My Life Story, Part II

Part II of the continuing saga ...

When I reached sixth grade, we moved to the Seattle area to accommodate my father's job at Boeing Aircraft; he was an industrial engineer, and commuted to work.  We lived in an area called Kenmore, at the North end of Lake Washington.  I went first to Kenmore Elementary, for 6th Grade, and then on to Kenmore Junior High, then Inglemoor High School.  It was while I was still in junior high that another "incident" happened.  I'd been dressing partially, sometimes in my mother's stuff, but increasingly in my sister's, who was a year and a half younger than me (I am the oldest of five).  I would take them out of the dirty clothes hamper and wear them, and then carefully put them back, hoping not to get caught.  I had a friend named Artie, who like me was not one of the "popular" kids; unlike me, he used to get into trouble with the school authorities on a regular basis.  Anyway, I'd confided in him that I liked to dress up, and one day we we went into the woods on my parents' small acreage, and I put on one of my sister's cast-off dresses, with a scarf over my short hair, and we went out the other side, wandering the neighborhoods in back of my parents place.  While we were out, he took off, leaving me to make my way back through the woods, and stop to get dressed in my male clothes.  Who should I find waiting there but one of my parents -- strange, I can't remember which one -- who told me Artie had told her or him that they'd see something very interesting in the woods.

Well, my father decided I need to see a shrink -- or maybe it was a psychologist -- and he found, somehow, a "good Christian" one, and I went to see him.  I remember in our initial session, him telling me he didn't think my dressing was any big deal, and that "I would grow out of it."  I answered "then why worry about it?  Why see you?"  His reply was telling: he laid on the guilt.  "Don't you want to stop," he asked.  Don't you want to be normal?

Thus began my first foray into therapy, in junior high, with a therapist who (a) knew nothing about the subject of "T" and (b) pathologized it, thus contributing to my already deep store of shame.  Of course, he assumed I wanted to stop, what I did was perverse ... what red blooded American boy would want to dress like a girl?

Well, I stopped for awhile, but of course didnt' for good.  Soon I was back at it, dressing in my sister's and mother's stuff, and although I'm sure that there was always a sexual component (I believe most crossdressers are delusional about that), it wasn't until I was in college that it became overtly sexualized.  By then, in the early 70s, I was scouring the university libraries and used book stores for any information about crossdressing, and of course, finding very little.  What I did find helped reinforce the idea of wrongness, and deepened that ever-growing, steaming pile of shame.

Next: Part III of the saga.  Marriage, schooling, children, careers, and all that jazz.

My Life Story, Part I

Like others, I've been this way for as long as I remember, certainly since well before adolescence.  I  was born in Wichita, Kansas, and until I was in 2nd grade or so, we lived in town, on a street called Terrace Drive.  I remember playing hide and seek with the neighborhood kids, who were mostly girls, but also Monopoly and other indoor games.  I didn't play as well with the boys, at least I don't think ...

And this lack of remembering about my childhood didn't worry me too much, until I saw a therapist about ten years ago, a great guy who--like the good Freudian he is--didn't help a lot.  But what he did do is prick up his ears when I said I had little memory of my childhood.  And I wonder how much of what I "remember" about my childhood -- playing with dolls, not playing with dolls -- is based on all my readings of other childhood memories of TG folk?

With that caveat, we carry on: I vaguely remember stereotypical TG stuff like playing with dolls, and maybe even role-playing with the girls, but I have no recollection of how often this happened.  I didn't particularly like to play with trucks and stuff.   On the other hand, I remember wanting a cap gun and loving cowboys, so go figure.

I also remember not liking rough and tumble activities, and wasn't very good at sports.  Scratch that: make it very bad at sports:  I was one of the children that was always picked last.When I got a bit older, say 6th grade, I have the sense that I played with my younger (by 3 years) brother with trucks and stuff because I was expected to; I also have a vague remembrance of doing it to please my father, although that might be a retrojected (is that the opposite of projected?) notion.


Although I do not remember much of my childhood, I do remember that I dressed as a girl on several occasions, at least one of them with the collusion of my mother.  The earliest I remember is playing house with my brothers and sisters and friends, and wanting to play the part of a girl (the mother?); my mom tied a towel around my waist!  Another time, I went out as a little girl for Halloween, something I haven't done since. Although I don't remember who exactly went along, I remember the door being opened and one of our neighbors (who certainly knew who I was) saying "Oh, what a beautiful little girl!"  On a third occasion -- I think I was 9 or 10 -- my father was on one of his fishing trips with his buddies.  When he came home, he caught me dressed.  He wasn't happy, to say the least.

Looking back, those times had to be with the collusion of my mother, at least; there was no way I could have done it otherwise.  On that third occasion, I seem to have been running around the house, in the open, dressed like a girl.  Again, I don't see how I could have done it without my mother's knowledge.

One other incident comes to mind: I was very young, and my parents took me (were others of my siblings there?) to an outdoor circus passing through town.  There was a "girl" elephant rider, wearing a tutu and tights, and at one point her wig came off revealing her to be a boy.  I remember the announcer making a joke, something like "Oops ... she seems to have lost her hair, folks!"  But I also remember that my mother turning to my dad and said "I'll bet I could make a little outfit like that for Johnny" meaning, of course, me.

Was my mother colluding with my early crossdressing to get back at my father?  I know he wasn't around a lot in those days, preferring to go out drinking beer with his rodeo buddies, or fishing with his friends from work.  It was returning from such an occasion that he caught me on that third time.  Did she position me where he could find me?  I have no idea.


Stay tuned for the exciting sequel!  It is must-see TV.  Get it?  TV?

The Four Sided Mountain

The mountain in the header of this blog is Mount Kailash, located high on a Tabetan plain. It is sacred to four world religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Bön (not Marché, silly). It is revered by a large swathe of the world's population, because adherents of the first two traditions alone number some 2.5 billion people.

Kailash is considered the most sacred mountain on earth, and, paradoxically it is among the least visited of all.  Historically, the has been due to geographic considerations: its location in a  remote part of Tibet is far off the beaten path.  Its climate is harsh and unforgiving, and it can take a week of difficult travel from Kathmandu.  Since the Chinese take-over of Tibet, it has become even more rarely visited: for years, it was closed to pilgrims. Since the late '70s, travel has been strictly regulated by the Chinese authorities.

The mountain rises from a windswept Tibetan plain like a goddess overlooking her realm. Four of the longest rivers in Asia  have their genesis around its base: the Indus River, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra and the Karnali  (a tributary of the Ganges).  Kailash is wonderfully symmetrical; its four sheer faces presenting themselves to the four cardinal directions, and all of these features give it a holy, mandala-like character.  And it is this for which it is revered in the Asian world.

Mount Kalaish has a mandala-like, or mandalic,  character, with its perfect four sides oriented toward the four winds.  Mandala's are prominent in both Buddhism and Hinduism, where the preferred term is yantra. The psychologist Carl Jung recognized the special nature of the mandala, which he regarded as symbolic of the unconscious self.  With it's four symmetrical sides, it represents the four information-processing functions of the psyche: sensation,  intuition, thinking and feeling.  The center of the mandala represents the self, the true, integrated core of an individual's psyche.  What is perceived by the self/soul is filtered by the functions, which represent how an individual views and evaluates the world around her.  The self or, to use religious motifs, the soul at the center holds all things together.

In the quest for wholeness that Jung called individuation, a person's ego -- the part of the consciousness of which she is aware -- must become conversant with the self, and with all the personalities contained therein.  In this way, she can become a whole person, with all her pieces, both masculine and feminine, integrated more or less harmoniously.  That is my personal quest, and the subject, in the main, of this blog.

The Name is Lily

There are a couple of things readers of this blog need to know about me.  The first is that Lily is my name, but not the one I'm known by in my daily life.  I am transgendered.  I have some flavor of gender dysphoria, a disjunction between my biological sex -- i.e., that dictated by my chromosomes -- and my inner workings, my inner sense of who I am.  This is commonly referred to as being transgendered.

The second thing is that I have no idea about what flavor of TG I am.  I thought I knew, I thought I was "just" a heterosexual crossdresser, but now ... in middle age (in my late fifties), I find that I don't.  I have no sure notion about either (a) where my TG-ness (transgenderosity?) falls within the great unwashed masses of the gender dysphoric, or  (b) where I fall amongst those of humanity as a whole.

Both uncertainties frighten me.  I have spent years working on my persona, to use Jungian language, so that it conforms to what society expects.  But I have been trangendered as long as I remember, and shall remain so until I die.

Recently, I have felt a growing need to come to grips all of this, and began moving to being more intentional about my expression of  my "female side."  Thus, after a long-ago interment of my feelings, I have begun to re-excavate them once again.  Somewhat to my surprise, I no longer yearn to present as a young, good-looking woman, who can wear miniskirts and size 8 dresses (well, not much, anyway!), but I would like to be able to freely move about as my chosen gender.  So, I am aiming toward a dignified, middle-age image, and have begun to accumulate a wardrobe again.  Also, I am gathering things I never had in earlier forays into the CD world: breast forms, for instance, and decent wigs.  My aim is, as I said, to be able to present as a woman with dignity and honor, and to not be crucified for doing so.

But wait!  There's more!  I have come to the realization that for my own psychological health, and that of my family, I need to see about integrating the feminine and masculine within me into a more coherent whole.  One that is present in whatever mode I choose to be.  I recently discovered the psychology of Carl Jung, and have begun to study and hopefully internalize it, and that is the direction in which this blog leans.  I hope it will be a serious--though not without humor!--exploration of these issues.  Further, I hope that as I work these issues out for myself in these electronic pages, that they may be of some small value to anyone who may choose to read them.