Bye xxx

Yes, I've decided, the chronicle ends here.

I've examined the reasons for this in recent posts.

Projects have an appropriate lifespan. If they carry on too long quality diminishes, and creative energy is spent that could be better deployed elsewhere.

Many thanks again to all who've supported this blog. And to all who've made a positive contribution to trans culture.

I recommend these sites.

Here's a final farewell dance, a final celebration of the feminine, courtesy of Deb Rubin:

Lots of love and poignant farewell kisses to you all,
Deborah xxxx

Deborah's December

I think I am going to wind this blog down.

(I know I've said similar in the past, haven't I?)

A dead-endedness was well expressed by me here. The journey into my inner femininity has been good, but now introspection has finally run out of steam. I've grown weary of 'interiority, imagination and desire'.

Plus there's the issue of cyberspace. Really the inspiration for my two blogs was the particular potential for trans of the phenomenal implications for human society of the sudden development of cyberspace as a new ontological realm, that redrew the relationship between the ontological realm of outer life and the ontological realm of inner life.

But enthusiast for this that I was in principle, in practice my feelings about cyberspace have become quite different. Partly this is because of my character, and partly because of the way cyberspace has developed - predictably, it's become not at all not like the stuff of utopian visions.

In fact I have come to loathe the fucking internet - its enervating 'got to check, got to check', its passwords, its viruses, its spam, its security protection software, its erratic connectivity, its updates, its new bewildering new versions of what I've just got used to, its pace, its commerce, its entangling networks, its trolls, its childish symbolism, its acronynms, its slang, its false cheeriness, its heydudecasualspeak, its crazes and trends, its surveys, its mailing lists, its quantitative friendships, its trivial democracy, its permanent form yet ephemeral character, its endless, endless banalities. It makes me want to go into a deep wood, miles from anywhere.

Nevertheless, the appeal of my own little autonomous realm within an underground world has held its appeal. The satisfaction of creative expression, plus the sense of a personal role in a select small scene, perhaps drew me into a position where I appeared more trans than I actually am. Deborah Descends is the diary of a sub-personality, however deep a one. To be honest, I feel I don't really belong alongside people who suffer from serious gender dysphoria, from people who are thinking of transitioning. They have my full support. It would be wrong of me to comment on their concerns further.

There are people who would like me to interpret myself one way, people who would like me to interpret myself in a different way. This pressure makes me uncomfortable: my desire to please interferes with my self-interpretation.

I don't want to be someone exerting subtle pressure on others to interpret themselves in particular ways.

I hate the hostility of trans politics.

I do not want to be yet another online amateur theorist, opinionated about subjects I haven't really read that much about.

No big conclusions, then, because internal dialogue has not ceased, it's just moving away from blogland. In any case, each post was just an expression of the thoughts of the moment, and so is this one. The journey continues, the direction as unclear as ever.

But thanks a lot to all of my friendly readers (and especially the commenters xx). Deborah Descends was essentially self-centred, but if you got anything good from it, I'm really pleased.

Onwards and upwards, then, in inner, outer, cyber or whatever space works best! xxx

Deb the dancer

I've been watching videos of the bellydancer Deb Rubin. They're lovely, they're inspiring. Fatuously, I feel an affinity with her because we're both called Deb, and 'Deb Rubin' sounds a bit like Deborah.

And there's that 'ohhhh!' feeling. Like 'That's it! That's me! That's exactly who I want to be!' Like I should have had this epiphany when I was four, and orientated my life around it, and by now I'd be a famous bellydancer opening my autobiography with this memory. Didn't happen, did it?

Identifying my inner woman with Deb Rubin raises questions about the whole notion of 'inner woman', doesn't it? I don't of course look at all like her. She does all the looking good and all the dancing, I just identify with her. The only credit I merit is for the mere choice of identification as a form of self-expression.

Oh, all this nebulousness inside of me. Necessarily insubstantial, necessarily useless because confined, yet safely preserved beyond the ravenous reaches of harsh rl.

But if Deb Rubin does represent some spirit inside me, or at least some aspiration of the spirit inside me, then she informs me that brilliance, beauty, strength, grace, art and accomplishment are achieved through movement.

Inside this blog, I feel my t-journey has become static.

Time for a new dance, a new dance floor? xx

Websites I recommend

I think these are good:

A Life Merely Glimpsed
Male Femme
Crossdreamers
Third Way Trans
Pop Bebop
Unordinary Style
T-Central
The Crossdreaming Portal


D xx

Deborah in doubt

My tragedy is the insubstantiality of my own existence. 

Oh, she's just evading the uncomfortable consequences of acknowledging her transsexualism.

No, she's not, she's just indulgently making too much of a mere fetish.

Kisses from an aporia

The story of the cursed ballerina


Once upon a time there was a brilliant beautiful ballerina who said 'all I ever want to do in life is dance'. Whereupon a jealous, cruel and pedantic goddess with a mean sense of irony said 'okay, from now on that is all you will ever do'. This came to pass. The tragic twist was that as the ballerina ceased to have any life beyond dancing, there was nothing for her to express in her dance except 'I am trapped in an eternal dance', and the only way that she could express that was by dancing. All her audience could see was the brilliance and beauty of the dance: it completely failed to communicate the only thing she wanted to say.

Dead-end Deborah?

I have been contemplating the insubstantiality of my own existence.

I have frequently extolled the potential of cyberspace for liberating ontology, in a way that is particularly good for trans people. Cyberspace gives people a place to act - a real space to act - in which they are not tied to external reality. Wonderful!

Of course things are seldom so great in practice as they seem in theory. Maybe negotiating the software is too much of a challenge, or maybe the real has a pull on me after all, but I've never really got into Second Life or other virtual 'role-playing' realms.

So, for Deborah, this blog itself is most of the online realm. The blog doesn't really record rl, yet neither does it create or inhabit a substantial alternative realm. It's a rather empty, confined space - a lonesome cell with windows. Self-expression within it becomes ultimately just an assertion of existence. Like writing a diary in which all you ever describe is the act of writing in the diary.

In truth, of course, ontological status is fundamentally uncertain for both crossdreaming and blogging.

Can inner women socialise?

I feel that I am treading water. The blog is becoming an uneasy yet comfortable outlet for trans feelings. It is not taking me into new space. I just witness myself asserting my own existence and doing nothing much with that existence, beyond feeling feelings about it.

A self needs more than self-expression.  xx

The angel of agnosticism ascends into fluffy clouds

I've said 'em before, I really don't want to keep on saying 'em again, but here in succinct form are the essential beliefs of chairfemme Deborah:

1. 'A wise girl knows that she knows nothing' - Socrates, bluntly feminised by Deborah. Agnostics never persecuted no one.

2. Respect and enjoy your special sexuality.

2. Be open-minded. Be kind.

Print this page, girls, cut out the above and keep it in your handbags forever. Cos Deborah is a-dancing on. Don't wanna be no statue angel of agnosticism. xxx