Chemistry

Excluding SCC, I have been out and about as Petra only thrice this year. Ouch. Well, four times now as of last weekend. I did then rather enjoy things seen through pink lenses, and wrote effusively about the whole pretty pageant here.

Time has been the principal thief of opportunity. Work stuff is planted to rails of my metaphorical farm. The fallow, clovered pastures that Petra did once flourish and frolic in are presently under plough, upturned and nitrogen fixed for commercial purposes. 

I have come to think that work, the way I spend my days has a pretty big impact on my “Petra-ness” beyond simply being a time soak. The impact is behavioral too. Like any job with grazzilions of dollars at stake, the day is composed of a fair amount of adversarial posturing, the odd volley of tactical aggression, and an always-present sense of wariness about things in general. You know, the generalized chest-beating, loud tree-top howling and Samsonite-hurling that corporate Great Apes conduct in the service of the business.

Women can and do succeed in my role, in my industry, so the exercise of masculine traits is not a pre-requisite of success. A little more project nurturing here, a dose of quiet collegial grooming there, terrific female Great Ape behaviors, these work too.

And ya know, dear friends, I am not proposing that one behavior or another is the exclusive domain of one gender or another. I am merely suggesting that having spent about 99% of my life expressing male, those are the behaviors I reflexively lay hand to under pressure. I call frequently on those traits in part because there is so much newness in the work that I need to rely on a lot of background processes, reflexive stuff to keep my higher mind available for the work.

And so “Petra” has been a little less available to the whole me just now.

Darling friend Janie, of CD Janie blog-fame touched on a related topic recently in a series of short, revealing posts starting with Inner Voice deliberating on the process of going rapidly from femme-space to drab-world and back again. Go read. Janie is a star. Do come back then, will you?

These posts struck a chord in me. It seems that while there is a certain amount of biology that manifests itself in the life of the gender-curious, there is a pretty big beaker of chemistry in the mix too. My brain chemistry, just now, is wired more for my familiar male life than it is for wonderful explorations of the less familiar, the more feminine.

I will tell you this though:

Getting out for a gorgeous evening really has the effect of shaking that beaker up and generally catalyzing and effervescing things. I have spent this past week more distracted by thoughts of a dreamy nature than I have been in a good long time. I popped into a shop in drab mode and snared another gorgeous new outfit at a shocking price (pictured Harvest Gold Ann Taylor skirt for a dumbfounding $7.00, 8% of original retail and a smart top too). Chatted with the (typically) gorgeous sales assistant at length. She was in a sad state having just found out that she was on duty at Midnight, Thanksgiving Day for the increasingly insane rigors of Black Friday.

I wanted to touch her hand and say it will be ok more than I wanted to throttle the throat of the insensitive, short sighted lemming at HQ who thought that an upmarket woman’s boutique should follow in Wal-Mart’s less than stylish footprints. I drove home closer to the speed limit, leaving more room between me and the next vehicle, weaving less and exercising patience more. I found a tiny tributary of pretty thought to paddle around in and express in a product review for my friends at Guilty Pleasures.

Lovely things, lovely feelings. I hope that as more and more of my work becomes a little more reflexive to me, that I will have more room in my higher mind, room for Petra. It feels good when this part of me has room to stretch out and touch things as surely and gracefully as she can. I suspect that, with time, I will be able to employ my fortunate access to wells of feminine strength and wile more easily, more purposefully in my everyday life. Better living through Chemistry indeed.

The Invisible Plane

I wonder about Wonder Woman. Yeah, I know … take a number.

Natives of the U.S. of A are of course familiar with her. I am not certain how far beyond these fruited plains the jurisdiction of the Hall of Justice Superheroes extended, but I suspect that her image is familiar to most visitors here.

For my fashionable friends of the natal, full-time female variety, perhaps you regarded her rich black mane and impossibly voluptuous figure with a degree of teenage insecurity and wished for yourselves all that she had going for her. Look back and smile now. You have more variety in your wardrobe, great gal pals and rewarding romantic lives. In these key quality of life indicators, you have Wonder Woman beat by miles.

For my gender plural, Cross Dressing friends, perhaps you, like me spent more time thinking on her boots, bracelets and bustier. Fair enough. This fashion motif is evergreen, classic and wholesome.

And for the kinky minority of you with periodic imaginings of exactly what she might be able to do with her magic lasso, well I am not the judging kind. Just be sure though to have agreed on a safe word before engaging in a life of crime would you my dear?

Now, where was I? Ah yes, the Invisible Plane.

A great idea at first blush, but fraught with issues. Parking for example. Skateboarders and minivans would be dinging the heck out of it. Presumably, snow would accumulate on wings and fuselage. I suppose that having a hangar would solve those problems, but then neighbors would know that you had a plane and start pestering you for rides here and there.

Filling up the tank too would be a little unsettling. There you are, holding the pump handle aloft, gas disappearing into the ether. Passers-by would consider you mad, quite mad altogether. Let us therefore assume that you could perform routine maintenance in a private setting, yes? One hopes.

Now, for some unassailable logic:

If: Wonder Woman’s plane can make fuel invisible,
Therefore: Wonder Woman’s plane can make Wonder Woman invisible too.

And yet it did not. Why not?

Here my thoughts went this morning after catching up on a recent post from my beguiling friend Janie titled “Past Passing”. Do go read it would you (and then rush right back). I got a little stumped leaving a comment on the post because as per usual, Janie brushed up against the far frontiers of figuring a lot of stuff out. She seems to be in pursuit of a Grand Unifying Theory of gender, beauty and etc. A fine use of time, say I, and I too aspire to achievement in this daunting and complex field.

In any event, what I could not fit into a cogent comment on that post I felt I might make a complete hash of on my own damn blog. Hence the whole invisible plane theme here.

To one degree or another, we Cross Dressers and everyone somehow affiliated with the TG Super Friends Hall of Justice are met with the same choice when we present to the world. We, at moments at least, long for complete invisibility. And perhaps through skill, practice and fortunes of physicality we can be invisible, fully cloaked and able to infiltrate, unseen, unnoticed by those around us as anything other than that which we (at least temporarily) aspire to be: a beautiful woman. To “disappear” thusly is exhilarating. I say this because I know from happy experience that I have.

And yet, something is missing, something is undone when the invisible plane confers invisibility on its pilot.

I believe that Wonder Woman chose to remain visible in her plane. And it must be said, if I had her figure I wouldn’t leave the house without a brass band and a lighting crew heralding my arrivals. But yes, Wonder Woman made a choice, and filled a need, a need we all have: a need to be noticed for who we are.

When the bad guys saw Wonder Woman hurtling towards them at super-sonic speeds, you know their behavior changed, and pronto too. Bolt cutters and switchblades were dropped in place and the cads ran for the shadows. If Wonder Woman had been cloaked perfectly within her plane, things would have changed, but perhaps too late. Crimes would be committed and the innocent would remain cowering behind locked doors.

I for one have managed to lose (most of) my hang ups about passing. I do my best with what I have and take care to do things thoroughly. Out of respect for the fairer sex, I will always emulate them as completely and perfectly as I can.

But if my plurality, my fuller dimensions are ever to have freer dominion in this happy world of ours, my plurality must at some level, on some occasions, in new settings be as visible as good old Wonder Woman was in her sleek jet.

Otherwise, the bad guys will keep up with the capers, and the innocent remain cooped up inside, hoping for trouble to pass.

I am not a firebrand, a revolutionary, or a martyr (I think the whole martyr look thing was just done to death in the Spring/Summer collections of ’06), but I do feel a little responsible for pushing out some boundaries, inches maybe, millimeters likely.

I do imagine a day, 10, 50, 200 years down the road, tomorrow even, where beauty definitions will be much broader (no pun) and less tied to what we think of as masculinity and femininity today. I do imagine a day where how we express our fuller dimensions will be viewed as less aberrant, less threatening, less … well less everything that confronted you and I on our way to where we are this day.

But that happy day will not come with Wonder Woman invisible in the plane.

A new Autumn approaches rapidly. I am looking forward to it immensely. I will be ever vigilant in looking out for fellow Hall of Gender Justice stalwarts on patrol, making the world a more beautiful place, and safer for us all. You will be pushing boundaries out and bad guys further into the shadows with each step you take. You do have Super Friends, whether you have met them or not.

I imagine that I will be meeting with many of you at SCC in just a little over a week. Please watch out for my plane when parking yours.

Photo Credits to Comic Vine here and here, and much love to the nice people at Marvel.

Cross Dressing Character

I sometimes look back on older thoughts to see how well they true up with the present. The very first thing I wrote for this blog is still up on the right sidebar. Check it out with me now …

This desire has been with me forever now. It washes in and draws me out. I often swim against the tide. I sometimes let it pull. I don't believe that its going away though, and so its time for me to court it formally. And in giving it this space, perhaps understanding it better.

The desire I referred to was Cross Dressing. The tidal metaphor seemed a real natural.

I was moved to write about all of this after a very transformative transformation session. I had just then put myself in the very skilled hands of a woman who operates a Cross Dressing service. It had been 20 years or more since I had gone in for a top-to-toe, hair-to-heels treatment. Something tectonic happened. I realized (finally) that trying to keep the shifting plates from reorganizing my landscape was a poor use of my limited resources. Additionally, I rather liked the way the new landscape looked and felt. I felt complete. Becalmed and whole like never before.

That feeling was too powerful to not pursue. The pursuit seemed worthy of writing about too. Hence, all the bloggity goodness here.

I pointedly became outcome neutral about what Cross Dressing might mean to me. The thinking was to let the waves sweep me where they would, and have a good look around whatever shore they washed me up on. I realized I was running the risk of emerging in some unknown Illyria, as shipwrecked as Viola, with no bit parts left over for my own Cesario. Cross Dressing is a common gateway to gender reassignment after all. I worried, but went with it.

As it happens, I am fine with the largely masculine casting I have been assigned in my own drama. I am neither a big romantic lead or a tragically doomed prisoner of fate: just a reasonably well liked-protagonist with a flinty eye toward the human condition and the odd saucy aside for the groundlings in the cheap seats.

In this drama, I have the wonderful privilege, like Viola, of the odd costume change that effects an alteration of gender presentation. Like Viola, I see the world around me with the one set of eyes, and interpret the world with one (reasonably) constant heart. Like Viola, I have seen just how differently the world responds to me depending on whether I am presenting with feminine or masculine surfaces. Lastly, like Viola, I have found that I can present either surface without betraying anything within: I am essentially the same character always, and the clothes say less about me than I thought they might.

Yes, the importance of the surfaces, of the exteriors seems to have diminished to me. This has been an interesting and surprising finding.

What I find most surprising of late though is what is going on in the interior precincts: It is quite noisy in there.

I am practically under siege of my own thoughts. There is a steady, near constant storming and stirring of the mind having to do with matters related to dressing, gender, fashion, beauty and my relationship to it all. Like rain, these unbidden thoughts seep in through cracks in the day, through the brief interludes of idleness. Like wind, they gust and buffet when they damn well please, regardless of how busy I am and how much more my thoughts need to be on other issues.

This state of affairs has persisted for about 4 or 5 months now. My initial reflex was to think of this as a “problem”, something to be railed against (i.e. ...why won’t she just shut the hell up already?...), but I fought against that reflex.

In the same way as I initially let the desire to dress sweep me away, I decided to let my mind work as it will. Intuitively it seems to me that fighting against tireless, ceaseless forces is a sure path to madness, and a path I will be happier not taking.

I am now, only recently coming around to a model of understanding all the weather between my ears. And it goes like this:

At the time that I gave my surfaces the privilege of untrammeled exploration and presentation, I gave my interiors the same permissions. Perhaps I have sparked a reorganization of what happens behind the scenes, between the ears.

The brains of men and women famously and provably behave differently. Gender is a profound influencer of thought. Neural paths and cerebral processes that were suppressed and closeted as my wardrobe and desires were for long, long years have been given a wake up call.

When I made room on the surface for 2 distinct presentation layers, it took time and labor for it all to “normalize”. Perhaps a similar process is happening within. I therefore should not be surprised at all the noise. It is construction season in there you know.

I wonder if, in the fullness of time, my surfaces, my character and the very workings of my mind will all harmonize and seem fully in place, at peace and poised for whatever comes next. I think so. I am a hopeful sort.

I have remained fundamentally the same character regardless of “costume” I wear for the odd scene. I think that my character is better and fuller having access to “Petra”. My experiences have amplified some good things about me (empathy) and moderated some bad things (capacity for anger), but I am essentially the same person.

And this is a good thing.

I am glad too, to have access to new reservoirs of empathy for the human condition and a better ability to suppress anger just now as my brain sorts out how to process all of it. They might just come in handy, yes?

Out of Time

I have often thought, dear friends, that my spark of life was ignited a few decades late. Statistically, I am either late Baby Boom or early Generation Jones. Stylistically, I feel like neither. If I had access to a reliable time machine and a good alibi for my absence in the present, I would set the birth dial to the mid-30’s of the last century.

There I would be hitting my adult stride having missed the rigors of the great depression and the horrors of the greater war, slap-dab in the middle of the fat and happy 50’s. Jazz had yet to go off the rails, and drinking at lunch was encouraged. A quick course of Penicillin would get you past the worst class of STD you might happen upon. Dacron polyester fibers were still locked up tight in the laboratories of DuPont in this peak time for Couturiers and their clientele. And hidden just beneath the full, flared cocktail dresses and harmlessly hobbling pencil skirts of the day glimmered the Golden Age of Foundation Garments.

Yum.

Some of the very earliest posts here on Voyages en Rose were reveries to this not so distant past. The historically inclined of you might like to read them here and over here. The hysterically inclined however are encouraged to hang around here for a question of time with less sweep to it for a few moments.

You see, earlier on today I was busy hammering and sawing a Gemini reference into a different bit of writing. I failed. But then I started thinking about Gemini on its own terms. As little as I know (and truthfully care) about Astrology, I wondered if the heavenly twins might have a special message for people who express and experience as male and female.

Research bore fruit quickly. Here are the opening words of the # 1 ranked Google return for “Gemini characteristics”:

Gemini go everywhere together, hand-in-hand, symbolizing your dual nature. Our world comes in pairs: good and evil, male and female, in and out, yin and yang -- and you Geminis are living proof. Some might say Gemini are an entanglement of paradoxes, but the truth is that Gemini have an easy acceptance of opposites. Gemini world is one of duality. Gemini can like this and that, one thing and its opposite.

Well, that all sounded lovely, and there is more that rings true. You might want to read up on just how ambi Gemini is here. In any event, this skeptic was now paying full attention. Clearly, I am Gemini.

Except that I am not.

I just celebrated my birthday which makes me Taurus. I must tell you that I have never felt comfortable or natural in the constellation of my birth. If there was such a thing as Zodiacal Reassignment Surgery I would take a part time job to pay for it. I suppose I will just continue to live the lie. Alas.

But there is something that will make living that lie easier for me, and this I what I request of you as a belated birthday gift: Take a second, please, to answer this weeks poll. What is your sign?

We should be evenly distributed across the calendar, but we might not be. The more of you that participate in the poll, the more evenly we should be distributed. But, again, we might not be. Would it not be an interesting thing to find a larger than expected number of us gathered in the Third House, under Mercury, dualities and all?

I would not ask except in the furtherance of science. Or sceance. If you happen to write a lovely and popular blog catering to the CD/TG set, would you mind posting a link there and helping me jack the numbers a little? The more the merrier and the more accurate. Results and observations this time next week.

Comments, as always, desired and greatly appreciated.

A Cross Dressers personality

In prior posts (here, there, and o yeah, over here too) I have spoken about The Gender Analyzer. The Gender Analyzer is a piece of web gadgetry that makes an educated guess as to the gender of the author of a blog by examining the language used and how its put together.

I was typically a little delighted with “fooling” the machine, but more delighted by confirming my own feelings of, and pride about what I believe to be a healthy mix of gender characteristics in my outlook on life. Gender Analyzer said at different times that it had a 68%, 74%, and most recently, an 82% degree of certainty that Voyages en Rose was written by a woman. Nice.

Staci-Lana of Femulate (86%, go Staci!) directed me to another tool/toy from some people that use the same technology as The Gender Analyzer, over at uclassify.com. Amongst the tools at this site is something called the Typealizer. Typealizer does a lot of the same things in terms of analyzing the writing for “tells” about the gender of the author, but it goes a step or two further.

It goes in fact into the same territory as those personality typing tests that many of us have may have doddled through on the way to winning a job, or to addressing somebody in HR’s concern that we are perhaps doing the wrong one. Job that is. Ah yes. Personality typing. One of the grand-daddies is the Myers-Briggs. Not too far in the shadows is the Keirsey. There are countless others, but these, I am familiar with, and there is a Keirsey outcome in this post.

I have thought, in the past, when taking such tests that I was driving repeatedly past the same building having taken four left turns to get back where I started. And having forgotten how I answered the seemingly same question the first, and second time around. It always seemed to me that these exercises are a better test of whether you have control over your sweat glands and blush response than they are determinative of ones personality, but I am happy to cede to the professionals what they profess to know. There must be something in all the smoke and mirrors.

So imagine my delight at being able to take the test without a career hanging in the balance, and even better, minus all the sweaty and blushy bits. Simple as popping the Voyages en Rose URL into a box, and in less time than it takes to buff a nail, presto:

ESFP – The Performers. More on that in a moment, but first off, I love that they got my fashion sense right and placed me in my natural environment. An attractively dressed young thing with fine taste in boots and a bubbly beverage held happily on a bar. Bullseye! I love these people.

The language used to summarize my type follows:

ESFP = The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to
pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics,
bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don’t like
to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves. They enjoy work
that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They
tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can
make it hard for them in management positions.

Hmmm. Killing me softly, with their code, telling my whole life, on their site, killing me softly, with their code. They just get better by the minute. The observation on management is really trenchant.

I have quite pointedly pursued work that gave me as much responsibility for outcomes as I could handle, with the absolute minimum responsibility for the well-being and productivity of direct reports, otherwise known as people.

People are a daunting responsibility. I take it very seriously when responsible for a persons career track and general happiness in the workplace. I get better at it with time and practice, but its about the only aspect of my work life that I have constant second thoughts about. I truly worry that I over-said this, or under-stressed that. Some people call it throttle-control, which I sometimes took to mean controlling the urge to throttle a co-worker, but turns out to be about the even, constant and predictable application of force against an objective. Ah well, clearly this ESFP bar-fly has much to learn.

Further into the analysis, and with a familiar hand on my thigh, our newish friends at Uclassify lean in close and share some sweet uttering’s on the very workings of the pink fluff between my ears. Pictured here:

This visual happily sorts well with how I think my brain works. You will note an overcompensation to the lower left quadrant. Order, habit, detail, all of the things I focus on, perpetually, to sort out the otherwise busy jumble of impulses that I am besieged by when not mindful of my, well, my mind. Resolute concentration on how things are and fit together help me get along reasonably well in the face of my own self-diagnosed case of CDADHD. That would be Cross Dressers Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

In any event, if you blog, go ahead and learn something about yourself here. And if you do not blog, but visit my blog from time to time, I am glad that the personality you see expressed here is in some way curious and interesting to you. Come again.

Happy dressing and everything else ….

The Technology of Cross Dressing

It is natural that we think of ourselves as living in unique times, and in unique circumstances. Many will agree with me when I suggest that if there is something that defines our time today as unique, that thing would be technology. More specifically, the technology underpinning the communications explosion facilitated by what we think of as the Internet. “www” is, by any measure, a unique signature of our time.

But technology has long had an impact on the lives of cross dressers. Sadly much of this rich history lays obscured beneath the rustling crinolines of yesteryear, lost to historians and orphaned from our present day.

We all learned, for example, as school kids that the very first words uttered into a telephone by the great innovator Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas Watson were “Watson come here I need you”.

What is less well known though is the shocking rest of the conversation. Watson replied:

“I’m busy dammit what do you want?”

“I need help with my zip”

Well baby, we’ve come a long way. As I approach my own mid-century mark I marvel at how different life can be today, for the transgendered, for cross dressers, and by extension, anyone who at anytime in their life asks themselves this question:

“Am I the only person in the world who does this or feels that”

There was a time in my life where I could only assume that I was the only boy in the world curious about the touch and feel and sensations conferred by women’s clothing. I had no evidence to the contrary.

In my early teen years, I was startled, slack-jawed really while reading a letter to the editors of Penthouse Magazine that began predictably enough with… I am a sophomore at a small mid-western college …. but moved from the mid-west to the darkest recesses of my imagination a couple of paragraphs in, when our hero confessed to how explosively good it had felt to be dressed as a woman by the random (ed. and of course totally hot, playful but somehow menacing, wise beyond her years and yet coltish still) girl from a dorm across campus.

No literary merit in the letter of course, but I felt at the time I suspect very much the same way as the inhabitants of Easter Island must have in 1722 after 1400 years of complete isolation, all of a sudden other humans just pitch up and say, howdy.

Wow. I am not alone.

This perpetually aroused teenager let his inner detective and amateur anthropologist loose on the world in search of evidence of delicate heel prints and lipstick smears where they might surprise and was not disappointed. With a little digging about, I found a good amount of “specialty literature’ and indeed photographic evidence describing and depicting people in outfits (and positions and predicaments) that I fancied I might like to try out, just to satisfy my curiosity of course. Only until I grew out of it all quite inevitably and naturally.

On the predictable path to that not happening, I was noticing a growing number of increasingly public and outrageous flaunters of gender conventions in the arts and culture spaces. Bowie lead a long parade, Boy George, Adam Ant and David Sylvain and countless more made up and laced up, threatening the very moral foundations of our society by … well, by exploring. Not much of a threat as it happens.

I further found around that time in the classified ads of weekly alternative newspapers a growing number of entrepreneurs, veritable Florence Nightingales’ (except that they might dress you as the nurse) who might be engaged with to actually transform the willing into the woman of ones dreams. This discovery was available to me though in part because of my stridently urban life style. I lived in a city. A big city, a cool city, a rich city. 50 miles from where I was may as well have been Easter Island. Isolated, unknown, untouched.

Fast forward, not too far, to today. Most of the world, certainly all of you reading here today, live in a massive city. The greatest metropolis ever imagined and perhaps never imagined. A city of 3, perhaps 4 billon people with another few billion knocking at the gates and sure to take up residence in the next pretty flutter of a generational eyelash. And while many will not have the luxuries of time and comfort in large enough measures to explore their multi-faceted gender compositions, more do have, and many more in the future will have those luxuries. How much easier is the discovery today, and how many more people will make that always unique discovery that they are not alone?

And now, not being alone, what do we say and do with each other, and with the rest of the world through our technologies?

More heavy ponderings along these lines in the never too distant future.

Happy dressing, and etc ...

The Feminine Voice Revisited

I live in a dazzling hall of slightly distorted mirrors. I find reflection interesting and necessary, and am willing to pay for the view with the odd token of self doubt. Periodically, I will receive some unexpected validation from a kind stranger or a near and dear friend, and that has the effect of helping me enjoy the bigger, fuller outward view. Sometimes, though, I very cravenly seek the validation myself which is a strategy fraught with downsides. Like so:

• Positive feedback is cheapened because you asked for it, and
• Negative feedback is amplified because, well, you really did ask for it.

Nonetheless, and knowing well the stakes, I did it again. Faithful followers of these Voyages en Rose may remember the little language exercise I conducted with

GenderAnalyzer.com late last year (here), and earlier this year (here). The Gender Analyzer prompts you to pop your URL into a query box, click something or other, and in about the time required for a single carefully executed nail polish stroke, presto, a quick, and in my case, flattering guess as to the gender of the author of the content on the site.

The last time I mentioned (ed. plugged perhaps?) the Gender Analyzer here, Jon, one of the authors of the sites code was good enough to drop a line about how his digital diviner tells the X’s from the Y’s from a literary perspective. Per Jon:

" Basically it looks on word usage, not sentences. The classifier core is a naive Bayesian classifier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayesian_classification."

I had been hoping to find out that there was something in sentence structure or grammatical conventions employed by the author that would act as reliable “tells”. Failing that, perhaps a lack of profanity or obviously macho swagger in the language in general might tip the scales. Alas, that algorithm does not yet exist, or is only in use at the National Security Agency where it can do no possible good.

I suppose therefore, that any blog that has 103 instances of “pantyhose” (out of a nail-chipping 56,024 blogged words to date) would likely be assumed by a Bayesian Classifier (naïve, jaded or in between for that matter) to be authored by a genetic girl. So big whoop for Petra. I have fooled the analyzer now 3 whole times.

Interesting to your author and editrix though is the news is that I am fooling it better and better each time out. In December, 2008, a very young Petra was felt to exhibit a 68% likelihood of being female. Fast forward to Feb 2009, and Gender Analyzer had ratcheted me up to a 74% certainty of femininity. Yesterday, Voyages en Rose strolled calmly and confidently past the gender cops baring a little thigh without getting clocked, and in fact eliciting an 82% salute which I have to tell you feels to me as though I have just been hit on, and very nicely.

Oprah gets a 72%. Oprah! Cosmopolitan scores 66%. Cosmo! Petra, 82%. 82%!! So hooray for me! Or not. You see the better parts of me really don’t care.

I Cross Dress to look and feel differently beautiful for myself. It is greatly rewarding that I am able to do it well enough to mix with the bigger brighter world outside of my dazzling hall of mirrors from time to time. There is positive affirmation in doing so.

I Write about the experience to help me feel and understand Cross Dressing just a little better. And it helps, truly it does. Importantly though I have met so many nice people here, and learned a great deal from you in the bargain. I know from your visits and notes that we share something wonderful, and are far from alone. Again, more beautiful vistas beyond our private spaces.

So, I think I will leave the Gender Analyzer alone in the future. The real objective should not be to fool anyone or anything. The real objective is to express ourselves fully. Mirrors be damned.

But do allow me one last bit of fun. My politics were referred to in the recent Givenchy post. Liberal is the easy word I suppose. So in a moment of idle devilment, I ran notorious right wing commentator Ann Coulter through the Analyzer. 64% male. I laughed out loud. So go ahead and check your own blog, or other sites of interest, and please leave comments as to your findings and views.

Politics again in this weeks poll (over on your right darlings…). The classifications are far too simplified, and far from standard, but please pick the one that best describes your leanings. I promise not to think of you as smoldering hot liberals, or ice cold conservatives. If you feel attractive to yourselves, you are attractive to me. Results and commentary next week.

Happy dressing, and happy everything else….. Petra

Passing (well … sort of) & other news

Very short post here my lovely and curious friends. As I was doing my daily email, Google Reader, Blog traffic review and general CD/TG snooping I came across 2 things I wanted to share with you.

First, the sad sad news of the lingerie spill on Highway H-1 just outside of Honolulu. A truckload of intimate garments, wind-tossed, tire-spoiled and ditch-begrimed, never to feel the warm touch of flesh. Again, nothing but sad. For full article and video, click here. I imagine myself on the scene dodging traffic in a desperate bid to save the bras.

Next, the happy stuff. In this mornings research I found a neat site. (And I must credit the lovely and talented Lynn Jones whose fabulous "Yet Another T-Girl Blog) can be found here). The Gender Analyzer is a simple online tool that scans websites and offers up an expert opinion on the gender of the author. If you have a blog or want to play with your favorite web sites a little, just press on a new set of nails and click over here.

I did, (minus the nails girls, it’s a busy drab day) and had the analyzer look in on Voyages en Rose. And what do the experts say? (Click on image to enlarge)

I passed. I encourage you all to hum along to your favorite triumphant music and imagine yourself waving to an adoring imaginary audience with your wrist pointed just so and an open hand. That would be Petra just about now.

I glow.

For real, this is interesting to me. I have not edited myself too heavily here. I do a lot of writing professionally and have never considered my gender as an influencer of my style. I have, however, attempted to occupy Petra’s mind while writing here, because it’s a nice way to spend 30 minutes “dressed” without all the effort. Petra needs at least 2 hours to appear and disappear in the real world. Here in the virtual world, she can log in and live it up in snap.

And evidently, she can pass.

And now, I encourage you to imagine my quick pirouette and slightly sassy walk into the sunset on this happy occasion. A last flip of the hair and a wink over my shoulder right your way.

Happy dressing and happy everything else to you.