Transgender Day of Visibility

This year I am determined to not miss the Trans Day of Visibility. I can't remember why I missed it last year but I did.

The day is held on March 31st and this year, it will be held in the Cincinnati Zoo campus auditorium.

As part of my new desire to volunteer more within my larger (non VA) cross dresser, transgender support group, I volunteered to help with an information table.

It's interesting to note also, this years event is being hosted by "Living with Change." It has been set up thanks to the generous donation from the CEO of the Pure Romance Company.. "Generous" to the tune of two million dollars. The CEO just happens to have a transgender daughter and it's worthwhile reading the story by following the first link above.

Of course I asked my partner Liz to go and help too, so we are planning to have a great time!

More Walls

As we get ever closer to my workshop at the Trans Ohio Symposium, the impetus to "fill in" my topics gets stronger.

Thanks to you Cyrsti's Condo readers, I am settling in on the walls we have to climb over to successfully negotiate a Mtf gender transition (and trans guys too). The first wall I described was cross dressing. As soon as we feel secure enough in the mirror, many times, our thoughts turn to going out in the public's eye.

The second wall we face, is what happens to us when we do it. Much of the excitement we felt looking into the mirror and seeing a girl look back, has a tendency to turn into utter fear as we go out. I know when I first started to live a feminine life, I would look for any semblance of a mirror to reassure myself. Slowly but surely, I became relatively comfortable walking around as a feminine cross dresser.

Then, a little at a time, a voice was telling me, something was still wrong. I was tired of just feeling like I was a guy walking around cross dressed as a woman, I wanted to live more like a woman. At that point, the  real fear of loosing what was left of my masculinity set in. Did I really want to keep going down the road I was on. All of a sudden, labeling myself as a transgender woman was very scary.

As we have discussed though, fear is a powerful motivator and I sat out to do the best I could to co-mingle with cis women and see if I was accepted. This wall was as tough to climb as any previous walls because I had to communicate with the public and often the same ones. It was during this time period I settled on yet a new name and one wig, so I could look the same.

As I made it to the top of this wall, I could look around and see the world as a more feminine person. Most importantly, after the fear subsided, I found I felt really natural. Plus the more natural I felt, the more people around me were beginning to feel it too.

It was about this time, tragedy struck my life and ironically opened the doors wide to consider the next wall. Living my life full time as a trans woman and sacrificing all of my male privilege.

It's All in the Smile!

It turns out, science has now mapped out the specifics of how each gender smiles:

"The dynamics of how men and women smile differs measurably, according to new research, enabling artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically assign gender purely based on a smile.

Although automatic gender recognition is already available, existing methods use static images and compare fixed facial features. The new research, by the University of Bradford, is the first to use the dynamic movement of the smile to automatically distinguish between men and women.

Led by Professor Hassan Ugail, the team mapped 49 landmarks on the face, mainly around the eyes, mouth and down the nose. They used these to assess how the face changes as we smile caused by the underlying muscle movements -- including both changes in distances between the different points and the 'flow' of the smile: how much, how far and how fast the different points on the face moved as the smile was formed.

They then tested whether there were noticeable differences between men and women -- and found that there were, with women's smiles being more expansive.

The article goes on to say:

Lead researcher, Professor Hassan Ugail from the University of Bradford said: "Anecdotally, women are thought to be more expressive in how they smile, and our research has borne this out. Women definitely have broader smiles, expanding their mouth and lip area far more than men."

The team created an algorithm using their analysis and tested it against video footage of 109 people as they smiled. The computer was able to correctly determine gender in 86% of cases and the team believe the accuracy could easily be improved."

A smile maybe more than your best accessory...it may be your most important one, as a transgender woman. 

Read more here from Science Daily.