Play It Again Sam-antha

The second precept from the Precepts of the Order of Inner-being (Buddha) says, “
Do not think that knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice non-attachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life, not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times
“.
Hold onto that last line especially. Observe reality in yourself. Not the story you tell about yourself at two in the morning — the actual thing, as it happens, while it’s happening. That turns out to be a much harder assignment than it sounds, and it’s most of what this column is about.
How many times have you done something purely in reaction? We — the transgender community — have done that most of our lives. We lived (and some still are living) a masquerade, hiding part of ourselves from the world and ourselves. We go through certain motions, never really knowing why. Well, for those who slowly (or quickly in some cases) arrive at an orgasm after dressing up, they obviously do it because it feels good — or perhaps even great.
Is the sexual release the motivation? For some it may be; for others, it’s not. And just to confuse things more, for some it is a sexual release, and yet that is not the true motivation of their actions. Regardless, for many, shame then kicks in, and the whole thing is forgotten until the next episode. And around we go again. The urge takes control, and you simply have to submit. 
And notice how efficiently the forgetting works. It isn’t that you decide not to think about it. The whole episode gets filed somewhere you don’t visit, and the version of you who goes to work on Monday genuinely has no appointment with the version who was in the mirror on Saturday. Those two people barely correspond. That’s not a character flaw — it’s a survival arrangement, and it did keep a lot of us alive and employed. It just has a cost, and the cost is that nobody is ever in the room long enough to ask why.
The tranny admirer, that guy who looks straight enough (who might even have a wife or girlfriend at home), goes through a cycle as well. He gets an urge. However, he does not dress up to relieve it; he gets no kick from dressing as a woman. He would rather find a T-Girl and relieve his urge sexually, sometimes giving, sometimes receiving. And interestingly enough, he does not consider that gay or bi sex. Then again, in some cases, neither does the T-girl. For the T-girl, she “feels” like a woman, and to the admirer she “looks” like a woman. By morning, the admirer has forgotten the whole thing. Until, of course, it’s time to do it again, in a week, a month, or a year from now. And for those of us who let them, we continue the circle too. So, “Play It Again Sam-antha.”
I put that last part in deliberately —
for those of us who let them
. It’s easy to write about his cycle as though we were furniture in it. We’re not. Somebody answered that message. Somebody decided that being wanted for an evening was worth being forgotten by morning, and made that trade knowingly. I’ve made it. I’m not moralizing about it; I’m pointing out that it’s a transaction with two signatures, and we tend to only examine his.
Most of my life, I found the sexual urge to be the driving force behind my dressing up, leaving me feeling ashamed after the orgasm. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, “What the hell is wrong with me? This is ridiculous”.  But after I began to really explore myself, and the actions I engaged in, the sexual release ceased to motivate me. Suddenly I was in touch with inner feelings moving through me that were developing – or at least starting to be noticed. There was a sense of this is who I am, a comfort or easiness in being (or at least presenting) the woman within. I was starting to like her for who SHE was. She was me, but with pieces of a personality uniquely her own.
That shift deserves more than one sentence, because it’s the hinge the whole thing turns on. The urge didn’t leave. What left was the shame that used to arrive behind it, and once the shame was gone, there was room to notice what else had been there the whole time—buried underneath, drowned out by the noise. It turns out that when you stop interrogating yourself, you can finally hear yourself. I’d spent decades treating the feeling as evidence in a case against me. The day I stopped prosecuting, the feeling had something else to say.
I started to live in that moment, en femme, and recognize the experience of the she in me. Sometimes I was crazy with wanting to be a woman. Overwhelmed, in fact. Then, it was over – I was a guy again, feeling butch and ready to take on the world. I would flip back and forth, and on any given day, I was truly comfortable being whatever gender I was presenting. And in either mode, at that moment, I felt conflicted in that gender identity. 
Ultimately, the question of WHY on my mind this week is a different WHY than I asked several weeks ago. Last time, the why was linked to an event that perhaps triggered it for the first time: the acts and role-playing in each of us that began in youth and continued into adult life. Such a trigger might have been a childhood rape, an innocent dress-up game, mommy wanting a little girl, etc. Of course, there is also the hormone wash theory: that if in the womb the brain was simply wired female, in other words, you were born that way 
This week, the question is geared more toward the physical ACTion and Reaction, and what prompts them in our adult life. In other words, is dressing up simply a REACTion to relieve pressures at work or home? Do we need to blow off steam by putting on a dress and letting our emotions run free? Are we gay and not able to come to grips with it? Or do we simply choose to enjoy the feminine side of our personality, unable to do it in male clothes? By looking at the circumstances before it occurs, you may gain insight into WHY it occurs. Don’t assume the knowledge you have now is changeless, absolute truth. Have we gotten comfortable in the routine? 
Here’s an experiment, and it costs you nothing. Next time, before anything else happens, stop long enough to note what kind of day it was. Not a diary — one line. Bad week at work. Fight with my wife. Nothing at all, just Tuesday. Do that a dozen times and a pattern shows up, and I promise it won’t be the pattern you expected. Some of us will find a pressure valve. Some will find no trigger whatsoever, which is its own answer and a rather important one — it means this isn’t a reaction to anything. It’s just you.
If you thought this column was going to give you answers…..eeeehhhhh, wrong. It will simply bring up more questions, or at least ideas to think about. Maybe you and the “girls” can discuss it over tea?
And that’s worth sitting with, because it reframes the loneliness entirely. The world never rejected the whole person. The world never met the whole person. We sent a representative — a careful, edited, perfectly plausible representative — and then we felt unseen when nobody saw us. Of course they didn’t. We’d made sure of it. The hiding that kept us safe is the same hiding that kept us lonely, and you don’t get to put down one without putting down the other.
It took me a long time to understand that. I was play-acting for so long, following someone else’s script, that I forgot—or maybe never fully developed—who I was.
I think that whoever you are is who you should be. Safe to say many have had environmental stimuli that motivate them to cross-dress. Others simply find it a part of who they are. Don’t be afraid to find out what motivates you. Your reasons last year may have changed this year. You may have been going through the motions for so long that it has become comfortable to keep going, and yet the motivations in your life may have changed without you noticing.  
That last part caught me. I assumed that whatever had been true of me at twenty-five was still the operating manual at fifty. It wasn’t, and nobody sends a notice. If you ask the question only once, you’ll spend the rest of your life answering it with information that expired decades ago.

Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.

Your truth from yesterday may change with a new discovery tomorrow. Find yourself by searching without the fear of what you will find. Never be afraid to change yourself or to change your point of view.
Victor Hugo once said,

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.