TBB’s Bubble

In talking about going through the bubble — that place between where people get that you have a trans history and where they get over it — TBB says that the process changes.

When she walked in the world as a crossdresser, she used to think that she passed all the time.  Now she knows she wasn’t passing, rather she was just carrying her own little force field around her and inviting people to enter.

Now that she walks in the world as a mature, graceful and beautiful transwoman, she often assumes that people know she is trans when they just assume she is normative.

Last night at the VFW post, hanging with a pre-op friend, her first karaoke song (did you think TBB could resist a stage & spotlight?) was a gender-neutral James Taylor tune.

A half hour (and a few drinks) later, she went right for the Sinatra.

TBB’s pal was surprised at how well she could perform.  The post commander was surprised too, but for different reasons.

“Did your friend, well,” she asked the pal “did she used to be a guy?”

“She’s a woman.  Just a transwoman, like me,” the pal said.

Everything was cool, but TBB entered the bubble without knowing it.  Two transwomen together, size, whatever, well, she assumed.  And since she did, she was comfortable enough to belt Sinatra.  Boom the bubble opened.

Comic Magician Carl Ballentine used to play a theater where the manager loved him, and was surprised when the audience didn’t laugh.

“Do you book any other magicians in here?” Ballentine asked.

“No, they are boring.” the manager replied.  “I only book you.”

Ballentine understood the problem.

“Book some boring magicians,” he told the manager.  “Unless they know magicians, they don’t have any context for me to be funny.”

When you have people who only know one transwoman they don’t have any context to understand the range.  TBB is much more together than her friend, so she looked good.

Rumor is that TantraGal is coming to the TransDance tonight after the wine club.  We shall see what she sees.

Entering the balloon without knowing it is scary, which ever way it happens, if you think you pass and are wrong, or think you don’t and are wrong.  It’s the gotcha we don’t like.

And it’s only in context that trannys can be understood.

Or at least that’s how I understand it.

Exemplary Erudition

Last night at dinner, when the discussion turned to controlling computers with your mind, and TantraGal wondered about wired up hands free orgasms for a pleasure party, I recalled a passage from Kilgore Trout’s Venus On The Half Shell about a space pilot who used brain controls to increase hormones, which enlarged his penis and controlled his spaceship. Of course, as Trout notes, he could have used the brain controls to directly manipulate the space ship, but he really never considered that.

Of course, I had to give context, Half Shell being written by Phillip Jose Farmer posing as Kilgore Trout, a character created by Kurt Vonnegut, local boy.  And afterwards, as asked, I found the passage and references on the interweb and emailed them to TantraGal

It occurs to me now that referencing details from a passage in 1972 novel was, in the end, what most set me apart from the other 10 people at the table, not the fact that I was trans. Exemplary erudition is not conventional, don’t cha know?

I did help Mark, who sat across from me in his spiritual seeking. He gets arrhythmia when under emotional stress, so wants to see medical intuitives. He thinks what he needs is feminine energy, but I suggested he might want to look for masculine energy, where he can be physical with his emotions.

Now some of that might have been viewing eight episodes of BBC 3’s Gavin And Stacey, which illuminates the importance of mateship between men, but I didn’t mention that.

And the programmer gave a discussion of how bad it was to work at a start-up software firm without ever even trying to catch my eye. Since I was senior management at that firm, and knew him well there, I knew he hadn’t recognized the past me in the present me. Just as well.

They canned me when new management came in, big house-cleaning. But I met the new manager later at a transevent; he was a crossdresser. We talked about the company and he told me what the founder had done. I laughed. The founder had played the same tricks on him that he had on us, and the new manager was not happy. Oh, well, what goes around comes around, eh?

TantraGal wants to be the hostess, but she needs her control. She never let me get close to her virus laden laptop to use the USB key I had taken the time to load with tools, including SysInternals AutoRuns, which would probably let me just clear the adware and crap out, the stuff the expensive computer fix firm missed.  I suspect that means I won’t get anywhere near her writing, as she first suggested.

Still, at that table I realized again that what makes me exceptional isn’t being trans, it’s being exceptional. Oh, well.

My mother in the sky kept me company on the way home, a gorgeous full moon floating over the Mohawk, reminding me that even if it’s cold and windy, spring comes, spring comes.

Again.