"Looking back, it makes sense..."

[Deleted]

I asked my friend Lisa, who I’ve known for 16 years, how my transition “makes sense” after looking back on everything, and this is what she said:

“You always seemed disinterested in the things that interested most guys, in my experience, especially when it came to the physical give-and-take dynamics and nuances that typically occur between men and women. It is hard to describe, maybe impossible, the subtle interpersonal feelings of which I am thinking…

Men, no matter what type of personality or persona, always touch, breathe, and express the most intimate nuances of affection in the same way, or close to it. I don’t know how to describe it.

You were not the same. You were different. And, because I have had intimate relationships with both men and women, I know how women make those same gestures, but in a very different way. The way you did.

And, you kissed like a girl (which is a good thing, trust me) because you were one. ”

I ♡♡♡ her soo much!

[Mingma]

I have a lover who lives in a different state.  Because we see each other only a few times a year she has watched me slowing coming to terms with the reality of who I am as a series of snapshots.  She has had some very painful and even violent relationships with men over the years, but as we became friends she immediately recognized that she did not need to fear me.  That I was not male, and not really female either but something else, something rare and as she describes it wonderful. She  sees more dimensions of me intuitively and in a quiet accepting way, than anyone else in my life and I cherish the time we spend together.  She stopped for a few days last week on her way home from a month in Africa and we talked a while about this very thing.

She as much as anyone sees and celebrates the blending of man and woman in me.  The way I touch her is, in her observation, something like a man but lightly and with the lack of rush as a woman.  She remarked that the lines of my apartment are clean and strong, but always softened with fresh flowers, and my meditation space is cluttered with prayer flags and the accouterments of Buddhism.

My appearance is generally feminine and I have been on HRT for years, but I will never have the surgeries that would seal the deal.  I have little interest in being or looking like an ageing genetic woman.  

That there are people who I love and are close to that celebrate the lack of firm duality in me is perhaps the greatest gift I have ever received.  Arin, I totally understand why you love Lisa.  She is a priceless gift from the universe because she sees the totality of woman beneath the outside cover. 

It is okay to be MTF, FTM, but also appropriate to be a blend of both.  Yeah it makes sense looking back that I was destined to appear as someone other than a man and other than a woman.  I think that is a fallacy of a purely binary transition.  It isn't usually complete, and if it is, it seems like that requires the destruction of a part of self that ought to be embraced as integral to who we are and will always be.  Kind of like the need to destroy a village in order to save it.  Another thing I have never understood.

Ming