For most of you, you know me as Alaina. I have been known a great lot of you for quite some time. I feel as though I have not been truthful to you, I really haven't been truthful to myself. I want to re-introduce myself to you. I want you to know my story but whether or not YOU want to read it is all up to you. I have been struggling with gender issues my entire life and to some it may take you by surprise, some it may be obvious. I have dropped the A's from my name and go by mainly Lain now, but that isn't a big leap. In the next year or so I will be starting down a long road to what I hope will be freedom and happiness and the real me. At some point in the future I will start a transition into becoming a male. I have asked my girlfriend and friends to refer to me as a "he" in private to kinda get used to it and sometimes this is forgotten which is understandable. I don't correct people I don't know when they refer to me with a male pronoun as I don't think there is anything to correct. In fact if someone calls me 'ma'am' or 'miss' I get frustrated. I cannot tell you what relief it brings me to recognize who my real self is. I know this is alot to understand and take in and I am more than willing to answer any questions you have to ask. This is going to be a long process and I would love to know that I have your support but I understand that this may take a while to digest. I have asked my best friend Liam to join me on this blog because we while we are not at the same point in our transition we are going to be going through the same thing in the long run however long that may be. He has already gone through the counseling and started horomone therapy. He will be able to answer the more specific questions and well as add his own blogs and commentary. We will both be posting pictures.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I feel like I have kept my distance from some of you because I was trying to hide.
Below is my story.
K-6 I basically let my mother style my hair, buy my clothes. I imitate her. I am always the dad when I play house, and usually don't play unless that it the role I get to play. I am more interested in GI Joe than Barbie. I hate to wear dresses but my mother insists and I placate her because I don't like making her mad. I play video games on my computer and unlike most other girls I am not interested in boys in 5th and 6th grade. I don't really get along with most of the other girls in my class and befriend many boys. My dad's nickname for me is butch....how fitting. I took several acting classes during the summer of 5th grade, I finally get to be a boy. I am cast as Macbeth in a summer play at Heidelberg.
In 6th grade I move to another town about 20 minutes away. It's halfway through the school year. 6th grade is brutal as it is and I was intruding on a class full of students in the middle of their school year. Their friend slots are filled, I basically spend the rest of the year by my self. I heard how the girls would make fun of the other girls and I would just sit perfectly still, hoping they wouldn't see me. I knew they could see how uncomfortable I was and 12 year old girls are equipped with radar to detect anyone who may be even the slightest bit different and they go for the jugular. I heard a girl get teased about buying a jacket from K-mart. A silly insult, I know, but the way it was said had teeth. In history class we had the choice to become a medieval character, I chose to be a knight and a magician. Being a princess or anything in a female role never crosses my mind.
7-8 In middle school I finally achieve friend status with a few people, mostly band members who seem to be the most forgiving, I think they kind of have to be. I play the trumpet and have a blast doing it. I am still not interested in boys and this doesn't pose a problem quite yet. I make up a faux casino in my trumpet case and call myself the "Godfather", I have a few friends that go along with it and it's fun for a while but when it finally fades away to a new fad, I am sad. Why am I sad? Maybe because I am being treated as a boy and very comfortable in this? The first true friend I met in jr. high is one of the closest friends I have today, the highlight of my school year was being asked to go swimming after the last day of 7th grade, thanks Beth, I needed that. I have my first real crush during the summer of 8th grade. She was the cousin of the kids next door and would always come to my house when her family visited. Her cousins were all boys and she hated them. She would often spend the night and I would really miss her when she left.
In high school I remain true to my mother and keep buying the clothes she wants me to buy, keep styling my hair the way she wants me to and did all the things a high school girl should do. I date a boy just to say that I dated a boy.....what the hell was I thinking with that one. Crushes come and go and I try to ignore them because, well, they are girls and it's just not acceptable. I go to prom, I strap on the obligatory dress and do have a good time, I was just wishing I could have been wearing a tux. The summer after Senior year one of my closest friends and I start dating we have a great time and then I move away to school. For the longest time, I blame him for breaking up with me when he really did no such thing, we just kinda dissolve. Then we try it again and the same thing happens. Then we get in touch again find out we had a lot in common, then again we just kinda fell out of contact. I think the things that we both had to deal with got in the way of our friendship, I hope that never happens again, Jake. If that's not the case please correct me.
In college I am lucky enough to room with one of my best friends. I don't really make any other friends and we basically hole up in our dorm room and watch cable TV all day. We write a movie script of which I usually wrote and played the male parts (It could still hold it's own against some of this crap that is written and produced today). Sophomore year I come out to my best friend and to a few others. I go to the LGBT meetings and don't feel comfortable so I stop going. I don't like the label "Lesbian" but for lack of a better term, I just roll with it. Beth left halfway through sophomore year and I feel the loneliest that I have ever felt. . I start to date a girl named Rachel and it was the first time I ever had any feelings towards a girl that were reflected back at be in the same way. She stayed a few weekends but for the most part it was a "friends with benefits" situation. About a week after I met Rachel I met Heather and we all know that I was with Heather until last year. We had a small civil ceremony in Vermont and then moved in together shortly thereafter. She referred to me as wife and I HATED THAT. She was generally supportive of everything that I mentioned and went through and never had any problems (identity wise), with the exception of some gender recognition issues.
In about 2003, I met Jenn. Jenn and I become best friends almost instantly. We started to hang out and become very close. We are both "butch" lesbians but never really embraced that term. We share similar ideas, styles and mannerisms. We go on vacation and have a blast in Boston and just genuinely become family to each other. Heather and I move at the end of 2004. That really doesn't stop us from being close. As we chat...correction texted and emailed, because unless we are on fire we don't talk on the phone, we discover the art of Drag. This is a topic we will have a separate post about.
Heather and I arrive in Cincinnati and we both start school. In April, Jenn and Julie decide to have a wedding ceremony and Jenn asks me to be her "Best Man~sans penis". We are both super stoked to get fitted and wear our tuxes....so much so that we had another event the next year just to wear another tux. It was a great, albeit hot, day and I think I can speak for the both of us that it felt right and extremely comfortable to be in the male roles that we had that day.
Time goes by and we end up going on vacation to Mexico and have a blast even though I am sure that we both would have been more comfortable without breasts and in swim trunks only. Imagine seeing a person you think is male with a female bathing suit on. Now think about how we feel when those people are looking at us. I guess I have always been dinenchanted by my body but I guess I just put up with it in different ways, baggy jeans, baggy shirts to hide my breasts, sports bras to make them as unnoticeable as possible, men's pants, men's shirts. I am not meant for women's clothes. The body dysphoria grew more and more noticeable from there. It was on this vacation that Jenn starts to bind with a compression shirt from ftm.underworks.com and...I can't seem to keep my font from going back to normal so italics from here on out my friends...oh the tribulations. How to put it on, how to keep it from rolling up....I think that is another post all together. I get my binding shortly after we get back and have the same trouble getting it on but take Jenn's advice and it works. I don't ask Heather for help getting it on because I think I didn't want her to see that side of it. The item manipulating my body into a shape that I want it to be is not something that I am proud of. It is aggravating, hot and sometimes painful. I don't care. The self-esteem boost, well moreso the self-confidence boost, I get from it is well worth the annoyances. It is not long before I am wearing it everyday to work, I am lucky to be in an environment that doesn't care what gender I am and am treated well. (aside from the work aspect anyway). I buy a new one and it fits so much better. They redesigned it and now it doesn't roll up and it's great. I am already going to be going on my fourth one shortly.
I think that is enough for now. Please blink and do comment and ask questions.
