A Taste of Ivory

Ivory Aquino never thought there would be roles for a transgender girl from the Philippines, so she was prepared to give up on her childhood dream of being an actor.

“I didn’t feel at that time that there were any roles I could do,” Aquino tells PEOPLE exclusively about her despair.

So, with acting seemingly out of the question, Aquino decided to try her hand at becoming a singer.

“With androgynous figures like David Bowie, I thought I could do music without thinking about gender,” she says in the upcoming issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.

But after moving to the U.S. in her teens, and undergoing her gender confirmation surgery out of the country at age 26, Aquino had a revelation.

“My outsides finally felt like my insides,” she says. “The first thought that came to mind was, ‘I can act again!’ ”

Aquino, who stars as the trans activist Cecilia Chung in the ABC mini series, is still in the beginning of her acting career.

For more, go here.

Life Turns on a Dime, Part Four

I call this time in the mid 1980's my validation time.

I was still struggling with the fact that dressing trashy versus classy was not the way to  go and teasing truckers on the interstate with a hiked up skirt was not going to work.  Plus I still couldn't get it through my thick noggin why it wouldn't.

Very basically a cross dresser dresses for what a man wants to see and a transgender woman (in order to survive in the world) must take into consideration what women want to see too.

After yet another viscous fight between my wife and I, she said "You make a terrible woman." Of course I was devastated!  All  the work shaving my legs and mirror worship just couldn't be wrong. Then she said, "I'm not referring to the way you look. I am referring to the way you act and think."

You would have thought even I would begin to get through my thick noggin what she was talking about and for once I was getting a glimmer of hope. On my trips out cross dressed, I was beginning to notice more of the world around me. About this time too, my wife would even go out with me to dinner in Columbus. So if I didn't "dress like a slut" (as she put it) I would have even more chances to live as a woman. The more I lived it-the more I loved it.

About this time was when transgender began to creep into the public's vocabulary replacing the all encompassing transvestites or transsexuals on either end of the spectrum. I began to think-could transgender be me?

Shortly we moved back up towards Columbus, Ohio and I became involved with one of the most diverse groups within a group I had ever seen or been involved with.

I was about to find another dime and have a real idea what validation really meant.

Don't Blame me Dammit!!

Who had the brilliant idea for me to write a blog approximately five years ago????

CONNIE that's who. As Stana or Paula or Shelle or Mandy can tell you, keeping up on a blog takes a tremendous amount of time for almost no monetary return.

Ironically, even though we may live oceans apart (Paula) or shared a different transgender veteran  (Shelle) experience, threads run thru each blog which ultimately make us trans sisters. Keep up the good work ladies!

FYI, Connie and I met on another LGBT message board type format when she was bashing a group of "trans-nazi's" My lesson learned was a pretty trans picture for the most part did not equate out to a pretty/warm interior. Somehow, many of them neglected to finish that part of their MtF gender transition.

Imagine that.

They Call Me the Breeze

Yesterday I was trusted to make one of my rare solo trips to the grocery store.

In the morning I took a shower and washed my hair (hey it was Friday :) ) I have naturally wavy hair and normally I just mousse it out a little while it is still wet. I call it my "mousse is loose look."

As it turned out, Friday afternoon was really windy with all the wild weather we have been having. Freezing rain last night all the way to a high in the 60's by Monday/Tuesday. So the mousse was really rocking!

Either I am gaining weight again in my hips/butt region, or my fave jeans are beginning to fill out better and look good with my calf high boots. A big fluffy sweater and it was off to the store for me...wind and all.

After all this time I still relish the freedom of going anywhere without caring what anyone else thinks. The grocery store ranks near the top and restaurants near the bottom because of the possibility of still being busted by some little (or not so little kid).

If for no other reason, my size can create attention. But not yesterday.

No attention from anyone except a blond haired woman wearing sunglasses on a very cloudy day. We exchanged curious glances before I wondered was I "glowing" that much? :)

Life Turns on a Dime Part Three

As I settled back into my home town (approx 80,000 peeps then) I was able to scratch out a living on one of the local radio stations as a DJ and pocket a few more dimes from the bar I co-owned. My Dad described it best when he said "Well at least the flies didn't have to stop when they flew through one of the two doors."

As always, I was drinking heavily and making early plans for Halloween around July.Well, a girl can dream, right?  My first year back party was notable in that I thought I looked damn good in my black dress, heels and beret until a guy in a mask came up and said "I know who you are." Finally he said I looked like my Mom and I knew who he was. Over the years that followed, he turned out to be quite the homo/transphobe, so his comment that night was probably the nicest thing he ever had to say about me. (Like I cared.)

Time went by, my daughter was growing and the recession of the early 1980's claimed the bar as one of it's victims as my town was dead center in the infamous "Rust Belt". Times were rough and I ended up taking a job in a fast food chain and taking over a store in Yonkers, New York-which was quite the shock.

As luck would have it though, here I was in a part of the country more liberal towards a growing LGBT community and I still couldn't take much advantage of it. One notable exception was when my new wife stayed home and I went to a "transvestite mixer" on Long Island. This evening turned out to be a real eye opener for me, for a number of reasons.

First of all, the mixer was being held in a motel bar with several "admirers" in attendance. And, I was flattered by the women at the door who weren't going to let me in because I was "real." To make a long story short, I was hit on a couple of times before I packed my inflated ego and went home.

The evening caused so much pain between my wife and I she finally said "That's it, be man enough to be a woman." One of the most profound things I have ever been told-and ignored until after her death decades later.

In the meantime, we moved back to Ohio and set up special times when I would go get a motel room,dress and mainly go shopping, Which was good and bad. It was good of course because I could really learn the ropes as a woman and bad because I started to cheat on her and go out when I thought she wouldn't know.

All of that worked well enough until one day she got off early and caught me driving past her in the other family car or the time I accidentally ended up walking right past her boss in a parking lot. Later he would mention the "Big redhead" he saw, and she knew.

What really hurt me was lying to her and the ripping and tearing I was going through as a person. It was about that time in the 1990's after one of my "adventures" I set up gender marriage counseling appointments in nearby Columbus, Ohio. The counselor came right to the point and said I had and will always have gender dysphoria but did I know I was bi-polar?   Well, that made sense too-but what the hell? Something else wrong with me? Since that time it seems like half the world is bi something so it was nice to be on the cutting edge.

About that time too, I was getting much better at my overall feminine presentation and started to volunteer to go grocery shopping when she was at work etc. The problem became too we moved to a much smaller town and getting recognized was an even bigger risk. So. I began to wonder was the "thrill factor" of dressing like a woman was drawing me to it?

Coming up next "validation versus reality."

Life Turns on a Dime- Part Two

After I was discharged from the Army in 1975, I essentially loaded all my possessions (including my ever present gender dysphoria) into the back of a VW Beetle I had bought in Germany, spent some time at home in Ohio and headed for Texas. I had a real close friend who was being discharged about the same time in El Paso. (Ft. Bliss)

I had packed my stash of women's clothes and almost was brave enough to try my hand at walking around outside my room at a motel I stayed at on the way down to Texas. The mirror was busily lying to me and telling me I was the best looking blond ever when I came to my senses, became scared and spent the rest of the trip feeling guilty about at least trying a short trip to the motel's restaurant/bar.

Of course I didn't have too long to ponder my insecurities when my car broke down outside of El Paso in the dessert. I don't even remember now what I did to get a hold of my friend in the dark ages before cell phones, so I waited until the morning and flagged down another motorist to get me to the nearest garage. Fortunately, all I had was a destroyed distributor cap (remember those?) so relatively quickly I was back on the road with too much time to think about my future.

My friend was married so I slept in the guest room and both of them worked during the days so I could cross dress to my heart's content. Unfortunately I was becoming increasingly frustrated with simply staying inside.  Looking back, I should have started to realize then I was so much more than a cross dresser but I would continue to try to outrun or out drink my feelings.

After a couple months I moved back to Ohio if for no other reason than I knew the territory better and what I would have to do to try to finally try to get out the door as a woman. I can use the "woman" word now because back in those days, transgender wasn't even used as a word and quite frankly I didn't know what I was.

The defining moment I do remember was the first time I saw my reflection in the window of a store on another night I yet almost went into another.

The huge defining moment of my life though, came in 1975 when my first wife was discharged from the Army and came to live with me in Ohio and about the time I was about to run back to Texas, we found out she was pregnant. (Even with birth control.) My daughter beat the odds and forced me to settle down.(Kind of.) I went back to school, bought a small bar with my friend and tried to out drink who I really was.

The revelation was still decades away.

A Voice in the Darkness?

I have always respected Helen Boyd who authored "My Husband Betty" and "She's Not the Man I Married" plus her other blogging and writing.

I picked this up from her post "The Other America" and thought I would pass along a link and an excerpt for you all to read:

THE OTHER AMERICA

JANUARY 13, 2017 HELEN BOYD  LEAVE A COMMENT

You can’t listen to the few words Joe Biden spoke when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with distinction, without realizing what deeply decent people we have had running this country.

At a moment when Moonlight, Fences, and Hidden Figures are in theaters.

At a moment when rights for trans people were really having an effect.

At a moment when the Pipeline protests caught the national attention and once again, Native Americans showed us how to respect our land and ourselves.

At a moment when everything seemed to be going something like right finally, when our national conversation about the prison pipeline and the deep patriotism of the Muslim parents of a fallen war hero reminded us of the worst and the best we can be as a nation — at that very moment, it all fell apart.

It hasn’t yet. The fumes of Obama’s legacy are what we’re running on now. It was only 8 years ago when the high hopes and inspired souls overjoyed so many of us; that we looked at each other with wide-eyed amazement as if to say can you believe we did this? And the rest of the world looked at the US with surprise and respect: we could be still be America. We were.

I don’t know what we’re going to become. That other America, the wretched one, the gilded mean one of bottom lines and wealthy excess, of poorer people making the groceries stretch a little longer, of a nervous middle class, what of it there still is, of people dying from medical conditions they might have survived in a more generous time.

For more please go here.

Cyrsti's Condo "Archive Post"

From 2011:

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Stuff!

OK girlfriends and guy friends...here is a miss mash of stuff (kind of like my closet!),
Number one is another site dedicated to "transequality". The "National Center for Transgender Equality" web site features great information and even a training piece. Check it out!
Way less serious news includes "The Village Voice" reporting that "Lady Gaga" is going to do a video with transsexuals. That is earth shattering! Really? Lady Gaga?

This soldier,who made the "Top Ten Chinese Crossdresser List" just blew me away!
"Back in the day", I had a friend who delighted in carrying "Mao Tsetung's" little red book. I really never believed he ever opened it, but it really upset many people... All he was looking for in our Midwestern town. Seemingly a thousand years later China is emerging as a world force and I thought we would feature a picture of one of China's former soldiers  Well, here she is!
What would "Ozzie" think! Yes that "Ozzie Osbourne". I don't really think "The Oz" is capable of a coherent thought but was he shocked when daughter Kelly ­tearfully dumped ­fiancé Luke Worrall when she found
out he was ­having a secret affair.
The heartbroken star finally ended her engagement to the model when
she discovered he was cheating with Elle ­Schneider, an identikit
blond.

But what Kelly didn't ­realize was that Elle was born a man - and is

now a pre-op transsexual.
Elle, 21, from Miami, revealed her secret to the Sunday Mirror, and
produced an ID card that shows she started life as Reynaldo Gonzalez.
Elle said she was open with Luke that she was born a boy and it turned him on more. Imagine that!
It seems (from my angle) this could be Kelli's fault. Her own transformation resulted in "Elle" and her looking like sisters. Maybe Luke thought that too?

Life Turns on a Dime-If You can Find One...Part One

Perhaps one of the curses of old age is the ability to look back over your life and see with some sort of clarity your "hits and misses"

I could fill another blog with all the stupid things I did but for the sake of  brevity I am going to keep this relatively short.

In some sort of numerical order, I'm going back to my own paper route days. (early 1960's) I saved my hard earned money from the route, mowed grass, shoveled snow then bought and stashed my own make up and shoes. Every once in a while I was given the job of cleaning both locker rooms and I was able to find a skirt big enough to fit me, so essentially I was in business.

I lived in a rural area so imagine my surprise when one of my only available friends and especially his Mom seemed into us dressing as girls. Also during this time, I began to drive an old 55 Ford around the barnyard and try to smoke his Mom's Lucky Stripes cigarettes. Quite the combination of experiences. It's hard to say how far all of this "experimentation" would have taken us as he moved away not long after that. I was 14.

Fast forward to 1967 when I went to Proms as a senior and desperately wanted to be the girl only to know the Vietnam War and the draft was bearing down on me as hard as a runaway truck. I worked the college route hard for four years until my lottery number came up in the teens and I was off to the Army. The only lottery I have won to this day, but I hit the jackpot. Along with many other raw soldiers during the winter of 1968 at Ft. Knox, I learned the hard way how team work really worked and how to get into shape. All the time licking my wounds from pre Army breakup from my finance who knew I was a cross dresser. She said tell the Army I was gay or she was gone.

Little did I know I would see three continents in three years compliments of Uncle Sam and most important, I met the mother of my daughter who is my most cherished possession. I also didn't know of the benefits I have to this day (unless the Republicans take them away.)

After the Army I tried to drink my gender dysphoria away for years to no avail, went through two marriages and tried to actively commit suicide once.

As I said...this post should and will be presented in more than one part. Stay tuned :)