Thursday, April 29, 2004

The wages of sin?

There's deception, and there's deception.

It's a bad thing to find out that someone you've slept with has lied to you about their past. Especially if the knowledge which was kept from you would have prevented you from sleeping with this person. It's painful and hurtful and all that. But that doesn't give anyone the right to kill.

So, Mx. Prosecutor, whose side are you on, anyway? The wages of her sin of deception was death? That's not very convincing. She didn't sin by keeping the secret of her past. She kept that secret because she knew if she was out she would be ostracized by these bigots at best, or else attacked or killed-- and her suspicions were proven correct. She was brutally slain, in cold blood, because those guys couldn't see a transgendered person as a human being capable of suffering, not because she kept a secret from them.

This will never stop unless people, we, are able to get it out into the public consciousness that no one is going to condone murder of a transgendered person no matter what stupid excuse the murderer comes up with: "Oh, they lied to me" is not acceptable, neither is "I was in shock and didn't know what I was doing."

Friday, April 09, 2004

I went a whole week without updating. How strange. Mmmmyep.

I definitely felt like a boy today.

Things have been better with me and Fledermaus, and that's helped my depression some. Mostly it was the talk with Doc about communicating and feeling comfortable and the realization that Fledermaus being straight does not necessarily mean I can't be myself. Which is something he'd been trying to tell me for awhile already.

Erin's visit was great. She reminded me what I already knew, but hadn't been paying any attention to, which is that this sort of process (i.e. breaking down my gender identity to see what it's made of) greatly facilitates, indeed almost necessitates, spiritual exploration, which I haven't been doing a hell of a lot of in the past few years. She reminds me that if I don't take this opportunity I will indeed regret it. So I am going to.

Which brings me to another point-- I seem to have forgotten how.

Riiight. It's not the sort of thing you forget, right? I mean, you just sit around and think about who you are and how you got that way, yeah? Except I think I've gone as far as I can with that. The rest of it's between me and Doc. But I know there are other ways to exercise my psyche (note: not exorcise). I should put together a plan. Write up a curriculum. Have a ball. And it should all go on here.

Exercise for the next seven days: Be honest with everyone about everything which comes up. Be scrupulously honest with myself.

Friday, April 02, 2004

Still working on the whole getting well thing. Starting to get depressed, too, which I guess could be connected to the cough-- see, the emotional state connected with the Lung energy system is sadness, so if you're sad for a long period of time it can weaken the lungs or if your lungs are weak it can lead to depression, according to Chinese medicine. Or it could have to do with the feelings of alienation. If I'm going to find a community of people who don't judge me negatively on the basis of my gender identity, it should probably be at my tiny, radical, politically leftward leaning college. But I feel like a stranger here. It might help if I actually talked to people about it other than close friends, but that's hard to do. I still want to try having a Transeverything Weekend or something, with movies and games mixed with educational lectures and fora. Maybe in the fall.

On the up side, my dear friend Erin is in town for a visit. I have missed her so much, and every time I see her I am struck by how she has grown as a person and stayed the same all at once. It's, um, actually sort of inspiring. She would probably smack me around for saying that.