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.

As Christmas 2014 Comes then Goes

Dec24

sepia-selfieThis doesn’t really get any easier at this time of year. This will be my third Christmas isolated from family, from children and grandchildren. You learn to take a deep breath, gently set it behind you, and try to move on. You focus on your friends, some of whom are very dear and very kind, and some of whom have ensured that you won’t be alone for Christmas day. And yet… your own children remain firmly fixed in your mind, even as you don’t exist in theirs.

Ultimately, things like this are why I will likely leave Texas once I have completed some key milestones in the medical side of my transition. If I’m a thousand miles away, it becomes easier to not dwell on the exclusion.

I have a few errands to run today, small things yet they need done. I will think about my siblings back in Ohio, and hope they and their families are having a happy holiday season. I will consider my friends all around the nation and hope they can find happiness and cheer in this time of year as well. And then this evening, I will make a quiet dinner and try not to think on my family gathered just a few miles away, celebrating, opening gifts, and enjoying one another’s company.

I read a heartfelt and thought-provoking piece about what trans people experience at this time of year titled Transition Is Not Death. There are powerful words on that page, words that claw at hearts broken and alone for no other reason than they had to face themselves honestly finally. A trans child (or parent) is struggling to reach for life, not death; to be themselves with those whom they loved first and foremost. And yet the very reason to transition, to reach for life for the sake of those they love then frequently becomes the basis for those same people to reject the trans individual.

It’s heartbreaking when I see it happen to others. For me personally there’s nothing left to break anymore so I struggle to continue reassembling a shattered life, especially at this time of year. This year it no longer hurts; it’s just empty. So I focus on those who are trying to fill it for me – Julie, Elizabeth, Fran, Kate, Jennifer and all my internet friends. To each of you I say thank you for helping me rebuild my reasons to love this season. It’s an effort that is still underway, but you have each helped me in various ways.

So as yet another Christmas day comes then passes, I realize that Christmas is my personal Yule, the longest, darkest day of my year. And that once it is past, the light will begin to grow again. In realizing this, I know that I have those around me who care, even as I let go of those for whom I once cared.

Happy holidays everyone. Sometimes finding joy in this season can be difficult but if we search, we can find it, even if it’s not where we hoped or expected. I hope each of you can find your own joy this Christmas, and that you can continue to let go of the pains that others choose to inflict. May your new year bring you each joy, strength, growth, wisdom, and the love of those around you.

It wasn’t easy

Dec20

I’m a bit angry tonight. Over at another forum where I am a moderator, people tell me that I don’t understand their pain, that I had it “easy”, that their situation is “different”. Bullshit. Let me explain a little bit of what I went through in reaching the point where I had to transition and what happened afterwards.

My wife never respected me for years and years, until 2009 when I outmaneuvered the stock market the prior two years and avoided the big crash because I had been paying attention. That was 32 years of marriage where my opinions were always treated dismissively. She wouldn’t have cared about that either, except when her father discovered what I’d done and in his eyes suddenly I went from that annoying son-in-law to some financial intellectual heavyweight whose opinion now mattered, because where he had lost large sums of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, I had increased my 401K pool by 25% by placing my bets smartly right before the big Lehman crash. Suddenly my opinion finally mattered to him and therefore finally mattered to my spouse.

Of course, a few years later I came out as trans and that was the end of that brief period of respect.

Through all the other years of marriage, I convinced myself that my spouse loved me, etc. Once I came out though, the gloves came off. I was nothing more than “a penis and a paycheck”. I already knew she’d had affairs because we had intimacy issues (because of me – I fully take the blame for that) and I caught her in at least one affair (and suspect others), but she only stayed with me to keep up appearances to her parents. If it weren’t for them, I’m sure that she’d have left years ago. And I found myself almost wishing she had. Because the first affair that I discovered was the year I went from 29 to 30, a long time ago in my life. And if she had left, I would have transitioned then, I think, or shortly thereafter.

A great deal of my first year of therapy was with dealing with my sense of rejection, of my sense of worthlessness, and coming to understand myself, to love myself unconditionally, to realize that I do deserve to be happy, not miserable, and that I should not stay in a relationship that was ultimately abusive and destructive of me as a human being.

I would be divorcing her right now anyway even if I had not chosen to transition. I’ve learned too much. There’s too much water under the bridge. Her real feelings for me have been revealed though she later tried to walk her original statements back. But you can’t take back what you say. The best you can do is apologize and try to prove you’ve changed. But she hasn’t changed. We’ve had discussions that prove that. I’m still an embarrassment. She still wants nothing really to do with me.

None of us who transition had necessarily easy roads. When people say to me “Oh you just decided and did it!” that’s not at all true! I agonized over this for years and years. I fought it for decades. And do you know what? My own fighting this was stupid. My own fighting this was dumb. It was one of the worst things I ever did to myself. And I definitely did it to myself. Nobody else did. I convinced myself to be miserable for everyone else’s sake and when I couldn’t take it anymore, after 35 years of marriage and came out to my spouse and my adult children, I suddenly discovered that all the sacrifices I had made were stupid and nobody cared. Nobody. My eldest son flatly told me that I should have gone ahead and killed myself because “that would have been easier on the rest of us.”

Look at that statement. My son told me to go die because it would be convenient for him. His wife, upon hearing me coming out, was reported to have said “My god, what will the neighbors think?” That’s all she cared about. Not one bit about me as a human being. Nothing about the years I had worked, that I had put my son through college, that I had spent hours and hours playing with him as a child, coaching him youth sports, that I had helped him get his first job after college, that I had helped keep him and his family financially afloat for a year when he was laid off from another position… none of that mattered. What mattered was that I was an “embarrassment” who should have killed myself because “that would have been easier on the rest of us.”

I get upset when I see people saying it was “easy” for me. They haven’t walked in my shoes. There’s a certain transwoman who seems to love to wallow in her misery and thinks I had it easy. They (and she specifically) haven’t experienced my losses… because I don’t whine about them on that forum the way some of them do. I work through them with my friends, my therapist, and those who’ve come to be close to me.

So when I tell people they can do this, through all the pain, through all the loss, and that they can come out the other side happier, healthier and more in control of their own lives, I have a real basis from which to speak. It’s not frivolous. I’ve been through it. I’ve cried myself to sleep for two solid months over a marriage ending that intellectually I knew was a worthless dead marriage but that my heart was still broken over seeing it die.

The greatest regret of old people as they approach death is almost universally regretting what they failed to do, rather than what they actually did. I do not regret my decision to transition. I’ve learned so much about myself, and I’ve gained real friends who love me no matter what. Friends who’ve been there every step of the way and who’ve picked me up and carried me when I needed it. And those friends are who I consider to be my “real” family now – not blood, but love defines my real family, my soul sisters (and my daughter – my only adult child who has accepted me and supported me).

So to those who say I don’t understand their years of intellectual agonizing over the decision to face ourselves, I do. To those who think that I had it easy, I did not. To those who are agonizing over this for months or years now, I agonized over it for years and decades. And when I tell you to stop chasing your intellectual tail, it’s because I had to stop chasing my own intellectual tail too! When I tell you that there is life, and love, and hope after a marriage dies, it’s because I had to face that too and I found those things also.

So don’t tell me I had it easy and just dismiss my opinion. You don’t know me. And maybe if you did, you’d realize the advice I gave you was not “easy” advice at all, but given because I care and don’t want you to make the same mistakes that I made for as long as I made them.

–Cara Elizabeth.