More of a Process.......

I find that at the moment I doing two things I am slowly beginning to understand that both of these are processes rather than single actions, or decisions.   I mentioned that a couple of weeks back I rather dramatically outed myself to me friends in ne of the bands regularly play with.   Relating the story to some of my gay friends the next day I observed that I was learning that coming out was more of a process than a single act.   They looked at me as if I had just floated down on the rain and (mostly) managed to restrain themselves from a "Well Duh" reaction.   I had just realised something that they had known since infancy, but short of taking out advertisment in The Times I am going to have to tell my story a lot of times, and it will become increasingly difficult to remember who knows how much.

As with coming out I have only now really started to understand that transition is also a process.   I have heard girls say, "Right! I am now ready too transition" as if the next morning they would wake up totally female with none of that pesky maleness hanging around making life inconvenient.   Well of course we all know that it's not like that, but  there is all the difference in the world between knowing some thing and knowing it through experience.

Now I am right at the beginning of both of these processes, but yesterday I took what I thought were a couple of giant bridge burning steps (see I can mix metaphors with the best of 'em) on the same day I made an announcement on Facebook about my name, reverting to my original surname, and sent out a couple of e-mails to the leaders of another couple of bands I play in.   Some members of both of these bands have already me Paula, and I am sure that the rumour mill has been active, so I wrote these e-mails to advise them that I am Trans and that from now on I will be undertaking the vast bulk of my musical activity, rehearsals an concerts as Paula.

Some of you will understand that I did this with some trepidation, and just a little bit of excitement.   I have yet to receive a response from one band, I got an e-mail back from the other almost by return! Unfortunately it was an out of office reply so it now won't get read until next Thursday.