the need to deny any aspect of myself.

Instead, I feel pride.

All of that is why I don't think I suffer from gender dysphoria.

Instead, I'm happy-proud to have gender euphoria.

Meaning that whatever my gender posiiton is at any one time, I love it. And that "my transgenderism" is all about the freedom to slide along the trans curve willy nilly.

And before you start getting up in arms, this condition describes me, and me only. I'm quite aware that everyone's different, and there are people out there who are genuinely devastated by the gender that biology has forced on them. I'm not in any way denying that (like I said, I once thought I was transsexual, after all).

New crop

So the great non-purge starts today. Really, had I not (in writing this post) declared this was occurring, no one would've noticed the difference. So really the very action of writing this blog post is in itself attention seeking and narcissistic. Haha. I can't fucking win. Anyway, I want people to know that this is what I am doing, and why.

So a number of pictures that I've come to realise I dislike will disappear from my allotment on the Internet. But while I'm taking away with one hand, rest assured, I will however be giving back with the other as I continue to take inanely narcissistic shots of myself, like these from earlier this mercilessly slow Bank Holiday weekend...