Saluting All Veterans

Being a transgender veteran myself, I would be remiss in not mentioning all transgender veterans. Including current or veteran serving/or served in the Armed Forces of the United States. When you consider the percentages of trans vets, you can not think about all of those who went before us who silently took their secret to the grave.

Plus, these days we (trans people) still find ourselves fighting for our rights to even fight for our country thanks to the current administration. Seemingly, though, those efforts have been derailed in the court system.

Transgender or not, thanks for your sacrifice.

Passages

As I continue to put together a possible workshop title for the Trans Ohio Symposium this Spring, I dredge up old memories and wonder why I went down certain paths.

One major one revolved the fact I had the penchant for certain people seeing me both ways, as a man and as a cross dressed woman.

As we all know, time makes for an excellent filter. Good or bad, we have a chance to re-live and wonder about the past.

One word which keeps appearing in my past is validation and my earliest senses of being validated as a cross dressed woman came from Halloween parties. In fact, it took me years to realize when somebody complimented me it was "You look good as a woman...for a man."  Somehow I finally realized the difference between reality, pictures and the mirror.

Summer Picture

I was missing the key element of feeling comfortable in my own skin which finally led to a confidence I had never known as a transgender woman. Plus the biggest key to it all was the ability for me to grow my own hair. (Yours may be different of course.)

Passages for all of us transgender women are easy to over simplify, which I think leads to the infamous "I'm more trans than you debacle."

One way or another, the journey never seems to totally end, it just gets easier with time...most of the time.

Who Was That Woman...Part Two

We continue to receive the occasional comment concerning our Cyrsti's Condo past post, called "Who Was that Woman."

Cutting to the chase, I wrote about the brief glimpse I saw of myself in a restroom mirror. Instead of recoiling in horror, I made the quick gender judgement of "woman." (Without thinking)

One comment in particular made me feel so good, because it comes from a cis woman friend I have known for years and used to chill out with occasionally. Aimee wrote:

"I am so happy for you! I think that you could give me some lessons on female self-confidence. And I think THAT is fantastic! "

Little do you know Aimee, I got plenty of lessons from you :).

I am adding a couple more comments which seem to fit:

As Connie always has said, "Your best fashion accessory is a smile!" and as Paula Goodwin said:

I'm a little behind you on the HRT Route ~ well quite a bit actually, but the changes to how I look to others is already quite dramatic, my latest joy is having the confidence in appearance to go out without makeup."

How ironic is it we go to all this trouble to discover less is truly more in the makeup department.