Taking Becky home to meet Mum

I did it!

Remember a while ago my Mum asked to see some pics of me as Becky? And a bit later I asked for your help picking something suitable? Well, yesterday it all happened.

It's taken me a while because I wanted to get some proper prints done, rather than showing her on an impersonal computer screen. I gave up on my photo printer a while ago when I realised that I hardly used it, and when I did it indiscriminately ruined pictures with ink patterns. So getting good quick prints necessitated a trip to Boots the chemist to use one of their automated print machines. Highly expensive per-print, but perfect for my needs.

I arrived at the machine grasping a Compact Flash card holding half a dozen images I'd decided to print (plus a CD of the same for backup). There was a guy already at the machine. He said he was waiting for some prints to come out, but did I want to use the terminal while he was waiting?

Er, no thanks. I wanted a little bit of privacy for this!

After a few more minutes wait it became clear that none of this guy's prints weren't coming, and the assistant responsible for the photography department was called, a highly courteous and efficient man with very impressive sideburns. I took the chance to wander around the shop looking for holiday essentials.

After 10 minutes browsing, I checked on progress to find the Photo Man sideburn-deep in the innards of the Kodak kiosk (two words beginning and ending in K - how satisfying!), so I decided a trip around town was called for.

A 20 minutes later, with a bag full of holiday essentials that were a lot cheaper than Boots equivalents (good old Wilko's - chavvy but undeniably cheap), and the kiosk was deserted. On closer inspection it was also radiating a general air of brokeness. DAMN!

I took a wander around town some more, taking in the slowly re-forming architecture. When it's finished it will be quite impressive, at the moment it's a bit of a ghost town.

30 minutes later I tried again. The Photo man was back behind his counter grinning from mutton chop to mutton chop, it was working! I left clutching a set of very nice-looking prints.

If getting the prints was tricky, actually showing them to Mum was worse. I'd been invited to my Mum and Dad's for tea, but I didn't really want Dad to be there when I showed mum the pics, and I was pretty certain Mum wouldn't want him to be there either.

After a delicious tea (cold chicken and ham with salad and new potatoes - a Bank Holiday Mum Classic), and a bit of a lounge in front of the TV (Robin Hood Prince of Thieves - a Bank Holiday Telly Classic), Dad left to do Dad Stuff in the garage (painting shelves - a Bank Holiday Dad Classic). Now was the time.

I was as nervous as hell. I think Mum can normally tell when I'm gearing up to say something, and gets nervous too. We sat exchanging small talk about Alan Rickman's excellent sheriff of Nottingham until I finally plucked up courage to show her the envelope of pics.

6 of them, 4 of the ones I showed you before plus a couple of extras of me out with friends. I decided that they were all good pics, and maybe seeing lots of different aspects of Becky it would help her see it wasn't a lonely thing.

She made almost exactly the right noises.

"Wow!"

"How do you look so good?"

"I'd never recognise you!"

"You do your makeup so well!"

"It looks like you have a really fun time."

It was really nice. I don't take for granted the effort it must have taken to see her son like that. We chatted for a while, she asked me some questions to fill in the gaps of what she already knew. I told her who the other people in the pictures were, and told her what their boy names were so she could link it to when I'd mentioned visiting them in the past. Giving boy names and girl names for each tranny led to the obvious question...

"What's your name as a girl?"

Which threw me for a second. The person who chose my name 33 years ago was asking me what other name I'd chosen for myself. It felt weird.

"Becky, mum."

She didn't really comment on that. Probably a bit too weird for her too. We talked about wigs for a bit, and how my mum only owned 4 items of makeup (I think I have her beat about 10-fold)!

A short time after that Dad came in from doing Dad Stuff and the conversation was curtailed. I'd let my Mum into a part of my life that 3 years ago I was terrified of even complete strangers finding out about... and, all things considered, it went very well.

Thoughts after Middle Sex

Dear Channel 4,

My wife and I sat down last night to watch "Middlesex" last night expecting an informative documentary about the former English county.

Imagine our surprise when we were presented with over an hour of homosexualists, shameless benders of gender, and effete Indian rentboy-wallahs having their John Thomases lobbed off!

I don't know if you're planning to do any future documentaries in this series, but suffice it to say if I see "Rutland" advertised in the Radio Times I shall not be watching!

Yours outraged,

Brigadier P. Slade (Mrs.)

Actually, Middle Sex on Channel 4 last night was very good. It argued that the idea of their being only 2 sexes, "male and female", and only two sexualities "gay and straight", was fundamentally flawed. That things were far more complicated that that, and even labels like "transvestite" and "transsexual" are too limiting.

Of course, myself and any other right-thinking t*person have espoused this theory for years. Spend any time on the tranny "scene" and you come to realise that trannies are like snowflakes, they're very pretty, they melt in hot weather, and each one is completely and utterly unique. (I sat back with a very self-satisfied look on my face when I came up with that analogy.)

No two of us made the exactly same journey to get where we are, no two of us are doing what we do for exactly the same reason, and no two of us are going to take exactly the same path from now on.

Things aren't black and white, and they're not shades of gray, there just aren't enough graduations. The word "spectrum" is often used to represent the myriad vibrant shades of human existence, but even spectrum implies a one-dimensional range of levels.

I suggest we need a whole new "colour-space" to describe every possible human gender and sexuality. Colour theorists use the L*a*b system, which defines any colour visible to the human eye in 3 discrete dimensions. I think I'll invent something similar for human sexuality and gender identity. If I organise it myself I can make sure that I get to be bright pink.

I'm not arguing for an end to labels like "transvestite". Humans need labels. The ability to catagorise and name things is what makes us intelligent creatures. Prehistoric man wouldn't have come down from the trees if there weren't words to distinguish between things like "food" and "not food". But equally everyone understands that "food" represents a huge range of items, in varying levels of palatability to different people. No-one's ever suggested that there should be only one food that everyone should eat. Well, except maybe for MacDonalds.

But for some reason a lot of people seem to thing there's only one thing that a transvestite can be, and it annoys and confuses them when you say "ah yes I am a transvestite but I don't dress up very often, and I'm not really turned on just by dressing anymore". It doesn't fit exactly into the little box in their brain that they've put aside for transvesites, right next to the little box for "transsexuals that all look like Terence Stamp in Pricilla Queen of the Desert".

T*girls are just as guilty as "regular folks" for this, I've found. A lot of them seem desperate to gain that sense of belonging that comes from being in a group of like-minded people, and they tend to transfer their own transgendered identity onto the other trannies they meet. When I first joined online tranny groups I got in contact with lots of people who wanted to know what hormones I was taking, what kind of panties I wore under my clothes to work, etc. I don't do either of those things, but for a while I tried to measure up to other's expectations of what a tranny should be, because I too wanted that sense of belonging. I wanted to be a part of the tranny tribe, different from the mainstream but homogenized into it's own orthodoxy.

Now I'm happy to just be me. I'm a tranny, if you need a label, but that's just a broad-brush term. There's a word for the exact type of tranny I am, it's "Becky".

King's Lynn town centre is a construction site at the moment. A long-overdue shopping centre revamp is finally getting going. The car park outside the swimming pool is currently a forest of concrete columns. Modern clean lines juxtaposed with the ancient ruined Greyfriars tower in the background. The tower is the remains of a 13th century Franciscan friary, and is sometimes called "The Leaning Tower of Lynn". The lean is particularly noticeable against the vertical lines of the new columns, which is why I took the picture. 

On the plus side...

... the other tokens were for sandwiches, salad, and Pimms!

Garden party at my place!

Big Tesco is Watching You

Ok, so you know how Tescos tracks what you buy with your Clubcard, so that they can better target marketing campaigns at you?

...and you know how when they send you your money-back vouchers, they also send you vouchers for things you're likely to buy?

My Tescos vouchers came today. Including this...



They know too much!!!

Un poco de ambiente

Just been getting my head together a bit about Barcelona, which is looming large on the horizon. Nipped into town today to buy the Time Out Barcelona guide. The Time Out city guides are by far the best, particularly as they have a good Gay and Lesbian section. Okay, so they don't have a Transgender section per-sé, but when I read "Gay and Lesbian" I always add on "and Transgender" in my head. The gay scene is generally pretty safe for trannies too.

Actually I'm kind of hoping that we might get further afield than the safety of the Gaixample and sample the more general Barcelona nightlife as Becky. Barcelona's gay scene is fairly diffuse anyway. As you would expect in a such a vibrant, easy-going, artistic and cosmopolitan city, a lot of Barcelona is un poco de ambiente, "a little bit gay".

Anyway you're going to have to put up with 2 weeks of blog drought in mid-June whilst I soak up the sun and take pictures of tile patterns whist saying "isn't this pretty, Thomas?" in a John Major voice. I might be able to wangle some blogging on the move, but don't expect anything too incisive!

Also, when I get back, I'm not even going to be able to write much about it. This is because I promised Bella Jay from Repartee that I'd do a piece on the trip for the magazine when I got back, and it really aught to be stuff that I haven't already plastered all over my web site. I mean, just imagine if every tranny who reads my blog decided not to buy that copy of Repartee because they'd already read the best bit in it on my website! Sales would plummet and I'd feel terrible about it.

I'm sensitive like that. You can probably put it down to me being ambiante... if only un poco.

A Teenage Transsexual speaks

I'll probably regret doing this, but what the hell.

Here's a delightful exchange I had on Yahoo messenger a few minutes ago. I've only edited it to change the other person's Yahoo ID.

e: heya
e: long time no speak becky
beckyenverite: hiya e - how are you?
e: ok i spose , had a nose job last week
beckyenverite: nice
beckyenverite: i'm guessing you went for a more feminine model and not the coco the clown look ;)
e: nope lol... my nose job was actualy a Medical Correction not a cosmetic
e: i cannt breathe through my nose never have been able to .. the spetum ( passage up the nose ) was bent .. and so was the nose so i had those sorted
beckyenverite: Cool
beckyenverite: Can you smell now too?
e: not yet im still blocked up from the op
e: i have my plasters n stuff off on friday
beckyenverite: Ow
beckyenverite: I bet you're hoping they gave you a Kylie nose anyway. ;-)
e: kylie nah she can go die
e: i want a Me nose not soem weird celeb
beckyenverite: go die? that's a bit harsh. :-/
e: so
e: all these stupid ppl who like celebs .. there just a weird bunch of arse holes
beckyenverite: okay, i don't like that kind of talk
e: >:-|
beckyenverite: there are people who think we WE'RE a weird bunch of arseholes
e: tra
beckyenverite: you off?
e: nope was a continue the word kinda thing now fuck off my list

I'll end it there cos it all got rather personal and ended with me being called a "fucking tranny".

You might remember E, she was a minor TS celebrity herself when she appeared on a Channel 4 documentary last year. She joined a tranny group I was in, because she wanted to make friends. Particularly TS friends, as TV's weren't really something she wanted to get involved with.

I hope the TS friends that E makes take her to one side and explain that to gain acceptance, you have to practice giving it. To other trannies, even if they're only the lowly TV kind, and even to people who like Kylie.

More delving into the logs

As well as turning up "interesting" search-engine strings, there's more exiting stuff to be found in the depths of my website logs.

Another thing my logging software does is flag up what it calls "spongers". That's where other sites display pictures that are actually hosted by my site. It's intended to highlight naughty people who are displaying my content on their sites, and haven't even had the common decency to use their own bandwidth to do so. But I tend to use it just to see people who've (perfectly legally) put copies of my banner on their site, because I'm nosy like that.

Apart from the banner, do you want to know what the most-sponged picture on my site is?

It's this one...



A "humorous" little fake cover I did a couple of years ago. It turns up all over the place on the web. Mainly in blogs and on forums with comments like "I saw Brad reading this on the bus the other day... snigger."

I don't mind, when it turns up on a forum it's actually a fun little game of mine to register with that forum and post a message explaining where the picture came from, and that the person who stole it was a regular visitor to my site. *evil grin*

Another interesting snippet from the web-logs. One of my pictures turns up regularly in a Google Images search, and is actually the conduit for several visits to my site each day. It's this pic...



Presumably it does well in with Google image search because the filename includes the words "boobs". I'm gonna include the word "boobs" in all my images now, my traffic should go through the roof!

Vodka

One of my favorite quotes by Homer Simpson: "Alcohol. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

Alcohol seems to be inextricably linked with my tranny lifestyle. It's a necessary evil at social gatherings, freeing inhibitions all round. I'm more able to talk to others, and other people seem to find it a lot easier to talk to me. It's sometimes surprising to remember that as a tranny I'm a completely unknown and scary quantity to many people. It normally takes them a couple of drinks to come over and say how they've wanted to talk to me all evening, how groovy they are with the whole dressing up as a woman thing, and just how incredibly great I am. I love being told how incredibly great I am!

The downside to the demon drink is a short while after it's sparkled it's fairy dust over the evening, it begins it's work guaranteeing that you won't remember the evening, and the parts that you do remember you'll wish you hadn't. Plus the whole "morning after" thing which everyone knows about.

This weekend I went to a barbecue. The occasion was 3 people's birthdays: my good friend Jessica, and Sophie's neighbours Claire and Andy. It was a large crowd, with a major "non-tranny" contingent.

I think I mentioned last week that I hadn't decided whether to dress as Becky or not, but I took the stuff to Sophie's just in case. In the end external pressures decided for me, several people seemed to want Becky there. Shannon didn't want to be the only tranny (apart from Sophie) present. Claire's parents had loved partying with the trannies at New Year's, and were expecting some kind of repeat performance. Several others had been warned of the presence of trannies, so the general vibe was that it would be a general disappointment if Becky didn't turn up.

The evening started with a fair division of labour. It looked like rain so the men were given the job of erecting the awning over the BBQ, whilst the girlies laid out food, and the girly-boys untangled the fairy lights.

Vodka arrived. Around 5 litres of the stuff. Plus beer and wine. I had a Vodka and cranberry to calm my nerves whilst trying to get the knots out of the fairy lights. It was very nice. Then the first of the burgers were ready, time for more drinks and a bit of mingling.

I remember a while later noticing I was incredibly drunk and it was still light outside. Everyone else seemed to be impressively drunk too.

Midnight had barely passed, and the party was all over. People were crashing on sofas and spare beds, exhausted. It seemed an oddly compressed affair, as if the party had burned too hot and then burnt out.

I need to tinker with my alcohol intake. I'm sure there's a level where I'll have fun and still be able to remember it. The trouble is, I think, that level of drunkenness is also the level where I start thinking one more drink can't hurt!


The gang at the barbeque, before it all got too drunken.

GenderTalk

I happened across this while hunting for interesting podcasts for my ipod the other night. GenderTalk is a weekly radio show discussing "global transgender issues". Not really my cup of tea, but I thought I'd give it a try and added it to my feeds in iPodder.

I'd forgotten all about it until last night when I was hunting for stuff to listen to in the sun-shower. It's all very "tranny activism" oriented and has a quite American flavour and slant, but it's quite amusing, and particularly revealing of problems that t*folk are still suffering around the world. For a show by transgender activists it seemed overly conservative in attitude, but I wonder if that's just a reflection of the over-arching attitudes in the US these days.

One news story was a real eye-opener to me. A college kid (male) had been suspended from school for turning up at a dance in a prom dress. The news-reader added that the police report had citied that he was "dancing in a lewd manner", at least I think those were the words. The presenter then seemed to suggest that if you were going to dress out for the first time, maybe you shouldn't act in a way that draws attention to yourself.

Two things. Firstly, a guy turns up at a party in a dress and the police get involved? Is that such a huge crime in the US these days?

And, secondly, why the hell shouldn't you go out and dance a bit provocatively at a college dance? The idea of "Transgender Activism" has always been something I've shied away from, particularly as I'm a died in the wool TV who's never really had (or going to have) issues with "workplace acceptance" and "equal rights" etc.

But if in the US a guy can't put on a frock and shake his/her funky thang at party... maybe there's more need for activism than I realised.

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong!

Okay, following on from the "blog + boob + chinese" thread last week. I've just checked my logs again today and seen...

"tory sexy long toenails"

That is so wrong.

I feel physically ill.

Trannyopoly!

What is it with all these "themed" Monopoly sets? At first it was clever and different, now it's just getting silly. Simpson's Monopoly I can understand, you've got all the places in the city of Springfield to buy and sell. After all, each country has had their own city-based Monopoly since the beginning. But Spiderman Monopoly? How does that work?

Playing Monopoly in my house is a torture reserved for Christmas family gatherings when there's nothing good on the telly (i.e. most Christmasses these days). We normally play it for about an hour until everyone remembers how much of a shit game it is and give up. Monopoly was invented as a tool to teach the evils of the capalist system, i.e. those that have get more, and those that don't have don't get. In other words it's a game designed to be depressing. Whoopee.

It's bad enough knowing you're going to lose because your Dad's got all the utilities and 10 hotels, but at least that's tangible. Knowing you're going to lose because your Nan's got 3 webs on Doctor Octopus, that's abstract AND depressing.

Anyway, I decided to jump on the themed Monopoly bandwagon and do a Tranny Monopoly. It would allow mums, dads, grandparents and kids to experience the cut-and-thrust life of a transvestite.

I got as far as doing this...



... and then ran out of ideas. 'Nuff said.

HugsRegards, Becky André

I seem to be writing a hell of a lot of personal emails to people at the moment, mainly correspondence to people who have written to me via my site. Believe it or not, Evil Becky doesn't answer all of my mail!

One upshot of all this tranny emailing is that I've typed "hugs, Becky" so much just recently that twice this morning I've narrowly avoided writing it at the bottom of a couple of work emails! That, officially, Would Not Be Good.

Maybe I need to use auto-signatures in my email software more, but I like the personal touch of writing the whole message by hand. People can tell!

Oh and by the way, my boy name isn't really André.

Lost Weekend

So yeah... what have I been up to since I last blogged?

Good question. I took Friday off. I seem to remember shopping for Jessica's birthday present. And then it's kind of a black hole. I must have eaten, I think I tidied the house for a bit, watched some telly, played World of Warcraft, but that's about it. The whole weekend was a bit of a dull blur. Ho hum.

I suppose on the plus side I wasn't spending money. I'm trying to save now for a holiday in Barcelona next month. Should be awesome!

This weekend will be better, it's Jessica's birthday barbeque at Soph's place. A chance to meet up with some old friends and stuff. Although there'll be quite a few trannies there, I'm not sure whether I'll do it dressed. Being outdoors in hot weather (hopefully) and eating copious amounts of meat isn't conducive to cross-dressing.

My car is behaving slightly oddly, which is worrying. I can't pin it down yet, but it seems to jolt a bit more than it should when I go over bumps, and the steering wheel sometimes shudders slightly at the same time. I'm not very mechanical, so I'm not sure what to look at. I'm pretty sure if I take it to the garage with my vague symptoms the diagnosis will be one word: "expensive". So hoping to avoid that in the short term.

I'll use the technique beloved by all IT support people. Switch it off and on again, and hope for the best.

Rejected 'Love Is' Comics

This made me giggle this morning.

Evil Becky Answers Your Mail #4

Eep, plenty of work for Evil Becky at the moment!

Chris writes:

WOULD JUST LOVE TO CHAT AND SEX WITH YOU ON HERE, YOU HAVE A SEXY LOOKIN BOD BABE XXX

Evil Becky replies:

Ah, all-caps again, the calling card of the moron.

I suppose chatting "on here" (if by "here" you mean the Internet) is feasible, but it's not gonna happen. To "sex" with me on the Internet isn't supported by the current protocols.

You'll have to wait for someone to implement sexual intercourse over IP. And, of course, for Hell to freeze over.