Looking Back at 2015

Jan17

The year 2015 will be a pretty important year for me in numerous respects. A lot happened and I learned a lot along the way. 2015 was the first year I lived as myself full time. My legal paperwork was done in September 2014 and I was full time thereafter, no looking back.

In January of 2015, I decided to make things happen and stop waiting for them to happen. I have one life to live and I decided I wasn’t sacrificing that life for my spouse’s retirement, especially since she no longer plans to be with me. So I cashed out one of my IRAs and put that money to work.

In February I scurried about getting paperwork submitted for my passport, which I paid extra for “express” handling and I got it just a few weeks later. My name, photo, and a nice big “F” in the gender box made me smile. March became a waiting game, basically waiting for April, and also further realigning myself at work as my colleagues continued to become accustomed to my new presentation.

I underwent FFS in April with Dr. Cardenas, in Guadalajara, Mexico, where I also met the amazing Anne Kelley. We shared a particularly powerful moment during both our recoveries that was bonding, and was a revelation. It was about Anne so if people want to know the details, they should ask her, but for me it was emotionally powerful to see someone coming to terms with themselves in such a beautiful and loving manner.

May was recovery. Let me tell you right now that FFS was far worse and harder in terms of recovery than my GCS, which came later in 2015. FFS was so worth it, but it was a bear in terms of recovery for the first few weeks. I’m happy with my appearance though and I’ve gotten compliments on it, and most importantly, it helped me to stop seeing “him” in the mirror anymore.

June was more waiting and continued recover. Friends and I began planning for Ren Fest in November. We always try to plan several months in advance to give people time to plan for a specific weekend. There were also details to complete, medical tests and exams before my GCS surgery, all of which had to be submitted to Dr. Chettawut’s staff in Bangkok before I even left.

July came and a good friend, Ashley Wilson headed to Thailand ahead of me by about two weeks. I did get to see her while I was there later, before she flew back to the US. And after seeing her, it was my turn. I awoke from GCS and really wasn’t in much pain at all, mainly just uncomfortable. They kept me pretty well controlled with pain meds and such. And my dear, dear friend, Julie Jeznach, had traveled to Thailand with me and was there to visit while I was in the hospital and to help me with my recovery for the three weeks afterwards. We had a lot of fun for the month we were there. I over stressed myself once, got scolded for it, then spent a day and a half recovering from it. Fortunately, no permanent damage. And I learned the tedium and the joys of dilating! And yet we saw things, ate fascinating food, met people, and Julie got to see the Tiger Temple!

In mid-August we flew back home. It seemed almost surreal, Julie and I going our separate ways. I also know that Thailand had been good for Julie too. Good food, regular exercise, walking (for us both as little as I could do) all contributed to Bangkok being a positive experience for us. But then it was over. I rested another week then returned to work while working from home. Working from home was a blessing. As circumstances turned out, and as the changes on our team at work developed, it would arise that I wouldn’t need to actually go back into the office until some time in January, 2016. The rest of 2015 was 100% from home, which gave me time to adapt to my dilation schedule, take breaks as needed, etc. Often my work day the rest of the year went past 6 pm, but that included time for breaks and medical necessities throughout the day as well.

September and October were much the same, except the reminder and the ongoing lesson that I don’t really have family anymore. I know there are some who might disagree, but being ignored, having things said behind your back, pretending you don’t exist on important family days (birthdays and holiday), does not constitute “love” except in some sort of deranged “religious” mind. I won’t comment further about that except that their behavior reveals a lot more about them than it does about anything else.

Out of that comes a lesson, for me at least. We’re repeatedly told to remove toxic people from our lives. I subscribe to that idea, but implementing it in practice is complicated and is often a process, not a single decision. It’s a process because our hearts don’t always listen to what our heads tell us, and vice-versa. In this case, my head knows I don’t have family and I need to let go and treat them like I treated my father, someone to whom I was biologically related but who are anything except family, based on their behavior. But the heart takes time to let go, often not wanting to accept what the mind otherwise knows to be true.

The last few years have been that process for me and I think I hit rock bottom and was finally able to put this behind me in December of 2015. And no, there was no danger of self harm, just a great sadness and listlessness as my heart realized what my mind has been telling me for a number of years now – you have no blood family.

I also began an online dating experiment in autumn of 2015, and discovered that clearly stating that I am a post-op transgender woman, up front, is a sure way to not get responses from anyone except thoughtless men, who in turn blocked me when they did find out, or from identity thieves, whom I seem to be getting better at identifying, especially since some of them are so pathetic. Out of nearly 400 messages received thus far, only 4 read my profile and realized I was trans, and only 2 of those were really interested in some sort of friendship or relationship. Unfortunately, both of them were very far away and both they and I were looking for someone closer.

November was fun, with time at Ren Fest spent with my friend Elizabeth and myself both dressed up in garish costumes. But I think I want to modify mine more for next year. Maybe replace the heavy leather shoulder pauldrons with fur ones and a few other changes. There were also minor outings, manicure and pedicure, buying some new clothes, and otherwise enjoying myself.

November blended into December, and for the most part, I ignored the Christmas season. Dwelling on it too much was painful. And my mind and heart had to work that out in their own way, as I described earlier.

2015 ended and I was in a sense, relieved. It was over. Time marches on and 2016 is before us. I’m hoping to carve out time for at least one trip this year, perhaps back to Memphis. And maybe, if I can financially swing it, a trip elsewhere. We’ll see.

Choosing to be myself has had a cost, a saddening cost but one which I would still pay, because the alternative was no longer being able to live with myself. Despite rejection from those I’ve loved and to whom I’ve literally given my heart, my life, and even my finances for over thirty years, I still would make the same choice. My choice was to live and I am content with that choice, despite the costs.

LGBT Republicans, Stop Giving Me The ‘Single Issue’ Excuse

Oct25

I often ask LGBT Republicans why they vote for the GOP despite the GOP’s open hostility towards LGBT people. The answer is usually something along the lines of “I’m not a single issue voter!” Well, let’s look at that utter nonsense, shall we?

Economically, since 1980, tax rates on the wealthy have steadily fallen due to Republican influence. If tax cuts created jobs, we should be swimming in them, but we’re not. Instead, as the chart on the right shows, Republican led economics, since 1980, have led to the shrinking of the middle class. It’s a documented fact that the economy always does better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

Then there’s the deficit. Republicans love to scream about the deficit. But who are the only presidents in the last 50 years to reduce the deficit? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both Democrats.

And discussion of the deficit leads to discussion of the national debt. Who tripled the national debt? Ronald Reagan. Who was on course to double the national debt before he lost a second term? The elder George Bush. Who did double the national debt? The younger George Bush. And the younger George Bush did that with a completely Republican Congress after being handed a balanced budget that was paying down the national debt under Bill Clinton.

How, in the face of these facts, can any person believe anything the GOP says about economics? HOW? What sort of twisted mental outlook does it take to lie to yourself to convince yourself that you should vote for these failures and liars?

Republicans scream about Obama issuing executive orders, but he’s issued the lowest annual rate of executive orders since Grover Cleveland! Here is a chart showing the number of executive orders issued per year and Obama in no way issues more than Republicans. So that’s another lie.

And the orders Obama has issued have largely been because Republicans have refused to work with a president elected by massive popular vote as a means of punishing the entire nation for daring to reject their right wing extremist views!

When do you, as Republicans, stop and look at reality and realize that it is your party that is being obstructionist? That it is your party that is exhibiting every sign of racism imaginable? That it is your party that wants to institutionalize bigotry against LGBT people’s civil rights as some sort of “religious freedom”?

So economically, everything about the GOP has been a lie and destructive to you, the middle class voter. Every single thing. Have they been right ever about anything? Can Republicans ever even tell the truth economically?

Then there’s the false bogeyman of “gun control”. LGBT people who vote based on this single issue wrongfully claim that Democrats want to ban all guns. Nothing could be further from the truth. Howard Dean made the case several years ago that extremism (notice that word?) about gun control was a losing political issue, so the Democratic party looked at that and realized it was true, and walked away from that. Yet the Republicans still try to throw that charge against Democrats even as they try to ignore mass shooting after mass shooting. Even as they try to ignore massive levels of gun violence among our poor (and largely minority) communities. Yet the GOP continues to push absurd notions like every teacher being a walking armory rather than other measures that have worked in other nations. But nothing demonstrates that hypocrisy like the NRA’s own convention where guns were banned. I wonder why they did that, hmm?

Then there’s the issue of voter suppression. The GOP works tirelessly to enact laws that are aimed at suppressing would-be Democrats (poor minorities and women) from voting. They’e even admitted this. Here’s a collection of public Republican statements about the real effects and real intentions of “voter id” laws: Unbelievable GOP Statements on Voter Suppression

And yet despite openly saying that, Republican voters refuse to listen to what their own party leaders admit, and cling, irrationally, to the idea that voter id laws will clean up some non-existent voter fraud problem.

Then there’s the War Of A Thousand Lies. Iraq was the war where Republicans proved, over and over and over again, that they will lie about anything to start a war to make their corporate buddies rich. And that’s what happened. Cheney’s Halliburton raked in $35 billion alone from the Iraq war. And those nearly 1000 lies? They killed over 4000 Americans, wounded another 30,000+ Americans, and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. There’s no morality that can excuse what the GOP did to get us into the Iraq war or excuse the human costs of the Iraq war.

Then there’s the truth that the GOP has introduced over 120 anti-LGBT bills this year at the state and local levels around the United States. How many have Democrats introduced? Zero. The GOP hates you if you are LGBT. And thinking you can change the GOP from within? How’s that working out for the Log Cabin Republicans? In the 1970s, the GOP didn’t even care about LGBT people. They weren’t for us, but they were not rabidly against us. But today they are foaming at the mouth against LGBT people everywhere, trying to pass laws that would institutionalize bigotry against LGBT people, and yet some of you vote Republican?

I could go on and on, but I won’t. Voting Republican as an LGBT person is an act of insanity. Don’t give me the “single issue” voter excuse and dismiss me being LGBT as my reason for voting Democrat. I vote Democrat because Democrats are not war mongers, because Democrats are good for the economy, because Democrats want to improve and enforce reasonable restrictions on buying and owning guns, because Democrats have actually been good at controlling and even reducing the national debt, because Democrats want you to have health care, because Democrats believe you should not retire in poverty.

Voting Democrat as an LGBT person doesn’t make me a single issue voter. It makes you positively insane for believing all those Republican lies when the plain facts in front of your face tell you they are not true.

So what excuse do you have now for voting Republican? It’s sure not a “single issue, LGBT” excuse, is it?

A Public Service Announcement About Facebook, Network Connections, and Bad Programming

Sep22

Facebook is an amazing social media experience but technologically, it’s a pile of crap. And it’s not the only pile of crap out there either. A lot of work has gone into making the HTTP/HTTPS protocols useful as “live” protocols when they never intended as such. HTTP/HTTPS were always intended to grab static content and deliver it for viewing, not interaction.

But this is like VHS and Betamax. VHS was worse but it won that war. The world wide web now sits atop a mess of HTTP/HTTPS code that is really problematic and often unnecessary, and which often has unintended side effects.

Case in point – I recently lost access to my Facebook account. Every time I tried to login, pages would not successfully load. I checked all sorts of things, flushed browser caches, tried four different browsers on four different machines. None of this helped. I could login to a different account fine on a given machine but not into my account.

A friend came along and mentioned that she had similar issues before and solved them by going into Settings, choosing the Security tab, then choosing “Where You’re Logged In”. Since I couldn’t even login, I wasn’t sure this was helpful, but I persisted and I finally managed to login to my account on Chrome on my HTC One smart phone. When I did, I was shocked. There were a large number of sessions, from all sorts of places. One was from the Atlanta airport in 2013 – more than two years ago! Yet Facebook still counted this as an “open” session and apparently was trying to keep it alive.

I began killing clearly old sessions. After whittling that number way down to just the few machines I use around my house, I tried to login from my desktop PC again. It worked. The laptop worked. And while I don’t always do that, it worked logging in from my work laptop as well.

So I am making this post as a public service announcement, and for myself as well. I want to preserve this reminder on somewhere other than Facebook so I can get the specifics again, should I ever need it again.

But I will also try to avoid that and periodically check my open session count, just to be sure it doesn’t end up crazy huge again either.

September 7th, A Day To Remember

Sep7

It was 19 years ago today, September 7th, that I was wheeled into surgery to remove the remains of a tumor that had been destroyed by months of chemotherapy. Prior to that chemotherapy, I had been about 195 pounds. By the end I was around 140, and honestly probably more in the 130s. By the end of chemotherapy, most days were enough time awake to eat, maybe watch a single TV show or two, and then sleep, 20-22 hours per day. And then I was told the tumor was dead.

Chemotherapy was over in mid-July of 1996. I was given basically 6 weeks to gain a little strength, then the surgery would ensure that the remains of that tumor were gone.

What was supposed to be a 4 hour surgery became 10. The tumor had apparently been wrapped around my aorta and in dying to the chemo, it had become this rock hard substance. My surgeon visited me later and apologized for the extra time but said he was literally chipping that stuff off my aorta, like flakes of cement.

The tumor had also been wrapped around the nerve to the left vocal cord. That nerve is a bit weird and shows how evolution does things, not always in the most sensible way. That nerve comes from the spine, over to the heart first, then back up to the left vocal cord. There was no way to separate the remains of the tumor from that nerve so it got cut.

This left me unable to speak since the left vocal cord was flaccid and unable to flex to meet the right cord, since no neural signals could now reach it. To correct that, a plastic implant was inserted in that vocal cord in another surgery in early November of 1996. I still have slight numbness in my hands and feet from chemotherapy. My scalp was ravaged by chemotherapy and never really recovered. And my hearing, already a 20 decibel loss in my good right ear, became a 50+ decibel loss and I finally admitted that I needed a hearing aid.

Despite all this, I survived. But this all also made me think very hard about myself, who I was, what I’d done to myself emotionally and psychologically to get to where I was then. I also got to see my children graduate from high school, get married, go to college, have children of their own. It took me another 8 years, to about 2004, to really learn about and understand the words transsexual and transgender but I’d bought into another lie – that if I hadn’t transitioned early, I couldn’t transition at all. It was six more years after that, 2010, that the mother of all dysphoria episodes began that simply would not relent and which drove me to the brink of suicide, before I finally admitted I needed help, and with prodding from Julie Jeznach, I finally sought that help.

The rest, as they say, is “herstory”. People to whom I gave my life, my time, my love, my earnings, have rejected me. That’s their choice and I have to accept that, but it’s still bitter. And knowing what I know today, I can honestly say that I do have regrets. We’re not supposed to have regrets and I know that I can’t change the past so I don’t plan to wallow in these regrets at all. But I do acknowledge them. And if I’d known 30 years ago what I know now, I would have just walked away instead of worrying about other people’s emotions and opinions.

So I write this today with my younger trans friends in mind. Being trans can suck. People can be ugly, cruel, callous, hateful. But we’re trans and we can’t escape that truth. My advice to you, to each of you, is make your decisions for yourself first. Anyone who can’t handle the decisions that you need to make for you neither loved you nor is your friend so is not worthy of your consideration of their opinions.

While I am very happy with where I am in life right now, in one sense, I write this today to my younger trans friends to say “Don’t be me.” Don’t put others ahead of yourself. Don’t defer what you need to be happy to make others happy first. Most of the time they won’t care about you. Not really. And those that do care? They’ll have your back and be there for you.

Have a good September 7th, a good Labor Day, and a good day for yourself first and foremost.

Sending My Name To Mars Aboard Insight! You Can Too!

Aug20

Previously, in October 2014, I signed up to send my name to Mars aboard the Orion spacecraft someday.

Send Your Name To Mars!

But now I’m going to send my name to Mars a little bit sooner, on a new unmanned Mars lander named Insight destined to head that way in the very near future.

And you can too! Go to this NASA page before September 8th, fill out the information necessary, and your name can be embedded on a microchip headed to Mars in the near future.

Liz – Day By Day

A long journey to find myself

Archives