Let it Rain

 

"Rain Valdez just received her first Primetime Emmy nomination for “Outstanding Actress in a Short Form Comedy or Drama Series” for her lead role in RAZOR TONGUE, which she created, crowdfunded and produced. Rain is the second transgender actress to ever be nominated for a Primetime Emmy in an acting category and the first Filipina American transgender actress to be nominated. Rain is also the founder of ActNOW, the first and only acting class in Los Angeles prioritizing a safe space for LGBTQIA actors and teaches beyond the binary. Rain got her start playing ‘Coco’ in season 2 of TV Land’s LOPEZ and doubling in Amazon's TRANSPARENT as Miss Van Nuys on screen and a producer behind the scenes." 

Really?

 Is it really April already?  On occasion I feel as if time does fly when you are doing very little. 

Easter, which we don't really celebrate has come and gone. As it was never a major emphasis when I was was young, even I didn't spend much time or effort thinking about what my girl cousins were wearing because I never saw them. Plus there was only one girl in our neighborhood. For once there  there were fewer feminine distractions to fuel my gender dysphoria. 

So now as I try not to revert into another mundane post concerning  the shape of my thighs, at the least I have a chance to look ahead to a few events on the horizon.  The first one is my twice a month visit with my VA therapist on Tuesday. Normally we converse nearly 45 minutes to make sure I am not thinking of hurting myself or someone else. 

Picture from a Martial Arts Banquet Liz
and I went to years ago. I felt extremely
out of place.

Wednesday though, things start to pick up as I have another Rainbow Alliance Board Meeting. It seems there will be a couple of good opportunities to visit with other enquiring minds via Zoom. 

Included is the meeting will be the discussion around a Zoom meeting I am included in that includes a group of Miami University (Ohio) Sociology  master degree students on LGBTQ issues. Plus a call for another senior LGBT group in the area which I plan on volunteering for.  

The most important subject will be a fall seminar the deceased leader of the group signed us up for. I view it as another possibility for me to build on my transgender aging presentation. If I have enough courage to pursue it. At this point in time, at the least I will look into it.

Finally, on Friday I read I am supposed to receive my Covid relief check. 

All in all, April is off to a rousing start, even if most all of it is done virtually. I am hoping that may change soon in the future since I have completed my vaccines.

Vanity?

 On occasion I am incredibly surprised about how much more vane I am as my transgender woman self than I ever was as a guy. Of course it is easy to point out all the gender differences there are in fashion possibilities, even though even that seems to be in flux these days. 

With me, from the earliest days of viewing my cross dressed self in the mirror, I dedicated myself to improving my "look" as much as possible. In fact, anytime I had the chance, I was practicing. It sure beat the time I had to spend in my boring boy clothes and crew cut haircuts. I couldn't wait for the day I could purchase my own wig and better yet, grow my own hair out.

Of course, as the years advanced I grew "into" my feminine vanity and it became part of my existence. I guess more than a few feminists could say the whole process is part of societies' method of subjugating women as a whole to unfair standards of beauty.

Since to a large part, I got such a late start to living a full time existence as a trans woman, I still feel the newness of the whole process.

In many ways, my bodily changes due to hormone replacement therapy have helped increase my vanity to new heights. For example, after I pulled my leggings on this morning, I noticed my thighs were increasing in size due to the redistribution of fat in my body. By now, I know you are thinking wow how mundane is that but it gets worse. With all the problems in the world, I notices one of my thighs seems to be bigger than the other. Of course I have heard of the relatively common occurrence of women's breasts being different sizes, which is a problem I don't have. 

I wonder now, as I approach another appointment with my endo doc in the middle of this month, I am going to discuss with her the possibility of me moving my Estradiol transmission method from patches to injections. The injections I have heard are the most effective way of achieving the best femininizing results. Realistically, I am not expecting much more in my breast development but would like to see more in my hips.

Even though I have not decided which direction I will take (depending on what she says) I am leaning towards the injections.  

I guess vanity will probably get the best of me again.   

Charmed is Trans

 On the CW television network, the "Charmed" show has added another transgender character.

From the "Deadline" site:

"Actress Mareya Salazar is about to bring some of her magic to Charmed. The trans actress is set to join The CW series in a recurring role for the reboot of the spellbinding series. The timing of the news couldn’t be any more perfect considering its Transgender Day of Visibility — and we love to see Salazar join the cast.

The casting marks the second transgender actor to join this season. In November, Deadline exclusively broke the news that JJ Hawkins joined the cast in the recurring role of Kevin, a transgender male college student who inspires one of the Charmed Ones to take on a very formidable opponent. With Salazar and Hawkins, Charmed continues to move the needle when it comes to bolstering authentic representation of the trans community."

Perhaps the day is coming we won't  have to mention an actress is transgender at all. They will  just become actors or actresses.

The Battle Continues

 A reminder for a former president outside his Mar--a-Lago  home:

And, on the bright side, reversing Trump, the Pentagon has issued new policies for transgender troops. Policies which largely banned transgender people from serving in the military were reversed and new rules were given which will broaden trans troops access to medical care and gender transition. 

I will be interested to see what if any actions the Veteran's Administration will take now. Currently, the VA mostly covers only hormone replacement therapy and some essentials such as wigs and prosthetic breasts. To my knowledge, still no serious surgery.