brief thoughts regarding the anniversary

[raybear]

Last night I was thinking about Tara's comment on the phone regarding the picture of Rockie she showed me and how it was pre-T (he did NOT look pre-T AT ALL)....and I kept staring at my reflection in the window above my turntables and thinking about how "male" and guyish I look. Like how broad my shoulders have become, and how my neck seems thick (not in a scary football player way, but not dainty and just...broader), and how my hairline looks....it was weird. Nearly foreign, but also familiar. Then Riley posted a comment about how he sometimes forgets that I'm not a bio-guy. That sorta fucked me up. And it's not the first time someone has expressed that sentiment to me -- hell, even when I met two people the first week I was on hormones, they told my friend that they were floored that I wasn't born male. Funny stuff this transition thing. I don't have an regrets of any kind -- it's more about realizing that I'm still making adjustments, and even though I imagine myself in my head as sort of guyish, I'm still used to imagining my actual physical self as some weird mix of a female-dyke-teen boy body. So I'm shocked when I look at myself and sort of see an adult male. Hmm. I never really identified as a "boi" or "boy", and I'm not convinced that it's just an age related thing. Because even if I had come out as trans 4-5 year earlier, I might not have felt that way. But what does it mean to "be a man"? And is that who I am or who I want to be? I think I'm just a person, first. I'm an adult (or working on it). And then the next description is guy or transguy or transfag or queer. I don't generally unite my gender identity with age, but now I'm realizing that you have to, because gender starts in the head but it plays out in the body and the body has an age. It has a general set of characteristics that appear at certain times of the body's life. I don't mind having a post-adolescent body -- but it does take some adjustment to re-envision myself.