Musings from my everyday life...

The mental illness diagnosis is convenient isn’t it? Never mind that it’s not being honest it does however fit nicely into the world of dogmatic people for whom our acknowledgement becomes problematic. Think of the churches for whom the sanctity of male and female and marriages based on that unbreakable model cannot bend to accommodate reality; after all wouldn’t everyone want to adopt our “lifestyle” if they relaxed the rules? These are not deep philosophical thinkers but leaders of groups which view us as a fly in the ointment that cannot form part of the human fabric. We are to be viewed as defectives in need of pity and moral guidance. Never mind that we come from all walks of life including politicians, lawyers, engineers, scientists or social workers; the mental illness model fits just as well as any even if it bristles against reality. The fact that the world doesn’t actually work the way these groups mandate doesn’t matter to them. It is much more important to keep their floc

Halle and I met for brunch at a little eatery on a bitterly cold morning in small town Ontario. We had chosen this location because it was equidistant from our respective homes. She is only the second fellow blogger I have ever met in person. I had been reading her blog for years and have always found it to be a profound exploration of how she felt about being born different, grappling with the feelings and what to do about them. Now she has fully transitioned and she is beaming with the kind of confidence that comes from dropping the grand piano she had been carrying on her back for all of those years. She has arrived and has even re found and married the first love of her life who accepts her for who she is; both her grown children have accepted her as well. You couldn’t ask for a better ending to a story. Oh and did I forget to mention? She looks great to boot. The conversation flowed and we had much to share regarding our lives and how each of us dealt with a challenge most

Here is someone who thinks he understands a subject but clearly doesn't and probably has read too much Blanchard for his own good. He makes the erroneous presumption that this "condition" we supposedly suffer from known as AGP begins at puberty. Of course how he would know what transsexuals experience without actually being one baffles me and those of us who do know what we are talking about because we are actually transgender will watch this video and think this man is an idiot. The whole talk winds looking like the graphic novel version of gender theory with even the speaking style being comical. A while back he posted on ThirdWayTrans's blog and, although I first responded, I realized it would be a huge waste of time to try to educate insufferable people like this and as I watched this I actually laughed out loud many times at the simplistic analysis. I ask myself why the people on the Blanchard side of the equation end up being so loopy but then that's pro

I have always liked Jeff Daniels as an actor and here he shows his integrity when talking about being a real method actor instead of a Hollywood star. Here is a man from the Midwest who never got the pomp and circumstance and the lifestyle that one has to buy into. He proves you can be in the movie business and still keep your principles which is all the more relevant in this post Weinstein scandal era.

Jack Molay said it very well in his most recent article: "I believe, as people who have followed this blog will know, that erotic crossdreaming is simply the psyche's way of handling a conflict between expected behavior associated with someone's assigned gender, and their real gender identity, whether they are some shade of non-binary or they identify fully with their target gender" Im my view, he is absolutely correct and I have observed this in my own life. My female anima (for lack of a better term) used to be an unwelcome appendage and I struggled to live a life where a strong part of my gender identity was firmly suppressed. As those of you who have also lived this way know, doing this takes a lot of energy because an intrinsic part of who you are is muted to a point that is not sustainable. The result is eventually hitting a wall which many transsexuals have described as the point where you can go no further. For me fusing both animas has been eye openi

My main focus for a time will be my son but it's a tricky tightrope to walk. You don't want to do things for him but instead want to help him develop the independence which this life requires. I watched him from a distance during the Christmas party at my sister's and he is alone lost in the crowd as much as I was at his age. Perhaps he is mired in his thoughts but also paralyzed by the fear of not knowing how to interact. He has confided to me that this concerns him but this skillset cannot be transferred to someone and they must force themselves into initially uncomfortable scenarios during which much trial and error occurs. I refuse to be a millenial parent who creates a monster that cannot be tolerated in the workplace and perhaps here is where his natural shyness will help take the edge off of any potential sense of entitlement. I know my son is intelligent and excels in mathematics and science but he also lives in that nether land of gaming which provides sanctuar

When I was a kid growing up in Montreal the local station CFCF 12 would run Season's greetings vignettes featuring rural images from the Quebec countryside. These little videos bring back such fond memories that watching one now instantly takes me back the Christmas break and watching TV with my siblings and having these come on between shows. Suddenly I am 12 years old again. Time does go by so quickly.

Felix Conrad's latest blog post about Anne Lawrence got me thinking and it would an understatement to say she is a polarizing figure within the trans community. To take the approach that your own transition is based on a fetish but then expect to be treated and accepted as a woman in society seems counterintuitive. It’s as if to say “No I’m still a woman despite my motivation for transition being highly suspect”. Ray Blanchard would call her a deluded man (as he would all transsexuals) even as she has taken all the right societal steps to be accepted and addressed by others as a woman. So in essence she both agrees and disagrees with him. This one of the reasons I have decided to disregard her work because the motivation seems very strange to me and I suspect that, like the rest of us, she can trace her feelings to early childhood. Nevertheless she speaks of the Blanchard model as if it were proven fact instead of being actually impossible to prove and, if she were being less d

What I want for all of you in 2018 is internal peace and balance because that is all we should desire. Possessions come and go but the knowledge of the self is priceless and fitting yourself into a world that doesn’t know what to make of you has much more value. To all who read my blog I wish you a new beginning in 2018 which includes a harmonious understanding of who you are if you aren’t there already. Confront your demons head on and defeat them with the understanding that you were put here for a reason and that you have value. The rest will come on its own. Fitting a square peg into a round hole is difficult but that is not the aim. The aim is to fashion your own aperture where you can fit and find likeminded souls who get you. Merry Christmas.

Think about it: the people most opposed to those who are transgender are either deeply ignorant on the subject or have an agenda. The rest of the population can be reasonably educated over time but not everyone will buy that we are not a social movement hell bent on destroying society. My experience with the kinds of reasonable and educated people I either work with or frequent as friends is that they are generally supportive even if they cannot relate. Even my religious brother, who I had a conversation with not that long ago, understood that one cannot paddle upstream forever and that whatever the cause of my dysphoria it deserves to be treated. When I mentioned that I was weighing social transition he understood and whatever I needed to do was up to me. My 82-year-old mother is much the same although perhaps a little more reticent. In the end, she concedes that she wants to see me happy and that is what counts most. I have not decided anything yet but it is good to know that I w

Definitely not one of those insipid Christmas songs. R.I.P Greg Lake....

Things have changed over time in that I can be in the busiest eatery and not worry at all about being noticed. I am a woman in the crowd and feel comfortable that way after not thinking this was ever going to be a possibility. So there I was locked out of my place most of Saturday after forgetting my keys and then trying the electronic keypad and having it not work. So no access to a vehicle, no cell phone and dressed as a woman. Twenty years ago the locked out and dressed as a woman part would have been the end of the world whereas today it’s the best part of the equation and the no keys and no phone part that irritates. It was the weekend and the only thing I had in my purse was my tablet so I could at least email my coffee buddy that I wasn’t going to make it. So I found things to do until someone came to open my door. As it turns out it was more an email telling me where to find the keys in their office which didn't happen till after 6 pm. I have not been sleeping well ne

Christmas feels very different to me now. I see the parents waiting in line with their children to see Santa and remember how it is a period when that bond and focus is at a premium. Our parental skills are honed here and we operate on a kind of auto pilot where the daily business of child rearing overrides our ability to discern whether we are doing things right. We do not have the luxury or time to step back and analyze and it is with this in mind that I enter another phase in my own life; one where my role as parent has clearly shifted from one of caretaker into mostly mentor. As a result, it will require new definition of what I want. That same mall walk makes me think of the materialism that threatens to overtake the spirit of the season. It is always there but doesn’t quite succeed in hampering it and I think most people focus on connecting with family and friends even if their religious leanings (if ever there at all) may have dissipated. Christmas is now mostly a pagan feas

That documentary on transgender kids that I wrote about yesterday had a sequence in which a brain researcher stated that the male and female brain are not gendered. She stated that they become so over time through socialization. Of course, we know there are brain differences between men and women but they have more to do with things like multi-tasking and spatial recognition and some men will fall more into the female spectrum and vice versa. So, the question remains: why is 1% of the population consistently not fitting adequately into their birth sex and the gender role set out for them? As tempting as it might be for some to dismiss this as mental illness the truth is that transgender people are as high functioning as anyone else and only suffer stigma through persecution so there is something going on that we do not comprehend yet. It makes sense that socialization does play a role but I will point to the case of David Reimer as one which greatly negates its importance. If D

This post is about the recent broadcast cancelling by the CBC of a documentary focusing on transgender children and whether or not they know best. It gives plenty of screen time to Kenneth Zucker the now disgraced ex-CAMH gender reparative therapy practitioner. Even my favorite retired researcher Ray Blanchard is given brief cameos with his claimed statistics that the vast majority of trans kinds desist into adulthood. This documentary asks the question why do we need to change bodies and can we still be a feminine man or a masculine woman in this world. The one very well adjusted transgender girl shown in this film points to transition as clearly helping some children while others we are told grow out of their dysphoria. One can't help but recognize a not so subtle undercurrent of trans as mental illness as one watches but you can decide for yourself as the entire documentary is on the Dailymotion website (thanks for the heads up Zagria). One clear falsehood that is repeated t

I have an upstairs neighbour who is a co-condo association admin. She really is a lovely person but grates a little on the nerves sometimes because she is the kind of individual who turns wide eyed at every occurrence. She then proceeds to rattle off dialogue non stop until I manage to calm her down. When she is happy she will send out emails with 5 emojies followed by 4 exclamation marks. It is the kind of behavior that rubs against my sensibilities possibly because she reminds me of a younger version of my mother who tended towards this level of excitement. I keep my turbulence on the inside and try and keep the external ups and downs in check except when I am really angry. But even that storm has been quieted down over the last few years with further resolution of my gender issues. This is the archetype I least like dealing with and I have often joked that her and I would last together in the same dwelling for a month before I would need to drown her in the bathtub. Someone like

Alabama voted for Doug Jones but he didn’t win because of the white vote. In that sense, the state is still very much a backwater for racism, transphobia and homophobia. Someone as reprehensible as Roy Moore was still able to get most of the white vote and you must ask yourself how much more of a bottom feeder he would need to have been to lose among this demographic. It was the black voters who voted overwhelmingly for Jones who was a far more credible and decent candidate. Alabama is also among the poorest places in the industrialized world which makes you wonder why people continue to vote against their own interests by supporting a party that favors the wealthy. But then again evangelicals seem to care more about hating people who are different than helping their state become less of a banana republic. The mind boggles.

There comes a point when you will feel like you will literally implode. I remember when my dysphoria got so intense in my early 40’s and after years of trying to ignore everything, it threatened to consume me. I had to suddenly explore it and, in my naiveté, try and cure it. Many of us have hit that wall and it is very unpleasant. For me it was the realization that I wasn’t a hesitant crossdresser but instead a gender dysphoric deep in denial. I was someone who needed guidance and so I reached out for it in desperation. Being screened at the gender clinic and undergoing therapy that would eventually lead towards self-acceptance has been one of the most difficult things I have ever had to go through. Add to that my stroke in my mid 40’s and my divorce and everything was falling apart around me. I had to slowly rebuild from scratch. There have still been bumps along the way and unexpected things have happened but I am still standing and probably far richer for the experience for I ha

A two party system is not helping America. This is what has encouraged the hardening of opinion and reinforced extreme thinking on both sides which only serves to gel an outright hatred. In the past the gridlines were drawn a little differently and a rural south was mostly democrat and racist while northern democrats thought differently. Republicans were the party of Lincoln and emancipation so there was a crossover of ideas that permitted a more balanced political landscape. Contrast this with the red and blue state polarization by social wedge issue that threatens to fracture the country in half. I am not American and yet my antipathy for Republicans and their extremism runs high. I can only imagine what some passionate patriots feel about what is happening to their own country and one only needs to read the comments left below a political YouTube video to see the vitriol first hand. These are dangerous times for a country that were it not for fundamental principles sewn into i

Social conservatives are all about finding fault with progress. They decry social justice warriors (SWJs), political correctness, the LGBT agenda and any other movements that threaten their world view. I have written about them here: people like Ben Shapiro, Tomi Lahren, Faith Goldy, Spiro Yannopoulos and Matt Crowder. They are aggressive and insulting and make conclusions about things they know little about. They have also gained a small but loyal following of angry millenials who want to find fault with the world and all that ails it. These pundits are shrill and painfully annoying and are armed with the kind of smugness that youth is particularly blessed with. Their interest in truth takes a back seat to criticising what they see as an overabundance of political correctness behind which they conceal their disdain for people they do not comprehend. They are the next wave of Ann Coulters armed with an even healthier dose of chutzpah. Basic psychology would suggest that their agg

Why and how can eroticism shift and wane and pave the way towards late onset transsexualism? The answer is we do not know but I believe it is a mixture of factors which are not limited to but can include: • Declining testosterone levels • Increased confidence in oneself and disregard for the opinions of society • An ability to finally comprehend oneself sexually The first two are almost obvious but the third is trickier because it involves separating the attraction towards being female we have always had and the discovery we were attracted to them sexually. Since these two things became fused at puberty, dissecting them becomes very difficult to almost impossible until we have dealt with the first two points. In other words, one cannot understand oneself until all of the shame and guilt is removed and we can truly analyze our thought patterns and put them into perspective. To a great extent, I have managed to do this but it took me many years. Before that I would simply denigra

One of my brother’s sons came out to my son this past week as being gay. I wasn’t all that surprised because he had shown signs in early adolescence as having a penchant for wearing princess dresses. I made the mental note at the time that he was either going to be trans or gay and didn’t think about it much again as he grew. For quite a while I began to doubt he was either and chalked up his early exploration as a rite of passage but then this recent unveiling came along to confirm things. My son called me to decry the objections of his religious parents who aren’t overjoyed with the news. He has told his cousin about me who in turn used my situation during talks with them. I for one am glad he came out at the tender age of 17 and not wait untill his forties like I did. I told my son that I support his cousin 100% and that he should not hesitate to call me and if needs to. This bit of news will hopefully open the eyes and ears of orthodox parents who might have preferred that th

I know my friend Sherry will admonish me for saying this because she wears them, but I have never liked pantyhose or stockings. I used to wear them when I was young and had to cover up leg hair that I wanted to conceal but my legs have been smooth for years and I like the look and the feel of going out in bare legs. Besides, my pumps tend to slip out more easily when I wear any kind of stocking. Bottom line: I don't like the feeling. I was reading up on fashion advice on this issue and the consensus seemed to be that you should do what you are comfortable with provided your legs don’t look uneven with discolorations or have rough patchy skin. In my opinion, a tanning cream can take care of much of this issue. It seems that women under 40 are the ones who most prefer to leave the stockings at home but even in this age range there are some that swear by them which only proves how much of a personal issue it has become. In my office it seems to run about the same although many w

Here are the results of a recent survey of genetic women: “A new hairdo, walking in heels and a glowing tan are among the things that make a woman feel sexy. Freshly applied lipstick, newly-shaved legs and a little black dress also have a positive effect on the psyche” Are you surprised? I’m not because it is exactly the same list that makes transgender women feel sexy. For a long time the idea was pandered about that transsexualism was rooted exclusively in aberrant sexuality. But of course you cannot separate the sexuality from the individual because that forms part of their overall makeup and the fact that genetic and transsexual women overlap here surprises no one. We should also add here that women aren't always thinking about sex and neither are transgender women. Pre transition transsexuals would not readily admit they found these things sexy because they were afraid to be seen as perverted men in front of gatekeepers who understood nothing about their condition.

Sam is a mildly autistic 18 year old which makes him look awkward to most people and with the girls that he desperately wants to like him. In this slice of life comedy we can recognize ourselves a little and the difficult times we experience when we don't think we will ever fit in. We each have something about us that is a little different and makes us atypical and this show is taking me back to those times when life was so simple yet so very hard at the same time. Atypical can be found on Netflix.

Watch how trickle down economics works for Republicans. Cut taxes to mostly benefit the top 1% and then when the deficit increases go after Medicade and Social Security and take even more money from an increasingly smaller middle class and rising working poor. If you still believe in trickle down economics I have some swamp land in Florida to sell you. Go Bernie!...

We have our own version of Tomi Lahren in Canada and her name is Faith Goldy. She is pretty and young and ultra conservative and appears on our version of right wing media (Sun News) to say things like homosexuality is a choice and a sin and that catcalls towards women are compliments. Her brashness comes stupidity to be sure but also from her youth which imbeds her in a deep and profound ignorance of how the world actually works. I know this because I have at one time been there myself when I believed that people chose to be gay or lesbian. I also believed that I caused my own gender dysphoria. Youth is the period of your life when you are most likely to be brash and when your ideals are not deterred by reality or by empathy for the lives of other people. In this case, Goldy comes off as a strident Catholic who oddly doesn't have a problem with wearing overly tight fitting tops to her television interviews. What would the nuns think? It is a right wing and merciless Catholic