Alive and well

Life moves so fast sometimes. I have several posts stacked up, waiting for me to finish my thoughts and submit them to my editor, who just happens to be my mate of 35 years this month. 

The world is such an amazing place right now, for the LGBT community at least. There are so many blogs, news stories, TV Shows and movies it's become hard to follow them all. 

But the media is not all good, it seems the transphobic are coming out of the woodwork. Any comparison to cockroaches is strictly intentional. Their comments revel a lack of education and level of fear that makes me truly sad for them and their family. It's hard, but I resist the strong urge to leave a comment, hoping to explain that they just don't understand. 

The truly sad thing is that there still are sectors of people who value red neck ignorance. An article in the 'National Review' bashed Jazz Jenningd, the adorable teenager from Florida, author of a popular children's book and soon to be TV star. The comments were worse than the article itself, most expressing fear that it's all a big plot to force them to transition against their will. 

 This seems to be the heart of the real problem. The bashers have their beliefs, but feel that it is their right and duty to force everyone else to believe the same. Educated people understand that everyone has the right to be who they are and only want to be treated with respect. It would never occur to me to try and change someone else in that manner. They practice this kind of behavior and can not fathom that everyone else would not do the same.

its not just the trans community that's taking heat, several state leaders and county officials have openly defied the supreme courts same sex marriage ruling. Yesterday the governor of Oklahoma stated he would not remove a monument to christian religion from the state capital grounds after his state Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstutional.  

These acts embody their flawed logic. They cry religious freedom without understanding that  theirs is not the only religion. Their freedom is someone else's oppression. No one is trying to make them change their beliefs, but they refuse to allow anyone else their own. 

We have made great strides, but hold on its not over yet, and I fear it's going to get ugly. 

A new and welcome direction

Have you watched Sense8 on Netflix? It's new original series Netfilx produced that has been recently been released. Wow, it's really amazing. The Sci-Fi story is very compelling, but I'm amazed at the gender attitude portrayed.

This is from Andy & Lana Wachowski who previously brought us The Matrix. Lana is trans and her influence can definitely be felt. The story revolves around 8 people from around the world. One, from San Francisco of course, is a trans woman. Played by Jamie Claytom, a trans woman herself. 

The value of a trans story line, acted and directed by trans people can not be emphasized enough. These are people who truely know the subject matter. 

 In one scene, the girlfriend of the trans woman, gives a speech about how wonderful it was the she lives in a world where she is free to fall in love with anyone she wanted. To see a trans woman and a non-trans woman as lovers is something I think has never before graced the cinema. 

Ridgid gender identities are nowhere to be seen, in this story gender fluidity is the norm. Their awareness and sense of self Identity pop in and out of each other's minds. It's like putting your gender identity on shuffle, 

 If this show proves as popular as 'Orange is the new Black' , I think you will see these attitudes appear in more and more shows.

Go to Netflix and search on 'Sense8' , watch a few episodes, I think you will be hooked. 

Nomi (right) - played by Jamie Clayton. Dr Who fans will recconize her girlfriend Amanita, played by Freema Agyeman.

The New Normal

Catilyn Jenner reveled her new name and body in Vanity Fair this month. It is a unveiling worthy of an Apple event, simple, elegant and extremely polished. Bravo Catilyn, bravo Vanity Fair.

The world seems a bit taken aback by just how different, and beautiful she looks. I think this is just great and am amused to think of all the unaccepting people and what is going in their mind! Here is a beautiful woman, born a man. A man that is very hard to put down, having taken the gold in the olympics. This has to be causing a sever meltdown of their prejudice assumptions. He was never weak, never shy, certainly never a 'loser'. He was a 'Man's man', one of the boys. He played sports! 

When a person of this statue comes out as transgender it is a big deal. This shows the world that being transgender is more like being left handed than a disease. It's a coincidence of fate, not a curse, not a choice.

 Slowly, carefully, Catilyn is educating the general public on the reality of being transgender. She started with the Diane Sawyer interview laying the groundwork. Next up is her show on E!. She confesses not to be any kind of official spokesperson for the Transgender community, but she has a better platform than anyone since Laverne Cox. I think Catilyn's position is even better than Laverne's, we knew Catilyn before the transition. Laverne has told us about her past, but most of us grew up knowing Catilyn (Bruce at the time).

All this leads me again to my position that this is our time. The public ,finally has a reason to accept us. Because of Catilyn, Laverne, Jazz, Alexis Arquette and dozens of others. Each of them coming out very publicly, slowly changing the public attitude. 

Right now we are en vogue, and that is leading us to being normal in the public eye, and It's truly a New Normal.

My feelings exactly

"  I was always worried—you never wanted to look like a guy in drag, you never wanted to look like a guy in a dress, O.K. If you’re going to do that, come out, you really have to look the part. You have to look very feminine, you have to be able to, what I call my presentation is extremely important because it puts people at ease. And if you can do that, O.K., people are at ease, they’re just comfortable being around you."

        -Caitlyn Jenner 2015

Let's do the time warp again...

My wife and I were watching 'Keeping up with the Kardashians' together. Kim Kardashian was talking about Bruce(Jenner) to her friend Jonathan. She told him that the family thought his transition was going really fast, but Bruce felt it was moving very slow. Sixty-five years slow. 

 This spawned a glance between my wife and I as it's something we are very familiar with. She relates to the Kardashian family view, I relate to Bruce. We have experienced these same feelings. 

I spend every waking minute thinking about my gender issues, and I'm sure that most of you (trans people) do as well. Our loved ones think about it some times but certainly not constantly. Where I feel like this has been 50-someodd years coming, it's flying at my wife with breakneck speed.

 I think about it while working, cleaning, watching TV, sometimes even while sleeping. Add up the time I've spent on the subject during my life and it's a very large amount of time. Probably a thousand times more than she thinks about it. So when I suggest some new course of action, I've been thinking about it for years, but it is relatively unknown to her. She needs to consider it, I feel like it's been considered from every possible angle.

She wants to 'slow down' a bit so she can catch her thoughts. To her every day seems to bring new challenges, and she has not yet digested the day before. I think that it is taking forever, any slower and it seems to be going backwards.

If's this were a Sci-Fi flick, I would be in a time warp, watching the world around me move in slow motion, while she see me as a barely recognizable blur.

These are not insurmountable problems. We pause, try to see things from each others view, then decide how to proceed. She and I understand why this is, but it took some time to realize what was happening. Love and understanding can cure even Sci-Fi problems.

I hope that the Kardashians can keep up with Bruce!

When is transgender not transgender?

Old news by now, I have always felt different, me and (at latest estimate) 1.35 million others in the United States alone.  knowing why I felt different was scary, but not life shattering. What bothered me the most was not my wanting to be female. It was not wanting to only be female.

Everything I read kept telling me that people like me were 'women trapped in a mans body' or the reverse if born with female genitals. The stories told of others, dying to become the opposite gender. They could barley stand to remain in the gender they were in. 

This actually made me feel more inadequate than feeling transgender. I could not even get a mental disorder right. I wanted the female gender, but I could not convince myself that I wanted to give up the male. I felt isolated, not really living in the non-trans world, not not really good enough for the trans world.

Now that transgender has sprung into the limelight, there are a few new voices in the noise. Voices that I recconigse, voices that sound like mine. Trans people, not happy with the binary definitions of the majority (the trans majority,the majority of a minority!)

We may be few, or many, but we are starting to be heard. We were never upset that we were not the opposite gender, we were upset because we had to be any single gender all the time. 

There is a time to wear fishing waders and a time for dress shoes, for me there is a time to be male and a time to be female. And I'm so glad to know that I'm not alone. 

15 minutes of fame

Yesterday was spent with my wonderful daughters, shopping and getting our nails done. The sales person at the jewelry store was pleasant and helpful. A team of smiling attendants cared for us at the spa. It was a wonderful experience and my toes have never looked better. We were joined by a friend for dinner and drinks and went to a restaurant where we are well known and always treated like royalty.

 I have come to expect excellent treatment when shopping or dining and  have yet to be disappointed. These are businesses, they are there to sell, and being nice to the customer is good for sales. 

After dinner one daughter and the friend decided to hit some night spots, they invited me to join. A fifty-something trans and two beautiful girls in their twenties out on the town. Quite a juxtaposition from my perspective.

We went to a couple of their favorite bars, which were not in an LGBT friendly neighborhood. The patrons of these bars were not used to seeing someone like me.

The mood of the crowd was positive, and I assumed the attention was due to the very pretty girls accompanying me. But people were taking an interest in me, directly, and in a good way.

These were not people wanting to sell us anything, nor was it the LGBT crowd. They were the average general public, and I had caught their eye.

Current media attention is focusing on the transgendered, stimulated by Bruce Jenner's very public announcement. I keep seeing the word 'trendy' appear when describing transgenders.

That was the difference last night, I was trendy. People have been reading about transgender and here was one in person. Like a designer purse, or expensive shoes, I was the trendy accessory of these two lovely young women. It was quite nice.

These things never last long, the public has a short attention span, so go out and enjoy your fame while it lasts.

Don't forget to turn off the cat

There is a fundamental change happening in how we interact with the manmade objects in our lives.

In the past, all things electric had On/Off switches. We knew that in order to use a thing, you first turned it on, when you were finished, you turned it off. Life was simple.

Look around you, do you turn off your cell phone? How about your Laptop?  Do you have a DVR or cable box? How about a video game console? Do you know where the power button is on any of these?  If you have Wi-Fi at home it's never off. I have a Roomba that really can't be turned off short of removing the battery or letting it run down. Many new devices can only be turned off by removing it's power source.

 Your pets don't turn off, you can call your dog anytime, why not Siri, or Google? The cat goes into sleep mode, but is never completely off. Millennials just expect everything to be available anytime, the concept of things being off is a foreign thing to them.

There was a time when you would watch a TV show or movie where some invention would go wrong. The characters would run around shouting 'Turn it off! Turn it OFF!'.  I am sure that many millennials do not have a clue what this means, much less how to do it.

Why has this happened? Convenience of course. We are an impatient society, we can not be bothered to wait a few seconds for a device to turn on. 

Convenience costs money, in the form of power. We use many devices for an hour or two a day, yet they stay on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year long. That power costs natural resources.

Society favors environmental responsibility and we like to think we are responsible citizens. But we never give a thought to all the little convenient things around us, using power all the time.

So do yourself, and the planet a favor, turn off the cat when you are done.