Profile: Brett
You can call me… Brett {I am blessed that my birth-name is unisex!}
I identify as… I am a female soul clothed in a a male form.
I am predominately-feminine-Gender-Complete-in-male form.
I am a blend of genders, weighted to the feminine.
I am a MTF transsexual who has chosen to remain in male form and role for sake of those who love and need me.
I am Fairly Uniquely Brett
As far as third-person pronouns go, … I wish there was a good one that fit.
I prefer that people use what they find most comfortable. I have been very touched and blessed when people refer to me in the feminine.
I’m attracted to… I think that I am largely asexual: I am not attracted to males nor females, only my wife Judi, and I think that this is of supernatural origin. There was no one before her, no one else now, and there will not be anyone else if she dies before me.
When people talk about me, I want them to… Recognize me as a gentle, caring and nurturing person who genuinely loves God and others. I would also like to be valued as a unique person who is beautiful, graceful and strong on the inside, and on outside as well, someone who reflects some of the best of femininity and masculinity.
I want people to understand… That though I am very different, I am a person too, and I am legitimate, and I am not confused nor dangerous. I don’t need to be “fixed.” I don’t need to be accepted as a man or woman, but simply accepted as an authentic person.
About Brett
I am a female soul, clothed in the form of a male. Transition to female-form and identity was my first choice, but I have accepted God’s challenge to live content in this blended-form. My task now is to remain committed to this challenge, accepting it as a gift, learning to express my femininity in the context of a male body: I want this to be a winsome and comely expression, unique to me, with the force of feminine beauty, grace and sensibility, yet not unbecoming of the male form, nor denying the masculine parts of my soul. God has promised to make me beautiful, graceful and congruent, certainly in eternity, but also (I believe) here in my life on earth as well.
» Define yourself. «
Category: profiles 25 comments »
January 31st, 2011 at 8:25 am |
“God has promised to make me beautiful, graceful and congruent, certainly in eternity, but also (I believe) here in my life on earth as well.”
I can see your beauty and grace in your face and in your words. :)
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January 31st, 2011 at 9:21 am |
This was beautiful. YOU are beautiful. Truly. You have such a graceful face.
I have never commented on this site before but I just wanted to say:
Thank you so much for sharing.
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January 31st, 2011 at 10:18 am |
You seem to have such a huge heart.
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January 31st, 2011 at 10:29 am |
It is so nice to see someone else on here who is older enough to be someone’s grandparent. Being genderqueer is a challenge, but it comes with lots of satisfactions as well.
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Jessica replied:
February 1st, 2011 at 10:41 am
Brett,
You know what I mean – you go to a trans event of some kind and the blouse you are wearing is older than most of the people attending.
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Brett Blatchley replied:
August 23rd, 2011 at 12:12 pm
I *do* indeed know this!!! ;-)
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January 31st, 2011 at 11:05 am |
I love this, i love you! It’s so refreshing to see someone commenting positively about God in a place like this. In my own journey, I have often struggled with “God’s challenge” to live in a female body when i feel so masculine so much of the time. You’re beautiful for just being able to see through the pressures of a culture that asks us to choose. Thank you.
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January 31st, 2011 at 1:58 pm |
You are absolutely amazing
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January 31st, 2011 at 2:00 pm |
(:
That’s really all I have to say, that and thanks for being around.
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January 31st, 2011 at 2:07 pm |
this moved me very much.
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January 31st, 2011 at 8:45 pm |
Thank you for how eloquently and beautifully you expressed your ideas- ideas that often I share, but cannot find ways to express. You are magnificent.
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February 1st, 2011 at 1:01 pm |
<3!!!
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February 1st, 2011 at 11:07 pm |
You’re beautiful.. i know that when you arrive in Heaven God will say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”
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February 2nd, 2011 at 6:26 am |
This just made my day. You’re such a beautiful person. Your wife is very lucky to have you in her life.
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February 19th, 2011 at 9:14 pm |
Thank you, Brett…
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August 23rd, 2011 at 1:06 pm |
***Thank You All So Much***
I had forgotten that I created a profile here, and actually forgotten about Genderfork** until the other night, when I stumbled across it again!
**(Genderfork…cute-fork-avatar….AH!!!! I get it!!! (hehehe))
Genderfork seemed familiar (and exactly what I was looking for!), then I remembered that I’d been here before and had left a profile that had not yet been cleared through the moderators, so I checked and read all these wonderful, supportive comments you have all made: It was *such* an encouragement.
As a Christian who happens to be transgendered, I very much want to reflect positively on Jesus, but also on us in the TG community. In a way, I feel like an ambassador to both groups. TG people have often been hurt by Christians, and many Christians often view us as being “sick” or even evil (this has happened to me, but it strengthen my relationship with Jesus). Too many in both groups are deeply suspicious of people in the opposite group. YET, I have been received here in this forum as one of you, and treated with kindness even though I have mentioned my relationship with God in favorable terms. AND I am blessed to sense that God is important to some here. AND perhaps for those here for whom God is not important, you have treated me with kindness nonetheless. I am *so blessed*!!!
Since I posted my profile in January, and it’s now late August, I’ve refined my (Fairly Uniquely Brett) mode of expression: my hair is a good bit longer and I wear it in a twisted-through-ponytail, bun {with sticks}, and even a French plait. I’ve gotten my ears pierced (which was like a mini-SRS for me). I’ve lost most of the 7kg I gained since then {due to feeling-emotionally-bad-comfort-eating}. I’m now polishing my toenails as well as my fingernails. I’m wearing a bra consistently as my breasts gradually grow more feminine. And I’m wearing jewelry more freely.
Significantly, I am praying about the possibility of starting female hormones under doctor supervision. (I self medicated for two brief periods in the last dozen years.)
Aesthetic is how I want to appear: not “over the top,” not freakish. If I look peculiar to people (and I suspect I do), I want to be aesthetically pleasing at the same time. Some people have given me wonderful feedback in recent months, and it seems that I’m managing to “pull this off” – my “goal” in the “About Brett” section. They have confirmed that I really am graceful in my movements (like a dancer) and feminine in my deportment, and that I don’t “come-off” as “effeminate,” or a caricature of femininity, but that my femininity seems very natural, and appropriate (somehow!!). I am thrilled with this and I have needed this feedback because I can’t trust my own sense of how I appear to others.
Please understand that I am truly grateful for all your kind feedback, and maybe this interchange will be a little helpful for others who are struggling with their self expression too? That’s actually why I’ve come to Genderfork to begin with: I’m hoping to learn some things and meet others who can help me “pass” better as Brett…
…Maybe that’s the key? Maybe instead of trying to “pass” as men or women, we should concentrate on passing as ourselves? Then people will see us as we are inside, and if we concentrate on becoming beautiful people INSIDE, then this will naturally come to be revealed outside where people meet and see us.
Thank You!!! Thank You!!! Thank You All!!!
Especially, Thank You Jesus, because without You I would never make it through my gender stuff alive, You know I just wouldn’t – You pour a Niagara Falls of grace on me every day! Thank You that I can be pleasing to You as FUB!!! AND Thank You Judi for allowing me to be FUB; you’ve been uncommonly supportive of me as I progress on my gender journey!!! Thank You Janet, Dearest Big Twin Sister, God has used you mightily in my healing and growth; thank you that I am your little twin sister in male form :-)* )
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Brett Blatchley replied:
August 23rd, 2011 at 4:28 pm
Oh, when I mentioned “FUB mode” above, I didn’t mean that to imply that I have different ways of appearing depending on who I’m around. I know that some folks have to do that, but I cannot manage it – for me, I spent many years trying to become a *real* person, and I must live as who I am inside as much as I can manage all the time. So, as I’ve been healing, I’ve been living openly transgendered for approaching three years now. While I don’t “advertise” my transgender status, I am what I am for the world to see. God has given me “beauty for ashes” inside, in my soul and spirit and I desperately want to manifest these inner qualities He has given me, in some analogous, beauty and gracefulness in my external presentation – for me it is a matter of becoming as congruent, as authentic as I can possibly manage…
Mostly people seem to treat me as they would anyone else (and there do not seem to be stares or whispering in response to my passing). Rarely a teenager has said something snarky, but I turned and flashed them a genuine smile and either answered their question and/or wished them well – and I receive a blessing by responding to them with kindness!
Sorry, I don’t mean to go on-and-on about myself…I do want my experiences to somehow be a blessing to someone else, and that’s why I want to share them – it’s been a very long and hard road to learn these things on my own. God and I have been through a LOT with my gender stuff and other things!
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Jessica replied:
August 23rd, 2011 at 5:56 pm
I, too, have come to the notion that the only that will suit me is to pass as myself. It seems the only truly honest and realistic option. I’m just too old for let’s pretend (though it can be fun for a while). It certainly is not a satisfying way of life.
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February 1st, 2013 at 3:09 am |
Sorry for that negative comment – if Brett ever sees this, you seem awesome. I was just replying to a ridiculous comment.
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tigr replied:
February 1st, 2013 at 5:32 am
If you were referring to your own comment: I really appreciated it (and it only disappeared as well because it was in reply to a comment which didn’t belong on here)!
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Dutch Dork replied:
February 1st, 2013 at 6:55 am
Oh, no that’s good, I can still see it and I didn’t realize it was gone, so that’s why I posted this. But it’s good it’s disappeared now, done with the negativity :)
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Brette Blatchley replied:
February 3rd, 2013 at 6:34 pm
Hello ‘Dutch & Tigr :-)
Thank you for handling that difficulty with sensitivity and grace. I read both the comment and your thought reply ‘Dutch as they had both come to my email. I had planned a gentle and reverent reply and an update, but when I arose, the comments were gone. Tigr later encouraged me to add my update, which I think I will do.
Again, thank you all for helping to make Genderfork a place where we can be our most positive selves in peace!
February 3rd, 2013 at 8:00 pm |
Hi Folks! Here is a bit of an update…
A *LOT* has happened in this last year and I thought that some going along their journey’s might find some of the places I’ve gone-by and come-to to be familiar, or at least interesting:
I stopped living as a man about five years ago. If I was to have a “line in the sand moment” it would be my thought just before we moved to Asheville: I will never wear my hair short again. I don’t think at that time I realized that my repressed gender stuff was going to well-up into full-flaming desperate consciousness, but about a year later, it did just that and I realized that I needed to do *something* else with my transsexualism because repression was destroying me…
Gradually, very gently, I have progressed from living comfortably as an openly transgender person to being comfortable living as an openly transgender woman. Little by little, I cast-away masculine cues that seemed to bind me, and added feminine cues that seemed “right” to me – I was “coming home…”
About this time last year, I crossed some invisible line and became a woman:
People who had been watching me change over the years, suddenly (it seemed) concluded that I must be a woman, and so they started regarding and treating me like one. About this time too, I started female hormones and anti-androgen medication. I knew oestrogen was right for me when I self-medicated briefly in ’99 and I knew again within days of my doctor’s prescription that I was correct…
There have been many firsts this year for me. Not long into my year, I decided that I am “woman enough” to switch lavatories, and I have not gone back, nor have I had the first problem, and now I make small-talk with other women as I wait my turn.
Without realizing it, I was passing as a woman, though I was really only trying to “pass” as myself, who is herself, a woman. Toddlers and teenage girls all ignore me (the acid test!), and boorish men have given me the “idiot woman” treatment (men who might have hurt me if they guessed me to be trans). I mostly don’t rate a second glance, and when I do, I find they are nearly always “go girl” smiles from other women. So, I seem to blend-in with other women my age.
I swim as a woman, and appear as a tall, lithe and graceful, athletic woman in a swimsuit.
I’m not particularly girly, but I am deeply feminine, in a way that contrasts sharply with “effeminate” men and even serious cross-dressers; whatever I am, it is not a “guy in a dress,” and with nearly a year of hormones pushing me through my second puberty, my body *is* different: I have breasts (B-cup, going on C), I have a figure (HIPS!!! YEA!!!) and my facial cheeks are developing. I move, speak, occupy space, all like a woman…because I am a woman. Somehow these all seem to gloss-over the remaining masculine cues in my appearance. (You can see my Facebook profile page for a good idea of how I look now.)
And speaking of “dress,” I think I look best in skinny-jeans and a blouse, but today, for the very first time, I felt my body was sufficiently feminine to be able to pull-off a dress, and so I wore my first dress (a denim one) to worship this morning – I looked like the “girl next door.”
Our long marriage has been under strain as well. We really are not “husband and wife” any longer. We looked like this when we married; we looked like the traditional “straight” couple. BUT even then, we knew we were both very different from everyone else – we’re both powerfully gender-variant. We were not straight, nor were we gay – we were “other.” And so it is now, we are “none of the above” even though we appear to be a lesbian couple. We are trying to find language to explain this to others, a “love language” to enable us to love each other amidst these challenging changes. And in my asexuality, I am drawing physically distant from the one who’s soul I love…and surgery, I had given-up on over a dozen years previously, is something I am seriously considering…
I am within days of changing my legal name: Brett Lance Blatchley will become Brettany Renée Blatchley. “Brettany” is like “Brett” enough to ease my transition with others and can be shortened to “Brette.” (My biggest point of sorrow is that as I transition, I am forcing everyone who loves me into their own form of transition, and I very much do not want to hurt others: every victory I have as a woman becomes a loss for some of those who cannot abide by my shift.)
And I now qualify for a female passport, and may possibly be able to change the gender marker on my drivers license. When my name change is finalized, I will begin this process also.
The first dominoes have begun to fall: tip!
I have finally “come-out” to my employer. No, I’ve never lived a double-life: I don’t have a “guy” and “girl” modes, I’m always me. BUT since I work remotely, my coworkers have not seen me in about five years. So, it didn’t make sense for me to drag my professional relationships through the joys and sorrows of my transition experience. But I finally had to do this. and I began by coming-out to a close female team member, which was anticlimactic since she had already guessed as much from our other chats and my Facebook activities! She said our manager could deal with this…
…Turns out that he was able to deal with it: I could not have hoped for a better conversation. I told him I had been going through a life change in recent years and that I was ready to tell him, and actually needed to because my name would be changing soon. I told him I am a transgender woman and that I look very different from when we last met in person. He sheepishly told me that my Google profile pictures had been showing-up on his phone for quite a while, and he had forgotten what I used to look like! (Oops!!!). He started getting hints when on my first business trip in years, our client called back, singing my praises and she mentioned off hand that they had expected a man to come up and a woman came instead! No one had any problems with all of this, but he knew to watch and wait; he was confident I would tell him when I was ready. It turns-out that one of his friends, another software engineer, came-out about a month ago and so he and his office had already been through all the sensitivity training. As he spoke to his new female friend, he keep me in the back of his mind…
So, now I am a “working woman” and it feels *so good* to be me to everyone in my life!!!
With this disclosure, now everyone significant in my life knows that I live as a woman, and a number of them know why. I have been living fultime as a woman for a year now, though clinicians might say that my Real Life Test begins NOW. I confidently assert that I have already passed my test with flying (Heliotrope) colours!
Speaking of transition, for a long time, I had told others, told myself, that I was in a “not-transitioning” transition. Well, I’ve come to realize that if you are alive, you are transitioning in some way, and I so I have had to admit to myself that I really am transitioning. More to my point, surgery is something that may well be in my future because my body dysphoria is growing stronger (and hormones, while helping are insufficient), and I am renegotiating what that will mean in my spousal relationship of (now) twenty-four years. I will never hide who I was, but and striving to become who I am…
I’ve been nearly constantly working on understanding all this and moving to congruence…what for me has amounted to transition, over these last five years. Though the way I understand and describe myself has changed much, my sense of who I am as a person, particularly my gendered-self, has remained constant back through early childhood. Here is how I currently describe myself:
“I am a transgender woman. Parts of my body are male, parts are female, and the rest lies in the overlap between the sexes. Who I am as a person, my gender identity, is as it always has been: essentially female. Once I lived as a special sort of man, and now by God’s grace, I live as a special sort of woman.”
As all this time has gone by, I have been finding myself to become something of a local transgender “ambassador.” My transition and who I am have been quite open, and people have been watching me gracefully change, and they ask questions, and I gently reply with sincerity, humour and without defensiveness. Not everyone agrees with me, of course, but I have been blessed to have what seems to be an unusually smooth transition. Though I have had my share of losses (especially family ones), and my share of suicidal thoughts, griefs, angst, confusion, et cetera, I experience freedom and joy as I have never had before and people see this…
There is nothing like being free to be yourself – nothing!
…As I answer questions, and provoke thoughts, and live as (what I hope) to be a “pleasantly peculiar” person before them with as much authenticity as I can manage, these same people reflect that they are comfortable because I am comfortable with myself, and what I am is natural and does not seem “put-on” (though I have to learn to be a woman, every bit as much as any girl!). And so, I recognize that I am being watched and read and pondered, and I want people to see that we are much like everyone else, even if special in our own way…
So, if I were to put all this into a “fortune cookie,” I might read:
“Your next year as a woman will be better than your last year as a girl.”
Blessings & Joy Everyone!!!
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Dutch Dork replied:
February 4th, 2013 at 3:01 am
It’s so nice to see these updates. Most people just leave a profile and disappear, and it’s great to see where you are now. You seem like a wonderful and positive person, and I hope you continue to do what makes you happy.
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Brette Blatchley replied:
February 4th, 2013 at 3:23 am
Thank you ‘Dutch :-) {very very small voice}
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