Transition all the Way?

Sorry to say this but as a woman I’ve just about had enough of housekeeping. It’s the same old chore, week in week out, all the constant cleaning, sweeping and tidying up. It never ever seems to end. And there’s another job I hate, window cleaning. I just hate cleaning windows I end up doing it almost everyday. I put up with all of this whilst battling with some virus or other, it’s almost every week. I’ve been doing this for so long, certainly since the early 1990’s. When it began, it was all so new and different. Everything was fine and I quite enjoyed some of the chores. Now I’m convinced that it’s time to transition, BACK as it happens, back to where I started from, or almost.



Don't like Windows, nothing against Toshiba :)



By now you might have realised that I’m probably NOT talking about gender transition. Apart from a brief flirtation with a Commodore I began my life computing with an Apple Mac. Back in College, the best way to get your work typed out neat and tidy short of paying a typist was to head down to the orchard. The ‘Orchard’ was a room in college equipped with about 30 apple computers, a cranky dot matrix printer and a loudly chattering daisy wheel where you had to buy your own wheel and ribbon if you wanted to print! I bought a 5.25” floppy disk, learned how to use Wordstar and hey presto I was computing. Sure you had to go onto the College mainframe if you wanted to do anything serious but who on earth would want to read a student assignment on green and white lined paper!

It wasn’t long however before I was lured away through many attractively open windows (well actually only a few at a time - it was only version 3.0 after all!) into the world of the PC and Microsoft. There was always MS-DOS which could run my beloved Wordstar if all else failed but Windows soon took over my life. I thought that I had transitioned once and for all and everything was fine. Now I’m not so sure. Like I said, I have all those problems with those housekeeping chores. Maybe I had made the wrong choice. Was transitioning to a Windows PC such a good idea?

My daughter bought a Mac Book Pro recently at the start of her sophomore year and I was so impressed. That was the beginning of the disenchantment for me. Of late my blogs have gotten way too tedious to write, blogging on my Windows netbook has tried my patience to the limits too many times recently, spending too much downtime while it deals with it’s own problems, fights malware and generally slows down whilst doing things I don’t understand. So, from now on I’ve decided what I want to do. Future blogs will be written and uploaded from my new iPad. The downside might be having to learn how to use new software on a new system. Forgive me if I don’t blog for the next week or too :)

But now the all important question, will I transition all the way? Will I move to living the ‘i’ life 24/7 and never go back to Windows? Possibly not, I’ll still need my PC to transfer data to my new iPad, I can’t afford to buy a Mac Book as well.

Are there any parallels between gender dysphoria and dissatisfaction with your computer operating system? Maybe not at least not on any deep and meaningful level. However it did said me wondering. As it so happens, I’ve always felt the way I do now gender wise and I’ve pretty well always known that I was unhappy to be a girl in a boy’s body. I’m a trans woman. I’ve been transitioning for 7 years and am eagerly looking forward to completing my transition and getting on with the rest of my life. But I’m aware that it’s not the same for everybody and I do know that: it’s okay to NOT be sure, to keep on both modes of existence while you make sure, to wait while you save enough money, to wait while deciding who you really are inside, to hesitate while you discover more or even, shock horror, to find that you are happy seeing things from both sides. I’ve worked alongside many people from the LGBT community and I do know that I welcome the diversity and nature of who people in our rainbow community really are.

Robyn-Jane xx