Self-Made Man Read Online Free Page B

observed this phenomenon in action at various dinner parties or in restaurants. Women often lean into a conversation and speak in wordy bursts, asking to be heard. Men often lean back and pronounce with terse authority.
    Naturally, what you do with your breath affects how your voice will sound. Using fewer words, speaking more slowly and sustaining my breath through the words all helped me to use the deeper notes in my register and to stay there. This meant, of course, that I couldn’t allow myself to get too excited about anything, because this would change my breathing, and my voice would pinch up to its higher reaches. Conversely, I found that relaxing and breathing deeply before I embarked on a day as Ned helped me to get into his voice, then his bearing and then his head.
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    The process of getting into Ned’s head raises an obvious question, and one that many people have asked about this book, mostly as a means of clarifying exactly what the book is meant to be and what they should expect to get out of it.
    Am I a transsexual or a transvestite, and did I write this book as a means of coming out as such?
    The answer to both parts of that question is no.
    I say this with the benefit of experimental hindsight, because after having lived as a man on and off for a year and a half, if I were either a transsexual or a true lifestyle transvestite, I can assure you that I would know it by now.
    For one thing, I would have experienced far more satisfaction living as Ned.
    Transsexuals generally report that passing as a member of the opposite sex is an immense and pleasurable relief. They feel that they have finally come into their own after many years of living in disguise.
    Just the opposite was true for me.
    I rarely enjoyed and never felt in any way fulfilled personally by being perceived and treated as a man. I have never, as many transsexuals assert, felt myself to be a man trapped in the wrong body. On the contrary, I identify deeply with both my femaleness and my femininity, such as it is, more so after Ned, in fact, than ever before.
    As you will see, being Ned was often an uncomfortable and alienating experience, and far from finding myself in him, I usually felt kept from myself in some elemental way. While living as Ned, I had to work hard to make myself do his work, to be him. It did not come naturally at all, and once he had served his purpose, I was happy to discard him.
    As for cross-dressing, this, too, was not definitive for me or particularly enjoyable. I can’t deny the brief thrill I felt in getting away with the disguise, and in seeing a part of everyday life that other women don’t see. Wearing a dick between my legs was an odd and mildly titillating experience for a day or two. But that frisson wore off quickly, and I found myself inhabiting a persona that wasn’t mine, trying to approximate something that I am not and did not wish to be.
    This is, therefore, not a confessional memoir. I am not resolving a sexual identity crisis. There is intimate territory being explored here. No question. As my childhood proclivities can attest, I have always been and remain fascinated, puzzled and even disturbed at times by gender, both as a cultural and a psychological phenomenon whose boundaries are both mysteriously fluid and rigid. Culturally speaking, I have always lived as my truest self somewhere on the boundary between masculine and feminine, and living there has made this project more immediate and meaningful to me. What’s more, I did partake in my own experiment, live it and internalize its effects. Being Ned changed me and the people around me, and I have attempted to record those changes.
    But to say that I conducted and recorded the results of an experiment is not to say that this book pretends to be a scientific or objective study. Not even close. Nothing I say here will have any value except as one person’s observations about her own experience. What follows is just my view