Cyrsti in Wonderland.

Very few humans have a chance to reinvent themselves-legally of course.
Now it seems for whatever reason, I may have that chance.
I'm not taking any credit. In fact if it wasn't for more than a couple very understanding friends and a family member like my daughter (and another who I consider family) there is no way I would have made it here.

I am a believer in being at the right place at the right time but not in blind luck. Luck is putting yourself in a position to take advantage of a situation.
But, on the other hand as you probably know by now I'm also a huge believer in Karma. Sooner more than later life has giveth and taketh away for me. I went through the dark years of no transgender information at all to tons of it now. Plus, when I was growing up it's possible I could have been arrested for even dressing as a girl in public. Now I pretty much have my own regular mainstream spots I'm accepted in. I could go on and on with examples.

Now the sky is the limit. I still have to get my ears pierced before the summer but past that I'm thinking of picking up yoga and even belly dancing. In other words, I'm really starting to embrace this reinvention idea.

I think the biggest problem with doing all of this later in life is the subconscious idea I can't do it somehow. Of course we all know the first sign of failure is thinking you can't do something. Anyway you cut it, living 50 years fighting my gender issues with every fiber of my being is tough to change. We've talked about the practice of muscle memory here in Cyrsti's Condo. My challenge now is to embrace every challenge coming and think yes I can do that!

So this reinvention thing I think an invention in itself (give that some thought) The end result is I'm just being me. On the other hand this whole idea just fires up my imagination.

Maybe I should start a short story called "Cyrsti in Wonderland"? Nah! I have nothing to wear!

Before Transgender?

As you all know, some of us who have been on this planet for awhile grew up in the information dark ages and what I called the gender "black out".

I found this story from The New York Times Magazine about Ethel Person by Stephen Burt.

" In the 1970s,  she one of the first mental-health researchers who tried to meet cross-dressers, transsexuals and (as we now say) transgender people on our own turf, or on our own terms. She visited cross-dressing societies and drag-queen balls; she interviewed all the transsexual patients of the celebrated Dr. Harry Benjamin, and she drew on those visits, those interviews and on hard-to-find publications, including porn. At once a sexologist in the tradition of Alfred C. Kinsey, a psychoanalyst in the tradition of Freud and a writer sympathetic to feminist critique who knew a sexist culture could change, Person asked how we come to see ourselves as men or women, gay or straight or neither, and how to help people whose sense of self causes them pain."

To out this in perspective, I was close to graduating college in 1971. Here's another excerpt:

Person's results make unsettling reading." In papers like “The Transsexual Syndrome in Males” (1974) and “Homosexual Cross-Dressers” (1984), Person and her collaborator, Dr. Lionel Ovesey, distinguished “core gender identity” (whether we think we are truly men or women) from “gender-role identity” (whether we act macho or demure, no-nonsense or girlie-girl) and both from sexual-object choice. Those distinctions can seem obvious now, but they had to be explained at length back then, when those explanations — for psychoanalytic thinkers like Person — often led to broad claims about unconscious origins."

For all of us who lived through this era, this is a good short read. For those that didn't this is a great look at a few of the processes which have opened transgender information doors today. Follow this link.