Musings from my everyday life...

Over the last 25 years or so I have read numerous accounts of the lives of transgender people with one item of particular interest to me being the age at which the identification began. People who most readily identify as crossdressers seemed to begin their fascination just before or around the age of puberty (raiding the hamper for their first bra or pantyhose for example) whereas transsexuals are aware much sooner and realised something was amiss with their gender identity; something which was more than just about clothing. Today we speak in terms of a transgender umbrella but clearly there is a difference in terms of gender dysphoric feeling to the extent that people who Harry Benjamin would have identified as his types V or VI would have exerted an incredible amount of effort to avoid transition; typically they ended up doing so lest their mental health suffer. Benjamin found that the higher up his SOS scale (a self admitted work in progress) you went, the less one identified with

Lord knows I've never been a summer person. We in the northeast don't exactly live in a temperate climate zone and we either bake in the summer or freeze in the winter; there is very little nuance in the formula. Over my lifetime these extremes have gotten worse and has resulted in the sacrificing of the fall and spring seasons I loved so much. So needless to say, I don't suffer the current summers well and this one has been particularly unpleasant featuring heat waves one of which recently killed 53 people in the province. This is a sign that things are not normal. Yes these people were older and some sickly but this never used to happen before and as the mercury climbed and the humidity only made things worse people didn't know where to hide. France and Japan are two examples of countries being exposed to record heat to the point where the latter has declared a state of emergency. This is no longer an anomaly and it has been getting steadily worse since the 1970&#

Michael Cohen is set to be raked through the mud by the pale and vampiric Rudy Guliani who stumbles his way through the right wing talk shows trying to curtail the damage inflicted on his client. Cohen is going to sing and make official what everyone already knows: that Trump conspired during the campaign with Russian help to get him elected. Up to now, Trump's lowlife personality and bedroom antics don't seem to get any traction in unglueing him from his mesmerized base but with tariffs hurting farmers and secondary steel manufacturers the shine is starting to come off the apple. Cohen is only going to make things worse and as the midterm elections approach things are not looking good for the rotund and corrupt president. It may just be that GOP members of both houses start to head for the lifeboats as all gets uglier and if they sense that their failure to reign in Twitter Boy is seen negatively some will turn on him just as Cohen is doing now. If you ever wondered wh

To get an idea of how amateurish the writing and simplistic the analysis is in J. Michael Bailey's 2003 book "The Man who would be Queen" was, one simply needs to feature an excerpt. Those of you who are transgender and clearly Mr. Bailey is not because his ignorance gives him away immediately, will recognize the obtuseness present here and perhaps even get a chuckle. It's the simplified version of the Blanchard pseudoscience in a much less politically correct tone (and I am being kind here). To have presented this as a scholarly work should clearly have been embarrassing to the author and I am hard-pressed to understand how Northwestern colleague Alice Dreger would have defended this tripe as being representative of such. It just made her look bad for doing so. The Transsexual Phenomenon this clearly is not and it explains why many transgender people back then would have been up in arms; none more than the intelligent Lynn Conway who rightly saw this book like th

This is how discrimination works: people who are already entitled feign some sort of injustice and complain that their own rights are being violated through granting others their own. It is vile and disgusting but it is unfortunately reality. Black people must ride at the back of the bus, they must drink from their own water fountains. Today it is the transgender community facing much the same type of backlash. "We don’t want to see them and we don’t want them poisoning our normal children" is their message. Transgender people don’t cause any harm to anyone and all they want is the right to self-determination and some basic respect but conservatives who think that they are part of a movement hell bent on destroying society are not going to allow them this indulgence. They may be losing the war but they keep fighting the battles and try to wreak havoc in hopes someone will listen. This is the way human discrimination has always worked and whether the enemies are Jews, Bl

Women smile at each other very differently than when it's between a man and a woman. It's like a little signal that you belong to the same gender and that you understand each other. As I have gone deeper into self acceptance I get them more frequently. Sometimes I will be crossing the street and happen to catch the eye of another woman and we will both smile and I get my dose of confirmation. Having lived in both worlds now the difference is markedly different and two men who dont know each other will absolutely not partake in this practice. For that exchange to occur you must belong to the sorority that is womanhood. Sometimes women comment on each other's clothing or makeup and not long ago I was asked about my shade of lip colour by a young woman who happily entered it into her phone. As I stated here recently, I will equally not hesitate to point out a nice dress or shoes and receive a warm smile and a thank you in return. For obvious reasons one dare not try this

Working on this side project as a woman has been interesting for me. It allows me to reflect on what I want to do going forward by getting me one tiny step in the direction of what full time living might be like in the work place. I don't have any definitive answers yet but this is part of the process of discovery.

A lot of us who are born transgender carry a little bit of resentment towards the world; at least I did for a long time. How can we not when we immediately rubbed against its sensibilities from a young age and forced to adjust to its demands? I carried that anger for a long time and it was pointed out to me during my gender therapy back in 2007. At the very end of our sessions, the sexologist treating me told me straight out and it stung but I knew she was right. The energy of repression is sometimes too much to bear and it must go somewhere. Today I am mostly spent of that anger and, although I realize that life is still complicated for a person with gender dysphoria who has not transitioned, things are far better than they have ever been. The anger morphs into another form of energy which is used to fortify ourselves and repair psyches that were previously traumatized from having to work so hard to fit in and live with all that stress. I am still working on that hair trigger re

This mother wasn't going to allow fringe right wing bastardized religion affect the life of her transgender daughter so she got political... https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a22460397/kimberly-shappley-kai-shappley-update/

God I love the flying fingers of Lyle Mays in this piece...

Ana Maria is a strong independent woman who wants to make a difference in our company. She is in her late 30's, a married mother of 2 children, highly intelligent and very communicative. However being a woman in a highly technical field, she isn't taken as seriously as she should be and is sometimes brought to tears when she confides in me about it. She is my closest female confidant there and knows all about my transgender past and present and is a huge supporter of mine as I am of hers. The single biggest complaint that we have when we transition is that suddenly we become invisible. People who took our advice without question suddenly defer to another male colleague and this is what Ana Maria faces every day even when her idea is the best one. Invariably, she tells me, it must be supported and pushed by a male colleague if it is to gain traction. Things have changed enormously since I began in this business but they still have a ways to go and Ana Maria notices the m

While I was having a bite recently with Ralph (Shybiker) he asked me the following question: “Would you ever be interested in pursuing another relationship?” I then reflected for a moment and came up with an answer: yes and no. No, I will never look again in a conscious way. I am not the type of person who goes online and seeks somebody out and finding a fully accepting partner as a transgender person is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack; especially one from my generation. In other words, you would be wasting time searching instead of living your life. At this point my biggest fear is repression and I will never return to it. Once we achieve an echelon in our transgender journey there is no going back because we must claw our way slowly and deliberately inch by inch just to get where we are. Meeting someone who would have me go backwards is just not something I want at this stage of my life. Is there openness on my part? Of course there is but it would now take a formid

Ya gotta love Randy Rainbow...

You won't believe what Sacha Baron Cohen gets these Republican rubes to say. The creator of Borat on his new special called "Who is America" does his best to expose stupidity through the use of comedy and its both funny and tragically sad at the same time...

I have loads of fun complementing women on their clothes or shoes. Invariably I will get a huge smile or earnest thank you and a little banter will result. I am not trying to get anything out of it but it's just part of the fun that comes from being a girl. I don't do it all the time just when the spirit moves me and I gauge it will be well received. By this age my shyness filter is all but gone and very little makes me hesitate save for outing another trans person of course. Plus it's harmless and brings me and them a little sunshine into our day. The latest episode involved me commenting on a woman's black Prada pumps. They must have been 4 inches high with the stiletto heel. I told her how nice they looked and how I admired her ability to walk in them "Honey I've been living in these since I was 14" she said beaming a big smile at me "You should get yourself a pair!" Of course I was wearing my chunky heel pumps and pointed to them

Attack the media, lie, insult allies and more. These are the signs of a classic scoundrel and burgeoning fascist. Robert Reich warns about not being fooled by the subterfuge. Oh and to the anonymous person who clearly misunderstood my post on NATO: Trump can leave NATO and take all his toys away as well. America will only find itself increasingly isolated and other unions will be formed. You don't get to shit on your allies through beligerance and still expect any kind of support. It's called burning bridges...

President Trump continues his war against liberal democracies as he defecates all over a 73 year old institution in NATO which has kept the peace in Europe and has helped the United States for all those decades. Trump has a fetish for autocratic types like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin with whom he has said he will have his most pleasant visit; this the man most likely to find glee in the undoing of this formidable union. Someone please get this malevolent idiot out of there before he sets any more forest fires. Let's collect that evidence and put him on trial. At this point I will even take Mike Pence (and yes, I can't believe I just said that).

TYT's Ana Kasparian does a great job here summarizing the stances of Jordan Peterson: the new hero of North American males who tend to espouse right of center ideas. He has become their role model and speaks to their desire for a different outcome through his views on monogamy, free speech, religion, equality of outcome and personal responsibility. I was willing to give Peterson a chance at first but the more I heard the more I found he was simplifying situations and not presenting the entire picture. He talks about the left as if it were a cohesive and united force instead of a spectrum that runs the gamut from radicals to progressives. This is precisely why the right has picked him up as an icon for if he presented things more accurately this would not have happened. His views of Canada's Bill C-16 are completely unfounded and he sounds the warning bell on free speech without one decent counterargument as to why the rights of trans people are not important and their freed

I continue to be very pleased with the Silk'n hair removal apparatus and have zero regrets about having purchased it. It is doing the job prompting me to think that technology certainly has come a long way. There are spots where the hair growth has almost come to a standstill and I can see how a few more months of use could deliver amazing results which includes the face which I have treating in selected spots that didn't have a chance to respond to laser all those years ago. My daughter has now begun to use it based on my testimonial. The picture below is of me using the least amount of makeup ever: light foundation, loose powder and a light fleshy coloured lipstick. Everything took all of 5 minutes to apply. NB: Dr Morris responded to me after I emailed him the article on blood clots: "Of course. The real question is the long-term risk of estrogen. The study is complicated by the use of anti-androgens which also increase the risk of thrombosis. But the alterna

This is not to scare anyone but it would be one of my primary concerns as an older person potentially beginning HRT... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-transgender-stroke-risk/hormone-therapy-poses-stroke-risk-for-transgender-women-idUSKBN1JZ2Q1

Universal basic income is an idea whose time may have come. Proposed by an increasing amount of leading economists, it is one way to combat the increasing wage disparity between the 1% and everyone else. Neoliberalism brought us the idea that open global markets would adjust and allow blue collar workers to be retrained when their industry moved to a low wage sector but this was a fallacy. Instead we saw people falling off the grid who were not suited for moving from making textiles to working in IT (to name one example). The idea that people would adjust was a pipe dream bought by believers that free market capitalism can correct these things on its own. Liberal democracies with strong safety nets fought this problem partly through supporting workers and buying them time to reinvent themselves but in the United States, where the gap is the most marked among the top industrialized nations, there is little backup. A rugged individualistic mindset where this is seen as an unearned ha

Ralph (Ally) and I met in Old Montreal in front of City Hall. You may know him from his handle of ShyBiker and he has his own blog where he chronicles his travels, purchases, photoshoots, thoughts and ideas. Ralph has always felt female inside and he did his best to live in a world that didn't indulge him this identification. As a baby boomer born during a period where we didn't yet have the proper language for how we felt, he did his best to honor these feelings within the context of his reality. He doesn't hide from anyone and is out to the world as the person he is which happens to be a fascinating and unique individual who is not going to bend to the will of society. Ralph lives his life in his own terms and we talked about how each of us views the coming years and how our aim to be authentic will become a priority. He told me how much he loves Montreal and he intends to return and see more of it. It will be my pleasure to tag along and play tour guide if he lik

My daughter was just hired at the animation studio of her first-choice. Her first professional job thanks in part to her strong work in her animated film I posted some time back. She is excited and I couldn’t be happier for her in that she will embark on a career doing something she absolutely loves to do. My son is going to start college in the fall which is a step we have here in Quebec before University and I am sure he will do well academically. His battle with anxiety continues to improve as he finds his footing with increasing age and experience. Looks like I am out of a job as a parent at least in the way it used to be. They now have their friends and boyfriend (in the case of my daughter) and it is now my turn to remake my life with a redefined role that focuses on what I want. Also, for the first time since the split over 2 years ago, I was able to test myself by watching a short film my ex-girlfriend was in and not get overly emotional. It looks like I must be getting p

Only in Trumpworld can you have a scandal ridden tenure as head of the EPA, be actively trying to dismantle the very regulations that it purports to enforce and get a slap on the back from President TWITter for a job well done. Because Scott Pruitt was a horror show in his role and finally and mercifully resigned before doing more damage than he already had. I am waiting for Michael Cohen's information to Mueller to have a significant impact on the corrupt and morally bankrupt Trump. The question that remains is what courage does a timid GOP have to do the right thing and impeach. Mind you, as George Will recently stated, the only man he finds worse than Trump is the bland-faced yet ideologically twisted beyond repair Mike Pence and I unfortunately tend to agree with him.

This couple impressed the hell out of me. Two nice people who clearly love each other and are working through the complexities of a gender transition. The wife is grieving the loss of the man she loved but is happy that her new wife is no longer suffering from painful gender dysphoria. Not a lot of happy stories like this one out there so when they come along they are worth noting. When Lauren talks about fixing herself, boy can I relate.

The Millenials are coming and they will change society. The generation born between 1983 and 2000 (which my children are a part of) have a much more open minded view of the world than we boomers. They are more accepting of difference and diversity and will drastically change the landscape that we built and I for one think: thank God for it. I also won't surprise you when I tell you that they aren't the least bit Donald Trump fans but you already knew that didn't you. Robert Reich explains...

Recently I was noodling around on the piano and thought I would record it. I have a lot of great grand piano sounds on my Korg Krome and this dark grand setting is one of my favorites...

I was brought (along with my siblings) to this wonderful country by my parents in 1970 and they never regretted their decision.