Comfortable

fit I saw him at Northern Concord in Manchester, All this, it seems to me, is about realism. Not realism about who we wish to be, but realism about who, every second of every day, we are - in relation to the other people around us. It’s about negotiation on both sides, and it’s about achieving a “fit”. A fit is when who we consider ourselves to be and who other people consider us to be are the same thing. We’re working towards those two things being the same thing and if we want other people to consider us, we have to consider the other people out there……which makes me think of him…… He was at the end of the space, sitting at a table in a dress with a pipe in his mouth, a good old-fashioned pipe. He was she was comfortable. It can be the ultimate comfort to be across in a safe space. Nothing to do with presenting or passing, it’s one step along the road from being more comfortable alone at home, or with a life-companion who is comfortable with your being more comfortable en femme. Sometimes it just takes a loose dress. Once everything is more laborious or constricting sex enters the picture, arousal, fetish, and so on, and the need to expose that to another set of eyes. But comfortable is different. He sits back, in sympathetic company or alone, in his her-ness, his she-ness, and is a simpler, easier person to convey on Life’s journey. For that it’s worth quite some planning and organization, - a change of clothes packed in a bag, maybe a small cache of make-up, quite long journeys away, lockers and keys and cloakrooms, - a life organized round respite. She is not on the outside but on the inside – it’s somatic. If everybody did it, as the saying goes, there would be no war.