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Adjust Your Attitude

Feb5

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” ― Winston Churchill

The above is blatantly and starkly true. For years, I let the pessimist in me hold me back. Finally, reaching rock bottom, I reached out for help and found a therapist who helped me find the “glass half full” perspective on things. I’ve taken that initial learning and begun to apply that to more and more parts of my life. And I also learned to admit that I can’t do things alone, reaching out for help, and finding it. And finally, I learned to let go of those who didn’t want to support me instead of obsessing over losing them. I realized they had walked away from me, not the other way around, so I let them go. Yes, it hurt but once I made that admission, that they no longer wanted me in their lives, I was able to heal from that hurt.

This all comes down to “adjust your attitude”.

I see many trans folk each day saying “I can’t” or “Soandso won’t let me” and the only ones who, in my opinion, can legitimately say that are our trans youth. They are stuck with their parents and whether or not their parents accept them. But if you are an adult, you get to choose. And sometimes we have to accept that we cannot have our cake and eat it too.

When it became apparent that further fighting my inner self was going to kill me, I finally relented. I have people to whom I gave decades of my life, and literally hundreds of thousands of dollars from my total earnings who now openly despise me. But I knew that I had to be me and if they could not accept me, that was their loss.

By adjusting my attitude, by seeing the “glass half full” as often as I can, I’ve managed to move steadily forward. I’m accepted as myself anywhere in public (except occasionally around a few people I knew from before). I am full time. My legal name is now Cara, not David. I am still professionally valued and supported at work.

By realizing that nothing comes easily, by focusing on “baby steps” (thank you Paula Ult, Mia, Carolyn, and so many more for that advice!!), I have accomplished far more than I ever expected and now am on the verge of getting even more done.

All of this stems from a change in attitude. I stopped arguing with myself. I stopped accepting society’s definitions for many things and as I did so, I learned that science had already walked away from those cultural falsehoods as well. I stopped letting my rational mind limit me. I stopped letting other people define me and chose to define myself, listening to my heart, my intuition, my inner sense of self. And in doing these things, I have found personal peace.

So if there is one piece of advice I would give to each person who is unsure of themselves, it is this – adjust your attitude! I know this is not easy, but until you do, you will be just like I was – foundering in your own self-doubts and fears.

P.S. Enjoy the journey!! “Don’t be concerned about reaching your destination. Enjoy the journey and the destination will take care of itself.” Jenny Marie

Trans Kids Know Who They Are

Feb4

Transgender children know who they are, and they know this at a deep and fundamental level, just like cisgender kids do too. This is further proof that our sense of gender identity is very deep and below the rational thought level within the human brain. It also raises serious questions about how detrimental parents trying to “condition” their child to accept their desired gender for the child can be versus allowing the child to express their natural gender identity.

Transgender kids show consistent gender identity across measures

“A study with 32 transgender children, ages 5 to 12, indicates that the gender identity of these children is deeply held and is not the result of confusion about gender identity or pretense. The study is one of the first to explore gender identity in transgender children using implicit measures that operate outside conscious awareness and are, therefore, less susceptible to modification than self-report measures.”

That’s significant. It’s important too because it further removes the wind from the radical right wing religious extremists who insist that “God doesn’t make mistakes” in trying to argue that male is male and female is female. Well guess what? God doesn’t make mistakes and God made those kids trans! So deal with it, religious zealots!

This further indicts the horrible sexual fixation of modern western Judeo-Christian culture and the detrimental mental health impacts that distorted view of reality has caused to so many people, not just trans people, but many, many more. Our ingrained cultural notions of gender, sexuality, and how these things intertwine are fundamentally broken and not aligned with reality at all. It’s time we cast superstitious nonsense aside and embrace reality as it is, not as some radical extremist preacher wishes it were.

An Unexpected But Perfect Gift

Jan6

Two years ago in December, my mother passed away unexpectedly. She was in her late 70s but had COPD issues due to a lifetime of heavy smoking but otherwise members of our family tend to live well into our 80s and 90s. So mom’s passing was unexpected and I can honestly say that even at my age, I miss her greatly every single day.

Mom never had much. Abandoned by my father when we were still small children, plus health issues she had mid-life made life tough on our family but Mom kept us together. She raised us, loved us, and was thrilled as each of us grew to adulthood. But for herself she never had a lot. One thing she did have was free and clear ownership of her home from her early 50s onward.

It was a small home in a small town in eastern Ohio. It wasn’t worth a lot. She had little savings. Plus it took us two years to sell that house. Because of her financial situation, my guess at the value of the house, legal fees, funeral expenses, house maintenance while we waited for it to sell, etc., I didn’t expect to get much from my mother’s estate.

Anything would have helped, of course, but I expected a few thousand dollars total.

Before I go further, I’ve budgeted out about $15,000 for my trip to Thailand for my gender confirmation surgery. I’ve waited a lifetime for this and could wait a few more years as I saved the money.

So imagine my surprise when I was informed that I and my siblings would each be receiving approximately $16000 as our last gift from mom.

I’m sitting here with tears in my eyes today, looking heavenward, and repeating “Thank you, mom”. For even in death, her last gift to me turned out to be perfect.

Leelah Alcorn – Her Death and Facing Human Monsters Among Us

Jan2

People are trying to whitewash what Doug and Carla Alcorn did to their child. I’m having none of it. They chose to be religious bigots. They chose to ignore medical and scientific fact in favor of 6000 year old superstitious nonsense. As surely as Leelah was their child, they also killed their own child with their words and by sending their child to therapists who practice a form of therapy that is considered “unethical” by both the AMA and the APA. They helped kill their child by authorizing three times the dose of Prozac recommended for children, when Prozac itself is proven to increase suicidality in children.

I will not stand by and submit to the nonsense being spewed by Carla Alcorn about “unconditional love”. If that’s what love looks like, then that kind of love kills.

I will not excuse James Dobson and his hypocritical motto “Families: where life begins and love never ends” because his transphobic rantings fueled the Alcorns extremist positions. For Leelah Alcorn, Dobson’s advice as “Families: where life ends and love never begins.”

I will not stand by and excuse them for their role in this because the culture around them “brainwashed” them. They had a choice and they deliberately chose scientific ignorance over medical fact.

It’s time to end this religious superstitious nonsense. It’s time to make reparative therapy a felony crime, including when practiced by “religious” therapists!

As a nation, we no longer tolerate lots of fundamentalist nonsense. We no longer allow women to be sold to the man that raped her to be forced to be his “wife”. We no longer tolerate “curse of Ham” religious reasoning for racial bigotry. There are lots of fundamentalist extremist ideas to which this nation has already said “NO!”

Now it’s time to say no to Reparative Therapy – a form of psychological abuse and torture intended to force someone to conform to gender and sexual stereotypes. It’s time to ban reparative therapy and make it a nationwide federal felony. And it’s time to prosecute and imprison every barbaric monster who insists on practicing this superstitious nonsense.

And to close, I’ll go one step further. We need to prosecute the therapists who helped kill Leelah Alcorn.. Punish them. Because they still think what they did was right and that, in itself, is a horror and a wrong that a respectable society should not tolerate.

Please sign the petition for Leelah’s Law, to ban reparative therapy throughout the entire United States. It’s time to strike back at the human monsters among us and remove them from civilized society. Let’s pass Leelah’s Law so no more children face Leelah’s fate. And let’s prosecute the Alcorns and the therapists who took part in this religious killing. It’s time.

The Myth of Post-Op Regret And Suicidality

Jan2

There is a popular myth going around that attempts to quote from this 2003 Swedish study:

Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden

People using this study do so selectively. Let me explain the statistical manipulation going on with gender surgery detractors and the myth they try to construct.

First they note that general population rates for suicidality are around 1.6% in the United States. Then they note that suicidality rates for post-op transsexual people are about 4.1%. They then claim that since this is “hundreds of percent higher” that surgery does not work.

But let’s talk about the reality. What is that reality? It is that the pre-op suicidality rate for transsexuals is 41%!!!

Yep, that’s right. Pre-op rates of suicidality for transsexuals are 1000% higher than post-op rates. How do we know this? From the UCLA Williams Institute study Suicide Attempts among Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Adults. (Warning! PDF!)

And the Swedish study actually supports gender surgery. Their conclusion?

This study found substantially higher rates of overall mortality, death from cardiovascular disease and suicide, suicide attempts, and psychiatric hospitalisations in sex-reassigned transsexual individuals compared to a healthy control population. This highlights that post surgical transsexuals are a risk group that need long-term psychiatric and somatic follow-up. Even though surgery and hormonal therapy alleviates gender dysphoria, it is apparently not sufficient to remedy the high rates of morbidity and mortality found among transsexual persons. Improved care for the transsexual group after the sex reassignment should therefore be considered.

Note what is said very, very gently and in careful scientific language: “This highlights that post surgical transsexuals are a risk group that need long-term psychiatric and somatic follow-up.”

So what detractors are doing is selective statistical selection to “prove” their biased point. When we take the entire picture, we see that gender surgery actually reduces suicide rates to 1/10th of what they were pre-op. And, as the Swedish study concludes, what trans people need is more support, not because they are trans, but because too many people in society today are just ignorant assholes.