Happy Easter

 

Image from Austin Tate on UnSplash.

When I was growing up, one of the moments I will always remember were the Easter celebrations I was forced to attend.

Primarily when I was stuffed into a suit and tie and had to watch all the girls in their pretty dresses and wondered how it would be to enjoy such a supposed pleasant experience. I say pleasant because my wife Liz has told me how it was to be scolded when she played with the boys on Easter and ended up getting her new white tights dirty. I told her I so much wanted to wear white tights at Easter but could not, so the grass was not always greener on the other side of the gender border.  

Since our family was not very religious, Easter was one of the few times the family attended church services which made it even harder to accept. Accept I did and had to internalize my thoughts in a very dominated male family. Little did I know, it was just the beginning of a life of internalization I would be facing due to my deep gender issues. To fight the idea, I was transgender I did my best to cross dress it away until I could take it no longer, bought my own white tights and moved on into bright feminine fashion. Slowly but surely, I reimagined myself and begin to change my own narrative into a pleasant transgender womanhood. Then it seemed cisgender women everywhere around me moved away from dresses and hose altogether. 

Now on Easter, the closest I come to any sort of an observance is when I am able to attend the afternoon Passover Sedar at my daughters in laws who are Jewish. On occasion too, I attend Wiccan circles with Liz and identify as a Buddhist, when pushed to do so, on some sort of form I need to fill out. I loved the Buddhist religion from my experiences with it when I was in Thailand in the Army.

Ironically, now when I am free to do so, I don't attend any organized religious Easter services at all. So, I do not wear or even own a symbolic pair of white tights at all. 

For those of you who do celebrate Easter and love to dress up in your prettiest clothing, have a great day and enjoy your present gender tense.  You can even see if many other cisgender women break the current fashion trend by wearing a dress at all...with white tights.

Transgender Inclusion

 

My Fave Girls. Liz on left, daughter on right
from the Jessie Hart Archives 

I actually survived my second "Seder" Jewish ritual service and dinner in fairly good shape. The one my wife Liz and I were invited to last year proved to be very uncomfortable due to my back's reactions to very uncomfortable chairs. This year I was greeted by my son in law to my own comfortable chair which ended up fitting perfectly with the table we ate at. I was so relieved. 

I also was happy my trans grandchild was the "moderator" and led the lengthy service which was partly in Jewish. Since lately I seem to struggle with English, speaking nay Jewish was certainly out of my reach. 

It turned out,  my grandchild who is re-enrolling in The Ohio State University this Spring seems to be coming out of their shell quite a bit and was there with their partner, whose name I promptly screwed up when we arrived. So much for making a good second impression. Which has been normally the story of my life. Open mouth, insert foot. 

Being included so totally in their rituals of the Jewish Faith has always been amazing to me. In fact, years ago at my oldest grandson's Bar Mitzfah  I was asked to get up in front of many people in his temple and have a part in the service. I was still early into my Mtf gender transition and was petrified but was able to come through it all unscathed.  I am not a real expert but the Jewish Temple my daughter and family belong to are Reform Jews and not the stricter Orthodox Jews which is possibly why I was welcomed and included with open arms.

For the day, as I wrote about briefly yesterday, since I was never allowed to even think about wearing a pretty, bight colored dress like the girls and women were allowed to wear,  I resorted to wearing my own bright colored clothes. What I attempted to do was wear as much as I could of the clothes and accessories my wife Liz has made for me over the years. She knitted me a pink and blue sleeveless sweater vest which I wore over a white camisole top and my bright patterned leggings. Then I added the earrings and hand beaded trans hair beret she made me. As I said yesterday, she is very talented and has her own shops on the Etsy craft platform under "Liz T Deigns" if you would like to visit it. 

Outside of being able to wear what I wanted to relieve myself of past anxieties, the best time I had was when my transgender grandchild made a special effort to sit down with Liz and I and discuss their advanced Physic's course she was taking soon at OSU when classes resume. They (chosen pronouns) most certainly didn't  get any of my genetics from me in the math or science area's of academia. I can barely add or subtract on a good day. I wish I could say I understood all they were talking about but I didn't. I was better suited in understanding the history behind the "Seder" ritual and how in it's own way intersects with all the problems going on today in the Middle East. 

 As I thought of all of sadness in the world and discrimination against the transgender population, my fondest hope is I can leave some sort of a legacy on how you can lead a successful life as a trans person. Being included in such an inviting ritual such as a "Seder" was a start.