Atypical Transgender Late Bloomer

From Wiki: The Crying Game is a 1992 crime thriller film. It explores themes of race, sex, gender, nationality, and sexuality against the backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and England. I must confess to being a Forrest Whittaker fan and he carries the opening and the viewer with him. This is not a transgender movie as much as a terrorist-vs-good-buys movie, with one character's transgender status playing a realistic role as the characters interact. Many people are surprised at the gender-bending reveal. I thought this was a great movie. It didn't pander, didn't milk the trans aspect for drama, and it sustained suspense throughout the movie.

From Wiki: The Danish Girl is a 2015 biographical romantic drama film, based on the 2000 novel of the same title, and loosely inspired by the lives of Danish painters Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener. The film stars Eddie Redmayne as Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of gender reassignment surgery. This was an excellent movie. It deals with a man who felt the tug of being a woman, in a time removed from our modern capabilities and sensitivities. There was controversy over casting a man to play a trans woman. Eddie Redmayne certainly carried the role. After the controversy arose, he stated that it was a mistake for him to have taken the assignment. I thought this was a good movie that avoided cliche and told the story of the people involved.

The House of Representatives has passed a Big Beautiful Bill that will, among other things, prevent HRT treatment for all minors, and prevent all HRT treatments for adults on Medicare and Medicade in 2027. Other insurance companies follow the Medicade/ Medicare lead in what they conver. Effectively, if the Senate concurs ( and I don't see any data suggesting the Senate wont concur , I'm cut off of HRT in 2027 unless I move to a state whose constitution guarantees it (Massachusetts, Rhode Island). THese rat bastards. There's research indicated this will push more Trans people into suicide. They government doesn't care. And let me suggest: the R's don't care AND the D's don't care. Show me what the Dem's have done to protext trans people. It's not there. Data, statistics say this will increase suicides. Thanks, pro-lifers.

I recently met two old friends and colleagues for dinner at a distinctly old school restaurant. We each talked about the effoorts we'd made to end up where we were in our lives that day. I suggested that I finally felt free of the people holding me down, like the Lilliputians who tied Gulliver down to the beach. My condition being held down Of Human Bondage was developed by parents, siblings, family, lovers, children (who I hold blameless), society, systems, careers, promotions, expectations, norms, heteronomativity, cisnormativity, etc. If you have enough little people, and enough tiny threads, you can hold about anything down. I went to OpenAI, first time I've used it. My prompt was: create image of older mature femme transgender woman Gulliver, dressed in transgender colors, wearing purple hair, being tied down by LIllilputians I did not get the purple hair I asked for. I'm sure there's nuances in prompt engineering, but this one certainly served well, and b...

This is a review of Dog Dag Afternoon from a trans perspective. The movie stars Al Pacino, John Cazale, James Broderick and Charles Durning. (wiki) . Although Al Pacino is the designated star, and in fact chose the rest of the cast, I think the unrecognized star is John Cazale - a theater actor who was the love of Meryl Streep's life, and who played Frodo in the Godfather movies along with Pacino. Cazale died young, leaving his wife Streep a widow. This is a twisted-lovers movie. Pacino's character loves someone in the NY jail system because they attempted suicide. The lover needs money for an operation. So Pacino robs a bank, so the lover can pay for a sex change, but things go terribly awry. As it happens, Pacino's love is trans, male-to-female. The transness is not the lynchpin of the movie. I leave it to you as to whether it's sensational or titillating. Pacino's wife also takes a part in the movie. This is all based on a true story told in Life magazin...

NPR: Federal Prisons take female clothing away from Trans Prisoners in accordance with Trump policy. They mean to do away with us. This is like Joan of Arc stuff, where they took away her clothing, locked her up, and left men's clothing in her cell.

It has been such a week. (I'm not referring to the SR22 crash, or the F35 crash, or the H60-CRJ crash, or the LR55 crash). The Trump Administration has moved swiftly to target negative public attention on transgender people, and the way the federal government interacts with the topic. Because on any given topic, it's the Federal Govt and the DoD that are the biggest customers; no other single entity spends so much money. After the DCA midair, the names of two of the helo crewmembers were released and the third's name was withheld for two days. Speculation immediately began on the MAGA-sphere that they were withholding the name because crewmember-three was transgender. Not true, but the fires burn bright. The President released an Executive Order specifying there are only two genders are they are not malleable; you're either a person who is conceived to make the "big cells" (eggs) or to make the "little cells" (sperm). It's laughable that this ...

Watched the movie, Will and Harper , on Netflix. I almost typed Netscape, that's how old I am. This is a great show and a great treatment of trans issues - by which I mean, exposing trans reality and trans issues to the cis audience. It is certainly a buddy movie and a road trip movie , in the vein of The Road to Morocco , but this went far beyond those tropes. And it's a movie , which is by definition an artificial story told with intent and agenda (a-gender?), but this was a pretty good one. It seemed balanced; it displayed the social ugliness they encountered in some spots, and on social media. It rang true. It is a very feelings-oriented movie, but it manages to do that without feeling cloying. We need a Bechdel Test for movies with trans characters. This one passes with honors; it has a trans woman, playing a trans woman, and the actor is playing themselves in a semi-documentary format. To sum it up, this movie hits much better than for instance Lil...

Saw the movie, Emilia Perez . Spoilers . This is the story of a terrible violent Mexican cartel boss, with a wife and kids, who strongly desires to abandon his life and become a woman, using the unlimited fortune they have built. To that end, he enlists a struggling attorney to make arrangements in the background. Bottom line up front: this is a fantastic movie. It might not be for everybody. It grabbed my heart. There are criticisms from the trans/ LGBTQ community. The narco boss is a terrible person who goes trans. It's not a positive role model. This is not too different from Silence of the Lambs having a purported trans character : sure, there may be a trans character, but they're a serial murderer. The scenes of the narco becoming a woman, and the results of four years of transition and surgery and a fortune spent, were compelling to me. Karla Sofia Gascon is the first movie actress I've just stared at and thought, Whoa, in a very long time. (Previous: J...

I checked into a hospital in the South for a full knee replacement. It was a well run facility with a good reputation. They asked me about my gender identification. I said, genderqueer. I have not wanted to mess up my medical records with multiple name fields. Someday, I'll do them all at once. They did ask the Depression/ Suicide protocol questions. I told them the truth. Yes, I think about suicide. Yes, every day. No, I don't have a date or method in mind. Yes, I have a weapon in my home. Man, they did not like that. I think they were more worried about their institution than about me. I get that, but: don't ask the question if you don't want the answer. They wanted to assign a person as my suicide watch. I really objected to that as intrusive. In the end, they blinked. I told them, nobody whose about to kill themselves puts up with a knee replacement. It's a lot of short-term pain for long-term gain. That's not suicide thinking. I realised that telling ...

I thought the new Matrix Resurrections was excellent. Highly recommended. And it certainly delivers as a trans allegory . It took somebody pointing it out to me, but when The Suit (new-Smith) keeps referring to Tom, he's dead-naming Neo. And Neo, who's been wearing pants the whole movie, ends up wearing a cassock-dress and in a supportive role. Neo and Trinity are willing to commit suicide to avoid being forced into a box that's not their desire. There is an awful lot of suicide in the movie, and in the series (going back to The Kid in the Animatrix). It's not a subtle thing - weaponizing people to jump out of buildings to maintain the economy's progress. I did appreciate that Smith's last line ('know what the difference is between us?') pays homage to the last line in Bound. It's not a perfect movie. So what. It is a great movie. The pitch room scenes took too much time and overworked the banality. The fight scenes took too long and ofte...

There's a lot of challenges in beginning to present cross-gender. The clothes, the shoes, the accessories are an expense, and can be a significant expense so many people turn to Thrifting (as a verb) which is a common experience. But there are other factors - shoes (ugh!), and makeup / cosmetics. multi-jillion corporation Sephora has initiated a series of Zoom makeup tutorials to continue to support the early Trans community (and build customers, to be honest) called Classes for Confidence . So I signed up for the class and was very impressed at their initiative. Then I received an email suggesting I request a complimentary makeup kit to be used in conjunction with the Zoom class. Wow. Just wow. And it showed up two days later in discreet packaging. Double-wow. Smallish containers of about fourteen different potions and creams. It was really very nice of them (and an easy way to put a lot of sample product into the hands of an about to be customer-for-life.) The Z...

I have dresssed up en femme a few times now. I got my kit, my basic bag of clothing, from a few thrift stores. The ones in the richer neighborhoods have much nicer stuff. I've got a few scarves. I've got a few skirts. Two sets of leggings. Two brassiers. Eyeglasses and masks get in the way but improve anonimity. I have not gone out while dressed up. I am fortunate that my significant other is radically accepting of it all. In a perverse way, I feel calm and safer when I'm dressed en femme. I feel like I'm free of all the Toxic Masculinity bullshit I've been force-fed and had beaten into me since I was three years old. I feel a lot more comfortable dressed as feminine (in girl-mood, as Eddie Izzard says) and I feel heppy to be relived of all the male expectations. I'm much more comfortable with my feelings. That's perverse because where I live, there's a great risk of significant violence when you're dressed as something unexpected...

I have within the last ten days come to recognize that Something's Going On With Me. It's been there for a while. Now I have the "world enough and time" to ponder and pursue it. I've been growing my hair for a year now. Buzzcuts on both sides, the top grown out. It's an undercut. It's a bisexual bob that still needs to grow out. But I'm growing long hair after a lifetime of military haircuts. I'm wearing earrings. I had a mani-pedi in last fall. I wore nail polish for a few weeks last summer. I've worn a kilt in public a few times. My nipples have become sensitive to eroticism over the last few years. I've nurtured an interest in transgender women online in my circle of people, and then enlarged it to their circles of people. The notion of queering the gender norm is appealing to me. I like the way silky clothes feel on me. I want to feel pretty. I want to try out Femininity. I've been trying out eyeliner. So, even though I...

I am reading more and more about transgender people and their transitioning. It's of interest to me for a few reasons. I've known a friend who did it, and there was a professor at grad school who transitioned. I've always felt that in any change, the before-state is usually sustainable, the after-state is usually sustainable, but it's the transition where all the chaos and pain happen. People who are adversely affected by a poorly managed change usually get hurt in the transition from before to after What I find remarkable is the significant pain and difficulty these people go through voluntarily. Nobody initiates or endures this process on a whim, whether they choose to dress and present differently, or choose a hormonal transition or even a complete surgical change. I think the plumbing doesn't matter. It seems to me the folx must be under great duress to embark on such an adventure of self-identification. And in pursuing self-identification, aren...