Reincarnation: A Romantic Notion

I’ve been surprised in recent years to find myself fancying a belief in reincarnation.

This is a remarkable admission from a girl who has long been little more than amused by the half-baked ideas of the alternative, new age, occult, and various other pop-cosmologies.

Even my spotty participation in my traditional religion has long had more to do with the comfort of ritual than in an absolute faith in its tenets.

(Separately, I have come to accept in general terms the comforting idea that there is some spiritual dimension to life that transcends the biology of birth and death. And also, incidentally, to believe in my heart-of-hearts in the idea of a supreme being or at least of a collective life force that transcends all those individual spirits.)

But, it is only in recent years, and only through personal experience, that I’ve become increasingly receptive to the idea of reincarnation.

I’ve read almost nothing at all about it. No Edgar Cayce. No Bridey Murphy. None of the Seth books. Little Hindu doctrine. No Kabbalah.

No, it’s all come from my own anecdotal experience.

The most seductive part about it all is how much I like it as an explanation of my transgenderism. It’s sweet. It is a more romantic explanation of my transgenderism than all the other theories, from the most naïve to the most scientific, from the most personally instinctive to the most widely accepted and political correct in our community.

Unfortunately, my anecdotes are a bit embarrassing to relate. You see, they are very personal, and they unfortunately <blush> have to do with masturbation.

Okay, <blush again> to get on with it.

I, like most readers of this forum I imagine, am long past the stage of my transgenderism in which the wearing of women’s clothes is in itself erotic. Nevertheless, I still do occasionally masturbate while en femme. (After all, I tell myself, genetic women have been known to masturbate while in their panties or nightgowns.)

Like many women, surely, floating around in my mind’s eye during those times of growing arousal is the image of a man. Occasionally, it is a specific man, a past paramour, a movie star, a good-looking acquaintance (unapproachable in real life, but there at the bidding of my imagination). Most often, though, it has been a disembodied, Aristotelian idea of a hunk of a man, holding me in his arms, finding me beautiful and desirable, caressing me with slow hands, taking me with firm, gentle passion.

Get ready to cry, now.

Because in recent years, I’ve come to recognize in this disembodied man someone else, someone who is (or rather was) very real, somebody very specific. There is something overwhelmingly familiar and important about him.

It is as if I am not imagining being a woman making love with this man, but remembering it. Sometimes, after masturbatory orgasm, I find myself crying, feeling his loss deeply, mourning his loss terribly as he slips back into my pre-memory.

It is an interesting aside that this Proustian memory of this man never floods my soul in the same way when I am with a real man. During those times the solid presence of my lover anchors me in this time, in this life.

But, in the solitary quiet of a warm lonely bed, he comes to me out of my memory. He is so real. He is so familiar. My deep love for him and his for me easily displaces any other fragmentary images of imagination.

He is there with me, the most important person in my life, in another life, an earlier life, a life I think, I likely lived from birth to death, lived as a child, as a girl, as a teen, as a woman, a wife, a mother, perhaps even as a grandmother, that man, that man from that life, in my mind, in my imagination, in my memory, that man in my bed, in my bed holding me, holding me again as he did for so many years.

In some ways, I’m sorry that it is only from this embarrassingly personal place that this recognition comes.

But I am not at all sorry about what it means to me.

I love the way it explains my transgenderism to me. It tells me that my transgenderism is a phenomenon of the power of my memories of a life and of a love in another time.

It isn’t any kind of pathology. It isn’t any kind of helpless fate. It isn’t an unexplainable, unstoppable behavior that I simply must learn to accept and embrace. It isn’t sad. It isn’t pointless.

It is joyous. It is romantic. It is simple. It is, simply, nostalgia.

Nostalgia not just for that lost love, but for that lost being I once was, that woman I once was, that woman that at times, and in many ways, I still am … and still love being.

Cheryl Ann Sanders is known for her TG novel A Woman’s Passion written under the name Alan Barrie. It was at one time the bestselling TG novel of all times. Although more than 15 years old, it still sells in dribs and drabs on Amazon. Find it here.  Still others remember her essay that appeared here several years ago: “…And What I Wore.” An “occasional woman” at that time, this was a memoir of a weekend she actually spent as a woman with a man in New York City. That memoir can still be found in our archives. Unfortunately, the photographs that illustrate that archived version have been lost. A safe PDF version with its photographs still intact is available for download here. 

Cassie can be reached at alanbarrie@yahoo.com.

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Tags: featured, Identity, opinion, reincarnation, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul