What IS Possible

Recently I found these two stories of hope from within the transgender world-from very different ends of the age spectrum and the world.  The first comes from the Advocate.com and Canada:For Gabrielle Diana Gladu, 16 is particularly sweet. Two years after a suicide attempt, she is thriving — a transgender teen who beat the odds.

Tall, blond, sharp-witted, and stylish, she lives in Ottawa, Canada, with her predominantly Catholic family, who immigrated a generation ago from Poland and France. Her family is not fabulously wealthy, but they work hard and organize their resources well to support her. 

But Gladu is all too aware that increasing transgender visibility and fresh legal protections seem to go hand-in-hand with continuing discrimination in almost every sphere of trans people’s lives — be it travel, education, health care, or employment.

The second comes from Australia and Gay Star News: One of the most prominent transgender Australians has been named as Queensland’s Australian of the Year and as a result is eligible to go on to be named Australian of the Year for 2016.

Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Group Captain Catherine McGregor is being honored for her work as a diversity champion three years after she transitioned to being a woman and went public as the highest ranking military officer in the world who is transgender.

Follow the links for more!

What's Wrong with those "Aussie's?"

Catherine McGregor transitioned from male to female in 2012. (Photo: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

"Australian military officer Catherine McGregor, considered the most prominent transgender woman in Australia, functioned as a male until just after her 56th birthday, she shared in a speech at a National Press Club event in Canberra, Australia this week.

“I choose the term ‘functioned’ advisedly, because my relationship to my birth gender was fraught from a very young age,” McGregor, who is a group captain in the RAAF Reserve, said during her speech, reported Buzzfeed.

For people who are transgender, there is a difference between that person’s physical gender and the gender he or she actually identifies with. Gender dysphoria is a diagnosis included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which says, “for a person to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, there must be a marked difference between the individual’s expressed/experienced gender and the gender others would assign him or her, and it must continue for at least six months.” 

It can be hard to describe what it’s like to actually live with gender dysphoria (“Grammar fails to express" what it’s like to live with it, McGregor said). The writer of the Tarnished Sophia blog, who says in her “About Me” section that she has gender dysphoria, explains that it’s like being ready and comfortable with playing Romeo, and then on opening night being told you must play Juliet. “You haven’t played this part before, you don’t know the lines, the costume doesn’t fit at all, and you feel no connection to this character whatsoever. You don’t understand what her motivations are, and the director can’t explain them in a way that makes any sense to you.”

McGregor said in her speech that before she transitioned from male to female in 2012, her inner conflict was unbearable. “I suffered from it acutely and consciously at intervals over the course of my entire life,” she said in her speech. “I now believe my entire life was spent repressing and compensating for my gender variance.” '

Go here for more! 

Don't the Australian's know how damaging an active transgender military person can be? 

Of course you Cyrsti's Condo regulars know I am a trans vet and I feel the continuing discrimination against trans military members is the height of hypocrisy.

WGAL - Lancaster/Harrisburg

What is gender dysphoria?

What is gender dysphoria?