"Trans-tainment Tonight"

From the UK: "X-Factor's" Rylan Clark kissing a transgender model who looks suspiciously like Andrej Pejic. (She isn't)

Transition on Duty

More and more stories are coming out considering transgender and transsexual veterans.
Most of course are from veterans who are no longer in the service. We are still deemed unfit for service by the US Military.
Recently, The Army Times ran a story about a trans man who is beginning his transition on duty-in Afganistan.

Here's part of the story:

"She’s a lesbian, and almost everyone in her unit knows it. She wears her hair cropped short and has a distinctly boyish appearance. And she’s becoming manlier by the day, now that she’s started taking male hormones. Call her Keith. That’s the name this 26-year-old specialist, now deployed to Afghanistan, plans to take when she completes a transition begun several months ago when she started giving herself testosterone injections every other week, under the direction of a civilian doctor who specializes in gender changes. “It’s going well. My voice is deeper, I’m getting more muscle. I feel more energy. I feel more like myself,” she told Military Times in a recent interview via Skype from her containerized housing unit in Afghanistan. Keith declined to be identified by her real name because under military policy, troops diagnosed with “gender identity disorder” are deemed medically unfit for service and face administrative separation. The repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in September 2011 cleared the way for gay troops to serve openly but did not address transgender individuals, def
ined as people who don’t identify with their birth gender."

Of course there is so much more to this story and you can read it here.

Plans A, B and R

As I think back on the last four or five days, I would be remiss in not bringing this up from my trans girl road trip.

First of all, forget about plan A and B- lets go straight to the "R"...for rest room of course.
Going into this venture I thought I had one pretty secure plan"R". The bus of course would have a unisex toilet. As in the best laid plans of transgender folk everywhere-the bus restroom was pretty much declared off limits and the driver would pull into rest stops along the way. Scratch that plan!

My added problem is I take "Spiro". For those of you who take or have heard about Spiro. it's a drug which is commonly prescribed in HRT as a testosterone blocker. Well it also is a blood pressure drug which also makes you pee- a lot on occasion.
So here I was, stuck between the bus and the "R" place- down the road.

I felt another factor would be the average age of the women on the bus who were older than even me. My theory has always been the older the woman the less understanding they are about a transgender girl in the rest room. However,  it was time to hitch up my "big girl panties" and get with the program as alternatives were basically none. (The men's room or the woods?)

So here I was, not only using the women's room with at least 35 women who had to pee as bad as I did but standing in line with them.  I tried to not show the abject panic I was feeling as minutes turned to hours waiting for a stall to open.

Amazingly enough, I lived through the first experience and the second, third and so on. The reasons were very simple actually: extreme need and new hair. I can't and won't tell you wearing my own hair makes me this beautiful creature but it does give me relevance.

I also can't tell you I ever lost my rest room paranoia on the trip or perhaps ever will but I was able to not let it ruin the rest of the experience. In itself a major victory!