Becky - The Wilderness Years

Part 4 of Tales of Serendipity

This is a bit of a supplemental chapter, please feel free to skip it if you're not interested in the very early stirrings of a young tranny abroad!

Becky, of course, didn't actually exist as a named individual before 2000, and the faint inklings of tranny-ness I was carrying around in my head certainly hadn’t got a name back when I was in Sri Lanka.

I’ve just always wanted to use “Becky - The Wilderness Years” as a blog title!

I soon realised when I started trying to write down experiences from that time (when I was between nine and eleven years old) that while I distinctly remembered having tranny thoughts before I went to Sri Lanka, and I definitely had them afterwards, it was hard to remember specific tranny-related stuff from the time I was there.

I have dredged up a couple of memories though. One of my friends was the daughter of one of the ex-pat families we tended to hang around with. One weekend we were all visiting a hotel complex up the coast, and she and I got to exploring the rooms and corridors. We were always exploring, we lived to find places that we though no-else knew existed. We seemed to spend most weekends in various hotels, and the back-corridors and service areas were our secret passages and concealed hideouts.

This day we'd "borrowed" yellow towels from a maid's trolley and were using them as props for games. As a joke this girl (dammit... I can't recall her name) wrapped one around my head so it hung down over my shoulders. A bit like long blonde hair.

She laughed and said I looked like a girl, and then found another towel and wrapped it around my waist like a skirt. We then played a game, at her suggestion, where I had to pretend I was her younger sister.

Of course, my fledgling tranny neurones were firing like crazy. Not really knowing why this seemed so exciting, just knowing it was. The girl said that I would look great in makeup, and she'd make me over the next time I visited her house.

I protested like crazy and said I'd never do that because I was a boy (why? WHY do trannies always act so defensively?) and she never went through with the "threat".

Even when I made pointed reminders on each of my visits to her house. "Huh... you'd better not try to put that makeup on ME!!"

Yeah, I know, such a fool.

The other thing I recall was an occasion when my parents had gone out for the evening and we were again being baby-sat by Sheila, who (as always) was pretty much letting us get away with murder.

I'd been thinking about some of the cool summer dresses and makeup and stuff that my mum had, but there was never a time when I was alone in the house to, er, investigate.

I couldn’t stand it any more, so I decided to co-opt my brother into things.

"I say! Here's a wizard wheeze!" I said to him (or words to that effect). "Why don't we go into Mum and Dad's bedroom and try on clothes and stuff."

My 7-year-old brother, completely oblivious to my ulterior motives but always looking for inventive new ways to be naughty, was all for it. So (once again advising Sheila that this was to be kept strictly secret) we ventured into our parent’s bedroom.

There followed and evening of my brother and I prancing about in flouncy dresses and inexpertly applied lipstick. I’d made a little more effort than my brother, naturally, but not so much that it didn’t look like carefree messing about.

We cleared up afterwards. No-one would ever know we'd been. I even didn't argue about tidying up my brother's share of the mess, which was highly unusual.

Mum still, inexplicably, found out. We were both given a stern telling off. My brother was apologetic, I was mortified.

No prizes for guessing who the snitch was. Stitched up by Sheila, again!

The funny thing is, decades later when I came out as a tranny to my mum, I mentioned that dressing-up session. Because I was convinced she might have guessed from that occasion (and other indiscretions) that I was interested in girl's clothes.

Amazingly, she could hardly recall it happening, despite her anger at the time being seared in my memory. Just goes to show, I think, that trannies tend to place more emphasis in our minds on things that we feel "out" us, when the other people involved barely register them.

Final part: Trouble

Sky One in Good Tranny Doc Shocker

So did anyone watch "Transvestite Wives" the other night on Sky One? Having "Sky-Plussed" it mid-week, I watched it last night. I was all ready to be shocked, appalled and toe-curled, but it was surprisingly good. The couples featured were all sensitively handled, allowed to get their points of view across and it wasn't overly editorialised.

All kudos to the trannies and partners who agreed to take part, if someone had come to me and said they were making a tranny documentary for the same channel that brought us the unforgivably awful "There's Something about Miriam", I wouldn't have touched it with the proverbial.

I have seen some TG forums complaining that "Transvestite Wives" is part of a documentary strain featuring programmes about the wives of BNP activists and polygamists, which they think tars transvestism with the "sickos and perverts" brush by association. But to my mind that's a bit like dolphins complaining that they're lumped with the Nazis on the Discovery Channel.

My only minor complaint was the title suggested it was going to feature trannies who thought of themselves as wives, which is a bit beyond the remit of the average transvestite.

I'd have called it something much less snappy like "Wives of Transvestites", which just goes to show why I don't have a job working for Sky One. Well, that and not thinking that programme planning consists of working out how many back-to-back episodes of The Simpsons will fit in 3 hours of prime time.

High Street shopping

A lot of my recent shopping trips for Becky have been unsuccessful. As I've said before, last year's trend for bold prints in ghastly colours did absolutely nothing for me. So I've been really pleased to see a funkier metallic and punky vibe coming in with the autumn fashions.

Jane and I took a trip into town today, ostensibly to look for clothes to take on honeymoon in the outgoing summer sales, but also to look for something to wear next weekend at Angelic. I've always felt more comfortable buying stuff on the High Street, as opposed from out of catalogues. I just find the "hit rate" a bit better, even if I'm nearly always shopping in Boy Mode and never try things on.

We started off in the Matalan on the outskirts of town, which used to occasionally have some great deals but now seems to be suffering from everyone copying their cheap-as-chips clothes and homewares aesthetic. Although I did find a couple of nice short-ish skirts (one black, one a kind of tweed), and a roasting dish (er, for lasagnes, not as some kind of fashion statement).

Then it was on to the High Street proper. We skimmed through Next (still trying to flog last year's fashions) and River Island (better, but not much), and spent a bit longer in Dorothy Perkins, which had some great stuff in the window that didn't seem to be sold anywhere in the shop. Don't you hate that?

Then we tried Top Shop (maybe after a bit more dieting) and MKone (better, but nothing "sang" to me) and I was beginning to think that maybe I wasn't going to have any luck. Then we popped into Peacocks where Jane spotted a fab black asymmetric top with a chain shoulder detail and silver motif which just "said Becky" to her, and I agreed immediately.

Feeling bolstered by this find we went on to New Look, and by now it was Jane's turn to feel unblessed by the Shopping Fairy, with nothing really catching her eye. I however was in the Zone, and found a fabulous gold-flecked dress in the "tall" section and quickly matched it with a wide gold stretchy belt and a gold necklace.

The trip finished in Sainsbury's. While I made a start on the week's shopping list, Jane popped in to their clothes department, emerging a few minutes later clutching a small bag and grinning from ear to ear. She'd found a fab shawl/scarf in a tasteful leopard print that suited her to a tee. Only a few pounds in the sale, but I would have paid £100 to see that smile. :-)

So I'm now two outfits ahead of the game, which means we can have a casual shop around Milton Keynes next weekend without having to panic about what I'm going to wear that night. Excellent!

On muggles

On the eve of the last book and the latest film in the Harry Potter franchise, can I launch a campaign to expunge a particularly irksome Potterism from the Tranny Lexicon?

The word is muggle.

In the Potter universe it's uttered to describe non-magical humans, i.e. most of us. It's an ugly-sounding word, and it's designed to be. It's used normally in a derogatory sense. Muggles are generally seen as bland, ordinary and so stupid as to not realise the whole magical sub-culture of witches and wizards going on under their very noses.

In trannydom the word seems to have been adopted to mean "non-trannies", i.e. everyone supposedly not blessed with the magical ability to tip-toe merrily across the gender divide, like a wizard tip-toes merrily through brick walls at train stations (you can't tell I've only read one book, can you?).

To my ear, the tranny muggle still has the derogatory connotations of the Harry Potter muggle. It smacks of an elite looking down on a lesser class of people. I can kind of understand how it's a reaction by trannies who want to overturn the misconception that they are a lesser class of person, but I still think it's misguided.

And I don't really see why we need a word, when there's a perfectly suitable, albeit hyphenated, one in the form of "non-tranny". Or, how about this radical idea? Just call them people, which is what they are.

I'm sounding terribly lefty and right-on, aren't I? :-S

Let me phrase it another way for the trannies who are reading: we all know we're a little bit special, we don't need to rub it in to all those who aren't!

And to the non-trannies reading: Call me a tranny if you like, because that's what I call myself, but if you don't use derogatory words for me, then I'll practice the same courtesy to you. :-)

We Sparkled

Sparkle ... what can I say?

No really, what can I say? I've run out of new and interesting ways to do post-outing write ups without slipping into tired cliches.

I want to say "it was so nice to see x y and z again", but that would be boring. But then again, I did meet a lot of nice people, both old friends and new. And it was nice. Really nice. I'll just leave out the list of everyone, because you know who you are.

But that wasn't the important thing.

I want to write up a detailed account of the 3 days, but that would probably be boring too. So I'll summarize: I dressed up a lot. We went out a lot. Sparkle happened around us. And in many cases despite of us.

But that's not the important thing either.

I want to write gushing praise for people like Kim Nolan, and the AXM people, and the hundreds of other people who put an amazing amount of effort into making Sparkle happen.

That's important, but that's not it.

We took quite a few pictures:



But, believe it or not, that's not the most important thing.

This is the most important thing: I felt great. And, for the first time in a fair while, I felt like I looked great. Which, sometimes, is the most important thing of all.

Save the planet

I need to work on this a little more, but I couldn't resist letting you try it before I go away for the weekend. :-)

Vaportrannies

You've heard of vaporware, right? The term is used to describe software which announced to great fanfare, with loads of great promised features, but then sits in development for years and is never actually released.

I've noticed a similar phenomenon, the vaportranny.

This kind of tranny appears suddenly on the online scene, writes copiously about their transvestism on internet outlets, particularly about their desire to "get out and meet all the friends I've made online" and their frustrations of not having any decent pictures to show yet, but never actually seems to get round to being seen out in public, or even posting pictures of themselves for people to see.

Now, I know it's a shallow to base the entire legitimacy of a transvestite on whether they've posted a few thousand Boudoir shots on Flickr or not, but sometimes I left with the nagging suspicion that some trannies online are little more than the figment of the imagination of some bloke with mild tranny tendencies but no real desire to actually act on them.

None of you, of course. ;-)

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?