Recovering From the Lie

I was on an LGBTQ panel a couple weeks ago and a friend who is a transgender woman said something that really stuck out to me. She said that when you are over forty and trans, basically society taught us to lie. We had to lie to be safe, we had to cover up who we were to survive. When a person spends their first forty years having to lie and hide who they really are, how does that effect every part of that persons life.


Wow, it is true that many people have had to cover up parts of who they are to be safe. What kind of lasting effect does that have on people?  What effects does that have on our relationships?  As I contemplate these questions, something inside me knows that this has had a deep effect on many aspects of my life and the lives of all who have lived that experience. The idea of don't ask, don't tell is even asking people to lie, to cover up. When we work and live in a world where others can have pictures of who they love in the work place and gay people could not, or have to play a game or a part that is not true to who we are each day by how we present in order to be safe and have or keep a job. Many people have had to hide who they are to be accepted. When anyone has to do this for years how can living a life of lies like this not change a person? Having to live like that is existing under a constant state of hyper-pressure. Living in fear of being found out and what the consequences of that would be. These are real fears as many have lost jobs, been kicked out of families, churches, circle of friends or worse.


I think of relationships that I had with good people who would say things to me like " you don't talk to me enough about the real stuff." How can you when as a trans person, different from many of my gay friends, I did not think I could even share with partners what I was dealing with inside. How do you share or expect a partner or even close friends in the south in the 80's to understand this? There was no support group where I was and the internet was not there yet to find community.  We were very isolated at that time and before.  This experience has stayed with me in many ways, like with trusting people or always wondering if people really understand you or accept you fully. Those parts of me that were trained for so many years to carefully navigate the world take a time to work through if one ever totally does, it is certainly a form of PTSD. 


 Then when I finally got out of the south and felt I was in a safe enough space to share there were close friends from the south who said things to me like, "why didn't you feel like you could tell me."  It is hard not to laugh when people say such things. No matter how nice you were to me, you were nice as I presented, fitting into certain boxes that you were comfortable with. If I no longer fit into those boxes how was I to have any idea you would still accept me. How was I, or anyone like me, to know who to trust? Then coming out about being transgender and being very public about it, I have seen that people respond in many different ways. Some have come through and been able to talk with me and accept it and some have not, which is alright. I have to give others the same room to walk whatever their journey is, as I have asked for the safe space to walk mine. 


It is a good thing that many young people today don't understand this because we have been riding the wave of positive change in many ways. Much of the world is much more accepting than when I was a young person and I am glad for that. It is still important to understand that many of us did not grow up with that freedom and it has had lasting effects on us and our community. No one should have to live a life of lies to be safe or be able to have a job, love who they want to and progress in the world. If each of us let the people in our lives know that we want all to have the safe space and freedom to live authentically we can change this.

Dance of the Souls - Creating the love you want

My soul is dancing - I have had this crazy idea my entire life that I could have a love that is committed, stable, supportive, a SAFE space to come home to and to grow in together, set and work on goals together, real open communication, be able to be true to self, and have respect and yet have adventure, abandon, spontaneity, wild passion, freedom, playfulness, and the freedom of exploration.  Most people seem to feel you get one or the other of the sides of this coin in relationships and it is certainly RARE to find a model of this that is successful in the world.

Those of us who are on the fringe of society because we are different, face even more challenges then the average person to find fulfilling healthy relationships.  In fact, when I officially announced that I was going to medically transition I had a dear friend who is very open minded say to me, " Now that is going to make it difficult for you to date."  As a person who had ridden a roller coaster in the dating world partly due to figuring out who I am inside and how to navigate that in this society safely and communicate it, this statement from my friend stopped me in my tracks and made me think.  My motivation to transition of course had nothing to do with dating or thinking about dating, it only had to do with being true to myself.  But my friends statement did make me wonder how would people view me?  Would they view me as even more of a freak?  Would there be anyone who understood and or got me?  I did not have the answers to any of these questions and went forward anyway because I was at a point where I could no longer live my life as if I was playing the part in a movie, or wearing a Halloween costume year around to make others feel more comfortable.  I could no longer live a lie.  I am happy to say that since transition the opposite has been true, I have had even more people want to date me, which surprised me.  I asked my partner why she thought this was so, and her response was " that when a person is authentic and true to themselves, that is attractive and rare." 

I have struggled with traditional models of things from an early age from gender roles to relationship models.  I always questioned what society feeds us as the way or the right way to be or have a relationship, although I did try to make parts of their way work for much of my life and failed miserably.  The models of monogamy and marriage we grow up with in society are usually accompanied with shame and guilt. If it is not done in the way the majority do it in our society even though that way has not been very successful for most we shame people as a society.  I have always said as a business person if marriage is my product and it is brought back to me because it did not work more then fifty percent of the time, I would be out of business!  Why do we keep using this model?  It makes me think of the Einstein quote "The true definition of insanity is, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,"  Yet I have to recognize that there are defiantly some things about the concept of marriage that are attractive to me.

• Having a strong home base
• Knowing you have a safe space
• Taking care of one another
• Knowing someone that well
• Creating a healthy sense of family
• Someone you can count on

 The parts that I want nothing to do with are

• Feeling boxed in - lack of freedom
• Jealousy
• Guilt if it does not work out - or if you are attracted to anyone else
• Expectations to fit a societal mold
• Gender role expectations within traditional relationships
• Weight of the concept that I had to be that persons everything and they had to be mine, FOREVER
• The things above created the feeling for me and does for many that I have talked with about this feeling that I could not be honest about my feelings and desires (coming from the south did not help with this, where few talk about anything REAL)

I have examined this and been able to look at the fact that there are some things I would like to take from that concept and create in a relationship.  Part of the freeing beauty I have discovered now is that I and my partner or partners have the liberating ability to CREATE how our relationship works best for us.  WOW! Why don't they tell you this as a young person.  I don't have to do it the way mom and dad or my grandparents did, or the way the majority does it.  I can breathe, create, experiment, and explore what works with my partner/partners.  There is no wrong or right way, there is the way that works for us.  I discovered that a polyamorous style of relationships works best for me and there are even different models of poly. Some people seem to think being poly means free sex with many, these are the same folks who think that all that gay men do is have sex.  If that were only true, laughing.  Poly to most in the poly community, is having more then one committed relationship with open communication with all involved.  This is not easy, this requires great communication skills and communication times two or three or whatever.  Then in the poly world there are primary and secondary relationships, triads and sometimes just now and then play partners. This maybe something that works for you or not, that is not the point.

The point of all of this is to examine how what we are doing is serving us.  I ask many people when it comes to tradition or rituals, "why do you do that."  Most reply, "because my family did it that way or my church, I don't know."  My next question is, "how is that serving you now?"  The same can be asked in the style of relationships we have or the way we negotiate or navigate our relationships.  Is using the model you are using serving you or could you create something more fitting for you and your partner or partners.  I have questioned myself this way about everything I thought I knew about relationships and sex to come to this place of discovery of what works for me.  My life's work now is to create safe space for all to be true to self and this is another area that many are not living true to themselves in for a variety of reasons and the reasons really don't matter.  What matters is finding a way to get to a place that we can be true to self. 

The beauty, fun and freedom to start from scratch and create what actually works for you is amazing and enlightening.  Most of us have never felt that we have the right to create our own, few people are told they can or it is ok to create your own.  I am here to tell you it is OK, you have the right.  Here are the guidelines that my partner and I have developed for our relationship that work for us.

• Always consider one another in all we do
• Be respectful of one another and of all involved
• Remember real authentic love fosters growth - (change is not threatening)
• Always give one another a safe space to be and grow and come back to
• Communicate/communicate/communicate with love and compassion

My desire as I said is for all to have the safe space to be true to self and to live in love and happiness.  I believe I had to walk the road of learning to be true to myself personally before I could have a healthy relationship with anyone else.  Then and only then have I been able to examine what is being true to myself in a relationship and am now able to come from a place of authenticity that changes everything.   I am so sorry for past relationships that I failed in because I was not at a place of authenticity within, because no matter how hard I tried to make those relationships work or my partners did there is no way to have open communication with someone else when one is not authentic with themselves or is living a lie.  If you and I are authentic and real with ourselves then we navigate the entire world including relationships in an entirely different way.  It is liberating and allows us to walk through the world with an new openness and willingness to be vulnerable.  Being authentic with oneself is constant work, but choosing that path is ultimately releasing.

Now go Create what serves you! Find a way to "BE TRUE TO SELF"

Healthy Boundary Setting Skills - part 1 of a series on Safety and Self - Defense

http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews41_37/page8.cfm

This is a published article - follow the link to read

Body Diversity & the "magic letter"

Body Diversity & the "magic letter" - the importance of being true to self my latest article in Seattle Gay News - follow the link to the story

http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews41_18/page17.cfm

Self -Defense: A Necessity Not a Luxury

Here is my recent article published in Seattle Gay News about self - defense - informative tips in this article as well as some of my personal story

http://sgn.org/sgnnews41_08/page6.cfm

Trans Ninja

Follow this link to the article "Trans Ninja"  that I wrote for Seattle Gay News


http://sgn.org/sgnnews41_02/page8.cfm

The Struggle for Equality

Warning: this blog talks about both taboo subjects of religion and politics.

Why should anyone have to fight for the right to be true to who they are?   As we face a big election that includes alienating people for being who they are, LGBTQI, women, people of color, immigrants or the poor are all being discriminated against openly.  The argument that I hear the most, from those who want to take our rights away, is religious based.  This floors me.   I have a degree in theology and have studied the Bible and Jesus’s life in great depth.   Making people feel “less than” is not what Jesus was about, not what his teachings are about and not what most forms of theology are about.   Anyone who twists the Bible or other religious texts to discriminate against people and alienate people is totally missing the point.  Jesus was the guy for the other guy.  The guy who stopped people from stoning the prostitute to death.  The guy who would rather hang out with the kind of people most churches discriminate against today then the religious leaders of his day.   To quote one of my favorite religious authors Dr Peter J. Gomes from “The Good Book”, “In reading and interpreting the Bible, the great temptation is to use it as the moral sanction for our own culture.”  The Bible has been used to discriminate against groups of people since its inception.  People used the Bible to justify slavery as what God intended.  Many believed slavery and segregation were supported by scripture.  “When the missionaries came, they had the Bible and we had the land, now we have the Bible and they have the land.” An early twentieth-century African proverb says.   I have always found it interesting that a theology that teaches that our body is just a shell that houses our spirit that will live on makes so many judgments about people according to our shell.   Does one’s spirit have a vagina or penis?  Does one’s spirit have skin color?  The hypocrisy to say that God created us all in his image and then out of the other side of their  mouth say, but if your skin is dark, if you have a vagina, or if you love someone I don’t approve of then you don’t have the right to serve that same God as I, is appalling.

Folks, the summary of Jesus’s message are LOVE, ACCEPTANCE, GRACE, KINDNESS and I don’t see how discrimination fits into any of that.  I went to a Southern Baptist high school and college and then worked in the ministry for a while as a youth and children’s pastor.  I was raised in Christianity of the south.  I have a heart to help people and where I grew up was the avenue most available to do the kind of work I wanted to do.  I knew there was a strong calling on my life to help others.  When I was a youth pastor at a large church in Florida our church had a food bank where I volunteered.   One day two men came in who had lost their jobs and were living in their car.  These men politely asked for food.   The head pastor thought they were gay and informed them they could not have food unless they agreed to change their lifestyle.  This was a huge turning point for me with organized religion.  I struggled with this and still do. Even if a person says they believe the Bible literally, Jesus said “Feed my sheep.”  He did not say feed them if you like them, or if they do everything right, or if they live according to the way you interpret the Bible, he simply FEED THEM.   What still to this day boggles my mind is that the pastor thought he had every right, according to God’s word, to say what he said to those hungry men.  I walked out and never went back to that church. 

No one should have to fight to be who they are, not because of the color of their skin, their gender, their sexuality or sexual orientation.   All people deserve the freedom to be who they are and NOT be ashamed of it or feel like they have to hide it to be safe or to be able to live a productive life.   We are far more alike than different and science has now proven this.  Our DNA and genetics are so similar that the differences between a white person, a person of color and Asian person, a gay, a straight and so are so minuet that it is only 1 out of every 1,000 in our nuclear DNA sequence that are slightly varied.  

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

This means for ALL.  But it has not always meant for all, and it still does not today because all humans do not have the same rights and opportunities.  How long can we stand for this?   Yes, we have come a long way from slavery, segregation, women having access to more opportunities, gays in the military; we have a great deal to celebrate.  We are also not there.   Women still do not make the same for doing the same job as a man on average.  People of color still do not make the same as a white person on average. Immigrants are constantly told they don’t belong and yet we are all immigrants.  Native Americans are still fighting for their land and respect.   Transgender unemployment is at 39% due to gender variant discrimination.  Same sex couples still do not have the same rights as heterosexual couples to protect their families. We cannot be complacent in our quest for EQUALITY for ALL. 

Things we can all do to make a help make positive change toward equality:

·       Vote for candidates that believe in equality

·       Help campaign for those candidates

·       Talk to those in your life about the importance of Equality for ALL

·       Speak up when someone says something discriminatory

·       Support organizations that are doing work for Equal Rights

·       Be kind to ALL

Finally, what can you do today? We are standing at the edge of making history for marriage equality another big step toward equality. If you live in one of the four states (Maryland, Maine, Minnesota and Washington) that are voting this month for marriage equality, then please vote for marriage equality. If you have friends and loved ones in those states, encourage them to vote for marriage equality. Taking this step, will make it easier for us, as a country to take the next steps.