What I’m about to say is offered with love and very tough love at that.
I have been thinking a lot lately about what I see happening in the Trans blogsphere and I want to share my feelings about that. I don’t want to appear that I’m criticizing the way any of you choose to share your journey via blogging. That is not my intention and I will stand proudly behind what I say here and will never apologize for it. With all due respect, if you are hurt by what I say here, I am not the one to blame, it’s your problem not mine.
I recently decided to try out a 12-step support group because there were unresolved issues in my life that were still a very large part of the way I have been behaving since I returned from Thailand in March of this year. After having completed my transition last February with my SRS, I still needed to heal my little girl inside me and to do that I needed to discover both the critical and nurturing parents inside me so that I could chose the nurturing one as my parent and ignore for the most part, my critical one.
What I see in the LGBT communities in general and in my Trans community in particular is that we have become co-dependent on each other and in order to be able to grow out of that co-dependency and become autonomous adults in a world that is not a very friendly place to begin with, much less trans-friendly, we all will need to take a hard look at how being transgender has had a part in our failure to grow up and be responsible adults instead of whiny little children.
Blaming the system for not being trans-friendly is just one of the problems I have observed in this community. I also have observed members of our community express their frustration in the system not changing fast enough to suit them. No one promised that life would be easy or the struggle for equality would be won because it was the right thing to do or that everyone would eventually see it our way.. The universe is both beneficial and not beneficial and it all depends on how one looks at it as to what they will manifest in their lives.
From the very beginning of my transition, I chose the former idea that the universe will work for me rather than against me. I told myself that I would succeed in completing what I set out to do even though I had no clue whatsoever what I needed to do or how to do it. I took full responsibility to learn both what I needed to do and how to do it and after that, all I had to do was let my feet follow one another until I reached my goal.
That meant that when I came up against anything that didn’t work in my favor I simply side-stepped the wall and found another doorway I could go through instead of just banging my head against the wall that was not going to budge against my fragile skull. Fortunately for me I was able to find more doorways open to me than walls to block me. This was no accident, it was because but I never blamed the walls for my frustration. To me, that’s like blaming the hammer for mashing my finger and not deciding to find another way to hit the nail instead.
I know that some of you out there have seen me as just another lost voice in the wilderness and that is perfectly OK with me. Believe me, I won’t take it personally. I want you to know with all certainty that I’m Trans and Proud just as I am a very feminine kind of woman who no longer takes sh*t from anybody and I’m not going anywhere. For those who don’t like it, all I have to say to that is GET OVER IT or leave me the f*ck alone.
Deanna Joy Hallmark
