To Be or not To Be

During our Cyrsti's Condo discussion on Mtf gender transitional walls. I am considering using this one as my second wall.

I am using cross dressing as my first wall. After a point (which differs in all of us) a transgender person feels comfortable enough with her make up and clothing to consider the next step...going out in public. Or, should I say, uncomfortable enough. I know in my case, just dressing up for the mirror wasn't enough. There had to be more.

Once I opened the door and began to climb the public wall, I found out people wanted to interact with me and what was I going to do then? Essentially, dealing with the public pushed me off the wall and towards the next one. Interaction meant learning more than looking like a woman, I had to learn to communicate as one too. Since I had the benefit of working with many primarily cis women populated employees over the years, none of this was too difficult to relearn.

Something else I had to learn was in most all situations, other women read me for what I was, a transgender woman or cross dresser. Passing at this point became "personality." I found when and if I returned to the same location, people would have the tendency to remember me. So, to not be friendly labeled me as a bitch. Or worse yet, someone who was doing something wrong.

I found too, scaling this wall turned out to be easy, compared to the walls I would face in the future. After I became more comfortable in my feminine role, I found more and more I didn't want to go back. This also was the point in my life the term transgender was appearing for the first time and HRT was beginning to become more available.

In the distance, I could begin to see my next wall to climb and it was a scary one too! Going full time as a trans woman.

Could I or would I? Increasingly, my feminine lifestyle told me I could and the naturalness of how I felt told be I probably would have to.

Rest Room "Groupies?"

Recently, I saw this story about a gender fluid LGBT activist using the women's room at the Oscars.

From the Los Angeles Times and reporter Robin Abcarium: 

"On Sunday night, in a restroom at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, I was washing my hands when someone in a crimson ballgown swept past me toward the stalls. There was something about this person's energy that was different than that of other women who were milling around, redoing their lipstick, chatting about the Oscars show.

I felt I knew this person in the crimson gown. Or had seen them somewhere before. So I left the bathroom and waited outside, in the lobby. And when this person left the ladies room, I stopped them to chat.

Sure enough, it was Sam Brinton, 29, an unforgettable, gender-fluid LGBTQ activist whom I'd met almost four years ago at a conference in Las Vegas for educators who work with LGBTQ students. There, Brinton spoke about the degrading experience of undergoing reparative therapy as a teenager.

Today, Brinton, who has a master's degree in nuclear engineering from MIT, works for the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention group for LGBTQ youth."

For more on the story, go here.

The story reminded me of the "old days" when I would go out to the same venues (mostly straight) and normally always attracted the attention of a cis woman or two who were curious and/or just wanted to chat. Plus, from socializing with the other transgender women in one of my support groups  and hearing their conversations, I know the same thing still happens with them.

The reason why, I think, is very complex but mainly revolves a cis-woman's natural curiosity concerning why we trans women would ant to play in their "sandbox" at all.  Any other reasons would take another blog post to go into now!

Historical Moment!

As you have probably heard by now, Daniela Vega made history this weekend at the Oscars:

The star of Oscar-nominated film Una Mujer Fantástica (A Fantastic Woman), Daniela Vega, made Academy Award history Sunday night, when she became the frist transgender actress to take to the stage as a presenter at the ceremony. The Chilean introduced Sufjan Steven’s performance of “Mystery of Love,” which features on the soundtrack of Call Me by Your Name. “I want to invite you to open your hearts and your feelings to feel the reality,” she told the audience. “To feel love. Can you feel it?”

From El Pais:
The triumphant moment could not have been further from how things were when, as a 14-year-old, her life split in two, and she began her transition from a man to a woman. Once in her new female body, Vega did not know what path to follow – acting or singing – nor whether the artistic world would accept her.

"You learn and grow from pain,” she told EL PAÍS in February, hours before A Fantastic Woman took the Best Film award at the Goyas, Spain’s answer to the Oscars. “Transgender people are marginalized. You suffer a lot in the transition. And this pain makes us strong, hard, and can even make us bad tempered,” she explained, while Juan de Dio Larraín, the co-producer of the film, brought her a beer. With the support of her family, Daniela broke with social convention and assumed her identity as a trans-woman. “I have a lot of hope in the future generations in Chile, [society] is opening a great deal.

For more, go here.