my peepee is going kaput!

But funny thing is I don't care. I thought I'd care more, but I really don't. I know the hormones are working hard at diminishing my sex drive at the moment, but to be honest I can't wait to get rid of my "little one-eyed fireman." Oh, it'll be with me for a while yet and that's ok too - it still functions when I concentrate! I guess you could say my remaining manhood is slowly sweating out of my pores (or perhaps a better expression is: "slowly seeping out of my sphincter..." :-).

I used to be a regular worshipper at the altar of "sexual self-expression" but truth be told, I get more pleasure out of a gentle kneading of my little nipples these days. I get excited at the thought of cuddling, and soft, sensual touching and deep passionate kisses. I mean I always liked those aspects of intercourse, but before they were just a prelude to that moment of testosterone explosion. Now those sensual aspects (continuous mini explosions) are the most important part of the sexual experience.

This subtle evolution in my basic desires just dawned on me today. No doubt they've been building for a while, even before the hormones. And who knows, since I've had precious little sensual or sexual contact in the past few months and even years, perhaps I'm just going through some kind of sensory withdrawal symptoms!

Whatever the cause - I'm enjoying the changes and look forward to exploring them more as they come...

no, you can't meet or start an LTR with me if you've never talked to me and put in effort...

Ok, this diatribe is gonna sound very egotistical and bitchy and prudish to some, but I've been getting lots of messages from guys out there who think that they can interest me just by sending a short (and often horribly spelled) message saying I'm beautiful (compliments are always welcome, of course, but not sloppy or lazy come-ons :-) and then jumping right to asking if we can "meet up," "get together" or "am I top or bottom?" in the next sentence! That shit ain't gonna fly, period. But here's a little cheat sheet for those who might be interested in making an effort:

First: If you don't have a picture of yourself (a non-sexual one that clearly shows your face) available, are married or in a serious relationship, or consider yourself unequivocally "straight," (see my previous post on that topic) don't bother trying to woo me - you have no shot...

Second: I'm very very picky and demand that any suitor put in an effort to get my attention. If you want to get my attention, read the info about me on my various sites and put some real thought and wit into any message you send. If you make reference to us having sex or you doing sexual things to me or other rude comments right off the bat, or can't spell or put sentences together into coherent thoughts, I will ignore you out of hand (unless I'm bored and feel like chastising someone). Would you direct such thoughtless comments to a girl you liked in person? I don't think so.

Third: I'm a traditional girl in the sense that I will only have physical relations with someone I care about, have had real conversations with and share common interests, and have a strong attraction to. I must feel an emotional AND physical connection to go down that road.

Fourth: Unless you are a very generous gentleman (if you are a hot gg then i might bend these rules a bit :-) who can travel or pay me to travel and put me up, and have or are willing to put in a very impressive effort to befriend and impress me, long distance relationships aren't gonna happen, ok? I like to stay close to home most of the time (broken up by occassional party road trips) and really only have interest in local suitors (within a couple hours driving at most) who meet the above requirements.

So, am I being a total bitch right now? Nah - I just know what I want and won't settle for anything else. And know that I will always respect those who try to get what they want in life, and if what they want happens to be me I can't blame them for having good taste! So ya, I want my cake and to eat it to - what of it?! 'Nuff said? Peace.

"Straight" guys who are attracted to t-girls - are they really straight?

I seem to be a beacon for guys and other t-girls, many nice, some not so much, who claim they are straight but who also pine after me and other t-girls - they know that I am, crudely speaking, a "chic with a dick," but still they pursue me. There seems to me to be a large discrepancy in those stances. I mean, I am of course flattered and I would never deny or denigrate anyone the right to pursue whatever interests attract them, but I think at least some of these people are confused. I don't mean that in any negative way - I'm still massively confused about my sexuality as well - I'm bi and so embrace both hetero and homo relationships. But for myself, I found it amzingly freeing to finally let go of the confining definitions of normal sexuality and embrace the fact that I like both men and women (which I prefer to phrase "I look at the person and not the gender"). I let go of the fear of what others might think of me if they knew I was not a "normal" heterosexual. For the most part anyways - I still have to confront my parents on this issue, but that is coming very soon...

So that got me thinking about why I was unable to face that part of myself when I came to accept my crossdressing originally? Was it too much at once - my gender identity and my sexual identity? Too much for me, too much to put on my parents? Or was it simply the overwhelming feelings of shame and self-hatred that were generated within me due to lifelong, anti-gay (or to put it another way, pro-conformist) social conditioning and peer pressure? I was raised Catholic afterall (until I rebelled and stopped believing in all that pompous ritual at a very early age!) My guess is that for most of us it is a mixture of these influences. Unfortunately, we were all raised and continue to live in a world too often dominated by deep-seated homophobia and the sometimes violently defensive and or uncomfortable reactions of people and groups when these issues are brought into contact with their lives. When I told my family and friends about my dressing and even about my tentative thoughts about transitioning (in other words getting my penis cut off!), I still couldn't admit to myself or them that I was not heterosexual. I think fear drove me to cling to the idea that I was still hetero, dammit!, no matter how strongly the reality of my true desires was pressing in on me from all sides otherwise.

I guess my bottom line is that, as I'm sure I have stated elsewhere, why be ashamed of your sexuality just because there happen to bigoted, small-minded people around you? Is fooling yourself and those around you into thinking you're straight while at the same time agonizing over continuing non-hetero desires making you any happier than if you faced and examined these issues with an open mind?

Now I'm not saying this stuff necessarily applies to all t-girl admirers and others out there - these statements are just my own opinions based on my own experiences, so please don't flame me because you think I'm somehow questioning your manhood or something, ok? But if you have something thoughtful to contribute to this discussion or any other on here, please do speak up! These kinds of issues just fascinate me (and seem relevant to where I am in my life) and so I hope they do not offend you (if they do just stop reading this blog and stop trying to pick me up on Yahoo IM... :-)
Hugs,

Dana

Christian conservatives say Sponge Bob's tolerance and diversity pledge is immoral

So let me get this straight in my mind because my first reaction is that these people are just non-mainstream christian wackos, but it looks like they may be more representative of the christian right that most think: leaders of the right-wing American Family Foundation and the Focus on the Family group have spoken out against an educational video and web page starring Sponge Bob and Barney and other children's figures that promotes a pledge for children to take stating they maintain "respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own."

Here is the full story on CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/20/sponge.bob.reut/index.html

Here is the We Are Family Foundation web site where you can read more about the video and the innocuous pledge in question (a link to the Pledge is in the left menu):
http://www.wearefamilyfoundation.org/

And here are the sites for the two bigoted organizations (and these are the only two who managed to get into the CNN article. I guarantee there are dozens if not hundreds more of these close-minded groups out there):
http://www.family.org/
http://csj.org/

I urge you to email this message to those you know and then use the contact and Guest Book features on these sites to let these people know what you think of their stand against tolerance and diversity! It will only take a moment of your time and perhaps help some people who support these groups realize how myopic and small-minded their dictatorial and theocratic leaders are...

anonymous e-mail response (or "why I climbed out of my closet")

This a response I recently sent to a very nice but anonymous closeted girl who had sent me a message and so in a flash of typical t-girl egotism, I thought I'd also share its contents with my few kindly faithful readers...

The best advice I can give you is to think hard about your dressing and why you feel so ashamed of it. Are you yourself ashamed and think it's wrong or immoral, or are you worried that those around you will view it that way and will reject or humiliate you? If the answer, when you look into your heart is the latter, then you may want to start thinking about whose life you are living. No one has the right to tell you how to live your life as long as what you do does not harm others (and if someone is unchangeably embarrassed by who you are, then in my book, that person does not truly care for you).

I have talked to so many girls out there like yourself that are so deeply ensconced in their own self-constructed closet of secrecy, shame and depression that those feelings come to rule all parts of their life. And believe me when I say I speak from experience - I was in that closet not much more than a year ago...

If you ask me, the first step is to look into your heart and be honest with yourself. For most of us (but not all) dressing is a fully enmeshed part of who we are and purging it is no more useful or successful than trying to stop breathing or eating. If you find this applies to you, take steps and make decisions (but always at your own pace and comfort level) to fit that part of you into how you live your life. When you achieve a decent level of self-acceptance then all else will flow from that. If you are not ashamed of it and you communicate this belief to others, most will feed off of this and will not reject you for it. Some will, no doubt. These steps are never easy nor even advisable for the faint of heart, but for me at least, they were necessary.

I had lived with depression and self-hate for so long because of this that it was killing me slowly from within. I made the conscious decision (because I saw clearly that is was killing me) to no longer feel that way and slowly my life started making sense and I was able to have fun again, to enjoy and revel in this part (and all parts too) of myself. I still have obstacles to climb but at least I am confident that I will face them all knowing I'm doing it for myself (i.e., for the right reasons) and not because of what society or family or friends want or what I think they want for me.

Anyways, I've babbled on long enough on this soapbox. My words will not solve any of your problems, but I do hope they might shine a tiny speck of light into your closet and help you realize that there is always hope and that there are many others like you and me out there. In the end it's your decision alone whether and when and how to emerge from that closet or not, but that doesn't mean you have to make the journey alone or without the support of your trans-sisters...

Mushroom Ritual

Have developed a hankering for mushrooms lately. I sit down to dinner and find it in my meal almost every day. I love it on my tunafish sandwiches and it's a must with any salad or steak. Emmett and I have developed this little mushroom ritual. I take out the stems while he positions himself on my right flank. I do my little suishi chop on the shrooms and he gets all the end pieces one at a time as long as he catches them all in the air. If he drops one he doesn't get anymore. He never misses anymore.

Horn Dogs and Puppy Drool in the Winter of Life

For some reason lately, my dog Emmett seems hornier than usual. Maybe he's getting more in touch with his instinctual self - he hasn't had to wear a collar or be on a leash in months. Perhaps he senses in some instinctual way the hormonal changes that are going on inside me as I gradually become more feminine in physiology and is reacting to it. Granted he does have a lonely, boring, cloistered life; lounging at home by himself listening to NPR all day and occassionally nosing through the bathroom trash or emulating a human's ability to stand erect so he can scrounge the counter tops for crumbs. I've also had him on a diet for the last 6 months and he has slimmed down a bit, allowing him to be more active. On the other hand he is getting up in age; coming on 70 in doggy years. The highlight of his winter afternoons is probably when my neighbor kids head off to school in their big yellow, blinking noise machine and he can bark for a few moments in unfettered instinctual guard-dog joy.

Every day, as I settle down after work to do my exercise regimen, he tenaciously goes and gets his tattered, slobbery rope for me to play with him (he loves tug-of-war). And he's a whiner. I think it's the rottweiler in him - they tend to do that. So if I don't play with him he whimpers and drops the spittle-covered rope toy onto my exercise mat. If that fails to gain my attention, he rolls over, sticking his chest out and scratching his arched back while letting out a low-pitched series of moans. It's really very cute and adorable, but not when I'm struggling to finish a set of 300 crunches!

I wish I had the patience and money to get another dog for him to play with, but that just isn't going to happen right now. Besides, he gets 3 or 4 lengthy walks in the fields behind my house a day and has weekly visits with my parents and or grandmother ,who invariably feed him delicious, fatty scraps of whatever chared flesh we're having for dinner that Sunday. Especially my grandmother. Whenever she is in the same house, he is always deferentially at her side with drool dripping visciously at both corners of his mouth - his watchful eyes never leaving her hands in the often fulfilled hope of a dropped morsel or snack.

My last surviving grandparent can barely walk these days (and yet she refuses to let us take away her car - scary!!!) and I think she tries to hide how little she actually eats by feeding most of what's on her plate to the dog. She is a sweet and tough old lady; the wife of a career Air Force man and professional poker player (back in the days way before cheesy, watered-down ESPN tournaments). They both came from ultra-rural, isolated farm families in Minnesota and neither of them ever let go of their inherited fierce independence and small-town mental toughness, despite being stationed in exotic locales all over the world over the years.

In a way I think I inherited some of those traits from them and through my parents. There has always been a strong vein of anti-communication running through both sides of my family. Sharing emotions was (and still is in some aspects) unspokingly frowned upon. My now deceased grandfathers, both military men (my grandfather on my dad's side a tar man during WWII) unconsciously fed and enforced such an emotionally repressive atmosphere through genial sarcasm and oft-spoken maxims. "It's not what you want in this world, it's what you get" or "Play one; look at the rest," my grandfather would often exclaim when someone would bitch at the cards they were dealt or take too long to decide on a card to play during our intense and jealously competitive family games of hearts. And yet they were both gentle and caring men in their own ways; they would dote on myself and the other grandchildren as most grandparents do and obviously loved my grandmothers steadily and intensely.

I see this dialogue has wandered into unexpected and non-canine related territory so I will now end it and perhaps plan to continue an examination of my grandparents in more detail at a later date.

Unending war, indefinate imprisonment and the ethics of America

We must ask ourselves at this critical historical juncture just what kind of nation we want to be. Government officials are now contemplating giving themselves the legal ability (in reality, they are already practicing this) to "indefinately" imprison people they suspect of being terrorist threats. In other words, if they just think you might be associated with terror (i.e., if they don't have any evidence to convict you of such in a court), they still want the power to keep you imprisoned for the rest of your life!!! Nah...no one in a position of power would abuse that kind of power, would they?...You just have to look at the history and origins of any repressive society to see that that is exactly how these things start.

Such erosion of basic civil liberties and protections becomes commonplace in any militaristic society, as we most certainly now are. The War on Terror, according to our obviously brave and forward-looking "rear admirals", will only be over when we kill all the terrorists.

FACT: We will never kill or capture all or even most of the terrorists!!! We will never even kill or capture all members of Al Qaida (just like we will never get rid of all the drug dealers).

We pride ourselves on being an open, intelligent advanced nation, yet we pay zero attention to how our own cultural shortcomings and policies are creating the terrorism. Instead, our ego/ethno-centric elected representative government just keeps stubbornly nodding its head and saying we are good and they are evil and sending more stormtroopers (and that's not to denegrate the courageous men and women in uniform who are just doing their patriotic duty, but that is often how our troops are seen by the rest of the world when they are carrying out the bully tactics of US international policy!) out into the distant frontiers of the American empire...

Too pessimistic? Too angry? That seems to be at least part of the progressives/democrats problem these days - lots of bitching and no solutions to fix anything...

Cute blues 

more details on my decision to transition

A couple crossdressers and friends have asked me recently how and or why I came to the conclusion to transition, so here is a quick answer as best I can understand it:

Actually, I don't think there is any easy or single answer to why I decided to transition. And I would think the reasoning has to be different for each person. We must each forge our own path, you might say....For me it was mostly feeling and instinct. As I came out more and more as Dana over the last year and have been able to express myself more freely and have received support and validation from family and friends and even strangers, I realized recently that I am the happiest I have ever been in my life.

In looking back on my life in this new context, I saw that, in the most important aspects, I have been a woman all along (as the cliche goes: a woman stuck in a man's body!) and it was only social conditioning and fear of society's judgement that was holding me back from exploring my feminine self sooner. Well, I guess I finally reached a point in my life where a combination of decreasing shame about myself and growing self-confidence, self-realization, emotional freedom and maturity, and financial independence collided to form who I am today and my decision to move forward in bringing my physical being into balance with my psychological being.

Finally, the most important aspect of the whole decision was allowing myself to slow down and experience the pure, unfettered joy, exhiliration and happiness I feel when expressing my feminine side. And this is separate from the sexual side of things - which, of course is always there and is good too. More and more I found myself smiling uncontrollably and feeling an overwhelming sense of peace during little private or public moments while dressed or when thinking about the freedom and prospects of "living my life in closer harmony with my desires" (to paraphrase a close and inspirational friend of mine - thanks D!). To put it more bluntly - my gut instinct, which I believe I have a decent connection with, told me that this was my path...

So, that, in a nutshell, is my reasoning for transition. Please be aware that in no way do I condone or recommend making such a decision in a vacuum or without doing lots of research and with as much support and consultation from family, friends, doctors, etc. as possible. Without the unquestioning love and support of my family and friends I might never have gotten to this highpoint in my life!

You know you're a woman when...

...you start balling uncontrollably during several scenes in Spider-Man 2, especially the one where Peter Parker comes to the conclusion that he must give up his true love Mary Jane in order to keep her safe...

Great movie by the way! The perfect combination of action, humor and love story! Sam Raimi (and Kirsten Dunst) rule...

New decisions and realizations made, new goals established

The dawn of the new year and the culmination of events in the last has brought a couple life-changing decisions and realizations to my lil 'ol existence.

One: I'm now officially bisexual! You heard right - I'm sure a couple of my friends who read this will be blown away (or maybe they won't be - maybe they could see that part of me more clearly than I could), but I have finally come to the realization (or at least shed the inhibitions of my catholic upbringing) that I am attracted to the person and his or her personality, regardless of gender (mind you - not that looks don't matter, heehee). I still love women and prefer them as sexual partners, but I did delve into the pleasures of fooling around with a very nice (and hot) boy recently. There was no actual sex - I am just not ready for that! Small, sure steps is my mantra on this topic...

Why the sudden change of heart? I'm not sure...I had been contemplating it for a while I guess but just couldn't admit it to myself (social conditioning is hard to overcome sometimes). And I met a boy I felt comfortable with and attracted to (his mind and his body :-). I think it came to a head a few days ago when I got a late night, drunken call from an old college friend on his birthday (and no - he is not the boy in question silly!). We had a frank conversation about various topics as he sped through NYC on his way home to his wife and kids, occassionally shouting directions to his middle-eastern cabbie. And one of them was my sexuality and his wondering, while reading through my blog recently, if I was gay or not (and his support for me either way). I guess that was the straw that broke the straight and narrow's back, so to speak. I delved deeper into my feelings on the subject and found, just like my dressing, that it is a part of me and I am no longer ashamed of it.

Two: I am going to transition to becoming a women. I am the happiest, most relaxed and most self-confident I have ever been in my life lately and I can directly attribute this to my growing freedom at expressing myself as Dana. There are certainly daunting financial and emotional (and of course physical) obstacles to overcome, but I am fully confident that those things will work themselves out as long as my confidence, desire and dedication remain strong. I don't have a full-blown plan as to how to go about this transition yet, but I will now embark on it with joy and wonderment at how amazing life can be (and hopefully your emotional support).

Three: I have started taking female hormones. I have actually been on them for more than 2 months now (and boy are my nipples sore, heehee). Now some purist t-girls out there may chastise me for going down this road without medical consultation, but just know it was something I felt I had to do (and that was financially expedient). I do plan to seek out a gender specialist in the area and go from there though.

Whew!!! That's a load off my budding breasts, let me tell you! For those of my gentle readers that know me, feel free to ask me anything anytime. I welcome your perspectives and thank you for your continuing support...

May there be eternal peace in all your households,

Dana