There are some words and phrases which on the surface are very benign in the world but I have learned to dislike since starting the transition.  Not that they are bad, mind you and they are not used with malicious intent, but they still cause me to cringe when I hear them

Passing: passing occurs when a person classified as a member of one group is also accepted as a member of a different group. The term was used especially in the U.S. to describe a person was who assimilating into the white majority during times when legal and social conventions classified the person as a minority, subject to racial segregation and discrimination.  (like last week for some)

Some transpeople see “Passing” as the holy grail.  Being able to hide in plain sight as it were.  Difficult for most of us.  But still the word passing (or to pass) infers we need to stay in stealth, under cover. To me it implies that you need to disappear.  Basically it is what everyday people do…everyday.  While being accepted into the world of women is what I want…I am not passing to do it.  It implies that I am playing something I am not 

I am not looking to “pass” as a woman.  I am a woman.  I don’t need to fool or deceive anyone.   I just need to be who I am going about my normal daily existence.   Often when you work too hard at something, it stands out more. 

Please even though you mean well, do not tell me I look like a girl or woman.  You may mean it as “You have made it to Passing” but it implies that I don’t look like a woman other times.

So passing is one word I won’t use in relation to me.  My goal is to be who I am, not a clone of anyone around me.

En drag or En Femme:  these phrases have a specific meaning, neither one applies to a transsexual person.  I don’t mind when CDs or Drag Queens say this about themselves but don’t ask me if I dress en femme (I dress en moi , it happens to be the societal convention of how a woman in my world dresses).  And I don’t do drag.  I could, but to many people who aren’t in the community, every TG is a drag queen.  Drag Queens are entertainers (and if you are drawing a Venn diagram. it is a small circle that intersects with…well men and women.  Yes, I know genetic women who do drag.) And by the way, what I wear under everything is only important to me and someone special in the future I pray.

I absolutely detest the phrase en Drab.  Just so you know.  It is silly and inane.  For the people who aren’t familiar with that…it means to dress as a guy.  Now I know most male fashion lacks color and style, but it doesn’t have to be drab.

“When did you decide to become a girl (or woman)?”  Quick aside:  I am well beyond the age of being a girl. I still take that as a compliment though.

I didn’t decide.  It is who I am. It is born into me. It isn't like test driving a car.   I did decide to no longer pretend otherwise.  But this is an internal, innate part of who I am and always have been.  Besides I don’t remember the exact day.  There was a decision involved...I decided to pursue my real self.  This is almost always accompanied by “Why would you do that to yourself.?”  Now that will be a whole blog for later…but the Jeopardy answer is “What is doing it FOR yourself and not TO yourself”.

Which brings us to …

Lifestyle:  Lifestyle to me implies a conscious way of living.  i.e. Living in luxury when you could be living modestly.  Being in the BDSM community is one of my lifestyles.  Being a cat person is a lifestyle.  I have friends who travel…that is a lifestyle.  Being trans is not a lifestyle.  It is a life.  It isn’t something you switch on and off at will.  Place on a shelf while you do something else.  Again this is the Reader’s Digest version, but I don’t swap back and forth in gender presentation.  I don’t do this to get Ladies’ night prices. Straight people don’t live their lives as a lifestyle. 

There are a few lifestyles I would love to try.  You know jet setting.  Living on the Riviera.  Hobnobbing with movie stars and captains of industry.  That would be a lifestyle.  I am just working on having a life.

I know this is a mine field for a lot of people.  Like walking on egg shells around a transperson, but it is really not that difficult.  Treat us like you treat everyone else.  We aren’t that different.  You don’t have to even be PC as long as you treat us like you treat any of your friends.

Don’t call me “he” or “him”.  This hurts me more  than anything.  It means you do not accept me as I am, that you cannot see me as my true self.  I get it is a slip sometime.  Hell I do that with my cats every day...saying three names before getting the right one.  But honestly, I feel it is disrespectful, especially if intentional (family...please accept me and quit holding to a past..thank you).  There are some I love forever who cannot or will not even try.  And they don't know how each time they do that, I want to walk away and cry.  Do I look like a He or him?  Well then I need to evaluate my lifestyle, dress more en femme and try harder and pass.

March 28

Somewhere along the way here I will be a hypocrite.  You will see it when it comes along (or I will highlight it for you)

I am very naive'.  I believe that the world, at least the part that spans the Atlantic to the Pacific and two other sections, is maturing, growing, learning.  My belief has been shattered.  

You see I think that everyone who inhabits this world is equal.  I am one of the very few who do.  Let's talk entitlement and privilege.  I feel I have walked among those who follow that path, the ones who see others not as just different (in a good way) but lesser or even non-human.  Yes, my friends I was part of the elite, the top, the head of the food chain.  I was a white, Teutonic, middle aged, professional male.  I know it is hard to understand why anyone would give that up.  I could shop almost anywhere.  I could drink where I wanted to drink.  I could get the attention of the waitstaff and NOT be placed in a corner, usually next to the kitchen.  I could go to a car dealership and not be patronized.  Yes, it was wonderful and I enjoyed that game.  There, I said I was a hypocrite, because I was like that and probably still harbor a little.  But I want to make that right.  In my case I have truly been born again. No I didn't find YOUR God...My God was never lost.  I found the smiling faces that hide behind their "truth".

I am now part of three different "lesser" (according to more than a few of my "friends" in other parts of this country) groups.  I am part of the LGBT community or the gays as we get called.  Even though I may not be gay (we will have to discuss that in a later blog) but I am and embrace that.  I have many many friends who love partners who have the same genitalia.  Doesn't bother me because, they don't tend to flash said genitalia in public or have sex on the tables.  I am a transwoman (please take note the modifier there of woman because that will become important in a minute).  That is an even smaller minority than the LGBT community.  And I am now part of the LARGEST "minority" of all.  Women.   I am still professional, albeit evidently less so in the eyes of some.  I am unfortunately still middle aged although that moniker will soon be taken away also as I enter "senior" years.  My religious beliefs haven't changed with my gender.  I am still a Theist. (some of you may want to look that up...note that is a hypocritical snarky comment). 

The point of all that is I have "new" eyes.  I pray that I never had the rose colored glasses of some people but that maybe I was a bit myopic.  I thought that in this great "melting pot" (please forgive me here for quoting tha almighty Wiki but "In the 18th and 19th centuries, the metaphor of a "crucible" or "(s)melting pot" was used to describe the fusion of different nationalities, ethnicities and cultures. It was used together with concepts of the United States as an ideal republic and a "city upon a hill" or new promised land.^{[citation needed]} It was a metaphor for the idealized process of immigration and colonization by which different nationalities, cultures and "races" (a term that could encompass nationality, ethnicity and race) were to blend into a new, virtuous community, and it was connected to utopian visions of the emergence of an American "new man." That is how I wanted to see the world.  That isn't how the world is.  People still fight just to get on the same level as others who get placed there because of their looks or background or gender.  I knew it still existed but held the belief that we were progressing.  I was wrong.  And all it took was a simple change in name on an online forum.  First lesson was that many men still see women as sexual objects whose purpose to to serve them.  Well having been schooled in the ways of guys, I didn't like that much.  Still don't.

But recent legislation in many areas of the country are making prejudice legal.  Going in the face of what our forefathers must have envisioned for the country.  A country who has made inroads although it has not completed the task to make all citizens equal (Ah ha!  There is one person out there who is saying "Communism"...I disagree, it is freedom and equality).  Here is the gist of all this.  I see the country passing laws to PREVENT someone from taking advantage of another person, not laws to keep people down or allow one person to mistreat another.  I don't really care what body, color, language, religion they have.  If you want to call everyone being equal communism, then we need to say the opposite is a dictatorship, an autocracy.  That is what will happen when people are subdivided into disagreeing factions. (It already is with money driving what should be a utopian society)

Why would any civilized person refuse service to a law abiding person?  We all have our quirks right? We all don't fit the same mold.  How boring is that you would marry your mirror image...no wait that would be gay right? So this week, states have said it is OK for a business to refuse to serve a (place your favorite hated group here).  Germany did that in 1935 by the way...for some reason Americans found that reprehensible...OK back to the story.  Now lets just say green people cannot get cakes from the blue baker.  You may find that OK after all blue and green make turquoise and we all know turquoise is a sign of lower intelligence.  But now the blue baker thinks, I won't serve pastels, only watercolors because they stay on the paper better.  So no green pastels will be used...and so on.  I know it sounds silly but really whenever I see anyone discriminate against anyone else I ask myself a question.  I change the one word in the statement to something I am.  "we don't serve _______s"  We don't serve middle aged white male professionals.  You laugh but think about it.  They are the majority here.  In other parts of the world not so much.  So in those places you will become the target of hate.  In my world now that statement is "We don't serve transwomen here".  Even if not said there could be a physicality used and my life can be in danger.  No one's life should be in danger over who they are.

We are all one big group here.  Instead of fighting each other we need to try and make the world a safer place in general.  I am a human.  That is the bottom line.  And if we do meet our God, and I suspect that  said God is probably the same entity no matter where you are just has different nick names, I suspect that the GOD I will meet will look upon me and say "That'll do.  Ya done the best you could and I am proud of you."  If that god says "You blew it...you know I hated blue watercolor bakers"  then I will step away.

Love you all, you are all my friends unless you decide that you are better than I am or that you think I am going to hell because I won't play your game of belonging to a buffet religion.  Take me as I am.  Treat me as an equal, be my friend, don't judge me, I won't judge you.  We are all on the path together and there will be parts where we need to help each other.  Let's make that path smoother.  Life is short and hard enough without adding obstacles

In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy follows the "yellow" brick road to the Emerald city.  At the beginning there are two choices but she is directed to the yellow one.  Where does the red brick road lead?

I like to think I am following that red brick road, the road less taken, the unknown road.  Like the start of both roads, they were small, expanding as you followed them

Little things from long ago.  Remembering feeling that I was in the wrong body, that God had messed up, or the doctors and my parents made a decision.  What they thought was best, wasn't who I was (am).  Strange how a 3-4 year old can form such thoughts.  My strongest memory is asking my adult baby sitter why the doctor had "sewn me closed"?  Maybe subconsciously I have seen a female with no clothes and knew that there was a vagina?  Seems unlikely.  But I could feel the "scar". Now I know what the scar really is and every male has one, but then to me it was the reason I wasn't the girl I was supposed to be.  I related to girls better.  I didn't like the rough and tumble physicality of little boys.  I just felt...wrong

My story isn't very different than thousands of transsexuals out there.  Seems we all have the same base with varying details.  So I won't bore you at this point with those.  Just understand that often in life I felt out of place when in male dominated groups.  Like being trapped where I didn't want to be.  I knew, inside, that things were wrong.

But I convinced myself that it was me who was wrong.  That I had an illness, something in my brain, that made me think "wrong".  So I did what most transpeople my age did, I went in the opposite direction of my feelings.  I played sports.  Hot corner in softball, Goaltender in field hockey, what is now called a Libero in volleyball.  Even cornerback in football.  All places where I had to react to something coming at me.  I had to defend.  Seems I was asking to be attacked.  I did well at all of them, not prolevel but highly competitive.  Also, if you look closely, they are almost all (football excluded) what in the US we considered "Women's" sports.

Along with sports I tried to do things to prove how macho I was.  I was a jerk toward women I wanted to date (More on that subject in a later blog).  I drove too fast.  Skied double black diamonds...without poles.  Yet I always felt that what I was doing wasn't me.

Skip over about 25 years, being married twice (once to a Playboy Bunny).  Having a girlfriend (yes, see above about playing the jerk, but to be honest, I loved my wife and girlfriend equally).  I was successful being a professional and hiding my true self.  I did give myself a little respite, little hidden (or not) things that showed my femininity.  Clothing from the women's section.  Nail polish.  Smooth legs. Tinted lip gloss.  I now know I wasn't fooling anyone.  Of course my two women ( The greatest women anyone could ask to be with by the way) knew the big picture.  I was still telling myself though that I wasn't a transsexual.

Yes I wanted to be a woman with all my heart.  But it wasn't "logical nor practical" in my life.  I had to be what those around me wanted me to be.

Fast forward a again.  After years of letting life take me where it wanted and being content and comfortable, the rug was pulled.  My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and it took her 5 years later.  My girlfriend, my soul mate, died 18 months later (to the day)suddenly to an aneurism.  Now I had no anchor, nothing to keep me pretending.    A year of grieving, then thinking "Go be who you are."  I played a new role.  I was a cross dresser.  Man by day, woman by night.  This wasn't right either and with help of a great community, I learned that I needed to be a woman.  I didn't jump in with both feet.  I stuck my toe in...one day dressed and doing what normal people do...then more days and then...making the call.  Dressing 24-7 as we say.  On my yearly health exam I asked my primary doctor how to start transitioning. 

The next step was counseling.  No shock there, I had GID.  Gender Identity disorder.  Next was hormones.  A full year of real life (watching the practice i had built dwindle...persuading myself it wasn't the transition).  Then closing the practice...

Now I have the documentation and the changes that legally tell the world I am a woman.  I am who I knew I was 50 plus years ago.  I won't say wasted years because they were some great years with some great people doing some great things.  They are in essence bricks in the road.  A road that has a destination but I am not sure what that will be.  Am I close to the end?  Or will this road lead to bigger and better things.  Things like friends.  Like a love to share my life with who wants to be with me.  Like a new career.  Like being someone who is known for standing up for trans-rights.  I hope for travel and knowledge.  I hope to look at the world through "new eyes"  and see the wonder of a great country and world

So all I can say is "follow the red brick road".  You are welcome to come along.  Let's see where it leads.