What a woman thinks of getting help.

My mother was a tough cookie. War nurse, mother of five, outspoken opponent of racism, the list goes on. But I believe there was always a confusion about what amount of help a woman should properly expect or ask for in any given situation. She rarely asked for help. She was able-bodied. But the term "weaker sex" is not apparently for nought. As a female now I can note that I feel a huge sphere of dependence on help all around me, that in almost any situation there can come about a margin by mmy routine ways come up short of some objective. This was never apparent when I was a male.

My mother made light of her needs for help. She had a little French phrase she repeated in mock desperation whenever she seemed to be at such a point in her routine as I mention above. It was, "au secours!" I may not be spelling it right. It means, I believe, "oh, help!"

Because she made light of needing help I always thought of this as an indication that she really didn't ever need help. It was a quickly drawn conclusion that I never gave a second thought to.

But the whole matter rests squarely on the commitment of this civilization to a strict division of labor in marriage between husband and wife. If a partner has been raised to keep a certain such division of labor as a good agreement through every up and down, that partner will be able to mind his own part of the marriage without having to speak about unexpected variances of the division, that is, ask for help. I don't believe I can recall a single incident of my mother asking for help from my father. With men it seems to be a llittle different. They are expected to become a part of the industrial world where division of labor is a vast enterprise itself, and one in which innovations, which lead very easily to new divisions of labor, are of the utmost importance at the larger, or outer, levels of that world. So men have evolved an easy familiarity with unexpected needs for help, and know how to ask for it without distracting hesitation. In my family this has led to disaster, as my father expected my mother to adapt to his changing role in the industrial world as political developments led to new feelings in the world about types of people, in particular African Americans, and my mother was hard pressed to jump when he said to on such matters. Instead, she got on a soap box at the dinner table to bolster her defensive position that she knew would not fly with my father, but her need for maintaining a comfortable home environment required this soap boxing to prevent a gradual erosion of that comfort. Perhaps it was wise. What happened instead of gradual erosion was sudden death. My father blew up one day, when family circular paths of political leaning brought everything to a focus, and left the house for good.

But my mother's and father's habits of help both suffered no ill effects and they both lived out the divorce that followed in relative comfort.

But as a trans gender female I have a great amount of groundwork to do to open myself up to the female way with help. I must learn that my immediate impulse in speech, which carries the ease of asking for help without fuss, is in need of repair. The male world has wrecked the achievements of my female impusles, more valuable impulses, for me, than the male ones I trumped up to meet the muster. If I don't listen to voices as crying out for help I can never hear my own doing the same.

My first estimate of my self was as a female.

When I was very young I was very smart. I saw that my mother's speech was tied up with her mobility, that she talked things through as she encountered them. My father's speech was not reflective of his mobility. It was drab and slow moving by comparison with my mother's speech.

For this reason, I speculate, I was forced to select my mother's example for my sexual identity.

Astonishing!

But I think it is true.

I got into my mother's bureau and looked longingly at her lingerie. The smell was intoxicating. Between the ages of five and sixteen I was sexually active as a female. Wearing my mother's lingerie was so powerful a stimulus that it always made me have an orgasm. I had to wrap my organ in rags to be certain not to soil the clothes and give myself away. Actually I was caught twice and my father yelled at me that if I was caught again he would parade me in her clothes out in front by the street. The second time I was caught it moved my mother to sob and plead with me not to do it again or she would tell my father.

I'm sorry, but the alternative was to accept my father as my role model. I think he proved in his life that this would have been the greater disaster than me acting out the female role. He was fine for my siblings. I needed something more sophisticated.

Of course it was impossible to pursue the complete depth that this tendency needed. I couldn't ask my mother to raise me as a girl. I suppose I knew it was futile, that there was no solution to the problem of plumbing. This combined with the fact that my parents were both outraged by what little they knew about it made it impossible to pursue.

Sex change operations were not done back then, and even now they are more expensive than my family could have afforded. I have mixed feelings about the stigma. On the one hand it leads to humiliation and no one wants that. On the other hand my choosing the female path is a true fact and all my attempts to live a male life have left me wasted and ruined. Being up front about this is the only way I can live in truth, and that means it is the only way to realize my full potential.

I have not gone at female living in any way but those associated with using female clothes to have an orgasm. I don't see myself as physically female or suited to attract men. The path into and out of the transvestite bedroom is for me gender-neutral. Within that gender-neutral path there is the pursuit of stimuli learned from cultural information, not at first a real physical sensation, of the normal male behavior. But there is in it no such solid foundation for me as that of pursuit of the female orgasm.

I am sorry, but that is the way I have become myself. There is no male role-model for me. As a result I have failed to merge into a career path, as that requires a solid foundation in one's physical gender, whether heterosexual or homosexual. I have lived a phantom existence, and it has left me without a place in the world. It is assumed by the masses that because a child is made from the genetic material of both parents that both parents will be the child's best natural role models. In my case this assumption, which I was surrounded by growing up, was a total error, and in adulthood, having passed out of the family environment, it was an assumption that failed to explain my decisions and directions, leaving one big enigma as my whole life story.