Tag Archives: Autobiograpy

From the Horses Mouth … so to speak

Posted on by
Reply

Each and every day there is someone in the news proclaiming to be an expert on gender affirming care. What I have yet to see is anyone who is a long term post-surgical transsexual, with the exception of Caitlyn Jenner, discuss the issues involved in that fateful decision. Now, admittedly I do not watch every news channel, and for a very good reason. Most of them have an agenda and the predominant agenda is based in a push to force a trans-gender ideology on much of the adolescent population in our public schools. I find that tragic.

In the early years of the 21st Century, I stumbled across a mid-nineties article in a medical publication that discussed the suicide rate among transsexuals. The numbers in that article were based on “actual” suicides not “attempted” suicides. There were a lot of statistics listed to shore up the basic findings of the study which the publication quoted. The one statistic that stuck out for me was that the suicide rate among the cisgender community was in the neighborhood 0.25 percent of the study population. In comparison, the rate among the trans community was roughly 10.5 to 11 time higher. Personally, by the time I was in my mid-fifties I had personally only known 2 people who had committed suicide. Within one year of involvment in the transgender community I had four people I knew commit suicide.

Consideration of suicide is something that has never been an issue with me other than to wonder what it would take for me to even mildly entertain the idea. So, when I read about the current rate of youth who have “considered” suicide as a reason for “gender affirming care” in the youth today I have to admit to a certain degree of skepticism stemming from the knowledge that teenagers have a tendency to be a bit dramatic. So, just how accurate is that statistic? Is it based on hospital records or the teenager’s word?

My biggest concern regarding the frequency of “attempted” suicide is the influence that the school personnel are having in the student’s lives. It’s my belief that school personnel have only 2 jobs. The first being to educate children in their care … not indoctrinate them. The second job they have is to keep the parents informed as to the progress their children are making and highlight failings as well as accomplishments. That is not what’s happening today.

Anyone who has followed what I write in this blog knows that I have been beating a drum about the dangers of the NEA for quite some time. It’s a danger that I recognized over sixty years ago when doing debate prep on the high school debate team. Even then I was aware of the fact that our schools and the teachers they employ had in reality more hours a day in which to influence the understanding that children develop than the time their parents have. Recent events regarding gender identity have proven that what I understood then was fairly accurate, without knowing the extent to which the teacher’s unions would go to usurp the rights and influence of the parents. In my mind it’s akin to kidnapping when a teacher who is entrusted with the care of a child goes behind the parents back to push what, in most cases, is surely a temporary fantasy.

What is going to happen ten or even as little as five years from now when that child realized what a horrible mistake has been made? I can’t imagine what the actual suicide rate is going to climb to. Unless I miss my guess, an entirely new form of legal remedies will develop in the form of suits brought against teacher’s union and individual teachers themselves and deservedly so.

There are those who will say to me that I’m just spewing sour grapes since I didn’t make that irreversible decision until late in my life because I was a coward. Maybe! But, when I made that decision, it was with a background of having lived a life as a boy, a man, a husband and a father, which gave me knowledge that could only come from that experience. I admit there are times that I wonder “what might have been” had I not made that irreversible decision. I also wonder at times what life would have been like had I made that decision then. And I seriously doubt that I am no different from every other post-surgical transsexual.

I have had the privilege of living 2 lives which is something that these children who are being groomed by teachers and sometimes by misguided parents who think they are being loving, will never know. In most cases those parents are not being loving at all. How many of these children who are being secretly transitioned are going to return to that classroom with an AK47 ten, fifteen or twenty years from now and indiscriminately open fire in anger. (and yes I’m aware that the recent case involving a former student at a Christian school appeared to be revenge for having not been recognized as who she thought she was).

The bottom line to me is that we are witnessing a tragic confluence of out of control so called educators and woke ideology. As far as I’m concerned, the first of many lawsuits against school administrators and teachers is long overdue. Gender identity should be left to the individual and the family together with a trained counselor.

So now you have it straight from the horse’s mouth… So to speak.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too

Posted on by
Reply

The old adage that “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” seems to ring loudly when it comes to trans athletes. One of the first things I had to come to grips with when I made the decision to transition from George to Georgia was that I would be giving up certain aspects of George’s life in order for me to make that transition complete. At least, that was what I felt I needed to do in order for me, as Georgia to live a complete and satisfying life in my new role.

What I see happening in sports today, especially women’s sports, is a bunch of men who, appear to be unable to compete successfully as men sacrificing their masculinity for the sake of winning at a sport, they are not able to win as men.

Is it possible that I am just totally off the rails here? Yeah, it’s possible. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong. But, appearances do have their way of affecting the way we see things don’t they. What I don’t see happening is any of them stepping up to the plate and making it known as to whether or not they have taken the irreversible plunge and actually having the surgery required for them to come as close as it is possible for any person with an X and a Y chromosome to change that Y to an X.

People who know me personally know that I have never, not once, tried to tell them that I am a real woman. I’m not and I never will be. But in the grand scope of my life, I am happy with the choice I made and have not once ever regretted that change. Well, maybe once but that is another story for another time.

To me, women are something to admire, to appreciate, to love and be loved by. I do not understand the mentality behind a person with double X chromosomes thinking that maintaining a male physique in order to compete with people who have XY in their genetic makeup is being female in any manner, shape or form. Sorry but that just doesn’t compute.

What they are doing doesn’t in any way shape or form further the cause of achieving acceptance by the society we live in. It does exactly the opposite. It has created a necessity for society to call for laws that shouldn’t be necessary. They have created an environment that is no longer working toward acceptance and understanding to one that is nothing short of just plain hostile.

In my presentations to college level classes I make a point early in the discussion that what those of us in the trans community is a mismatch in our bodies and our emotional makeup. I make a point that normal men, basically feel comfortable burping and belching and dragging their knuckles. It’s natural for them to want to be tough and ready to defend whatever might need defending.

On the other hand, women, in general enjoy being pretty and being defended by that guy who drags his knuckles and burp and belches. Are these two descriptions intended to be any more than broad generalities? Not at all. What they are intended to be is a basis for a discussion of what is meant by the term gender identity. What do normal people feel about themselves opposed to what people like me feel about ourselves? That is not an easy question to answer but I do think it deserves examination.

I can’t speak for normal people since I am very obviously not normal and to be honest, I can’t speak for the male-to-female transgendered athlete. It just seems to me that wanting to be female in spite of the body one is born with a person would want to be as much like a real woman as possible. That is what I aspire to. But how could those whose bodies give them such an extreme advantage over the very people they claim to be on the inside, want to overwhelm them in physical competition so completely? That, to me is just incomprehensible. That is just not what I see as in character for a natural woman.

I know I am not in actuality a woman. I never will be. I was born with the wrong body and even though modern surgery can modify my body to aid me in my quest to be female, nothing, absolutely nothing, is ever going to change that simple fact of nature. I’m not a real woman. Society is never going to be able to change that simple fact of nature. All the advertising gimmicks and the pop psychology of the media pundits is never going to change that fact of nature.

What has changed as a result of all the hoopla over gender identity and the misguided efforts of politicians and activists, is the level of acceptance society feels toward us. Instead of a swell of support for the mismatch of body and emotions we are faced with a backlash. The level of acceptance we had achieved has been set back decades and it angers me. The do-gooders in the press, in education and in politics, along with the activists in the transgender community, have for the sake of their own advancement made life for the rest of us much more difficult.

The results of the woke pressure for all of society to march to the drum of gay and transgendered activists has indeed caused a major problem in the social fabric of our nation. The sleeping majority of people who used to be content to let us be a part of society, albeit a small part, are now seeing our entire community as a major threat to them and their beliefs.

The backlash is best described as the empty plate where a big slice of cake used to sit, but has been eaten by a greedy child who is now crying because he now has no cake.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it too!”

Unintended Consequences

Posted on by
Reply

There’s a phrase in our language that I find particularly apropos today. The phrase is “unintended consequences”. I really hope that the current climate which has enveloped the gender identity issue is not intentional, but that hope is most likely futile. What has happened is that the efforts of the vast majority of persons like me to be productive, contributing parts of society are rapidly being eroded by liberal activists whose only goal is to force the rest of society to accept their world view.

How in God’s name have we suddenly become the linchpin of this destructive Godless move to force, by means of intimidation, acceptance of the choices a relatively small segment of society has made? Those choices that have been quietly gaining acceptance for the last twenty plus years have now been set back by a small number of self-important individuals seeking attention.

I have been working and living my life free of the fear of intimidation for the better part of the last fifteen years. Today, thanks to the liberal left I no longer feel the sense of safety and freedom to live the life I have worked to create for myself and for others like me who simply want to be accepted as who we are. Different? Absolutely, but not a danger to the lives of society in general.

So, I’m angry.

I’m angry on any number of levels. The first level is anger at the relatively small number activists who have chosen this time to advance their own personal agendas on everyone they consider narrow minded, conservative Christians and anyone else that tends to agree with that point of view. It is a typical liberal philosophy that they know what is best for everyone else and if you don’t agree with them, you are a threat their existence … literally a threat to their existence as much so as Nazism was a threat to the Jewish people. Those liberals have been educated to think that way without question.

The end result is that the people in our country, indeed the entire world who do question liberal thought and the process by which they arrive at their conclusions, those people are labeled narrow minded bigoted anti-democratic (the government definition not the political party) Nazis. The fact that liberals resort to name calling is itself proof that they are incapable of constructive conversation, and they are incapable of that because they are incapable of constructive thought. Our education system has seen to that successfully enough to have reduced the numbers of thoughtful people to affect the outcome of a national election.

On another level of anger, I find the willing accomplices in our press are ensuring that the advancement of the acceptability of those of us whose bodies do not match our emotional makeup has been set back by decades. And it’s not rooted in the gender variant community as much as it is in persons like Anheuser-Busch’s Alissa Heinerscheid who fancy themselves as being more enlightened than anyone else.

I have no problem with anyone wanting to share their journey in life with anyone who cares to pay attention to them. After all, I did publish a book on my own journey. What little I have seen of Dylan Mulvaney, she does appear to be one of those people whose body and emotional mindset simply do not match. But the mere fact that she allowed herself to be shown in such an unfavorable light casts a shadow on her moral compass. She has contributed to the unexpected backlash besetting Anheuser-Busch … Unintended consequences.

It has been my experience that when we go about our lives like any “normal” person does, that our gender identity becomes pretty much a non-issue. Even people who don’t particularly approve of the choices we’ve made refrain from overt displeasure in our presence.

But the in-your-face approach that Bud Lite has employed with Dylan Mulvaney has created a backlash not only against Anheuser-Busch but against the trans community as a whole. This is what happens when people like Ms. Heinerscheid stick their noses in where they aren’t wanted and try to cram their ideas down other people’s throats. And it’s not just her.

Take the legislator from Montana, Zooey Zepher, who has managed to create a minor firestorm by trying to cram her gender identity issues down the throats of her constituent legislators and the people who voted for them. The mere fact that she was elected to the legislature should be proof enough that had she behaved like an adult and not a rabble rouser she would have probably accomplished far more. What she ranted about was a proposed bill that would ban “gender affirming care” aka gender reassignment surgery for children, which I assume means anyone under the age of eighteen.

Liberals like to cherry pick one or two individuals or circumstances, attach a label to them and then lump entire groups under that label. They simply cannot cope with genuine individuality. The term most often referred to in that case is group think. And group think bans any ideas, thoughts, conversations or efforts at open and fair debate. Liberals simply cannot fathom any idea that runs contrary to, or even slight askew to, the main body of thought which most cannot even track back to the actual origin of the idea.

And that brings us to the subject of group thought about gender identity. Any time I publish something related to my gender identity and/or my political preferences the criticism I receive comes from people in the LGBT(Q) community. It almost always runs along the line of thought that if a person is lesbian, gay bisexual, transsexual or (questioning) they have to be a liberal democrat, because after all they are the only ones who are accepting of the way we live our lives. That is just plain misguided thinking stemming from ignorance. Why is it that conservatives are always the boogie man? And we are now full circle back to group think.

The group has concluded that since they all think alike that conservatives must all think alike. Nothing could be further from the truth other than the desire live our lives independent of the constraints the liberal left would like to place on us, and a general distrust of government. The experience that I’ve had is that while some conservatives may disagree with my choices, they generally accept me as I am as long as I don’t demand acceptance. In some cases, they may choose to consider me misguided and seeking attention. Whatever their feelings on the subject they are almost always willing to have a conversation on the subject. Liberals will inevitably resort to name calling and insults rather than a discussion on merits.

Conservatives, in the LGBT(Q) community are more numerous than one might expect because they don’t wear their politics on their shirt sleeves. And they are most likely to be Christians which is another taboo for liberal progressives in the gay community. But that conversation is for another time. What I want to get across is the idea that conservatives of any life choice have been too eager to compromise in order to express a willingness to avoid confrontation. That has been construed as a number of traits, such as cowardice, lack of compassion, lack of intellect. That willingness to discuss issues has led directly to the liberal left branding us as weak and ineffectual. And they have been very successful in that endeavor.

It’s time for conservative to fight fire with fire … adopt a no prisoners attitude. Compromise has been a total failure and if that isn’t corrected immediately the demise of a wonderful form of government will be on our shoulders. It will be on the shoulders of all conservatives, normal and LGBT(Q). We are the ones who will have to shoulder the blame just like a parent who lets their child run wild without any discipline are ultimately to blame for the outcome of their children’s lives. Liberals do not respect compromise or reason. They only respect power.

Conservative willingness to compromise with the evil of liberalism has had all these “unintended consequences” that have brought us to the brink of collapse.

As for the “T” part of the alphabet soup label. Those of us who are not subscribing to the current disruption of our society by the noisy attention seekers; we need to let the world know that those people do not speak for us. We have paid our dues to be a part of society. The spoiled children who are rioting and their willing accomplices in education and the press have not paid more than a dime in dues to be considered as reasonable people. The backlash which is occurring should have been expected and would have been totally unnecessary. Just ask Anheuser-Busch if they are happy with their

.

So How Did We Get Here?

Posted on by
1

So, how did we get here? How did we get from the nation that I grew up in, a nation full of promise, a nation capable of landing a man on the moon, a nation that looked at its faults with an eye toward actually correcting the faults and not perpetuating the faults? How did we get from a nation of hopeful high school and college graduates whose worst crime might have been hanging a disagreeable professor in effigy instead of reality, from a tree in the center of the campus? How did we get from there to a nation where students march in masse protesting something, they have no actual knowledge of, while cheering the burning of our flag and destruction of the dreams of small business owners in the name of racial justice?

On the flip side, how did we go from nation of law-abiding citizens who identify themselves as conservatives; from a nation of people who accepted the outcome of an election regardless of who won because we trusted the system that counted the votes to do it honestly and let the chips fall where they may. How did we get from no need for conservative voters to gather in-masse, to support a president who, in spite of all the good he did, was not re-elected under a cloud of suspected corruption of officials in 5 states?

We didn’t get here overnight. We didn’t get here in a year. We didn’t even get here in a decade. We got here after years of careful and deliberate efforts of groups who had a fear of individual accomplishment. People who achieve through individual effort are feared by others who only find comfort in group think and group function.

When I was on the high school debate team one of the questions was “Should the federal government aid in funding public education?” (I paraphrase that question). One of the primary arguments on the negative side of that question was that local education systems would become too dependent on that source of funding and the result would then be encroaching federal control of the school curriculum. In other words, if you’re going to accept our money then you must accept our directions on what to teach and what not to teach. What was never expected was how non-government entities would eventually have far more influence than state and national government edicts.

It wasn’t the fault of politicians in spite of what we have come to think of them. It was the realization by non-governmental entities that what they had in their possession was something far, far more powerful than any government. Think about it … Who were the majority of those marching in support of Black Lives Matter and the call to defund the police? They were students. Black, white, brown; the color didn’t really matter. They had been conditioned by 12 to 20 years of sitting in front of “educators”; a group that had under their influence, as Rush Limbaugh would say, “young skulls full of mush” for a minimum of four to six hours a day. How many hours a day does the average parent spend on the mental development of their children? One? Two, maybe?

So, what kind of ideas are being stressed during those four to six hours a day? Well, as I noted in my last blog, 96.1% of the political donations made by the NEA in the last fifteen years have gone to democrat candidates. What kind of world to democrats want for our children? The last ten days should be your answer. They want to squelch any form of dissent to their ideas and their ideas are based on their belief that the average person is not capable of making rational decisions about their own lives. In addition, to that arrogant opinion of the average person’s intelligence is the belief that anything, and I do mean anything, they have to do to gain and hold that control is justifiable as evidenced by the obvious irregularities in the election results in five states during the last election. They have no moral compass whatsoever.

If you want to know then, how we ended up with such corrupt victors in our last election, look not to the politicians, look to how the people who elected them and the people who got them elected arrived at their justifications for their behavior. Those were arrived at through years of being under the influence of educators who themselves spent years under the influence of those who went before them.

I ask myself how did two educated conservatives such as my parents raise two broad minded conservatives, my brother and me, and then a decade and a half later a relatively narrow minded extreme liberal like our sister? It was a matter of how we were educated, when and where. Our parents didn’t change, the education systems changed.

I said in my last blog that if we are to effect lasting change in our country it has to start in our schools by getting involved with the local school board and administration. Weed out anyone who believes that their job is to shape minds. It isn’t; it’s to teach the basics not the morals of the teachers. It’s the parents’ job to shape the minds of their children.

Frustration is turning to Anger

Posted on by
3

My frustration is turning to anger. Maybe the final straw was seeing a mob; that’s the only word for it; pulling down a statue of Francis Scott Key in San Francisco. So what if he was a slave owner. If what I recall of my education is correct; and I’m pretty damn sure it’s because the NEA hadn’t corrupted the system yet; most of the signers of the declaration of independence were slave owners. My guess is that there wasn’t a single one of those fools involved in the destruction of that statue that’s had any seriously accurate education in our history.

It’s highly unlikely that any of the people who did own slaves were the ones to go to Africa and kidnap the people they “owned”. The slave traffickers in many cases weren’t even the ones to kidnap the people they trafficked in. In most cases the unfortunate people to be sold into slavery were captured and sold by other black tribesmen or Arab Muslim slavers.

But all that knowledge is secondary to the root cause of all the turmoil in our country. That root cause is total and complete lack of basic education and sense of responsibility for one’s own actions. Parents are turning the education and upbringing of their children over to the state. And the cities and states that are the most affected with the problem are those run by liberal politicians like Bill DeBlasio of New York City.

I know that conservative news and commentary outlets see this, but why don’t people on the left at least give lip service to the issue? Can it be possible that they really don’t want to see it because it’s such a glaring example of what liberal progressivism does to the soul of the communities it has taken root in? I tend to think that is the case.

Everything Marxism and Maoism teach is on full display with each and every march and riot that’s occurring on a daily basis. Has our education system become so badly directed that the average person is totally convinced that they owe nothing to the society they live in and that the government is there to provide them with not only the necessities of life but all the goodies that come from a free enterprise form of economy?

So yes, I am angry that people I know, people I care about and people I love are so totally ingrained with an attitude of hatred toward everything that has made this country the one place on the face of the earth where everyone wants to live.

I’m angry that everything about this country that I love and hold dear has become a target of hatred and a form of reverse prejudice.

I’m angry that the press in general, the liberal politicians, the entrenched bureaucracy in Washington, the public education system have all been co-opted by the notion that only a relatively few elites have the vision and correct idea of what is right and what is wrong.

I’m angry that those same people who have made common sense a thing to be laughed at and belittled, are the ones making decisions that affect my life and the pursuit of happiness embodied in our declaration of independence.

And I’m angry that those people who are supposed to be the defenders of free speech; the educators, the liberal politicians and most of all the press, think that I am ignorant because I am a Christian, a politically conservative Christian, a politically conservative Christian trans-sexual; that since I’m all these things, I can’t have an opinion worth voicing.

I could go on indefinitely about what started out as frustration and has now become anger and how that anger makes me want to lash out, but I don’t believe that’s productive, so I won’t.

If you’ve read this far, I think you get my point. I’m angry.

Scaredy Cat

Posted on by
Reply

I have a confession to make … I’m a scaredy cat. Yep! That’s what I am. To revert to another term I haven’t used in years … What am I ascared of? I’m not sure. I just know that I’m not terribly brave or courageous; not like soldiers or policemen or firemen; not like atheists or agnostics. It’s all about facing death.

It’s always seemed to me that a person such as a policeman or fireman and more particularly a soldier has faced, if not death, at least the prospect of their own death at least once in the course of performing their duties. They have more than likely come to terms with the prospect of life coming to an end. There is a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes and I imagine that’s because when one finds one’s self in a foxhole one is face to face with the prospect of their end being there in that foxhole.

I don’t remember ever not believing that God exists. I always felt that He did. However, for most of my life I just never paid a bit of attention to what his existence really meant to me.

Atheists and agnostics simply baffle me. When I look at the complexity of life; the way every single solitary thing, in not just this world but in all of creation, is assembled and ordered, it is just not possible for me to consider for even a moment that it’s all random accident the way atheists do. I find it equally impossible to ascribe to the notion that “the universe”, an impartial and emotionally devoid entity created itself without the benefit of intelligent thought.

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t it just a wee bit incongruous to think that morality is a natural happenstance which mankind has, over centuries come to accept as the correct way to live. Are “right” and “wrong” simply the unintended and accidental result of the passing of time. If that is the case, then it seems to me that it’s basically because the “weak” in society drummed up the notion, and began a campaign of acceptance among the compassionate strong, as a sort of shield against the not so compassionate among the “strong”.

But to be more practical about the issue, I find it further mind boggling to imagine that anyone with even a modicum of scientific knowledge can think that it’s all accidental. It’s been years since I studied biology and chemistry and even though there have been advancements in our human understanding of the “way things work” the basics remain intact. Everything, every single solitary minute particle of our world, our solar system, our universe, is ordered and positioned to serve a purpose of some sort. Again, I ask, accident?

And that brings me back to my confession. I realize that we all have to face the fact that there is an expiration date to our earthly existence. Firemen face that reality in doing their job. Policemen, in this current time of deadly attacks on them, certainly do and soldiers, in particular those who stare the enemy in the face at any given moment; those people have to deal with death as a matter of course. How they do it and continue with their jobs is a source of constant amazement for me. There is an old phrase that says, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” Seems logical to me though I have never been in one of those “foxholes”

I’ve never had the opportunity to discuss the issue with an atheist, so I can’t say what, if ever they find themselves in a “foxhole”, they would do. I think I would like to know how they mentally and emotionally address the final curtain.

For myself, I find enormous comfort in my belief that God does indeed exist; that He designed me and everything else in existence with care and precision meant to work together if we follow the instruction manual. I find further comfort in the fact that there are numerable instances in my personal life which I can point to that can only be explained in light of His existence and personal involvement in my life. I don’t care if it’s something as simple as searching for a misplaced item and saying aloud, “Where in the Sam Hill is my shoe?” and suddenly have it appear in my line of sight. It happens way too often to be coincidence. I am one person who has experienced God’s personal involvement in the mundane as well as the special occurrences of my life.

So how do I resolve the issue of being a scaredy cat? That’s really quite simple. I’m only scared when I don’t remember that I don’t need to be scared. Besides, as I have said to my best friend, Christine who is an avowed atheist, “If you’re right and I’m wrong I have not lost anything because there was nothing to lose in the first place. But, if I’m right and you’re wrong you will have lost everything.?

6/20/2010

Posted on by
Reply

Eight years ago today, June 20, 2010 at 1:37 AM in the morning I posted the following on my Facebook page.

“I’m done! I’m done! I’m done! I’m done! I’m done! I’m done! I’m done! I’m done! I’m done! I … AM … DONE!!!!! HALLELUJAH! THANK GOD ALMIGHTY!! I … AM … DONE!!”

After 3 years of remembering, researching my own past and writing down the results, I had written the final sentence in “Dear Mom and Dad.” Had it been published in that original form it would have been in excess of 700 pages long. Thankfully, the person I’d been dealing with at iUniverse advised me that unless I was James Michener it was entirely too long. Following that advice, I began a slash and burn editing process. Well, I didn’t actually burn anything. I still have the original hard copy script in a 2” black binder on a shelf in my bedroom along with all the notes I used creating my original outline. In addition to that, I have several flash drives with the various edits in my desk drawer.

When I think about writing another book I find the prospect daunting. After all I had an accumulated 60 plus years of events and people to make writing easy. All I had to do was write about those people and events as they were, though not accurately  remembered in the first draft. Accurate memories came only when I realized that the people written about would actually be reading what I wrote. Now with a mere 8 years accumulation of people and events I wonder if it would be of any value.

I also wonder if I could add anything to the dialogue engaged in by the majority of the transgendered activists and their accomplices in the LGBT (I refuse to use the “Q” since that is a term earlier used to describe gay men) community. I have, since the publication of “Dear Mom and Dad”, written about issues that are near and dear to my heart with respect to the trans community and I have written about issues unrelated to gender identity; faith and politics in particular. My opinions on the latter have met with approval and with disdain. Writing another book is somewhat immaterial it seems. What is material to me is that whatever I do in the future be of consequence. It that includes the inspiration to write another book so-be-it.

My involvement in the lgbT community has left me with a few impressions which have had a lasting effect on my attitudes regarding “activism”. The most significant of those is the impression that the demands of the community to be treated equally are accompanied by demands for laws that in essence require not equal treatment but special treatment. It seems to me that the demand for special treatment trumps the request for equal treatment. It’s an attitude adapted from the racial equality movement which approaches their situation in the same manner. In both cases, it seems to me that the demands are equally exclusionary. Granny would have said something like, “Make up your mind. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” To me, demanding equality is the equivalent of admitting that one does not feel equal or at least doesn’t see one’s self as equal.

I am firmly convinced that what our community needs are more people like Dr. Marci Bowers who has gone about her life without wearing her gender transition status on her sleeve, helping make the lives of innumerable people more enjoyable and complete.

Another person that I see as an example of getting on with life and using her abilities and education without wearing her gender status on her sleeve is Amanda Renae Simpson. While I acknowledge that her liberal political activity was largely influenced by her gender affiliation, I am not by any means going to discount her contribution to our community by using her training, education and experience to move about the halls of government in both Arizona and Washington DC exposing those realms to the notion that gender identity does not exclude one from making a significant contribution to society by productive use of their training and abilities.

These two people are not the only ones in our community who have made the transition and gone on with their lives using the training and abilities they possess for the good of society, but they are 2 that I have a personal connection with and knowledge of. They have made life more livable and enjoyable for the rest of us by virtue of their willingness to take personal risks without making demands on society for special concessions for them; at least none that I’m aware of. That’s what “people” do. They don’t make an issue of their gender; they simply apply their extensive training for the betterment of society.

For myself, I realized long ago that getting on with life without making a stink about my gender identity made life so much easier. I freely admit that I have been extremely fortunate in my physical make-up but I have also made it part of my attitudinal make-up to not expect special treatment. The expectation of special treatment generally leads to disappointments and there are enough of those already. For me, being treated as if there were nothing special about me is the highest compliment I can receive as a transgender person. The only thing I want special recognition for is the application of my skills and training in my field and the application of my talent in my writing.

“Dear Mom and Dad” finally hit the market July of 2012 and my first blog entry was posted by the publisher the same month. Since then I have posted nearly 120 more. Altogether they could equal another book I suppose. But it would be rather disjointed since my subject matter has varied so much. All in all, I will continue writing one way or another. It might be another book …it might be a more blog. It might even be some of what “ended up on the cutting room floor” as the saying goes, in that original draft..

Stay tuned …

Becoming who and what we are supposed to be

Posted on by
Reply

In the world of the trans-sexual, first becoming who and what you feel you were meant to be, then living as who you feel you were meant to be, is often more than just a mixed bag of emotions and decisions. It’s often a veritable mine field. It’s not uncommon for “normal” people to have difficulty with the hand life has dealt them, but for “trannies” it’s often impossible.

I have been fortunate, extremely fortunate, but it’s not easy to say why, at least in language that many people understand. The reason for that is my firmly held belief God has been guiding me to my current situation since spring of my sophomore year in college. There are a couple of ways for me to explain what I mean and how life has played out for me … so far.

The first is to compare the course of much of my life to a pinball machine; a description I used briefly in “Dear Mom and Dad”. Immediately after turning my life over to Christ that spring I made a genuine effort to make changes in my life. When my grades came through at the end of the quarter they were accompanied by a letter from the university instructing me to kindly not darken the doorway of their school again. Okay … so Jesus didn’t rescue me from that lion’s den. That pinball of my life went straight in the crapper.

The next ball involved a new romantic relationship. The direction that took was an unhappy marriage to an unhappy young girl with the proverbial shotgun in my back. All the time I just kept thinking that God surely wouldn’t let this happen to me. But, He did. The pinballs just kept coming … and going straight into the crapper.

Occasionally I would utter desperate pleas to God to once again bail me out of trouble, and sometimes He would, but usually not. I genuinely believe that God did what any good parent would do for a headstrong child going the wrong direction. He let me go the wrong direction until alcohol got the best of me and one of His tools, namely my wife, forced me surrendered to God’s will completely. And therein lay the key … my will. I had turned my life over but not my will.

It took a while for the fog to clear and for me to finally surrender the last shred of my stubborn will, but when that happened the understanding of my own emotional make up, what that meant and where it was leading, became clearer with each passing year.

I did not make demands about the path of my future. I literally lived day by day, week by week, month by month as my life slowly evolved from occasional expression of who I was becoming, to more frequent expressions and eventually full and complete expression of who I am.

Each of those phases came about almost entirely without effort on my part. Opportunities to move to that next phase seemed to appear almost out of nowhere. Each of those steps was taken without expectation what the next step might be; just realization of the changes in my emotions, changes in the reality of what my life had become at each point.

For me to arrive at the point where I now find myself; to move from the life of George to my life, has taken the better part of 35 years. The first half of that time was a series of inconsistent starts and stops. The second half developed into a slow but steady progression of attitude changes, periods of acceptance of life as it was, followed by unexpected advances toward a complete metamorphosis.

The changes in my life have been gradual and I believe guided by the unseen but gratefully felt hand of my maker. It saddens me when I observe much of the gender identity community of which I am a part, struggling in unhappy circumstances. Many are simply unhappy because life On the South Bank of the Rubicon (See posts for June 15, 2013; March 28, 2015; September 24, 2015 and September 1, 2016) is not what they imagined. Often, it’s because they forced transition on themselves and their families.

People are creatures who tend to like things the way they were. Forcing change on them inevitably results in backlash. It certainly doesn’t help when the man or woman they knew tends to show through the wig or long or short hair and makeup or the lack of it. But the primary cause for the unhappiness is the rush to change.

Poets have long written comparisons of the aging of fine wine to allowing change from grape juice to wine to develop in its own time. And comparisons of improper care taken in the development of a wine are frequently seen. Trying to force that change is also like trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

Would I be as happy as I am now if I had rushed into a transition neither I and those close to me were ill prepared for. Absolutely not! Many scoffers who consider me ignorant or lucky because they believe, or they think, I have had an easy transition. Or they think I just don’t understand them and their plight. In that they are partially right. I understand their plight, but I don’t understand them.

Every unhappy phase and moment in my life occurred when I was trying to run my life according to the gospel of “George”. When I finally decided to let God mold me and fix me, I found peace and comfort I can only compare to a warm blanket on a cold night. I still have moments of sadness. That is inevitable, but it is always followed by that sense of comfort.

When I see people in our gender community struggling with their lives and yet refusing to let God help them, it makes me sad. I want to share what I have found, but it seems that every attempt to do so is rebuffed.

But, I will keep trying to find the right words in the right combination and the right sequence. That’s what God expects of me, so I must.

Thank you Professor Jimmy and Crafton Hills College

Posted on by
6
Yesterday was another amazing day at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa California. Thanks to Professor Jimmy Urbanovich, A.K.A. Speech Teach … I was once again given the opportunity to speak at Crafton Hills College. The reception was, as it has been in the past, even more gratifying than the time before.
 
My experiences with the students and faculty there have continued to add support to my observations about people. The biggest complaint I have had with the LGBT community in general is that they make little effort to reach out to the rest of society to explain what it’s like to be in their shoes. Rather they tend to demand blind acceptance from society and when they meet with resistance, react with even more demands and anger. 
I have found in experiences like the one at CHC, that when I simply share my experience with people as I did yesterday, without an accompanying demand for acceptance that acceptance is the natural outcome. People tend become defensive when demands are made of them, especially when the demand is acceptance of something alien to them or something that they have been led to believe is somehow unnatural or evil.
To further advance my own perspective, I was overwhelmed by the responses I received yesterday, when after my main presentation in the auditorium we adjourned to Professor Jimmy’s classroom for some give-and-take questioning and answering.
There were the usual unenthusiastic attendees who were there simply because their attendance was a class requirement. Those individuals I always seek to find a way to draw out and challenge in a positive way. It’s part of the fun of what I do, but the real reward is from people like one young man who told me afterward that he had not wanted to come, but that a friend had challenged him to show up. This morning I had a lengthy e-mail from him explaining that I had given him a whole new, although uncertain, perspective on his own life.
One young woman, who attended the initial presentation wasn’t even a student, but chose to come to the more intimate session in the classroom even though it meant being late for work. She approached me before the session began to tell me that she would have to leave for work shortly and didn’t want me to think she didn’t want to hear anymore of what I had to say. She was still there nearly 2 hours later and was the first one ask for a picture with me.
Another student, a young man with a very athletic build shared his experience with seeing and individual in his locker room whose appearance was confusing to say the least; looked far more female than male in most respects in body but still apparently male. His concern was that the situation made him feel terribly uncomfortable, which bothered him. He asked me if that was wrong. I explained that his reaction was normal and not to be confused with disgust. He was simply experiencing a natural reaction to a new and unexpected situation. If there was something in the individuals behavior that added to the discomfort it was perfectly appropriate to avoid interacting with them.
These are just three of the reactions I received yesterday and they all point to my original statement above. Simply sharing your own story without demanding acceptance, understanding or approval is a far more acceptable way to gain acceptance, understanding or approval. It’s a far more effective approach with a far more rewarding outcome.
The discussion eventually led to “The Bathroom Issue”. On that I have some rather definite opinions which I shared and which are in line with what I stated above. I think the edict that former president Obama issued regarding transgender bathroom use was much to the same point I made in the second paragraph of this entry. There was no effort made to help people understand and furthermore, by virtue of it’s broad and general nature, it was an open invitation to abuse by individuals with less than noble intentions. And again it was made without regard to different regional moral and ethical standards which is why I personally agree with President Trump’s order to rescind the previous order on the grounds that it is a state’s prerogative issue.
My thanks, once again to Professor Jimmy and Crafton Hills College for the opportunity to share my story and views.

A Year On the South Bank of the Rubicon

Posted on by
Reply

Has it really been one year? Apparently so, and I have to admit that there was an unexpected rush of negative emotion the moment I set foot on the south bank of the Rubicon. I was aware of the possibility of that happening but I really didn’t think it would. Even though I was aware that regret could occur I didn’t expect it to rear its ugly head the instant I stepped out of the water. However, metaphorically speaking I polished my armor, picked up my sword and shield and set off for the imperial city.

It has been an absolutely amazing journey and much of what’s happened has been due to “Bruce” Jenner’s very public and visible transition to Caitlyn Jenner. For the first time since Dear Mom and Dad was published in 2012 the investments that my publisher was suggesting made sense, especially the opportunity to “pitch” my book to a group of movie producers in New York City on October 17th. The response to that presentation was overwhelming. Nothing has come of it yet but … hope springs eternal.

Of course there have been a few glitches and detours on the road to the imperial city, but nothing that can’t be overcome. Of course there is an occasional curiosity about what might have been had I not made the choice to cross that temperamental river, but only a curiosity, not a regret. I awake every morning with a sense of purpose that I seldom experienced there on the north shore. New challenges are daunting at times but serve to remind me that I am alive and well.

The one thing that remains unchanged is my Christian conviction and the confidence that is in inherent in that faith. Everything that has happened on my journey has been purposed by a bigger vision than I can even begin to comprehend. So my message today is short and sweet.

Regrets? Not a one! Happy? Absolutely! As they used to say on the cattle drives of years past … “Head ’em up and heel ‘em out!