Magazine Articles - Tinas Diary (3)

Tina's Diary (3)

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The tantalizing, and occasionally titillating, trials and tribulations of a transitioning transsexual.

Dearest Reader,

If you have honoured me by following the previous selections from my diaries, then you will have learned that there are about 5,000 transsexuals in the UK who have had or are undergoing gender-reassignment.

To put this into perspective this is the same as the number of known languages in the world, the number of golf courses in Europe and about the number Jesus had to feed with loaves and fishes. In case you fear that the world is going to be populated with gibbering gluttonous golfers, you can be reassured by a suicide rate amongst transsexuals of nearly 50%, due to the slowness of treatment and general harassment and bigotry, together with a murder rate sixteen times the average.

You will also have shared with me the embarrassment of my wearing female-form prosthetics and will have gained a rough idea of the time-frame involved in transitioning, from first approaching my GP, the involvement of numerous psychiatrists, through the Real-Life Experience to that glorious moment when I am eventually wheeled into the operating theatre.

All in the mind?

The involvement of psychiatrists is in itself a misnomer. In the UK, as with most of the rest of the world, transsexuality has been confirmed as a physical and not mental disease, although mental problems often arise as a result of being a transsexual. In the coming months I hope to highlight different periods in my own, ongoing, two-year transition by once again dipping into my diaries... after all... I am the kind of person to whom things happen.

Everything detailed in these excerpts is true. Even now, as I look back at the past few years and forward to the next, remaining months, I am ever more aware that I have indeed made a 'life-changing' decision, involving a multitude of different treatments - so many that it would be impossible to remember each and every one.

However, like many girls, I have kept a diary - it helps me make some sense of the various goings on...

Bloody hell, cop a look at the tits on that...

Date June Place Lancaster
Mmmmmmmmmm.
Perfected breast massage technique...
Got yet more xpensve boobcreams and hormones.
Pls let there be growth, or is it an oversized pimple - God knows, investigate more tonight. At the beginning of my controlled Real-Life Experience, one of the first things that I, as a transitioning transsexual, associated with being a woman was an enhanced breast. In this, at least, I bore a similarity to that very different creature - the Trans-gendered transvestite.

However, apart from a few 'lady-boys,' or those 'chicks with dicks' out for financial gain, most transvestites will happily settle for the aforementioned chicken fillet or some other padding for the bra. As a typical transsexual, however, I desperately wanted the feel of real flesh and accordingly searched avidly for any means possible to boost the size of my bust.

Boobs, tits, bazookas, puppies...

The male fascination with the female breast has led to an array of names. Men are proud to be known as either a leg- or a tit-man, very occasionally being kind enough to consider an alternative body part. For myself, I yearned for the day when my breast measurements might warrant anything more than a passing nod.

And so, like other small-breasted women, I often found myself spending more than I ought on ways of increasing my cupsize. Creams, lotions, pills, even suppositories - the ready availability via the internet of such a bizarre array of tempting goodies (each guaranteeing miraculous growth) blinded me to reality.

Throwing down the magazine that I had been reading, I woefully examined the empty larder that stared cavernously back at me. I had been reading an article where, prior to breast augmentation surgery, the would-be recipient was advised to wear a bra stuffed with a certain poundage of oats, pudding- or long-grain rice.

Keeping abreast of things

Well, let me tell you, I soon found that this was not as simple as it sounded. Scribbling a quick shopping list, I made my way down the long and winding hill to Lancaster's town centre and its array of shops.

I don't know about you, but I always end up buying more than I expect to, and it was two hours later when I finally retraced my steps towards home. It had not been a successful expedition. Although I had spent the week's shopping budget, I did not appear to have actually purchased anything that was on my list. OK, I must admit that I had received a number of wolf-whistles, and a few cat-calls, but the fact that they had been followed by exaggerated laughter suggested that maybe they had not been of an entirely complimentary nature.

What made matters worse was the fact that, by the time I made it back to my rented digs, I was being followed by a flock of waddling seagulls! Maybe one of the bags containing the rice had burst - it's not something that I could recommend nor would I intend to repeat in a hurry. Mondays are Hell may have been one of the working titles for Ian Fleming's novel Moonraker, but on that particular day it was a sentiment with which I fully empathised.

A letter from America

On my return I discovered a heavy Jiffybag upon my doorstep, together with a pale blue letter, both weighed down with a collage of colourful stamps. While I had been gone, the postman had delivered an overseas packet along with an eagerly awaited airmail letter from my father, only missing his 'one delivery a day' time-slot by four hours.

My father, a uniquely irascible character, had but recently emigrated to the USA and used to make fun of his newfound countrymen when they described themselves as 'Americans', by asking if they were from Mexico? A stickler for detail, he detested it when people upgraded a country into a continent.

The main point of his letter appeared to be a rant against the makers of a famous ointment for relieving the pain of haemorrhoids. Apparently, he proclaimed, this product used to contain 'shark and whale sperm', and since this element had been replaced by mere 'fish oil' he was convinced that its medicinal properties had been irrevocably diminished.

Still grinning at the contents of my father's letter, I opened the other packet to find a sample of a Japanese breast-growth serum. This, so the leaflet proclaimed, had been taken by pristine white glove from the shelves, from whence it was laid on a feather bed prior to being dispatched to me. There was also a lengthy instruction on the benefits of breast massage and the once in a lifetime opportunity to buy a further supply of serum for a mere £100.

Ay, there's the rub...

I carefully started to massage the serum into my left breast, taking care to follow the printed instructions and do three clockwise rotations and then three in the opposite direction - always ending by pushing towards the nipple. My fingers gently traced over the puckered bud causing it to stir into life. The slippery lotion seemed to generate a pleasant warmth, prompting a jealous response from my right nipple. I began to use both hands for the massage. How could such a languid caress cause such an urgent tingling? Before long my whole body was pleading for relief...

Later, as I read the ingredients of this miraculous lotion, the smile on my lips began to fade and my face took on an overall greenish hue. Hurriedly, I picked up my father's letter, together with the list of ingredients he had listed from an old tube of his trusty haemorrhoid lotion. I compared this with the overpriced ingredients from my newly purchased breast-growth serum. 'Oh my God!' - it was true - they were one and the same.

All over the world, trusting transsexuals were lovingly massaging shark spunk, from a potion made to cure piles, on to their fledgling boobs.

Now granted, some might even find that idea vaguely exciting, and it is true that these glistening orbs were unlikely to suffer from haemorrhoids, but surely this was against some part of the Trade Descriptions Act.

'Sometimes I don't think you want to be a woman- I think you just want to dress like a tart'

Date June Place Nantwich
Sooooooooo knackered!
Too much travelling to latenight fancy-dress parties and munches/meets! Good news - had fab times...
Bad news - showed mum photos!

Much needed respite from the rigours of doing my PGCE. It's not the teaching, nor the kids, it's just the general overwhelming strain of being in the Educational System after 30 odd years working in the real world. Also gave me the chance to attend, with Helen, a few socials, munches and even a couple of fancy-dress parties in and around the Manchester Village - but more of those later.

The result of all of this frantic socialising is that Helen took a number of photographs of me to show how far I had transitioned. Unfortunately, when I was showing my mother pics of me trying to renovate my house, I also passed to her ones of me dressed for a vicars and tarts ball, as well as me in an extremely short air- stewardess uniform. Now, she knows that I have acted in loads of films and television programmes, including Channel 4's 'Mile High' prior to transitioning, but nothing had prepared her for an airbrush tanned me in black paper panties. I knew I'd made a mistake as soon as I passed her the packet of photographs. 'Oh God.' I watched as her face coloured and anger caused her lips to tighten until they resembled a narrow railway track amidst a furrow of creases.

She passed the photographs back to me, but said nothing for what seemed an eternal twenty seconds. 'Sometimes I don't think you want to be a woman, I think you just want to dress like a tart'.With judgement passed she sniffed and bid me goodbye, ensuring that she called me by my old 'male' name, just to annoy me.

God, I feel very tired lately. It's a good job that I believe that this is due to my diabetes, and that I have faith in my judgement when it comes to taking medicine purchased off the internet. As it happens, it was a faith that was fully justified, given later events.

Keep taking the tablets...

For those that want to know, I have looked back over the past years and my original regime was as follows: 2mg oestradiol (oestrogen or oestrogen v. often used as HRT, but here acting as a feminising agent for softer skin and other female characteristics) 50mg Spirolonodactone (often used as a diuretic but used to stop testosterone production)

After 6 months, this had increased to:
4mg oestradiol,
150mg Spirolonadactone
100mg progestin (used, on anecdotal evidence, to promote breast growth).
25mg Finistrade (used to prevent male pattern baldness)
...plus tubes and tubes of hair-removing cream.

Of course, this is on top of a maximum dose of Metformin and glicazides, due to my being diabetic. Throughout, my dear doctors in Lancaster had continued to take me to task for taking unauthorised drugs, yet also monitored my liver - and kidney-function, potassium levels and even performed a hormone test.

By the time I went to hospital in London as a fully active 'Pre-op Transsexual' (considerably poorer but a little more feminine), the hormone dosage had increased to:
6mg Estradiol
200mg Spiro
200mg progestin
1.25mg Finasteride
No wonder I rattled!

I had to wait for a few weeks before I found the true reason for my tiredness - a wait through which I hope you will bear with me...