Tuesday en femme

I am very busy today and do not have time to write about my day out en femme on Tuesday. I promise to write all about it real soon now, but until then, I will leave you with a photo of myself ready to go out yesterday morning.

As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

completing his trousseau

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Tuesday en femme

Tuesday is a day out en femme for me.

I plan to be dressed and out the door in time to go shopping as soon as the stores open in the morning.

In the afternoon, I will visit two human sexuality classes to do outreach about being trans.

I will probably eat lunch in between classes at the student center and/or I may go out to eat after the second class.

Whatever I do, I will have a full report here for you to read as soon as possible.

What is it that makes a woman?

For his final year degree show at London South Bank University, Lee Slaymaker asks, "What is it that makes a woman? Or for that matter a man? Gender is often argued to be a social construction, free of the constraints of biological sex, with the result being that the term ‘woman’ may just as easily be applied to a feminine male subject as it is to a female one."

For the project, Mr. Slaymaker created three photographic images titled The Woman As Homemaker, The Woman As Sexual Object, and The Woman As Chef (photo above).

In each photo, a male inhabits the feminine role, "thus calling in to question the rigidity of socially accepted notions of the gender binary: not only do these images seek to challenge representations of the feminine gender but also those of the male subject."

To see the entirety of Mr. Slaymaker's project, click here.

new heights

The following statuesque stars join the Femulate Famous Females of Height List:

5' 8" - Lorraine Bracco, (photo right) actress, tv's The Sopranos

5' 8" - Frances Conroy, actress, tv's Six Feet Under

5' 8" - Julia Stiles, actress, the Bourne film trilogy

5' 10" - Natascha McElhone, actress, tv's Californication

5' 11" - Margaret Colin, actress, tv's Gossip Girl

Thank you, Lee, for suggesting the last three ladies.

not quite G.I.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Happy Thanksgiving

Dolly Parton leading the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2007.

It's a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I'd be a drag queen. – Dolly Parton

My feelings exactly. – Staci Lana

my reputation preceded me

Last week, I ordered a pair of shoes from Payless ShoeSource.

Via UPS, I tracked my shoes' progress cross-country to my local Payless store and they arrived midday yesterday. I planned to pick up my shoes today during the lunch hour.

At a quarter past high noon, I drove to the store, parked the car, and walked inside. A woman was at the check-out desk paying for two pairs of shoes. As I waited, I jealously admired her black patent high heel pump purchase in size 8.

When she was done, I approached the check-out desk and the sales rep looked at me and spoke my male name while reaching under the desk to fetch my shoes. I was in boy mode, so using my male name was appropriate, but how did she know I was the person collecting the online shoe order?

I have seen that sales rep in the store a number of times. I believe I purchased women's shoes from her while I was in boy mode on at least one occasion, so maybe she remembered me when she saw my name on the order.

I imagine I am memorable; how many males come into the store, admit they "do drag," and proceed to try on all the woman's shoes in size 11? Not many, I imagine.

The store is on the way to university where I will be doing outreach on Tuesday, so if I have time, maybe I will stop in and let her see how I look wearing the shoes en femme.

By the way, the shoes are very nice and very comfortable. I tried them on when I arrived home and wore them for about a half hour without any foot issues.

younger eyes

I am an Avon lady, so I am very familiar with their products and use some of them regularly.

Avon has just introduced a new product to correct crow’s feet. Their product blurb reads:

The first 2-in-1 treatment to resurface & visibly fill crow's feet… at home. Professional crow’s feet laser treatments can be painful and costly (up to $2000 per treatment). ANEW CLINICAL Crow’s Feet Corrector is a specialized eye treatment system uniquely formulated to smooth out and fill in lines around the delicate eye area — no doctors, no lasers. IN JUST 3 DAYS crow's feet lines look plumped out and leveled. OVER TIME 100% of women showed a reduction in the length, depth and number of crow's feet wrinkles.

Girls my age have crow’s feet, so I was very interested and ordered the product for myself.

After using the crow’s feet corrector for less than two weeks, I have noticed an improvement. My crow’s feet were not that bad, so I did not notice much of a difference in that area, but I did notice a big improvement regarding the wrinkles under my eyes. The corrector removed all the wrinkles and now I have smooth skin under my eyes. So, I can definitely recommend this product with one caveat.

The resurfacer applicator (step 1 of the 2-step process) can clog. If you squeeze too hard trying to unclog the applicator, you may release more of the product than you can use at one time (like I did). To work around this problem, run the applicator under hot water to unclog the clog.

the challenge

I love Thanksgiving for all the following reasons:

• A guaranteed four-day weekend every year
  
• The food
  
• Big balloons bumping down Broadway
  
• The food
  
• The Rockettes*
  
• The food
  
• Sleeping in late on Black Friday
  
• The leftovers
  
• Did I mention the food?

That being said,  I lost ten pounds since mid-September and I want to keep it off, so Thanksgiving will be a challenge for me. Wish me luck!

* Going to New York City the past two years to see Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in person, I sadly discovered that The Radio City Rockettes are not in the parade! They only appear at the end of the parade in front of Macy’s storefront for the television audience.

thanks

We celebrate Thanksgiving Day on Thursday.

"Traditionally, it is a time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude in general," according to Wikipedia.

No harvest here, so I guess I express “gratitude in general.”

Mother and Father are deceased, but I know that they are around in a spirit-in-the-sky kind of way, so I want to thank them for raising a beautiful daughter and not interfering with my feminine ways when I was growing up.

Maybe they could have been a little more encouraging by buying me some dresses to wear around the house (so I wouldn’t have to borrow my sister’s) and buying me some dolls of my very own (so I wouldn’t have to borrow my sister’s). It probably would have made my sister happy, too; I wouldn’t be borrowing her stuff and she would have had a sister to play with.

On the other hand, it could have been a lot worse and they could have forced me to be masculine!

So, thank you Mom and Pop for letting me be me.

600 K and counting

Yay... the Femulate hit counter passed the 600,000 mark today!

Thank you all for visiting my blog.

kismet

(updated below)

I like the sweater dress. They cling to my curves and look good on me, so I am always on the outlook for a new sweater dress to add to my wardrobe.

The front page of Kohl's advertisement in today's newspaper features a cute sweater dress, which reminded me that I have $20 credit at Kohl's and a $10 off coupon.

Kismet!

I will definitely visit Kohl's later this week.

Update:

On the day before Thanksgiving, I went to the local Kohl's store and could not find the sweater dresses.

C'est la vie.

transgender awareness: celebrate the living

Helen Boyd celebrates the living transgenders in her blog today.

these days

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance. Honor the dead, who have gone before us struggling to find a place in society as a trans-person. But do not forget to celebrate the living, who continue to fight the good fight.

Thursday, I will not be going to NYC to view the Thanksgiving day parade. I went two years ago and it was great, so I went again last year, and it was not as great.

I will probably go again, maybe next year or maybe next next year, but this year, I will watch it on television.

Anyway, in honor of the Thanksgiving day parade, my "Femulate Her" models for the next week will be exclusively from Macy's, the folks responsible for the parade.

Tuesday after Thanksgiving (December 1) is my next day out en femme.

I plan to be dressed to kill in time to be at the mall when it opens to shop for a new winter coat and whatever else strikes my fancy.

After shopping, I will drive to New Haven to do outreach at a pair of human sexuality classes at the state university. One class begins during the noon hour and the other class begins in the mid-afternoon, so during the break, I will have a late light lunch at the student center and chat with the professor and other outreach presenters.

I enjoy doing outreach. Typically, there are three or four other presenters: a mixed bag of post-op, pre-op, no-op, male-to-female or female-to-male transsexuals. We each spend five to ten minutes telling the class who we are (our mini-biographies), then the class asks questions.

I have been doing outreach for 3-1/2 years, so many of the questions I encounter are questions I have heard before, but there are always a few questions that are unique and sometimes so unexpected that they force me to think hard about my answer. Those questions are worth the price of admission.

After outreach, I may call it a day or I may have an early dinner if any of the other presenters are interested in dining with me.

Staci buys new shoes

I needed a pair of brown shoes to go with some earth tone dresses I bought recently.

I checked a few online shoe stores, but nothing caught my eye until I visited Payless ShoeSource and perused their new arrivals. There I found the pictured slingback platform shoe.

Its description reads, “Show off your wild side with this exotic slingback. It features a snake-print patent upper, pretty peep toe, adjustable slingback for a good fit, a padded insole for comfort and a sultry 4" wrapped heel with 1/2" platform. Manmade materials.”

They had my size in stock, so I ordered a pair for $24.99 with free shipping to my local Payless brick and mortar store.

Saturday night photos and Windows Live Writer

CDJanie started using Windows Live Writer to compose posts on her blog.

I was impressed with its image-handling capabilities, so I could not resist trying out the software myself. Downloaded, installed, up and running, I am using Windows Live Writer to compose this post.

To test out its image handling prowess, I have inserted and manipulated two more photos of me from Saturday night.

The software offers some cool imaging options. So I added drop shadows and tilted the photos. That was easy!

Why Men Are Becoming More Like Women

Marcus Buckingham writes in The Huffington Post today:

In its recent special on the State of Women, Time magazine announced that the gender wars were over and declared a tie. "It's no longer a man's world," Time concluded. "Nor is it a woman's nation. It's a cooperative, with bylaws under constant negotiation, and expectations that profits be equally shared."

I'm not so sure. In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.

Read the rest of the story here.

femulating in the shoe department

Femulators tend to have bigger feet than the females they are femulating. Those of us in double-digit women's sizes discover quickly that the selection of shoes is limited.

Recently, I checked every store in a local mall and only found two stores that carried women's shoes in sizes larger than 10: Payless and Sears.

I had better luck online and here are the stores I found that have larger sizes in women's shoes:

BarefootTess.com: up to size 12 15

DesignerShoes.com: up to size 15

dreamshoes: up to size 16

DSW Shoe Warehouse: their search engine goes up to size 15, but it found no women's shoes in sizes 15 or 14 and only sneakers in size 13. The selection started improving at size 12 and smaller.

Endless: up to size 16

Gwyneth Shoes: up to size 15

outletbuy.com: up to size 17.5

Payless ShoeSource: up to size 13; I have bought a lot of shoes from Payless (online and in store) and some of my purchases are the most comfortable shoes I own.

Zappos: up to size 16; I have made two purchases from Zappos and have no complaints. They are fast and they pick up the tab for shipping in both directions!

(Thank you Paula for a correction and an addition.)

Candy... not so dandy?

Candy is a new fashion magazine "completely dedicated to celebrating transvestism, transexuality, cross dressing and androgyny, in all its manifestations."

The first issue is a limited edition print run of 1000 copies, so I doubt if I will have an opportunity to see the magazine, but here is the contents of its first issue (the Fall/Winter 2009/2010 issue):

"Candy Darling" by Kimball Hastings and Bruce Weber
"Lypsinka, Andre J and Joey Arias" by Bruce Weber
"Smart Style" by Tim Walker
"Tribute to Nico" by Benjamin Alexander Huseby
"Bianca Exotica" by Marcelo Krasilcic and Antonio Frajado
"Rodarte" by David Armstrong
"La Crawford" by Popy Blasco and Daniel Riera
"Kim Ann Foxmann" by Silvia Prada and Daniel Riera
"Casa Susanna" by Dean Mayo Davies
"Tribute to Casa Susanna" by Brett Lloyd and Kim Jones
"Johnny Depp style" by Kira Bunse and Jos van Heel
"Angel Marlowe" by Ariadna Pedret and Terry Richardson
"Christian Lacroix" by Karim Sadli and Robbie Spencer

It's just a list of the contents, so it is hard to tell what the list really represents, but the list itself does not seem very exciting or groundbreaking. Candy Darling, Nico, Casa Susanna? Yes, those are trans fashion icons, but they are ancient history.

And what's with the limited 1000 copy print run?

And worse, what's with the biannual publication schedule?

Nice cover, but I just dunno if this magazine will be successful.