Dead Horses and Glue?

We beat a lot of dead horses here in Cyrsti's Condo...in a manner of speaking of course. Wow, I wondered do they still make glue out of dead horses? .Not much any more I guess, why make glue when you can make  hot dogs?

The point of all of this babble is comparing the ghost horse looking over my shoulder to a very real phenomena called "trans-security". More precisely insecurity. 

Take last night as an example, the four walls here were killing me as dead as the horse, so I took the horse to one of my regular watering holes for an "adult beverage". Specifically one of the two places I literally transitioned in. As always, I felt the same old insecurities creep in as my ghost horse and I took a seat at a moderately populated bar.

In a fairly short period of time, a couple of other female regulars stopped by to say Hi before they left. The more vocal of the two was simply gushing about the changes I was going through and how well I was doing with them? I'm getting very good at sniffing out a BS compliment versus a honest one and felt she was being real...However...

Somehow I was born and bred never to accept a compliment.  Growing up I learned the hard way a compliment was simply a way of saying "that's alright but can't you do better?"

The two women quickly went on their way leaving me to bask in the warm glow of the knowledge others were seeing and approving the changes I have been going through. Being me though, I didn't take long to think of how far I have come because of where I started.  It's similar to saying your sales are up 100% over last year...when you were closed!

I'm the first to admit, I committed my share of awful, crazy fashion blunders but as I was beating my dead horse thinking about them, I stopped. For once I accepted the compliment and the positive charge to my self esteem and took the moment to bask in the glow.

All too quickly my horse turned to look at it's backside.  That look is a signal to me to me that I could transcend both genders and be labeled as a "horse's behind". For once I grabbed my purse and my glow and headed home.

I wish I could say last night was another huge step in relieving my trans securities but I know it won't. There are simply too many issues out of my control and being ever aware of my surroundings is the right thing to do.

My guess this step is simply another even bigger leap in the transition process.  Bigger, because this involves rebuilding the non gender inner me and linking to the new me. Who would have "thunk" it?

By the way, do you know the best thing about a ghost horse is? They don't eat much!

Sweet 16!

Cassidy Lynn Campbell broke down in tears Friday night when she learned that she had been crowned homecoming queen but was born male.

The transgender senior at Marina High School in Huntington Beach, California began taking hormone blockers and estrogen injections prescribed by an endocrinologist and made the transition to living as a girl.

 She decided to run for homecoming queen, in part, to make a statement. "If I win it would mean that the school recognizes me as the gender I always felt I was," Cassidy, 16, told The Times before the election. "But with all the attention, I realized it's bigger than me," she said. "I'm doing this for the kids who can't be themselves."


 She succeeded in a big way!

"T'd" Me Off

An article from the Huffington Post recently had me thinking about a recent experience with a guy using the gender slur Tranny with me.  For reasons he would not admit to, a guy showed up in one of my "Google+" Transgender groups. Of course I couldn't let it alone since the original post was referring to the well worn subject of why transgender women carry the stigma of being promiscuous.  Of course he didn't believe in any of that but he and his wife have been looking for a "tranny slave" or two for their domination "fun" group. Not only are all of all "easy" we just love to be dominated!

Let me point out I could care less about anyone's sexual preference or fetish, it doesn't matter to me what most do as long as I'm not hurt...Within legal reason of course. He kept accusing me of that when my main point was his use of the "T" gender slur. Couldn't get him to understand the process was the same as using the "N" word or any number of other racial slurs.  His main argument was the transgender women in the group had no problem with being called a tranny. Very similar to "I'm not a bigot, some of my best friends are black."

Again he would have no part of my point that his "transgender" women weren't.  They probably were fetish cross dressers, gurls or even she males.

Unfortunately the abuse doesn't begin or end with a man like him as documented by Jennifer Finney Boylan  (left)

"Hey, can we have a conversation about the word "tranny"? It's a word that is generally considered dehumanizing and offensive when referring to transgender people, like the "N" word for a person of color, or the "F" word for a gay man. But there it was in headlines last week in the story about DJ Mister Cee, who'd been outed as having had sex with a transgender prostitute (see "Is That You Boo? Mister Cee DRAGGED Out The Closet By Alleged Tranny Lover Who Taped Their Encounter??? [Video]"). There it was in a Daily Beast interview with actor Jared Leto about his performance as a transsexual woman in the new movie Dallas Buyers Club. (Writer Marlow Stern's first question: "How did you summon your inner tranny for this role?") And there it was, virtually everywhere, when Chelsea Manning came out as trans last month, causing editors from The Huffington Post to NPR to go running to their copies of the AP Stylebook for help. Politico's Dylan Byers actually wrote a smart article about the challenge, titled "Manning Switch Challenges Style Editors," which you'll have to admit was putting it mildly."

Of course there is much more to this post which you can read here but I'm going to finish off with this excerpt:

"Once, early in transition, I found myself wandering around L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine, wearing a wig that would have been better off used as a home for red squirrels. If you didn't know better, you might well have called me some kind of a "hot mess." I still remember the huge eyes with which a small child, holding her mother's hand, viewed me as I drew near. "Mommy," said the child. "Who is that?" To this day I am grateful for the mother's reply. "That," she said, "is a human being."

FYI, I had that wig and the kid said "Big MEAN woman".