How Real Are We?

By Cristy Garcia

I found a Flickr post by my friend Cristy’s that we did not take a look at here. With Cristy’s blessings, we have run posts from her Flickr page where she has written some tremendous food for thought. You are welcome!

In this time and age, it is no longer easy to tell reality (truth) from fantasy (illusion). Every day we are bombarded with information that appears to be real but too extreme (for good or for bad) to be true. Social networks and supposedly serious news media, feed us all sorts of biased images, videos and reports that we need to filter to draw our own conclusions. The problem is that we grew up believing that what we saw, heard or read in the media was unquestionably true. Now, some people and institutions use that belief to manipulate our opinion and force us to take sides on every possible issue or event. What is good or true for one group or side is necessarily bad or untrue for the other and there is no room for in-betweens!

As technology allows us to distort reality, it becomes more difficult to come to definite conclusions. Take the movie industry, for example. The time will come in which actors, locations and film will no longer be needed to produce movies. Computer geeks will come up with all sorts of scenarios and characters to do the job with such realism and perfection that we will not be able to notice the difference. Hollywood will be replaced by Silicon Valley and filmmakers by game programmers. The good news is that actors will still have the theater to portray their characters, until androids take their place, in a hopefully very distant future. The question, not now but in some time to come, is if we will still be able to get a crowd together in a large room without fear of getting sick or seen by others. I digress but you get my grip.

In our realm and speaking as a heterosexual CD, fantasy and illusion have always played a key role as we attempt to appear female while being actually male. We rely in all sorts of trickery and gadgets to achieve our goal. In this scenario, is the act of crossdressing deceiving and untruthful or not? In my case, I am a “real” male who happens to be a “real” crossdresser that, when asked while appearing as a female, will always admit to being a male CD. My personification of Cristy might be deceiving but not a lie; lying would be telling someone that I am an actual woman when I am not. In any case, the truth always prevails and will come out; at least until illusion becomes the standard and reality the exception.

The next and more recent modality in our form of illusion is even more artificial yet more tempting and easy to implement. I am talking about those phone apps, advertised in social media all the time, that with one click can take a photo or video of a person and make him look like her, her look like him and all the in-betweens. Are you telling me that without investing money in wigs, makeup, etc. or time and effort in applying them, we can achieve the results we so desperately seek? Even more so; if we go through all the effort of getting dolled up and achieve a decent feminine appearance, there is an app that can turn us from a fairly looking woman into a gorgeous girl 20 years younger! It is hard to resist the temptation, isn’t it? Was not that, along with the proverbial pill that would turn a man into a woman for a few hours, what every CD dreamed of? Would that be cheating or not?

For years I have played with Photoshop producing my “body snatches” some of which turned out pretty believable. However, I have always made it clear that it is my ugly face blended with a gorgeous woman’s body dressed to the nines. By the same token I have not resisted the temptation to modify my own photos to make me look shapelier and more feminine. In both cases there is some time and creativity involved as well as knowledge of the software. I take pride of my virtual work and enjoy doing it. As a matter of fact, I used to do the body snatches years before I started posting my real photos. When I make them, I either kept them to myself (my own fantasy) or, before Flickr imposed the 1K photo limit for free accounts, I posted them in the “Cristy with Vitamin P” (P for Photoshop) page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/27290011@N07/.

In my humble opinion, things have value depending on the time, creativity and effort you invest in them. This is why, tempting as it may be, I have never downloaded any of those apps and have never tried their magic on Cristy. Wait, I am not being totally honest. The main reason I don’t download them is because I don’t have any Cristy stuff in my phone and I like to keep it that way. Yes, I am curious but not enough to get a separate phone for Cristy or pay for the app even if it is not expensive. I’d rather play with my own creativity and possibilities in Photoshop even if it takes some time and, when I do, you can rest assure that, as I have always done, I will let you know the photo was doctored, except when it is too obvious.

I am not saying that those who enjoy playing with face apps and such, without admitting to it, are lying to us because, after all, they are living their fantasies and I respect that. Is it misleading? Yes, but how misleading when, by concept and nature, we already start misleading (men pretending to look like women)? It is either “misleading squared” or maybe “enhanced misleading”. I prefer when someone admits to using apps when posting a photo that has been dramatically enhanced but respect their right to live the illusion. After all, there is no harm done and, like I said, we are all performers of illusions. Come to think of it, even the most beautiful genetic women are using those apps to improve on perfection! By nature, women always want to look better regardless of how beautiful they are and, as “women” we are expected to want it too.

I guess that what makes me nostalgic is the fact that more and more “virtuality” is replacing reality and fear the day in which nothing will be what it appears to be. Hopefully there will never be a time in which “actual reality” will become the unusual experience. After writing this rant, I came across the video I share below that relates to what I was mentioning about Hollywood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n56b7oNUss

This essay was written not as a critique but rather as a personal analysis and reflection on the times we are living, applied to our realm as gender illusionists.

In this particular case: I am not a Photoshop guru, but I am a perfectionist and took the time to alter the original photo so that the adjacent surrounding context, like the sofa and chairs, remained the same. It took me about a half an hour to produce the “After” image and another 15 minutes for the “Before”. Making myself fatter and a bit less attractive was easy. However, when it came to the “After before after”, it took me almost two hours to make myself look more feminine, thinner and younger. Did I enjoy it? You bet! It is certainly fun to fantasize about what could be or could have been but would never say that I am the one in the lower left corner. After all, I only get to look like one of the photos a few days a year. I hope it is quite obvious which is the one 😛

PS I am curious about how the original photo would look after a FaceApp filter and would greatly appreciate if someone could do it for me and share the result. It would be this or any other photo.

Originally posted June 22, 2020 with over 56,000 views to date.