Cyrsti's Condo

Image from Louis Paulin On UnSplash  Back in what I call my formative years, I grew used to trying to outrun my problems. Between college and my military service I literally was moved or decided to move on my own an average of every year and a half. It all started when I left home for college for a year and a half. Amazingly, during this time my gender dysphoria disappeared and suddenly I was free to live a somewhat normal gender life. I say normal because during this time I had several dates with girls from the East Coast who were much more sophisticated sexually than anything I had seen in my shy Midwestern upbringing. In fact, my Mom unknowingly set me up with my first sexual experience with one of her older (not a minor) students where she taught high school.  I think she was nineteen and I was eighteen, so I had a lot to learn.  The school I went away to was one a group of Midwestern Ivy League schools for students on the East Coast who couldn't make it into the top notch scho

  Photo by  Ugur Arpaci  on  Unsplash Several years ago, pre Covid, my partner Liz and I decided to take a bus tour down from our native Ohio to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. We had done a couple other bus trips in the past so I was ready for the rest room challenges I would face...I thought.   Very early on I learned  the toilet on the bus would be off limits to all except those in dire need. Which meant the bus would make scheduled stops at certain rest areas. My first learning experience came when I stood in line with approximately twenty other women waiting to use the bathroom. At the time I thought I never signed up for this but the first couple places we stopped were in rural areas, so everything went fine. So, at that time I started to gain confidence that no one on the bus would complain a transgender woman was using the wrong rest room. On the way down to New Orleans, things began to change. The rest stops turned into truck stops and other stops along state lines in deep souther

 I used to think crossing the gender frontier was similar to negotiating a maze when you have a series of walls to negotiate. Now I think the entire journey may be similar to climbing very steep hills and then completing the return trip down. The reason being is the severity of what we are attempting. After all, changing ones gender is one of the most difficult journeys a human being can undertake.  Photo by  Hu Chen  on  Unsplash As we climb our first hill or even mountain, many times we face the possibility of losing our family, friends and even jobs.  Many times it seems as if we are barely hanging on as we leave lives we were living in often comfortable yet non authentic lives to begin a whole new existence.  In my case I can understand the idea of holding on to my birth gender for dear life. In fact I worked hard to achieve a quality male life. I had a very good job, fathered a daughter and was honorably discharged from the military. I did many of the guy things everyone did and e