Feeling good, feeling hope, feeling focussed

It’s three months tomorrow , thirteen weeks today, since I started testosterone. So much has happened to me and it has to be said it has been tough for me so far. But things are beginning to level out for now. I have done a three part vlog update on my Youtube channel MrStubborndog and it definitely feels like I am turning a corner and growing in confidence again finally now. It is quite possible that the internal hormonal battle is easing up now my T levels are taking effect. I haven’t had a bleed now in 5 weeks and my cycle has been 24-5 days for many years now so I KNOW that is a change and a very welcome one at that!!

In these vlogs I talk about some of the physical changes I have seen, the shifts and changes in my mood and patience levels. I speak about leaving my job and the prospect of reinventing the professional me as a now qualified counsellor who is actively seeking to get back emotionally fit to practice. I share my feelings about parenthood and the prospect of seeking a sperm donor in order for us to try and conceive a child where Carmen will be mum and I will be dad, albeit one that fires invisible blanks I talk about the prospect of using new reproductive technologies for trans-fertility. Lastly I give thanks – to everyone out there, transguys and all for sharing our stories; and a very special thanks to my former workmates at the Youth Offending Service I now used to work for.

Many thanks in advance for watching them, feel free to pass them on to others and also to comment here or on the vid itself. It’s really helpful to get feedback.

Why Passing as Male is Important (via FtM Doctor)

This post by FtM Doctor evoked many different feelings for me and it feels really quite a raw and in-my-face subject for me at this still early stage in my transition. For me right now, it’s incredibly important to me that I am experienced by others as male as this is congruent with what I feel inside. It doesn’t always happen though and sometimes I shrug it off and try and reflect on what it was about me in the moment that gave away I am not an XY male. Other times I get hurt or angry. Occasionally I want to hide away until my body morphs enough and I have had the chest surgery that I really need to feel freedom with my body and fully be myself.

I’ve got more thoughts to add about this in coming weeks as it is such an ongoing thing for me and most transguys I expect, especially early on.

Passing as male is important to me, but it’s not as important to other transsexuals. There’s lots of reasons why many people don’t go to such a great effort to pass. Not everyone wants to be stealth. Being stealth is a trans-term for living in a way where as few people as possible know that you’re trans. Passing means that you can ‘pass’ for a person who was born male.  You can ‘pass’ and not be stealth – it’s quite fun actually, as it involves s … Read More

via FtM Doctor

15 Albums (via Harpymarx)

I got sent this meme on Facebook by my friend Niki and Harpymarx posted her answers on her blog below so I thought I’d do the same. Perhaps I’m just procrastinating about the post I want to write with 9/11 coming up but this isn’t going to take me long. To be honest there’s something about my music at the moment in this savage crazy world which helps give me a calming secure attachment to my place in it. If it helps you then do it yourself. Just give yourself 15 minutes and then list 15 albums/LPs that you’ve heard and that have stuck with you in your life. There’s no order, no hidden meaning, its just good to share what music is important to us and a sense of why that is. Nothing more than that … for love of music and what it means to us all. Share your’s too … that’s the only rule … and don’t THINK too hard about it, as its better as a right-brained activity really

Here are my 15 …

1. Patti Smith – Horses: its just SO full of powerful female energy and Gloria is my favourite all-time track – HOT HOT HOT!

2. Fleetwood Mac – Rumours: every track on this album I can listen to time and time again

3. The Clash – London Calling: the one on my list I don’t have but the title track changed my life when I heard it at 12/13

4. Tracy Chapman – Tracy Chapman: first saw her at the huge anti-apartheid gig in 88/89(?) calling for Mandela’s freedom. Just her, her guitar, singing ‘Talking Bout a Revolution’ – fell in love with her then!

5. The Beatles – Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club: as a kid I used to dash home at lunchtimes from school and play Beatles albums

6. Damien Rice – O: beautiful, haunting and melancholic for a depressive like me lol

7. Gil Scott Heron – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: pure genius

8. UB40 – Signing Off: the very first album I bought for myself at 13 the year after Thatcher came in – back when UB40 were edgy

9. Blondie – Parallel Lines: even better with the vinyl scratches lol

10. Nirvana – Nevermind: the musical score for my first young adult breakdown :~

11. Faithless – Faithless: because God is not a DJ … God is Maxi Jazz lol

12. Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds: reminds me of the 70s music geek reel-to-reel tape system my dad’s mate had and the power of music to tell a story

13. Bee Gees – Saturday Night Fever: I HAVE to have some classic disco in here and I just love this soundtrack

14. The Smiths – Strangeways Here We Come: more teen angst lol

15. Culture Club – Kissing To Be Clever: because Boy George introduced the teenage me to gender shape-shifting and helped me feel ok being a freak

Sam on his Facebook page has this great meme (include the meme on your blog as well!!). Fifteen LPs you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes, one album per band. Now that’s a tough one cos it will take me longer than 15 mins. so here goes in no particular order….. 1. The Beatles – Revolver: I always find the track, “For No One” really sad and poignant to listen to (“The … Read More

via Harpymarx

Feral Daydreams – a poem

It has been nearly two years since I last wrote a poem. Two years at the end of September. That was a special poem as it was like a diary, recording my growing feelings soon after Carmen and I met and were on our first holiday together in Cornwall. I’ve always written poetry in fits and starts through my life. I have notebooks full of scribbles and musings and I even still have a plastic bag full of the torn remnants of all my pre-1993 poetry. I self-destructed one night after my lover at the time aggressively raged at me for writing a poem to my best friend on her birthday – one day I’ll get the sellotape out and put the pieces together!

This morning after I have written the poem below I began to think about why it is that I have not written for so long. Maybe it is because I have been waiting to find my authentic voice of my core self. My voice has broken and now it is time to sing again maybe. Be warned – my guitar-playing is getting easier now my fingers are stronger so watch out for me doing my version of the easiest song I know how to play, ‘Working Class Hero’ by John Lennon, coming to a YouTube channel near you before too long

I hope you enjoy reading the poem. I keep hearing the stories of other guys as they struggle with T-induced insomnia and other major body shifts. This is how it felt like to me, this morning, in my 12th week of testosterone….

Feral Daydreams

A lone bee busies himself in the lavender

While the blackbirds sing in the morning,

Tunefully sparring from the safety of their trees.

The world is waking again today.

I see it with my night eyes waning

Aware that I will sleep to the rising buzz

That marks the birth of each fresh solar dawn

Like yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Will it always be as this from now?

Upside-down in a non-nocturnal world?

Back-to-front in a land of office hours,

At least in the country I live in.

But I have to sleep when my body tells me.

When the birds and bees start their shifts

Is how it is for now, as I am on bat-time

Until the new me is fully born it seems.

For now I will have one last tea and smoke

Reflecting on the here and now around me.

Before climbing upstairs and into the nest

Nuzzling my mate in slumbering daydreams.

It feels like puberty is feral, a special transition itself,

Where new order emerges from the chaos

Of the shiny and sometimes deadly sharp

Fragments of a former self.

Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.

© Sam Feeney

19 August 2010