Hi Everyone,

Dr. Alice Novic here reporting in. It’s 2010 and most is well. I’m forty-seven years old and have neither purged to live as a regular, straight man nor transitioned to live as a transsexual woman—contrary to many people’s predictions. Sixteen years of active crossdressing here, and hopefully more on the way.

My wife, Melissa, and I have been together now for seventeen years, both, fortunately, with careers that have survived these tough economic times. She continues to sign bands and cut albums, and I continue to help patients with conversation and chemicals. She is the most stimulating and fun person I’ve ever been involved with, male or female, and I continue to crave her companionship and her body--though I seem to be craving everyone’s body a bit less over the years. And Lissa still finds my daily song and dance appealing, especially when I’m not hitting the T notes too frequently.

As I promised her, I’ve hidden my crossdressing from the kids so that we can “tell them when they’re ready.” But honestly, it just doesn’t seem like it would be something that they would want to hear a whole lot about even if I did reveal it to them. Nonetheless, I present myself as much more of a free spirit to them than a standard straight man. My eleven-year-old daughter, Hanna, and I love movies and stories about the ups and downs of teenage girls, and she knows that I’m very hard to beat at i-dressup.com. (We play it like it’s American Idol, with my wife, son, and housekeeper as judges.) While she’s a shrewd Reese Witherspoon of a girl, my ten-year-old son, Jake, is more of nerdy, handsome, surprisingly sensitive Clark Kent of a boy. He and I enjoy more traditional things, like soccer, baseball, basketball, and, increasingly, online poker.

Unfortunately, years of running plus coaching my son’s soccer team, and playing in the coaches’ game have ultimately led to a permanent ankle injury that I feel with every step. I guess that vulnerable posterior tibial tendon of mine told me, “Don’t be fooled by that flat stomach and surgically refreshed face. Your body knows exactly how old you are.” I’ve now been retired as a soccer player--who cares—but also retired as a runner and was originally worried that I might blow up like a blimp. With physical therapy at least, I’ve managed to walk without an obvious limp and corrected some bad posture I had accumulated along the way. Now, like many Los Angelenas, I just strive to age as gracefully as I can with pilates, yoga, and walking. Maybe soon Melissa and I will add golf to our nauseatingly privileged routine.

But on the front you are perhaps most eager to hear about, I’m pleased to report that for the last half year at least, my Alice nights have been as great as my first year with Frank because of a special love life I’ve been able to arrange, called boyfriend by committee. Melissa continues to be fine with my weekly girl night and sometimes lets me split it into one early night and one late one. On my early nights I go on Platonic, Sadie Hawkins dates with Paul, the “Big Grabowski” I met in ’07, an easygoing giant of a man. We bowl, putt-putt, play poker—do everything but host dinner parties together. My late nights, though, remain Frank’s. Back from getting one of his hip transplants revised, he is healthy and back to satisfying me in all the ways he needs to—and he’s happy that Paul’s the one airing me out in public. Ouch. Yes, that smarts and wouldn’t be okay if I was a full-time trans woman. Still, I can’t help but smile when I think of the ten years Frank and I have shared together.

So, wife, kids, aging body, boyfriend by committee, that’s where I’m blessed to be these days—and basically too busy living my life to write much more about it. But I think we TGs are often too private about how our lives turn out and don’t let our younger sisters learn as much as they could from our experience. So today, at least, I trust I’ve done my part.

I wish you all the very best in finding your own solutions,

Alice Novic, M.D.

To learn more about me than you’d ever dare to ask, please see my smart, sexy memoir, Alice in Genderland: A Crossdresser Comes of Age