Could I...Would I?

Around here, it's the time of the year when Girl Scouts jump up everywhere it seems to peddle their ubiquitous cookies. Including my granddaughter.

As I see them do it, I wonder how it must have been to have been able to join the Girl Scouts. Instead of my exceedingly short miserable stay in the Boy Scouts. Of course I will never know, just like not being able to take Home Economics in high school and learning to cook and sew, etc. Way before transgender, and LGBT were even words for the most part.

I believe now, the most important lesson I would have learned is how girls/young women interacted among themselves when boys were not present. Back in those days where I went to school, the genders were pretty much segregated. Girls to Home Ec, boys to Auto Mechanics. So of course I wanted to be in with the girls as a girl, not as a boy cross dressed as one.

Closets being what they were (and are still) I evaded much of the derision and bullying I would have had to put up with. I played sports, followed the college prep studies and went to proms. Or, I played the game enough to get by, get home and steal away some precious time to cross dress alone.

As time has a way of doing, it went so slow back then and seems like a blur now. Time though does not heal all, as I still wonder "what if." What if I had done more to express myself and had the courage to at least try to step out of the closet. I do know then, the life I had would have been seriously impacted under the harsh lights of an ignorant world.

So on and on I went and here I am finally where I wanted to be...almost. Yesterday was a good example of being called a "he" at one stop and treated like a star by a millennial at another.

Overall the "could" came true and the "would" provided me all I could ask for so far!

When Will They Ever Learn?

RALEIGH, North Carolina --

Despite Republican assurances that North Carolina's "bathroom bill" isn't hurting the economy, the law limiting LGBT protections will cost the state more than $3.76 billion in lost business over a dozen years, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Over the past year, North Carolina has suffered financial hits ranging from scuttled plans for a PayPal facility that would have added an estimated $2.66 billion to the state's economy to a canceled Ringo Starr concert that deprived a town's amphitheater of about $33,000 in revenue. The blows have landed in the state's biggest cities as well as towns surrounding its flagship university, and from the mountains to the coast.

North Carolina could lose hundreds of millions more because the NCAA is avoiding the state, usually a favored host. The group is set to announce sites for various championships through 2022, and North Carolina won't be among them as long as the law is on the books. The NAACP also has initiated a national economic boycott.

The AP analysis - compiled through interviews and public records requests - represents the largest reckoning yet of how much the law, passed one year ago, could cost the state. The law excludes gender identity and sexual orientation from statewide antidiscrimination protections, and requires transgender people to use restrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates in many public buildings.

Still, AP's tally is likely an underestimation of the law's true costs.

For more, go here:

Christianity?

A very dear transgender woman friend of mine recently posted this and I thought it was worth repeating, and for once I had nothing to add. She said it all:

"My parents both graduated from Cedarville University. It is a Christian school. They teach a literal interpretation of the Bible. And they follow the Fundamentalist tradition of ignoring the message of Christ while focusing on small snippets of the Bible which they can take out of context and cite while preaching their message of bigotry.

My mother, God bless her ignorant soul, always updates Cedarville U. with my current address so that they can send me their quarterly newsletter. The Spring 2017 issue of Cedarville Magazine has an article about gender. It's a disturbing read.

And here is Greg Couser's sermon on the subject:
https://www.cedarville.edu/Chapel/Archive.aspx…

He says, "Here we turn to Matthew and Christ's teaching on sex and gender in Matthew 19:1-11 for some guidance."

Here is the passage:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/…

This disgusts me. Greg Couser takes a passage about divorce and argues that it supports his anti-trans message simply because Matthew 19:4 says, "He which made them at the beginning made them male and female."

Are you kidding me? It says God "made them male and female."

It doesn't say, "Males are all born with a penis and having a penis is what determines whether or not you're male."

It doesn't say, "All females must accept that if they weren't born with a vagina then they aren't really female."

If you're a Christian, you believe that God created women as women and men as men.

You must also believe that God created all birth defects. God created conjoined twins. God created intersex babies. God created 0.2% of women with the wrong parts. And God created 0.2% of men with the wrong parts.

How dare anyone tell trans people they're not really the person they are because of the body they were born with?

What a sad, hateful human being."

Noth