The double life of 'Victoria'
7:20 p.m. -- 2009-05-08
I call my blog 'confessions of a part-time girl', but I haven't actually confessed to anything much in a long, long time. To be honest, there isn't a whole lot left to confess to. If you've read all the entries I've made in the last ten months or so, you already have a pretty good idea of what life as a tranny (or with one) might be like.
But there's one last 'biggie' that I really ought to get off my chest.
For about five years, I was a girl, to some of my closest friends.
Uh...?
Yeah. Really.
Years ago, I ran an online computer game. In fact, not just ran it. I developed a fair bit of it. I got into online computer adventure games when they were in their infancy. At first, I was a player...
Get sword. Follow Rosenkrantz. Kill orc. Cast 'heal' Rosenkrantz. Get gold.
...and so on. But it's not all about killing orcs. You could do that in isolation, but in a multi-player computer game, you get to team up with other people, or compete with them, or trade, or just trade insults... whatever. It adds a social dimension.
And almost immediately, it occurred to me that this offered an outlet where I could express my feminine side: Not only could I create a female character, but I could, to all intents and purposes, 'be' female. Nobody need be any the wiser.
That was what intrigued me. To be honest, I wasn't all that interested in orcs and gold... but to 'become' a girl, who happened to play online computer games... wow. Tranny heroin. To be accepted as a member of the community, not as a guy in a dress, but as a 'real' girl...
The mother lode.
Of course, being a girl - at least, a plausible one - requires effort. But it came surprisingly easily to me. Or maybe not so surprisingly. And the effort was certainly invested willingly enough. A new name, a little bit of thinking about a background story... and I was ready. Fortunately, I kept it reasonably simple. You know what they say: if you're honest, you won't need a good memory.
Well... I needed a good memory, but I was consistent. I created a female persona, and I played that role for hours, every week.
Incurably geeky? Well... I wasn't prinicpally there for the computer gaming. Psychologists have written research papers about 'male-presenting' and 'female-presenting' game characters, and their experiences. All I can add is that it was a wonderful way to sample something of life as it might have been.
I like to write... so I wrote content for this online computer game. Players could walk around in my world, exploring places that I had described, and finding monsters, riddles and treasures from my imagination. At the risk of sounding bigheaded: I was good at it. In the end, I wrote several game worlds. But mostly, the reason that I carried on spending time in that online world was that while I was 'in' there, I was a girl... to everybody that knew me. And you don't just talk about orcs and magic swords, you know? People talk about all kinds of 'real life' things. And so did I. For years... and after a while, who's going to question?
It was great, and it felt so natural to me. To be the sassy, clever girl I might have been. I really did 'live' that other life. Okay, it wasn't always great. For example, I remember one night, when I caught one of the players cheating... it wouldn't really matter in a single-player game, but when you cheat in a multiplayer game, you spoil everybody else's fun... so there's an obligation to report problems, rather than exploiting them. This particular guy wasn't having any of that, and called me (among other things) a "fucking bitch."
Strictly speaking, of course, the joke was on him. But I was shaking. Really upset. So real had my online persona become, that I really was shocked at some of the things he said to me, safe behind his computer screen.
Not nice. But then, neither was what I did to him, in return. Those who create worlds are perfectly able to create prison cells... and teleport people inside...
All in all, I learned quite a lot about life as a girl. The patronising attitude of male techies who assumed I wouldn't be able to write decent computer code. The clumsy fawning of adolescent fanboys who wanted inside information from a world builder. The hostility and catty remarks from some of the other girls... and some genuine and good friendships, too! I wasn't there for cyber-sex... but God knows, I was propositioned often enough. The Internet always attracted a certain amount of sleaze.
To borrow a term from a novel by Michael Coney, I played 'a girl who was herself'. This was the meta-game, for me. Being in and of the fantasy world, but also projecting an additional layer of fantasy of my own. Addictive! But then, tranny heroin always was.
And... I enjoyed it hugely. Instead of being a geeky male who was good at writing game worlds, I was an exceptional female... for doing exactly the same thing. And the additional subtleties and complexity of my double life kept things interesting; and kept me coming back. Year after year... until 3D graphics became the norm, and it was time to shut down our little piece of computing history. A game that had attracted players from all over the world, in a continuous relay. Good times!
I know that a lot of other males created female characters. Being one of the game's hosts, I could see what addresses the various players were connecting from, so I had a good idea of who was who. In my opinion, most males make very poor girls. Within an hour, they're either expressing an interest in some lesbian action, or they're acting like a prostitute.
My somewhat prissy, bookish female persona was perhaps less entertaining, but more plausible. And so the deception continued, right until the end.
Just one problem with my feminine alter-ego: when I chose her name, I called her Victoria.
So for five years, I knew a whole bunch of people who only thought of me as Vicky. And then I had to go and fall in love with a girl of the same name.
I told her it was a lovely name. "One of my favourites," I said.
I didn't elaborate.
And, effectively, I got away with my deception. No real harm done... I'd done a lot less than Al Pacino in 'Simone' after all. No money changed hands, and nobody was pronounced dead. So... no real harm done?
It was only later that I came to regret my years of deception. When the real Vicky and I got engaged, and my best man and I put our heads together, to select people to invite on my stag weekend... there was this gap of five years in my life, where there was virtually nobody at all that I could tell him about.
The game development project had filled a gap in my life, immediately after Lucy and I split up. I had became something of a hermit, and my online life offered a window on the world. I knew that crossdressing had ruined that relationship, so the game had become the new outlet for my feminine nature.
Much later, I confessed to my deception. All the people who had worked to develop our game now know about my double life as 'Victoria'... and they've all been incredibly decent about it. At least to my face. I've met several of them, now, and we've had a beer or two, and nobody ever called me nasty names. But I couldn't invite them to my stag weekend, nor to the wedding. Not with a best man who was voicing his frustrations at being unable to find any 'dirt' on me for his speech. One drunken slip-up from one of my old gamer-buddies at either event, saying they'd known 'Victoria' for years...
Well, I'd have been toast, wouldn't I?
So. There was no 'dirt' on me. But my cleanliness comes at a price. Several close friends that I once spent hours with, every week... who can never be permitted to meet my wife.
"Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive..."
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