In one of my dreams last night, I was standing in front of my dressing mirror, trying on various costumes. One of them was what looked like a three-piece suit. Upon looking at myself wearing it in the mirror, my initial response was that I didn't like it, because it made me look too much like a man.
I looked disdainfully at my blonde, relatively short-cropped hair after thinking this, finding myself wishing that I looked more feminine.
The previous weekend I put on nail polish for the first time in what feels like, and probably has been, years. Not a subtle shade either, but full-blown dark-reddish pink. It was interesting to note my initial aversion to seeing nail polish on my fingernails. Through it I came to realise just how much I had drifted towards a more gender-neutral role the past years, or at least had been avoiding the more profoundly stereotypical feminine displays.
The sensation in this dream was also one of realising just how much I am stuck between these two worlds of stereotypically male and female. Even though physically there is relatively little that would shift me away from the fully female side of the spectrum, psychologically the picture appears to be far less simple. Most of it is murdering doubt and uncertainty about this body.
Tomorrow I'm having an appointment with an endocrinologist. The goal there will hopefully be to figure out what my body looks like in a hormonal way. Despite over a decade of research and many years of hormone therapy and hormone level measurements, I still do not have anywhere near a complete picture of this part of my body. It's indicative of how much uncertainty and questions still remain.
As I have said on many occasions prior: at this point I'm merely a medical experiment. Even if to most people it does not appear that way, they only see the outside which to my knowledge apparently appears to be pretty mundane. Yet when I, for example, walk through a shopping mall as I did earlier today, my mind is filled with terror-filled doubt as I scrutinise every motion, sound and gesture by the people around me as a possible indication of how freakish and repulsive I look.
Saying that 'you feel like you want to be' is easy enough, but it's sadly also completely impossible. The world has condemned me to be a medical, gender- and sex-less experiment until the end of my days, so that is what I will apparently have to be. For me to pretend otherwise seems rather foolish.
Yet I am liking this new shade of nail polish, and some days I can appreciate my feminine figure in the mirror. Even amidst a crushing identity crisis I guess some bits of reality will keep trickling in from time to time.
Maya
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