By Amanda J.
My last post started with a declaration that I’m not a woman and ended with me declaring that I was ‘messed up’ with a lack of opportunity, boredom with mindless CDing, increasing guilt & concern about the whole thing and a growing feeling that I no longer belonged causing me to walk away from all things feminine and concentrate on my male life.
But despite walking away, I was still looking at my photos from time to time and remained fascinated by the floozy with the stilettos and too much eyeliner. She was, after all, the embodiment of all my wishes and dreams since I first CDed as a teenager. Moreover, whereas once she was just pure fantasy, over the previous couple of years, I’d taken her out of the closet and into the real world where she’d passed unnoticed by most and been received with warmth by the few with whom she interacted. That had to count for something, but I needed to figure out exactly what was going on.
The answer came from Kandi’s Land.
I enjoy reading Nora’s Transliving interviews when links are posted here and, quite a while ago, after reading the subject of that day’s particular post, had a look at her other interviews on the Transliving website and came across one in particular and such was the resonance it had with me that I started writing a post which would have been a deep dive into the similarities I saw between the interviewee’s life and my own. Unfortunately, things started to go off the rails for me before that post ever got to a point where it was ready to see the light of day but, coincidentally, in the early part of 2025, the interview was posted here – the subject was Linda Mills who talked about being ‘bigender’ with a couple of Nora’s questions evoking a response which could very easily have come from my mouth:
Q: What triggers your gender change?
A: I could be triggered when seeing a woman whose appearance I admire and wish to emulate, or when I feel female camaraderie talking with another woman. Sometimes a visual cue is not necessary. For example, it is Linda answering these questions. When done, David may emerge. I’ve also learned to trigger gender-change intentionally…
Q: What happens when Linda needs to express herself but cannot?
A: I’ve learned to internalise and hide my feelings. It’s incredibly sad to have to do this but it is necessary for survival. As no one can read my mind, I simply blend in.
Fascinated, I followed the link to her website where amongst the wisdom she shares, this particular point stands out:
‘when I present as a boy, I act like (what I have come to understand) a boy acts like, and I feel fairly comfortable being treated as such. And I feel exactly the same when it comes to presenting as a girl. In other words, I feel more masculine sometimes, and tend to comfortably assume a masculine persona, and the same goes for my feminine persona.’
If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to visit Linda’s website and read what she has to say; it’s a truly fascinating insight and may help you rationalise your own situation as it did with me.
Now I have to stress that despite Linda’s situation resonating so much with me, I’m going to stop short of declaring that I’m bigender, not least because I don’t particularly like compartmentalising things with labels and also because I’m not entirely convinced that that particular label applies to me. What was important to me was the realisation that it was OK to sometimes want to transform myself into the best image of a woman that I can possibly be – and to live within, and be recognised as, that gender by others – without that being at the cost of being completely comfortable with my male side too.
And it was perhaps that realisation that more than anything reignited my male ‘mojo’ prompting me to pick up my tools and get stuck in to sorting jobs around the house that had been long neglected. And whilst I often thought about my feminine side and looked at my photos from time to time, the increasing prominence, acceptance and liking of my male side meant that I was largely able to cope without the CDing which had previously been a weekly, and sometimes several times a week, activity.
But whereas I had a lot in common with Linda, there were areas of divergence too. Whilst she talks of the coexistence of her two sides, I started to find that there was a divide between my male and female sides which, while it had previously narrowed to almost nothing, was now widening and I was watching the widening of the gap from the male side. In metaphorical terms, it was something like standing on a quayside and watching a ship sail away. I was happy standing on the quay as it steamed away but a part of me was still telling me that I should be on that ship.
But if I was to get back on that ship before it was too late, on what basis?
I’ve already declared that I’m not a woman in any shape or form. I wasn’t ‘assigned male at birth’, I became male at the moment of conception and have been so ever since. My pronouns are blindingly obvious and, as far as I am aware, every single cell in my body carries the XY chromosomal combination. There is no ambiguity, no element of doubt. And yet when I do cross the gender divide, it’s like a switch is flicked (another concept that Linda talked about on her website).
That’s quite an interesting concept and manifests itself to me in two ways. Firstly, there are the traits that can exist in both worlds but only exist in my feminine world – for example, although I could wear male oriented jewellery in my normal life, my male side has no interest in it other than the wedding ring I constantly wear as a mark of my commitment to Mrs A; my female side, on the other hand, wears the full range – bracelets, necklaces, earrings, rings. And secondly, there are things firmly sitting in the female world – my male side has no interest in going through endless rails of dresses but, when that switch is flicked, I’m happy to spend time looking at items, perhaps even holding them against me to see whether they’d look good on me (probably not but a girl can dream).
And whilst I’m under no illusion that I ‘pass’ in every situation (or indeed in any situation), I love being conscious that many who see me may not realise what lies beneath the feminine veneer and those that do will hopefully not just see me as a bloke in a dress. Above all, I show my respect for women by doing the best I can to conform to what is expected by, and of, them in their world, whether it’s through the way I dress or the way I act when out and about. But in saying that, I know there are boundaries and I take the utmost care not to cross them – women have fought long and hard for their rights and it’s up to them to invite me into their world, not for me to demand it. And whilst I like to think I am worthy of that invitation, I would never dream of taking it for granted and I certainly never want anyone to feel threatened by my mere presence, no matter how groundless their fears may be. And as I pondered the basis on which I wanted to move forward, I realised that it was to be the ‘real deal’ as far as I could be. And by ‘real deal’ I don’t mean to delude myself that I’m a real woman but rather to be open and honest about how I inhabit that world – a gender variant male seeking acceptance and not just a deluded old man treating it as an opportunity to play ‘dress up’ or ‘let’s pretend’.
To bring this to a close, as I considered Amanda’s evolution over the past few years, it struck me how far I’d come. If a crossdresser is just someone who wears clothes of the opposite gender, I’d gone a lot further than that. Even as I considered my few forays into the outside world, I realised that I’d gone from someone doing it for a dare (albeit a dare that was issued to me by me) to someone who enjoyed behaving as, and being seen as, a woman/transwoman. Of course, I’ve seen people do a double take or look at me & smirk from time to time and the sales assistants & baristas who have served me will have been in no doubt about my provenance but I have shared lifts/elevators with members of the public who have either not noticed me or smiled at me, maybe as a sign of acknowledgement and approval, maybe just because they were being friendly or having a good day. And not only that, I’ve enjoyed the buildup – getting dressed, putting on makeup and then a final check & collecting essentials before experiencing the euphoria of opening the front door and stepping out into the world. Whilst the mindlessness of CDing at home had outlived its usefulness, being seen as a woman in the outside world was something that I started to realise that I still need and, as things in my male life were now on a more even keel, my mind once again turned to my feminine side.
And ironically, or perhaps predictably, it was a statement by Linda Mills that proved to be prophetic so stay tuned for the third and final part of this trilogy of posts.
