Real Life Experience

The Real Life Experience (RLE) is the period during which a person wishing for reassignment surgery must live full-time in the role of their identified gender. This means that upon commencing the RLE, there can be no more switching between "girl-mode" and "boy-mode", names and identifying details get properly changed and used, and the appropriate public restrooms get utilised (in fact, in many places it is just as wrong for a full-time transwoman to use a male restroom as it would be for a genetic woman, and vice versa).

Gender variance comes to an end.

The purpose of the RLE is to ensure that the individual is capable of functioning as a member of their identified gender, and ultimately, won't have regrets after irreversible surgery. If someone finds that they cannot cope during the RLE, it's often still not too late for them to re-evaluate things and decide if they want to turn around. Usually, genital reassignment surgery mandates at least a year spent full-time.

The RLE isn't something to be underestimated. Deviation from full-time presentation may, depending on the degree of deviation, cause therapists to call into question your suitability for transition. For myself, this raises the issue of what to do in regards to my grandmother on dad's side of the family, who is the one person in our family not yet aware of my situation and most likely to react badly, and to whom I will soon no longer be able to present as male. I honestly don't know yet, though it's often in the back of my mind.

And there's a possible date now - January 8th, 2007. This might shift slightly by a few days, but comes as a result of yesterday's meeting with my manager, in which we drew up a list of people in the company who have known me as a male.

Towards the end of this year, I'll send out a personal letter to the people who have been earmarked, explaining my situation and why I'm doing this. Following that, L (the workplace transition consultant) will conduct her session to provide information about GID and gender dysphoria and answer questions without me being present. Then, I get pulled into the room to answer questions that might need to be directed at me, under L's watchful eye. After that, there'll be an informal send-off held as a sort of farewell to the male me that people are familiar with, I'll disappear over the Christmas break to sort out my personal details, and finally return after the New Year as me - Amanda (and in the words of L, "having done yourself up fabulously!").

And honestly, I'm both thrilled and terrified, feeling absolutely ready and not at all ready at the same time. Everything up until this point has gone more smoothly than I could ever have hoped (it's difficult to believe how supportive work has been, and I'm utterly grateful for it), and it's hard sometimes to shake the feeling that the first thing to go wrong might somehow be my fault, whether it be in my visual presentation or my voice or my mannerisms or something.

One part of me wants to back down and hide because it's the easiest thing to do and is what I've done for the last twenty-six years. The other part of me has been given a taste of life and knows that the difficulties will only be temporary. The struggle is twisting my stomach into knots, but really, I'm revelling in the fact that it's the latter part who'll win.