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All TG, All the Time?

From my transgender blog:

It's twenty years since transition. And during those years, TG issues have come up less and less frequently in my life. Here's a short history of that topic as it affected me personally.

I started transition in 1989. I began the world's first transender Internet newsletter in 1990. In 1991 I founded the Transgender Community Forum on America Online. And in 1994 I founded the world's very first Transgender Support Web Site.

During all this time, I kept a diary of every experience, adventure, and emotional crisis or epiphany. I wrapped up the diary (I thought) in 1996, four years after sex reassignment surgery.

Then, in 2005, my life partner underwent radical facial feminization surgery (FFS) that in an 8 1/2 hour surgery sculpted the bones of her face to lose all male attributes and become completely female in structure.

This was such a major emotional trauma for me that I began a new volume on my diary almost ten years after my last entry. And then, in 2006 I had the same surgery myself, a year and a week after hers. This, of course led to yet one more volume in the diary.

In the ten years between the first part of the diary and the new volumes I tried my best to drop out of the transgender community. I had been so active and so acclaimed as a pioneer of the modern TG movement that I had it up to here.

I was burned out, and I wanted nothing more than to leave the whole topic behind me. But, due to natural aging, I was forced to re-enter that arena with the facial surgery.

Now it takes about three years to completely heal from facial surgery. Even after 3 1/2 years, Teresa is still showing visible improvements from just a few months ago. And at 2 1/2 years, though I know the process of healing is largely complete, there's still a bit more improvement to expect.

All this doesn't come without a huge psychological impact. You see a whole different face in the mirror - one whose aesthetic ratios read as female instead of male for the very first time. Even though I was pretty in my youth and passed completely, there was still an underlying energy signature to my face that made even my own subconscious get a dose of maleness from my look, lurking behind the feminine presentation.

Facial surgery changed this, but it also screws with your sanity a bit. So both Teresa and I have grappled with this over the last few years until we have it more or less worked out in at least a functional and practical sense.

Still and all, there are days and times when some emotional issue will crop up regarding all the changes we've gone through over the decades - issues like a sense of duality to one's identity, or of having a soul transplant, or of having taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

It is at those times I come here to post on such topics. But it isn't all that often. In fact, I have a ton of other blogs and I post on them FAR more often than I post anything here. So, this is today's topic, and I'll tell you why it is bothering me.

I'm yearning for a place where I can write about any topic that interests me.

I can't do that on my other blogs because the occasional TG topic would hurt my business or screw with personal relationships of those who read my other blogs but don't know about my history.

And, I can't do it on this blog because the visitors are coming here to read about transgender issues, not about the new picture I hung on the wall, the new song I wrote, or the vacation I just took.

Nonetheless, this blog is the ONLY one where I wouldn't risk my livelihood or social life by posting whatever was on my mind.

So the question presents itself - should I limit my postings here to TG topics only, or are you interested in what life in general is like for someone who is twenty years past transition?

Personally, I think that it isn't too hard to find information on the Internet these days about all kinds of TG topics, from surgery, legal aspects, social issues and so on - a far cry from when mine was the only TG web site in the world!

And it isn't even that hard to find old-timers (such as myself) talking about their take on the TG life from so many years past transition. My opinion is that things have changed so much that the experiences of anyone who went through it long ago have nothing to do with what people might face today. And what's more, the social attitudes about it all have changed so much that even our comments about our TG issues of today are more or less irrelevant.

But the one thing that might have value is for those just starting out to be able to read about what a COMPLETE life is like, two decades after the fact - to get a sense of balance and proportion - to catch a glimpse of just how much having changed sex affects one's day to day life and (perhaps more importantly) how LITTLE it figures in.

Well, I know that's what I would have liked to have found when I was first starting out.

But what about you? Would you be put out if you came here and the first ten entries were about the new camera I bought or my daughter's wedding or the sly move I made in business? And only then would you find an article on some thought I had about an affect of the facial surgery on my attitude?

Or, would you just glance at the topics and think, "Phooey! Nothing here about transgender stuff. What a rip-off! I'm outta here!"

I'd like to know.

Copyright Melanie Anne - Founder of the Transgender Support Site

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