Living in the Middle

Tank - Guess - Similar

Shorts - I & M Jeans - Similar

Flip Flops - Rocket Dog - Similar

Here I am again in my most natural state, a bit of half and half, what some call a tween.  Which I kind of don't like, as I personally confuse it with someone who is almost a teenager.  I think that definition is more widely known, than the one of someone who lives their lives between the genders.  For me, really, it is just me.  A little bit female, and a little bit male.  That is how I really feel about my gender.

I was pondering these thoughts about my gender this morning as I was trying to decide what I should wear into town.  These happened to be the clothes I put on today after I got out of my shower, I just hadn't really planned on leaving the house.  But things needed to get done down in town and so I thought, why not just wear what I'm wearing?  Clearly it is what I wanted to wear today.

So.... it's funny, that it still occurs to me that maybe what I am wearing is not socially acceptable.  But, I am determined to show myself that I love myself, and that being this way is okay.  Being someone who lives in the middle of the two typical gender presentations, is who I am.

I suppose it is some lingering fear that something bad will happen to me.  I live my life quite openly.  If anybody ever cared to look, which I am sure some have, they would know.  I wear female clothes all the time.  To work even.  Am I trying to present as a female?  Not normally, that is only an occasional thing.  It actually has been a couple of weeks since I've been dressed fully and out anywhere.

But this 'tween thing?  That I do everyday.  Because that is who I am.  I just don't really like that word.

Pleated Skirt & My Own Etsy Store!!

Tank - White House Black Market

Skirt - White House Black Market - Similar

Shoes - Kelly & Katie

Bracelets - My Own - My Etsy Store

First off, with this outfit, I absolutely adore this skirt.  It is pleated all the way around and it swishes as I walk, which I just adore!  It has such wonderful movement to it that I will often grab it and swish it around and around.  It is such fun!!

Another bit of info --- I have finally opened my own Etsy store!!!  Wow, how exciting!  Well it took a bit of prodding from myself, my wife, and several of my friends, but yesterday I finally got around to setting it up.  Please go check it out, and see if you'd like to custom order something from me.  I'd love to make something special just for you!

Well this summer I am feeling much more confident, or that I just don't care that much, about having my arms out.  I read somewhere that this past July was the hottest on record, and it sure felt like it!  So to help with that brutal heat in California's Central Valley, you sometimes just need to ditch the arm covers!  Yikes!

Okie dokie everyone!  Thanks so much for reading.

Go checkout my Etsy!! Order yourself something special, from your's truly, the cross dressing woodworker!

Love you!

Love yourselves!!

A Nice Cool 104 Degrees Fahrenheit

Tunic - White House Black Market - Similar

Shoes - Ralph Lauren - Similar

Belt - White House Black Market - Similar

Shorts - Guess - Similar

On this day it was predicted to once again be above 100 degree Fahrenheit, but alas, I needed to make a run to CostCo.  Jules and I have friends coming next weekend and we needed things at CostCo that would be running out soon.  She was headed to the supermarket and to get her hair cut, so I was off on my own.

Being as it was going to be so super hot, I knew that I needed to wear something small!  This tunic is something I picked up recently and thought it would be perfect for the day.  But, as is often the case with tunics, they are not quite long enough to wear all by themselves.  Thus I snuck the shorts underneath it.  I thought it may have looked a bit unusual to onlookers, as it certainly looked as though I was wanting to "showcha-my-chocha!"  Ha!  Oh well, if that is what they thought, then whatever!  I knew that I wasn't showing anything, so whatever, right??

I knew it was going to be hot, thus I took off early in the morning with the intent of getting their just as it opened.  Lucky for me, I arrived about a half hour early.  Lucky I say, because then I was able to shoot down to the outlet stores and search for a pair of girl jeans that I could wear while presenting as a guy.

I'm a bit picky about the jeans I wear nowadays.  I really like jeans and I have many pairs of male jeans, and female jeans, but only a two pairs of female jeans I feel comfortable wearing to work.  They would Levi Denizen jeans that I purchased from Target.  Anywho.... into Guess I went and attempted to pick out female jeans that weren't too female.  Funny huh??

Pair after pair I tried on and set aside.  It was actually quite funny.  I wanted female jeans, but not too female.  How did that work?  Well I finally settled on a $30 pair that was straight legged, a bit tight in the thighs, a little loose in the calves, and a couple of sizes larger in the waist than I would buy if I was planning on wearing them while presenting as a woman.  It was an odd jean buying experience, but something that I came away from with quite a smile on my face.

I finished up with the pair of jeans, scooted off to CostCo, did my shopping, hit Trader Joes, and then was off back to home.  Of course, once I got back, I had to take some outfit photos, and it turned out that it was only 104 degrees Fahrenheit!  What a nice cool refreshing day! Ha!

Okay, that's it for today folks!  Hope you are staying cool out there!  But hopefully you are not in the flooding areas of the US.  Weirdo weather!

Love you!

Love shorts under short tunics!

Love yourself!

Seriously try to love yourself.

(I had someone today inquire about my painted nails at work and I told them that I don't always conform to what people think males should and shouldn't do.  And that even though it scares the heck out of me and I still think I am going to be pitchforked and torched, that I am trying hard to love myself.  And that having my nails painted and presenting as male is something I do to try and help myself to love myself.)

So seriously, do something to help you love yourselves!!

Makeup Brush Cleaning

Being as I only wear makeup on occasion I often neglect to take care of my makeup brushes properly.  Time seems to get away from me and before I know it months, or possibly even a year or more will go by in-between my brush cleanings.  This is really not a good thing.  I mean take a look at my uncleaned brushes above.  Um.... yuck!!!!  Besides that they are obviously quite dirty, what you can't see is all of the bacteria that are squirming around on those icky brushes.

Think about it for a minute.  We use these brushes to apply makeup to our faces, which, even if clean, contain lots of bacteria.  We brush it all around, and then most likely, like me, we put our brushes back into whatever holds them.  And then they sit.  Yuck!  Ick!

Okay, so anywho.... here is my setup as I finally got around to cleaning my brushes:

You can see the simplicity of it.  A cup of clean plain water, some regular makeup cleanser, and a dirty brush.  This happens to by one of my dirtier brushes that is used for my foundation.  My brush is from Urban Decay.  It is the Good Karma Radial Blurring Brush.  I am using Clinique's Rinse-Off Foaming Cleanser.  The process is fairly simple.  I wet the brush, then swirl it around in a glob of the makeup remover, and then rinse the brush in the cup of water.

I will then rinse out the brush under running water until it runs clear.  Lastly, I will gently squeeze out the water with a soft clean towel and lay the brush on it's side over the edge of a counter for it to air dry.  Generally by the next morning they are ready to go.

Of course I would expect my foundation brush to be extremely dirty as I use a liquid foundation that obviously soaks deeply into the brush.  Thus the nice dark milk-chocolate colored water that I get while rinsing out the brush.  But another brush that also needs to be cleaned frequently is my eye shadow brush.

With the eye shadow brush (from Urban Decay's Naked 2 Palette) it is possibly even more important that you clean it regularly.  With that brush, you swirl it in the color, apply it to your eyes, and then if you are like me, you will put it back into the eye shadow and gather some more product before applying it to your eyelids again.  This means that the brush touches your face and then goes back into the product, transferring anything on your eyelids into the product.  Um.... a bit of yuck!

So upon cleaning my eye shadow brush, here is the cup of water with that process:

As you can obviously see.  It is important to regularly clean your brushes.  If I really thought all that much about the ickiness factor I would probably clean my brushes WAY more often!  As it is, I generally clean them about once every month or two.  My wife, who uses her makeup almost daily cleans her brushes more.  Which is probably a really good thing to do!!

But what you need to remember is not the amount you use your brushes, but the amount of time in between cleanings.  Even if you only use it once, and then store it for an extended period of time, bacteria will most likely be growing on it.  If you then go and use it, you will be smearing that bacteria all over your face.  Which can cause all sorts of skin problems for you!

So, point being.... I should clean my brushes more often!  And maybe you should too!

My brushes after cleaning has finished:

Okay, that's it folks!

Love you!

Love yourself!

Love your brushes!

Bracelets, Bracelets, & Even More Bracelets!!!

Work, work, work!!  I'm so funny!  Why?  Well..... I didn't have to work a couple of weeks ago, but I volunteered for the contract, and thus worked I did.  Then this past week, the same thing happened.  Next week, I'm back to my regular employment.  All of this wondrous work has left me a bit stressed out, a bit more moolah in the bank, but a bit tense.  So how did I spend my weekend?  Working!  Ha!

Well, is it really work when you love it?  Woodworking is quite a passion of mine and thus, I spent Saturday and Sunday finally figuring out how to make myself some bracelets.  It is something that I have pondered for quite some time.  I really like, well maybe love, silver bangles, but alas, my largish man hands basically prevent me from owning any!  Low I was sad that I couldn't fit into my mother's bequeathed silver bangles.

Anywho.... I figured that maybe the easiest way for me to have some cool solid bracelets would be to make them myself.  I toiled away for a couple of days, and figured out several different ways to make some, and a couple of ways to NOT make them!  When they explode off the lathe, you kind of figure out pretty quick that you shouldn't do that!

So.... I'm pondering opening an Etsy store and selling them in custom sizes and materials.  I figure that I could pretty much make them in any size, thickness, and materials.  It would be good for us transgender folk, as well as cisgender people.  Hmm.... maybe I could figure out how to fit that into the other ridiculous amount of things that I do.

Which kind of makes me think.... maybe I just like to work.

Hmmm...... enjoying work huh?

Well, enjoying working, maybe not always enjoying the work.

Does that even make sense?

Love you!

Lover yourself!

Love work?

Sparkly Pink Lipstick

Tunic - Guess - Similar

Tank Top - Guess - Similar

Skirt - Guess - Similar

Shoes - Rocket Dog - Similar

Belt - ???? - Similar

In my previous post I wrote about being off at one of my jobs, upon my return to my house Jules asked what I wanted to do, and uh, of course I said - shopping!!  I had two days at home before I was off to another work function for the next week, so even though it was predicted to be over 100 degrees we went for it.

We left early, arrived when the outlets opened, and shopped for a few hours until the heat became too unbearable.  I realized during this trip that I have a bit of a Coach purse obsession.  While strolling through the store I was interested in only about four or five different purses, that I was seriously considering purchasing!  I ended up getting two, which I am sure I will show you at some point.

Upon arriving home, I went out, took my photos for this outfit, and then took this photo of our weather center:

So, uh, yeah, it was a bit hot out there on this day!  A not so perfect shopping day at an outside outlet mall in central California!!  Goodness me it was hot.

The lipstick in these photos is a tester from Urban Decay.  It is Vice Lipstick - Big Bang - Metalized.  Normally I wear the same fairly neutral colored lipstick from Clinique.  But on this super hot day, I thought the bright sparkly pink worked great!!


Love you!

Love yourself!

Only kind of love super warm temps!

Public Relations

Sometimes I feel as though I am in public relations simply by stepping outside of my door.  Well, maybe even when I am not stepping outside my door; as in my previous post on Register.com.  It's similar to a thought I heard Dennis Prager discussing once.  While I am not a lock-step believer in everything that he says, this one time he said something along the lines of - 'if you are a member of a minority group then you have a responsibility to be an ambassador for your group.'

Clearly many people will disagree with this thought, and at times I have felt similarly.  But the more and more I go out and interact with the general public, and the more and more people I come out to in my personal life, the more I realize that I can help people out.  I can help out transgender people, and cisgender people as well.  How so?  By being an ambassador.

The reality of many transgender people is that they are in super stealth mode.  Super stealth mode for many transgender people is to even deny that they are transgender.  They are the folks who in the privacy of their own home don some clothing or mannerisms typically associated with the opposite gender.  They may underdress (wear clothing typically associated with the opposite gender underneath their typical gender clothing.)  Or they may go out fully dressed as the opposite gender but not want anyone they know to discover that, including their spouses.

The other type of stealth transgender person is one who dresses as the opposite of their birth gender and does not want anyone to know that they were born and identified as the opposite gender of their presentation.  These people tend to be those who transition to the other gender and do not want anyone to know that they have been anything but the gender they choose to present as.

In no way am I wanting to criticize these people for their choices.  There are very legitimate reasons to remain stealth.  Health, welfare, safety, are very serious concerns for the majority of the transgender community, which dictate the need for stealth.

But me..... I am in a bit of a different position.  I live the majority of my life in an in-between mode.

My standard appearance while out camping recently!!

This tends to place me in a bit of a unique position; the ability to be an ambassador.  I don't have to be an ambassador.  I don't need to be an ambassador.  But I CAN be an ambassador.

This past week I found myself working in one of the jobs I am contracted to do.  I am being contracted to work with others within my profession and to coach them to improve their effectiveness.  I worked with them last year and it happened to come up that I consider myself to be transgender, but I did not go into further explanation.  During this past week I wanted to show them some photos of me fully cross dressed.

Why?  Isn't that the big question?  Why out myself to these people?  I am supposed to be coaching them. They are supposed to be able to look up to me as an exemplar within our profession.  I am supposed to be a professional!  And do you know what?  Those are some of the main reasons that I felt it to be important to come out.
 
And besides have you looked around us lately?  Have you seen the hatred and vitriol from some about transgender people?  I have, and I am disgusted by it.  But in all fairness, it is easy to hate something that you don't know, it is easy to hate someone that you don't know.

So...... a big reason for me to continue coming out to people, EVEN WHEN I DON'T NEED TO, is to put a face to a label.  It is far easier to hate an idea, to hate the idea of a transgender sicko using the ladies room for prurient purposes, than it is to hate me.

Hi... I am one of the faces of the label.  I will own the word transgender.  And I want people that know me, to know who I am, to know when they are hating upon an idea, they are hating me.

I will stand up, slowly, but surely, and give people a face to an unknown.

Oh and BTW,  what did I show the folks this past week?  The photos from this set.  The comments from the three people I came out to this past week was "wow, nice legs."


Images:
http://thebluediamondgallery.com/a/ambassador.html
https://www.flickr.com/photos/78447097@N03/10888776353