The Five Versions of Becky

Becky is, to a large extent, a digital entity. In reality at the moment I only answer to the name "Becky" about one night in a sixty, but virtual Becky exists all the time.

24/7 you can see her pictures, or browse her web site, or send her an email. This Becky (I'm tempted to call her something like CyberBecky to avoid confusion with the real flesh-and-blood Becky, but let's just make it clear that from now on when I'm talking about Becky I'm talking about the virtual version of me) is like my Electric Monk.

Douglas Adams invented the Monk in his book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency as a labour-saving device for a technologically advanced society. In this society they had devices to do every tedious task, from VCRs to watch tedious television for them, to the Monk to believe in things for them. The Monk believed in things so people didn't have to. In the book he went wrong, and started to believe in all kinds of things. It's a great read, but I digress.

Virtual Becky cross-dresses so that I don't have to. I get some of the caché of being an active full-time transvestite without the tedious daily shaving, making up and dressing bit.

There have been several versions of Virtual Becky, as my transvestism has changed, and technology and my relationship to it has evolved.

Becky 0.1 Alpha

This was pre-release, and actually pre-internet. This early version of Becky was the subject of stories, basic tranny fantasies, written furtively on MacWrite and stored on a carefully hidden floppy disks.

You think that's weird? This first version of Virtual Becky was weird. Over time as Becky became more "real", Virtual Becky became less weird. But here, right back at the beginning, Becky was a very private, very odd, thing.

Actually, it was actually a bit weirder than that...

I found this little program that wrote random sentences, based on fairly complex grammatical rules. I re-wrote this program to make up random tranny fantasies with Becky as the subject. Because then it wasn't me making me dress up, it was the computer telling me to, do you see? Do you see? I'm not a transvestite... it's the computer making me do it!

Er... yeah... pretty weird, now I think about it.

Becky 0.5 Beta

Fast-forward quite a few years and I've discovered the Internet. At first I'm happy to treat it as a read-only medium, voraciously hunting down the tranny fiction that other people had posted. I remember looking at tranny sites a bit like this one and thinking it was all very interesting but it wasn't really for me. Because I wasn't like those transvestites who went out and did stuff, it all existed in my head and that's where I was happy to keep it.

I still had the creative urge to create "tranny interest" stuff, and I started to make "captioned images" with Photoshop. They followed quite a simple theme, a picture of a real girl with a caption that suggested she was actually a boy. Actually "caption" isn't really the right word, they were little stories. Some of them even had plots! ... Well maybe not plots as such, but definitely a form of narrative.

But yeah, still deeply weird.

The difference this time was I was sharing them with other people. I set up a little group on Lycos (remember when Lycos had groups?) to publish the captioned images to. It was quite a popular little group (by the standards of these things), and for the first time there were people who "knew" me as Becky, albeit only as an online persona.

Joanna knows me from back then. She's probably got a few captions of mine from back then that could really embarrass me if they ever saw the light of day... but we have enough dirt on each other to ensure mutual distruction!

After a while I started to get to know via chat some of the people who were reading my captions, and struck up online friendships.

One of the people I got chatting to was a guy called Jay, whose went by the femme name of Jade and the online name of Jaded. Jaded because he'd done the whole "out every night" tranny thing and got tired of the whole scene.

One day I really must write properly about Jay. He was instrumental in helping me find a proper place for Becky in my life, and I owe him a lot. Unfortunately he died suddenly of a heart attack a few years back, just as I was getting on to the tranny scene, and I never got to meet Jade en-femme.

Becky 0.9 (Release Candidate A)
Through the gentle encouragement of Jay, I was eventually persuaded to go on my first ever "proper" tranny shopping trip. Within a day I'd made my second trip to Transformation (the first was back in the Becky 0.1 days and involved a hideous velour maid's outfit) and bought a set of nasty silicon boobs and an M&S bra to keep them in.

Becky still wasn't out. But she was making tentative steps in that direction. I'd joined the Angels Yahoo group and had started talking properly about my transvestism. This was a major step. Up until now Becky had been just a fantasy, a mental construct who formed the subject of silly stories revolving around being made to dress up. For the first time I was admitting that I wanted to dress up, and that was a real watershed.

Becky 1.0
Within months I'd made my first outing, and within days of that outing I'd bought the beckysweb domain and set up this site. It was basically just a place to show off my coveted first makeover pictures, but I put a little thought into the design (I went for the "deliberately crap" look... it's served me well ever since) and I was quite happy with the result.

Thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, you can get an idea of what my site used to look like all those years ago. Some of the pictures are broken, but it still kinda works.

Version 1 of Virtual Becky lasted quite a while, with just minor increment upgrades. I kept going out, and I kept posting pictures. Each new set of pictures had a bit of a background story to accompany them, but I didn't really say much about me, I wasn't happy revealing too much about Simon, or what I really thought about stuff.

I also started sticking other stuff on the site, the tranny licence dates from about Becky 1.2.

Becky 2.0

The latest, and current, version of Becky was brought about by sticking a blog onto the site, and then realising I actually had to write stuff to fill it. Suddenly I realised that to have a blog that was anything more than "what club Becky went to this week" I'd need to write about me, and that meant writing about Simon as well as Becky, and re-incorporating Simon and Becky into one entity.

Thus Virtual Becky completed a arc, starting as a very private thing in my head, moving out onto the web, then further out into the real world and finally home again. Now she's in my head and "out there".

It seems to be working like this.

But I feel vague twinges, like things are going to change. I wonder what Becky 3.0 will be like.

...

I kinda wrote this in the hope that other people might be able to relate... maybe not to the weirder bits, but in general. Have you gone through your own "ages" online?