I honestly can't think of a good title for this post...

Wother; I’m first of all sorry I haven’t been writing (anything) for the past…however unreasonably long it has been. I really wish I had some kind of excuse for my lethargy, but that’s just it: I was being lethargic: ergo, no excuse. Er, I should also apologize in advance to the complete incoherence of this post, though you’ve probably caught onto that by now. What have I been up to these past…weeks? The general breakdown of events goes like this: wake up, go to the lab (where I toil over bioinformatics and an endless deluge of journal articles), only to return home to practice violin and re-read the Harry Potter series in its entirety. How sad is it when your life can be quickly and thoughtlessly summarized in one sentence? Oh yeah, Australia is one hell of an adventure.

Enough complaints, though. For the past two weeks or so I have been conversing with a girl via facebook and Yahoo! Messenger—a girl who is just now starting the beginning of her transition by, unwisely I might add, advertising her coming out through her facebook status bar (to an unsuspecting family, I might add). The whole process of chatting with her between trying to focus on my own PhD work has been rather a…interesting experience for me. It’s made me look back at some of the emotions I had when I was immersed in my own nascent transition. I remember feeling, just as this girl does, a strong and urgent need for acknowledgement and recognition of my identity, this interspersed with a paucity of impatience and easily roused feelings of frustration and angst—all culminating in an unbearable plethora of pathos. I’d like to think this obnoxious/annoying teenage-esque state of being is common to anyone transitioning, but having read a lot of Lori’s blog, I have to change my theory (Though Lori, or lorisrevival, did write a lot about painful emotions, but she was never pathetic, and she displays and unbelievable amount of patience and understanding). No, this girl (and yes, I, too, at one point did this) remind me in many ways of Veruka Salt from Willy Wonka:



Essentially: I want my identity recognized NOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!!!!! I want to be able to transition NNNNNOOOOOOOOOWWWWWW!!!!! Alright, these are a little exaggerated—but only a little! In my ideal world, yes, no one would have to worry about their identity not being recognized, or otherwise being impugned. In an ideal world, we could transition right away—or, for some of us, we might not have to transition—and everyone would respond to trans people with consideration and respect. Unfortunately, such a world doesn’t exist. Instead, as we all know too well, we’re presented with a world so steeped in gender roles and expectations—a world that takes the rigidity of gender for granted—that people generally don’t know how to process transitions between sexes. Least of all families who, after getting to know us (typically over decades) have those relationships fundamentally shaken by our coming out (my note: this sentence feels really poorly written to me, and even Word is underlining it in zigzagging green doom…I’m just too lazy to fix it at the moment).

In my conversations with this girl I continually repeated the same few words: I suggest you be patient and understanding towards your family. All the while I remember the great impatience I showed my own. Yeah, I wish transitions didn’t suck and I wish they could be done with a simple flick of the wrist or a twitch of the nose (remember, I’m reading Harry Potter). But transitions are, at their core, life journeys. In what is one of the saddest truths I have ever learned, the cast of characters often changes after these life journeys, but if you’re lucky you’ll make it out with very few losses. We, those transitioning, are not the only ones on the journey. We have a whole traveling group of companions going on this quest with us every step of the way, and each of us has our own parts to play and our own challenges to overcome. Patience, understanding, and trust are tantamount to transitioning…and, unfortunately, sometimes, even that’s not enough.

One of my greatest regrets in life is alienating my family as much as I did. If I had shown more trust, patience, and understanding earlier in life, I would have found myself with allies—I’m only now beginning to have that relationship with my family after nearly pissing it away in the early stages of my transition through my impatience and lack of trust/understandin.

Laskfoq
↑ That’s me typing frustration because I don’t know how to end this (I warned you about crummy incoherence). This is what happens when I get stuck in a rut in a foreign country, then, following a self-imposed guilt trip, write blogs.