I’ve now been in Oakland for just over two weeks and holy
crap has it been crazy. With the exception of one, maybe two nights, I’ve been
out doing social things every single night. Like essentially all the time I
used to use reading, I now get to spend with friends. Once result of this is
that it is way easier to build great friendships really quickly. I’ve met a
number of people here, about a dozen of which I might call friends, but I’ve
found maybe two best friends…
I’ve mentioned L before. She’s a queer archaeologist who I
met at QAIG and who lives in Oakland. She’s pretty “masculine of center” as she
likes to call herself. She’s got me playing softball…in an all-women league!!!
Which is super awesome. And no, my “bigger muscles” (which are quickly going
away from hormones) do not really give me much of an advantage. She also takes
me to all of the lesbian/queer dance parties, which is SUPER awesome, haha. In
fact, tonight we are going to one of the big regular queer girl parties in San
Francisco. I am so excited! I am slowly feeling more and more comfortable
identifying as a woman and as a lesbian and much of that is because of L. She
listens to all of my crap and she listens closely
and really thinks about it. In many ways, L has been a huge hub of me also
meeting other friends. I could not
thank her enough and I cannot imagine my time here without her!
My other best friend here, S, is a little older (just over
30), but doesn’t at all look it. She is married, but both her and her husband
are incredibly social. S struggles with a lot of the same mental/emotional
stuff as me and even though we are in very different places in life and are
very different in that respect, our brains work in much the same way and after
just hanging out once, we seemed to have a very intimate connection…it’s
actually almost weird how quickly we attached to each other. S is decently
feminine, so she is SO great to go shopping with and talk about/do all of the
stereotypical “girly” things that I have missed from my life growing up as a
guy. Actually, I am meeting S tonight to hang out with her before the party
(she is Bi and is coming too!). Just the second night we hung out (a week
ago!), she really showed that she cared about me. And when it happened, it
struck me how crappy grad school can be for developing really deep friendships
(not that it doesn’t happen)…after all, you have SO much time and effort that
you HAVE to spend on school and not yourself…much less on friends. I also do
have a tiny crush on S, but I legitimately have a crush on a few of my friends
here, haha. I’ve mostly been meeting women here and along with my crappy
compartmentalization right now, the line between platonic and romantic feelings
has been blurred beyond recognition. Which is weird. But because I have a few
crushes right now, it is pretty easy to not let any of them (well maybe one) get
too strong.
I got a sewing machine and have already started altering
clothes to help save me money. I got this awesome denim jacket for 80% off at
banana republic, but it doesn’t have any pockets! So I put some in today :-) It
looks the tiniest bit jenky, but that’s not atypical for my stuff, haha.
Overall, I’ve been finding that I want to identify closer
and closer to being just a trans-woman (rather than something in between). Just
the other day, I went to a fabric store with L, and I presented somewhat
masculine (but not as a guy…just with a button-up, guy vest, and no wig) and
after being called “he” and “sir,” I literally got dizzy. My gender dysphoria
seriously kicked in and I just want to change and be identified as “she/’her.”
And now, whenever I go out socially, I always want to first meet them as femme
as possible. It’s too early to really understand it, but I have a feeling that
my increasing femininity was always there, but was harder to access surrounded
by so many people who knew guy-me. Here I get a fresh start.
Obviously life is complicated and there is other stuff going
on, but these seemed like all of the important points to understanding where I
am in life now. :-)
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