Welcome to My Life

I should clarify something.  When I started this blog, I knew I wanted it to be a platform from which I could disseminate some firsthand accounting of the experiences of a trans woman.  But then I started to wonder, should I write only about things specifically related to medically transitioning, like HRT, electrolysis, and SRS?  Or, would it be better to just treat it like a diary, and rely on tags to sort content for people who only want to read about certain things?

Ultimately, I realized, my number one goal in any media is to present the trans experience as just one part of the larger whole human experience of any number of people's lives.  That I want to shift the focus of the concept of "transgender person" away from the "transgender," and towards the "person." I mean, when you get right down to it, that is the problem.  People who hate transgender people, usually in concept, without any actual firsthand knowledge of or exposure to anyone they know is trans, hate because they do not feel anything in common with us.

The fact of a trans person's existence, that uncommon gender presentation, is, itself, such a fundamentally threatening thing, for whatever reason.  It makes us seem so alien to some people that they can only think of the "transgender" part.  Which means we're not actually people.  So, if we die, who cares?  The "trans panic" defense, recently outlawed in California but still legal everywhere else, exists as a testament to this problem.  People would rather allow our murderers to walk free than to acknowledge that we are human beings.  Rather than think, "how could one human being murder another?" they think, "I don't know, what would I have done if I found myself in bed with one of those freaks?"

The problem is a lack of education.  Partially due to a lack of information.  I've seen a statistic floating around that only 8% of people (maybe Americans, I can't remember) self-report as knowing a trans person.  (That they know is trans.)  Which means the rest of them are making up their mind about what trans people are based on the media, and not on their friend Sally, who was born Mike, or whatever.  That's another barrier to humanization.

On top of all that, on the macro level, nobody is even sure how many of us there are.  Part of that, again, gets back to the same lack of information generally about even the fact that we exist.  I knew that trans girls existed, but the only ones I'd ever seen were in porn, so it wasn't something I really thought about much.  It was so far out of my mind, and I so thoroughly lacked access to any real live trans people, that it took me a lot longer than it could have for me to even realize that I was trans.

Once we get past the how-many-even-are-there hurdle, it becomes pretty clear that what the mass media has decided is a good representation of the trans community is about as useful as the rest of what the mass media has decided makes for good representation: better than nothing, but only just.

So I concluded that it would be best to treat this more as a journal than as a very narrowly-focused trans information resource depot that would really mostly only directly help other trans people.  I will do my best to tag things with some modicum of intelligence, so that certain topics can be followed more closely than others as you prefer.

The idea is to just lay my life out there, as much as I can.  It'll be like reading someone's posthumously-published private journal, only while it's actually being written, instead of after they're dead.  It'll probably be pretty embarrassing sometimes, and I will be alive to feel it, but if all goes according to plan, by the time THAT starts happening, people will be getting embarrassed right along with me, because they'll identify with me on some level.

I'm absolutely positively certain beyond even a shadow of a doubt that I am going to:

• make an ass out of myself
• say some shit that is totally out of line, and have to recant it later
• get super defensive just because I feel attacked even when nobody is attacking me
• change my mind and vigorously defend something I had previously attacked (or vice-versa)
• maybe change my mind again, who even knows
• apologize and hope that I didn't hurt too many people too badly
• fuck everything up all over again

I hope that when I do all of those things, you will remember what I have to sometimes struggle to remember, myself: that I am a basically good person who generally makes the "right" choice (usually what I would probably describe as the most compassionate choice for everyone, among those that I am aware are available).

It's what I've started calling Aggressive Vulnerability.  If you are just relentlessly open about your experiences, your challenges, your fears, your failures, your triumphs, your family, your problems, your solutions and compromises... if you just let everyone in, they are all going to find something in common with you eventually.  And when they do, you become a part of them.

And when you are a part of someone, you aren't scary anymore.  You become important, integral, familiar, known.  They may still feel uneasy about some things about you.  But they will listen to you when you speak, and they will see you as ever more human while they do.

The point is that I'm not here to put my best foot forward.  I'm here to put my next foot forward, and it's not always gonna be pretty.  But I will be moving. I hope you'll walk with me.