What Is Transgender?

Explaining being transgender just isn't so easy once you get down to it.

You are not simply wanting to cross dress and look like a member of the opposite sex, you are for all the world (between your ears) a woman.

We are not trying to "fool" society any longer, we are what we are. Still, a large part of society wants to keep discriminating against us at the least or harming us at the most.

I talked to an old friend a couple days ago who had spent quite a bit of time around me as I was moving from cross dresser to transgender woman and she asked (of course) how I was doing. I said better than I ever would have expected and this full time "girl thing" I was living was the most natural move I have ever made.

So, maybe all those years of searching for gender peace in the morning when I woke up was right under my pillow.

I can't explain why I am transgender, what transgender is, just that I am.

JJ's Sunday Edition

Welcome!!! KerPlunk! another Sunday Edition is hitting your virtual front porch!

Weather: Summer Sultry (drag queen or stripper name?) here in Ohio, high's around 90 with humidity about the same. It's times like this I am happy to seemingly get away with a lot less make up. Let's grab a cup of iced caramel joe this week and get started.

Page One: The Week that Was - or Wasn't: I for one would consider it the week that wasn't for any number of reasons. Number one of course was the truck tragedy in France and thinking every morning should I even turn the news on? Plus let's not forget the Evangelicals and their new fave son VP Candidate Pence (scary).

I did read a post about a common sense approach to rest rooms (yes there is one!) It's called the individual restroom or "pick a door-any door." and among other places a grocery store chain from Minneapolis called "HyVee".  With every large format store it has opened since 2012, including three in the Twin Cities in the past year, Hy-Vee built at least nine individual restrooms, joining the ­vanguard of a design movement that had momentum even before transgender bathrooms became a political controversy this year. Big, multi-stall bathrooms as we know them — often dirty and uncomfortable for many people — are on borrowed time.
 “Pick a door, any door,” shopper Samantha Chavez said outside the bathrooms at the Oakdale Hy-Vee on a recent visit. “I can handle all my kids in the bathroom with me and it’s private.”

Single-user restrooms reduce waiting times, relieve social pressure that people with shy bladders feel in public restrooms, solve the problem faced by parents and opposite-sex caregivers waiting for their charges, and eliminate the controversy over where a transgender person should go.

For more go here. Hurry before the Evangelicals find something wrong with this idea!

Page Two: Yesterday's Coffee- Opinion: Let's see, you all probably have surmised my feelings about the Prez candidates and the new "Keep America White and Male" candidate Pence so I will shut up about that. I am sure I can't change your mind anyhow. On another subject with some rather lively debate this week, we discussed SRS and the transgender girl. I urge you to go back a  couple posts and check the comments. As far as I have always wrote, I don't think SRS is for me due to age considerations etc. However, anymore I feel I am slipping  into a more mellow position on the idea and even though Medicare does cover the surgery now would I do it? I do know one way or another I have moved from a solid "no" to "probably not" and I can't explain definitely why. Except I have been on HRT for over three years now.

Page Three: The Back Page: Well kids, it's time to finish my coffee and get moving. Thanks for spending your precious time with us at JJ's House. Stay loved and safe!

JJ 

Maybe It's Not So Quiet?

I received three replies to a recent blog post about the relative quiet here at JJ's House (Thanks!)
Lets get to them:

"Hi I'm Robin and I'm new to your blog, I plan on checking back as often as I can. I too have not decided on surgery, just thinking of the pain is hard."

Robin, welcome! and I too have considered the pain and age considerations on my part with SRS. Plus, I am not so sure my new genitalia would define what is between my ears anymore than my old one did/does.

Or as Connie commented:
"I was so tempted earlier to say this, as it came to me when reading your post, but I thought "better" at the time. After a couple of beers though.......No SRS? You mean no JJ with a va-JJ? :-)"

And Shelle:    

"Sometimes I drop the whole box of pins and prick myself getting them back in the box."

Finally an old picture in black requested by my friend Amy ! Luv Ya! :)

Correction!

Youngest Grand Son is nine-daughter is turning 40. Thanks Connie! :)

It's So Quiet in Here:

It's so quiet here at JJ's I can hear a pin drop.

It could be because I had another (yawn) uneventful trip with Liz this morning, or it could be my youngest grandson (nine) got a full drum set for his birthday party yesterday.

I "sorta" kind of always wondered what this moment would be. I don't think a transgender person stands a chance sometimes for the "din" in their noggins to quiet down enough to think things through.

Either you are on the "passing" path trying your best to convince the public of who you are, or you are going down the hormone/surgical route which of course brings it own set of challenges. Then, lets not forget the pesky legal gender markers we have to worry about.

So, since I've decided any major surgery (SRS) is pretty much out of the question for me, everything else is pretty much copacetic in my life. A good thing except I have been running so long, I don't know how to take it.

Which brings up the question for a transgender person, when a pin drops in your life, do you hear it?

You bet ya!

J.J.'s Sunday Edition

Hello All! Another Sunday Edition is hitting your virtual front porch! KerPlunk! 
Weather: We are in what I call a summer lull here in Ohio when Momma Nature gives us a break from the heat and humidity for a couple days. It has been really nice and I hope it is too where you are.

Page One: The Week that Was-or Wasn't: Here on the blog, the chatter over the drug DES very much dominated the conversation. Michelle Hart wrote (no relation I think):

"I see that the DES controversy has come out to play once again. I remember in the infancy of the internet, when many of us sought the hows and whys of who we were, many latched onto this tidbit of information. You have to remember that back in the late 80's early 90's, everyone had information to share, whether it was the right information didn't matter."
And went on: Today, I just think to myself the immortal words of Popeye, "I ams what I ams and that all I ams."
Plus, January Powell wrote: "Having previously miscarried, Mom got estrogen -- DES, I guess? She said the popular alternative then was thalidomide; call me lucky.

Thanks to all who commented on the original post.

Page Two: Yesterday's Coffee-Opinion: Once again the world was spinning upside down or even out of control with the events in Dallas, Baton Rouge  and elsewhere. As crazy and tragic as all of this has been-some of the reaction I have seen has been worse. Some are calling for the "zombie apocalypse" is or worse yet...other end of days. What bugs me the fact I know so many good people on both sides of the spectrum. And, most certainly we can't attempt to run a society without a police force.

If once we get there, the evangelicals have just built a full fledged reproduction of the Ark down in Kentucky which may be a place to run to. Somehow though, I don't think any of the LGBT community would be allowed in two by two, and what rest rooms would we trans folk use?

I'm far from a genius but somehow we need to stop the indiscriminate killing by and of police and start to heal so together we can face an every looming greater terrorist threat.

I'm also kind of jealous in that I would love to see my grand-kids inherit a functioning country.

Page Three: Shopping On a lighter note (finally), Liz and I are thinking about taking a trip to Maine later on this fall, and it's never too early to consider what I am going to wear for the cooler weather. I have always considered seasonal shopping to be one of the greatest pleasures of being a girl!!!

Page Four: The Back Page: Well kids, it's a busy day ahead with the youngest grandson's 5th birthday party, so I must go. Take a moment to set aside your mistrust and even hatred and worship whatever higher being you believe in...we all need it!
Luv you all!!
JJ 

I Got "DES'D"!

It was interesting to me how the comments fluctuated on my DES post about the estrogen laden drug given to at risk pregnancy Mothers from the late 1940's through the 1970's.


Pat wrote: My mother miscarried three baby girls before my birth. She was treated with mega doses of estrogen...likely DES. I surmise that there may be a connection but there are also plenty of folks dealing with gender issues whose mothers did not take the drug.

Calie: My mother took DES. Her feeling was always, "if one pill is good, two are better". No doubt in my mind that this has something to do with the way I am. 

And Connie: Blessed are they who have accepted themselves for who they are without needing to know the reason (or excuse?). There are no maybes about it, a lifetime of questioning does no good at all.

No, a lifetime of questioning does no good...but I will take the blessings.

Calie, as you may have read in the link, DES was given out as some sort of a vitamin, so indeed you could be right.

And Pat good point and I wonder if my Mom found out about the connection somehow. She always had a very "over the top" (guilt?) reaction to me?

Thanks to all who responded!

We've Been Around

I happened across this set of five short transgender videos you may want to check out called "We've Been Around" 

Which leads me back to a point I have been wanting to make for awhile. At our last Trans Day of Remembrance planning meeting, the subject came up about how many more transgender people were there. Maybe not organized - but there.

If you watch any of these video's it turns out we have always been somewhere in the shadows waiting for our turn.

I have also began to follow another very wordy blog whom I think was trying to explain away any transgender movement.

I would argue she doesn't read much other than her own blog or doesn't get out much.

As I have always said, it matters not how beautiful you are or aren't, or how rarely you do get out of the closet, unless you are a complete ass, you are part of a larger transgender movement.

Candis Cayne

There is much more to this link including Jen Richards, co-writer, star, and producer of "Her Story," who then used the example of transgender actress Candis Cayne who 
became a positive role model. Cayne, when she came to national attention in 2007 starring in the ABC drama, Dirty Sexy Money. She was the first transgender actress to play a recurring transgender character in primetime, said Richards.

Growing up, Richards said she didn't see people like her on television. They were usually "the dead prostitute or the punch line," she said.

The next generation of trans people will have the advantage of seeing "trans people speaking in their own voices" onscreen in programs like "Her Story," said Richards."

Maybe it's just me, but this just might be a transgender movement?

Andreja Pejic

As "Andreja Pejic" rose through the modeling ranks to stardom a couple years ago, she was a blogger's dream. Beautiful, successful, blond and a trans supermodel-who could ask for more as a blogger?

She made history in 2015 as the first transgender model to grace the pages of American Vogue. Pejic, who was born in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina, was discovered in 2007 while working at a McDonald’s in Melbourne, Australia. The scout didn’t know if she was a boy or a girl, just that she looked like a model.

Three years later and she was walking in both the men’s and women’s shows for Jean Paul Gaultier in Paris, and she isn't done.

This year, she will appear as a face of Make Up For Ever, making her one of the first transgender models to score a significant beauty campaign .

For more go here.