I suffer from some mental health issues. I had suffered from depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember. Yet, it has gotten worse especially since I transitioned.
I went to see a therapist for my social anxiety. I use to ballroom dance and I was so anxious when I would preform in front of people. I never experienced a problem like this, but I gradually learned it was because I identify as a woman. Ballroom dancing is very gender specific and I knew there was something wrong with doing the steps and movement that were for men. I began Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) on February 2014 to have the physical appearance of being a woman.
I was feeling better once I started but I began to get very anxious of being clocked (viewed as being my wrong gender or of being transgender). I began to develop agoraphobia. I didn’t want to leave the house and run into people. I didn’t have a fear of leaving the house, but rather being around people, mainly because of my gender dysphoria.
I will talk more about my mental health in this blog. I’m currently in therapy now and I loss my job chiefly because of my mental health. I’m still unemployed but I hopeful that I will be getting disability retirement soon. I already got approved for being disabled, but I have not received any payment yet.
I started a blog a long time ago on this very site, but I never renewed the domain name. I thought that I would start it back up again and see how long I can maintain it. On here I will be talking about politics, sports and whatever else I might be thinking about. I don’t know where this will be taking me, but as they say a journey begins with a single step.
I am a transfeminist, because transgender women are women.
I have viewed myself as a girl at a very early age. I was told that I am wrong that I was born a boy. I had to hide who I was. I believed the stories that were told to me that if I did accept that I was a women society would never accept me. I would be viewed as a freak and not be able to find a job.
In my early 20s I came out as bisexual, but soon after came out as a gay man. I rejected calling myself gay because I believed that meant I hated women. I learned this was not true when I befriended some gay men.
Coming out as a gay man did not help with my depression. There was suicide attempts and a self loathing. I knew something had to be done and I finally made the very hard decision to not only come out as a straight transgender woman but to begin the process of transitioning. It was the most difficult decision I ever made in my life but also the most rewarding.
As a transwoman, I have a unique perspective on society’s gender policing: girls do this and boys do that. I didn’t want for society to see me as a boy. I wanted society to see me as a girl. It was – and still is – to get society to use the correct pronouns when talking to me. I experience emotional violence and disrespect when some view me as the correct gender but eventually learn that I’m a transgender woman and they believe I am trying to fool them.
I am a transfeminist because I don’t want to see other women like me go through the same struggles that I have gone through.
When they had sung many songs, and talked of many things they had done together, they toasted Bilbo’s birthday, and they drank his health and Frodo’s together according to Frodo’s custom
The Fellowship of the Ring, Three is Company
After Bilbo Baggins left Bag End after his 111th birthday, Frodo Baggins gave a toast to his uncle on Bilbo and his uncle’s birthday. (They both shared the same birth date.) Samwise Gamgee carried on the tradition after Frodo and Bilbo made the trip to the Undying Lands. I would like to think that Frodo Gardner (the oldest son of Samwise and his wife Rose Cotton) continued the celebration as well.
The Tolkien Society carried on with this event, but did it on January third, J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday. At nine o’clock your local time you raise your glass and say “The Professor!” and take a sip or swig of your beverage. Today is Tolkien’s twelvety-third birthday, a very queer number indeed, as Bilbo would have said.
I celebrated the day today alone with some of his writings and some rum.
A few days ago the New York Daily News had an article about the Kansas City police department posting an anti-transgender on Twitter. The KC police have a tweet-along where they would tweet their daily activities. This isn’t uncommon and many police departments have drive-alongs or virtual tweet-alongs like the KC police department. There was a series of tweets where police officers tweeted that they stopped to talk to a “possible prostitute”. Again, nothing unusual, many police departments like to harass sex workers, or those they expect to be sex workers. I personally don’t think the time and resources should be spent harassing someone who is trying to earn a living. As they were reporting their discussion of the nature of her work and telling her to get a different occupation, they found out she was a transgender woman they then said “she was … a man” and caller her a him/her. It was all very degrading of the police officers to misgender her in such a manner. She is in fact, a woman, not a man. It seemed to me that the Kansas City police department needs some sensitivity training when it comes to dealing with the transgender community.
Yet, what really got to me about the article in the New York Daily News was the very last paragraph. They stated that the Human Rights Campaign called Kansas City, Missouri a “beacon of hope”. The Kansas City Public Media went on to report that the Human Rights Campaign gave the city a perfect score of 100 for two years in a row in their Municipal Equality Index. What a joke. As tweeter Wick Trick tweeted,the Kansas City policy department have harassed transgender women in this manner in the past. I found an article from GLADD from the 2012 Transgender Day of Remembrance that supports this. A transgender woman shared her experience of police harassment in the article.
During September of this year, Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin gave the keynote speech at the Southern Comfort Conference where he apologized to the transgender community for their lack of interest in issues that affect transgender men and women. It was a good speech, but I want to hear him put those words into actions. How can the city of Kansas City, Missouri receive a perfect score in the HRC Municipal Equality Index when the city’s police department harass transgender women? Not only that, but getting that mark two years in a row. These indexes that HRC puts out for companies and municipalities are a joke and only useful for gay white men.
You can talk the talk, Mister Griffin, but you are going to have to more importantly walk the walk. It is time for HRC to stop doing what is politically correct and do what is morally and ethically correct. The HRC turned their back on the transgender community when they had to “take the T out of LGBT” for the 2011 Employment Non-Discrimination Act (HR 1397) for political reasons. It is time to put the T back in not just for ENDA but for everything, including the indexes that the HRC publishes every year.
