That's why I was trying to draw the distinction between being and performing.

But to me, then, performing female includes things like doing krav and driving NASCAR and lactating. And so is pretty useless. Feminine is much easier to both use as a signal and to emulate.

I don't know what feeling female feels like, but that's because gender dysmorphia totally boggles me. I cannot imagine how it would feel wrong to be my gender. I'm that solidly, entitledly, cis. I just know that everything I do is female, no matter how few other women may do it. Because I am female, and that's all that matters.

I got my first outfit reaction. A lady with whom I have coffee-room acquaintance had a squee explosion over my dress. "It's a Lucy dress! I love Lucy dresses! And it has petticoats! Let me see the sleeves! Oh, I love it! I didn't know anyone but me loved these dresses! Oh!" She was hard core.

I just got off the phone with my boss, who's been working from home since she broke her ankle Christmas weekend. I called her to talk about a meeting this afternoon, and she spent most of the call telling her dog to calm down. The dogwalker phones before they come over to walk Shadow, so now, every time the phone rings, Shadow thinks it's the walker and gets hyper. By the time we were done talking, I could hear barking in the background. I was laughing when I hung up the phone.

This is something that I think about a lot, for obvious reasons. And my conclusion is, I have NO idea what being female "feels like."

I'm the same way - I have never "felt like a man", if that makes any sense. I mean, when I date a woman I can take the initiative and ask her out, decide what to do on the date and everything, but it feels like I'm playing the male role in this. I think deep inside I'm androgynous.

I care about bad graphic design!

I hate that flag.

I don't know what feeling female feels like, but that's because gender dysmorphia totally boggles me. I cannot imagine how it would feel wrong to be my gender. I'm that solidly, entitledly, cis.

This is me. I am totally supportive of my friends who are trans* (again, obvs.), but I've never felt wrong in my gender, so I can't get my brain around it.

then, performing female includes things like doing krav and driving NASCAR and lactating

All at the same time!

Sorry, I just love that lactating is in there.

I always thought it was cooler being female than male because society allowed you more leeway to cross gender stereotype lines, so you could be a chick and have/do it all.

I was really young.

But when my cousin went FTM my first reaction was "Why?" Quickly followed by "Because he had to." I don't need to understand.

Spa day in a canine hyperbaric oxygen chamber

Ruby looks nervous. She sits upright on her bunny-like haunches, her fuzzy red ears point straight up in the air; her round black eyes stare straight at mine. The man in the black suit is cranking the dial on the adjacent control panel. 0.3...0.4... the numbers climb by the seconds as the atmospheric pressure inside the glass cylinder rises. The man tells me the optimal pressure for dogs is 1.2 atm, roughly what Ruby would have experienced as a fetus inside her mom's belly.

We're at Wag Style, a doggie day spa on the side street of a trendy Tokyo neighborhood. I've brought Ruby here to test out a canine hyperbaric oxygen chamber that I once blogged about. The technology is the same as that rumored to be used by athletes ranging from Lance Armstrong to Michael Vick — it sends concentrated amounts of oxygen to problem areas in higher atmospheric pressure, supposedly expediting the recovery process.

But when my cousin went FTM my first reaction was "Why?" Quickly followed by "Because he had to." I don't need to understand.

Totes.

Hubby tells stores about being 16 and hieing himself off on a tall ship to the South Pacific (really, it was some kind of cruise ship, and they wanted crew, and he wasn't in school, and his folks said Yes) and I'm always struck by the difference about being a boy of 16 wanting to have an adventure and a girl of 16 wanting to have an adventure.

Sometimes I think it'd be really cool if I'd been born a woman. Other times I think I'd have ended up very angry and would have gone through a lesbian separatist phase.