As I am writing this it’s a little under 48 hours from when I should be on my way home from the Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) and it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

My wife is Chinese and for both cultural and personal reasons has never accepted my desire to be accepted as female. “Never in my lifetime” is the expression she tearfully uses to describe her feelings when the possibility of her having a transgendered husband is ever discussed, which is extremely rare anyway.

I belatedly told her about my first GIC appointment, some months after the event, but tonight I’m going to have to tell her that I have my next appointment on Wednesday, that I’ll be needing to get up early on Wednesday morning so as to prepare, I’ll be getting my hair done on the way there, and that as time on Wednesday will be so short I will need to do my nails on Tuesday evening.

This won’t go down well!

She is all in favour of me going to the clinic “to be treated” by the psychiatrist there; to be “cured of this illness”, which is how her cultural upbringing has defined such things. But she also knows that when I go there it is because I am seeking affirmation of my belief in my own identity.

There have been a couple of occasions when, in my haste to change back to male mode before she arrived home, I have mistakenly left things out and she has found them. Firstly I left my nail varnishes out on the computer desk in my bedroom one day. Her reaction was “Why have you been ‘playing’ with these?”. On another occasion I left a couple of pairs of panties on the bed by mistake and as luck would have it for some reason as soon as she came in she turned from the front door straight into my room and found them. She came strutting into the kitchen waving them at me and demanding to know “What are these?!”. I just took them off her, said “They’re mine!”, and went straight to my room to hide them.

One day I was running particularly late and, as happens when I get flustered, couldn’t think straight about where to put a particularly nice pair of panties; lace trimmed black satin and quite skimpy, my favourite pair. I hurriedly stuffed them in a basket in the unit the hamster cage sits on meaning to move them later on, but forgot to do so. I’ve never seen them since. 😦

So, stating my need to apply nail varnish with her here is going to be a toughie, but something has to give.

My biggest fear is that she will demand to see “everything” that I have; all my clothes, make-up, nail varnish etc., and that would mean disclosing all my little “hiding places” and facing a tirade of ridicule, not to mention the tears and possible ramifications.

There is another fly in the ointment as well, although given the urgency it may act as a welcome distraction.

Through wifey’s previous position as a Notary back in China we have joint Power of Attorney to act for a woman back in her old home city who is seeking to make a claim against the estate of her British husband who sadly passed away before she could move to the UK to be with him. An unexpected problem with that has arisen just today and will require urgent attention, paperwork to be found, collated, re-read and so on.

That in itself will cause a fair degree of stress, but whether it will be a big enough distraction remains to be seen.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, is wifey’s day off work and she has kept the day clear of other appointments so that she, by which I mean “we”, can go down town and begin shopping for her upcoming trip back to China. That in turn means that we will have the whole day together with the GIC and my “preparations” hanging over us.

I’m dreading tomorrow.