Your core identity

If you understand who you are at your core it should not matter what you wear. Near the end of my career when I was going to the office still presenting male (before the pandemic), I already had a deep understanding that I was a transgender person who had been that way from birth. My introspection over the years had only confirmed it.

However this knowledge often does not come easily and I have read so many comments on other blogs that show me how unique each person's perspective of themselves is. It confirms that we are as diverse and special as the stars in the heavens and why these days I am increasingly not thinking beyond a spectrum of human behavior.

Once you know who you are, it should bring you peace and confirm you have arrived at inner knowledge. However if any turmoil persists it is because we still have work to do on ourselves. Some of that work will divulge certain truths which may go against a life script we wrote (or let others write) for ourselves, which is why for many people only prolonged therapy will suffice. For some years, this blog was where I did that work on myself.

We can risk becoming obsessive with this topic until we have settled into ourselves, and so it was with me until something finally clicked. Of course my intellectual curiosity occupied much of that energy because I needed to comprehend what the drivers for a transgender identity might be. That I continue this fascination today, it is thankfully now pursued with much less emotional investment. But I am still left to clean up my indignation at the stupidity of the world and learning to let it go because I cannot fix it. To that end I need more Zen which is coming slowly with my retirement.

One thing is certain though: you can only outrun your core identity for so long before it catches up with you.

Believe me I tried.

Token

I posted a video of a young 23 year old transwoman's descent into right wing extremism where she recanted and admitted that she had tried to be loved by the type of people who normally would hate her. This is exactly what happened to a character like Blaire White.

By siding with people who definitely would not accept you unless you find some common ground, Blaire gets to look down on others to be spared the avalanche of toxicity which would normally come her way. It is what Dave Rubin and Candace Owens also do in the ranks of the right wing with the former being gay and the latter black.

Some people are odd that way in that rather than develop a backbone to defend against hate, they align themselves with it so they are not pointed at and become the token accepted one.

Granted, it is far from easy to stand up against hate and some even feel good for a time to contribute their own share of it except after a while you can no longer be spared how badly this makes you feel. Reveling in hatred eats away at you and you are only one step away from being devoured by your own group.

That young transwoman seems to have understood this and her own transition at age 15 gives her an advantage she perhaps cannot properly appreciate; something her growth in maturity over time will undoubtedly take care of.

The coming correction

I'm all for helping people but something is wrong when the manners are completely gone from one segment of society.

He stares at me almost like his request for money is an earned right. Something was clearly disconnected in his brain but it wasn't lack of intelligence it was something worse. I became a little rattled and walked away from the lovely Veronique, who I had been talking to, and wished her a good day rather than let temper get the best of me. At 60 years of age I will put you in your place in a heartbeat and his unfiltered sense of entitlement was going to get the better of me.

We are not in a good place in the world and between the wealth disparity and the right wing's increasing bravery with their vomit-inducing toxicity and stupidity we are headed for more trouble until something ugly forces a correction.

In the 20th century that correction was the second world war and I fear something equally drastic will need to happen here.

Because we never learn.

Antifragile

 

Conservative transwoman recants?

 

Un dimanche matin

 

Our past

As a trans person there is no need to throw out our lived history. Instead we need to repatriate it into our lives to create a whole person who happens to be trans. This is the last refinement step left for me in my journey where I properly fuse everything together into one complete package which includes much of my past that I want to keep.

You have always been the same person on the inside and you just want to stop living like a split personality. Hence the baby isn't thrown out with the bath water simply because you have a new life since many facets of your previous one shaped you and have tremendous value.

In other words, you don't need to build a new foundation if the house is solid.

banality

I don't much like banality. Talk to me about your new drapes in your living room or that new car you just bought and my eyes will tend to glaze over. Instead tell me something about what makes you tick, your life philosophy or political stance and why you espouse it.

Over our lifetimes we tend to wear masks and learn to understand how to behave in certain settings. We come to comprehend that being overly honest sometimes earns unwanted attention and so we often shelter behind the banal.

As a child I began to recognize which people were truly themselves and possessed a certain depth. I found them more interesting because they had nothing to prove and so could impress simply with their earnestness.

I'm sorry

Apologizing is a relic of the genX generation and older. I'm one of the last boomers and we grew up with little information and hoped everything would just go away or at least be manageable. We married and swore that everything would be fine because we had a handle on it all.

That this turned out to be false is not our fault if we were truly earnest. Being transgender isn't a choice one makes anymore than what color eyes one has. What we need to do then is come clean and admit our truth and figure out who our allies really are and who truly loves the person who lives inside us despite the packaging.

Thankfully young trans people do not have to begin their lives like this any longer and for this I am so glad.

Therefore, no apologies required only transparency.

Kind

Being nice and being kind are not always synonymous. People can be friendly enough but then we fail when it comes to being kind. We talk behind the backs of others and sometimes find glee in the failure of those who we do not favor.

Being kind is much more difficult than being nice.

Working on it.

The truth

I want to tell all trans people who are struggling that everything will turn out the way they would like except that wouldn't be truthful. Sometimes marriages dissolve and friendships are lost but that is part of the territory sometimes in living one's truth.

Typically the people who tend to most suffer are not the ones who can cross gender express once a month but instead those who have trouble not doing so every day because it is who they are. They are doing their best not to lose something while telling themselves they can cope and deny.

What is interesting to note here is that sometimes what we think we want at the time of crisis is not always the best outcome; something we can only see once we have come out on the other side.

If we are in that second scenario, what we need to ask ourselves is this: why we would want to be with people who do not really want us as we are but instead as who they think we should be.

Answer that.