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Tag: Identity
We all spend our lives going from one “first” to the next. When we’re little we use the potty for the first time. We take our first steps and say our first words. Trans people are often delayed in experiencing some of the “firsts” of their gender since the world believes they aren’t girls or boys. A young trans girl won’t get to wear her first bra at the same time her schoolmates are getting theirs. So the trans girl has to make her own first bra wearing experience. Sophie Lynne shares her first time wearing her mom’s bra and she invites you to leave a comment with recollections of your first time doing something typical to your gender identity.
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Decisions, decisions. Amanda has been living in northern California and trying her best to fit in. At heart she is a western Pennsylvania girl, more used to the muggy summer heat and lush greenery surrounding the confluence of the Allegheny and Manongahela rivers, where the Ohio river is born, than she is with the dry desert on the outskirts of San Francisco. She has days when she is convinced she needs to pack up and head back east. On other days she feels that she should stay in the west and make things work. Today she posts a question to everyone, should she stay or should she go?
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Many crossdressers who don’t get out of their homes while dressed or only go on the Internet is stealth-mode haven’t thought about picking a feminine name. Others who are just starting out are still wrestling with what size dress they wear and haven’t thought about what they should call themselves. To the rescue comes our crossdressing co-ed (who will soon be out of school and out in the business world) Chanelle Nirok with some tips on how to find your feminine name.
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Is it nature or nurture? That’s the question many in the trans community ask themselves at one point or another. Our Correspondent from Thailand has a theory about it and today she eschews a report on the transgender scene in that country to present her take on why we do what we do. Is it possible that we’re Wired That Way?
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It’s quite obvious that transgender people exist. We have been a part of many cultures all over the world since ancient times, and probably before. Conservatives who believe that we are “unnatural” are basing their belief, whether they know it or not, on Traditional Sex-based Theory. Want to know what that is? Read this post by Dr. Dana Bevan. She will explain our entirely natural niche in nature.
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Cate O’Malley has gotten her dander up. What has her riled? She lives in Florida in an area where there are human rights ordinances that protect her from discrimination. But she works just across the county line in an area that offers no such protections to LGBT people. What has her angry and proposing civil disobedience is the lack of protections for every citizen, everywhere.
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An Australian film maker working in Japan has produced a music video for a song by Robyn Loau titled “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime.” The video stars a trans woman and her Japanese girlfriend and tells the story of how the trans woman came out to her girlfriend about being trans. View the video here and listen to a podcast recorded by the couple talking about their relationship.
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Sophie Lynne has been feeling the burden of living authentically. It’s hard for many to be who they are when there are elements of our society that use trans people as a political hockey puck without caring what happens to that puck as long as giving people something to hit with a stick serves their political agenda. Being hit by conservatives was wearing Sophie down but the support for trans people announced by the Obama administration, and an incident at her pharmacy, served to revive her and get her back in the good fight.
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Today Amanda wrestles with the conservative’s biggest attack line against the trans community. “You people are delusional.” Amanda’s answer to that is that she doesn’t feel delusional, but she is willing to examine their charge and try to discern if it has any merit. What do you think she arrives at in her conclusion?
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Dina’s Diner is open for business and the cook has just whipped up a new batch of tasty dishes. Dina is serving her thoughts on the appearance of more young people crossing the gender border. Then she has some savory grits. No, hold it. “Grit,” on how, while young CDs don’t need to work at it, older CDs with “grit” can still deliver the glamor. Then it’s on to servings of a comparison of 1st and 3rd world problems, and Prince’s penchant for wearing high heels and ruffles. Take a seat at the Diner and let Dina feed your brain.
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A lot has happened in Christine Zee’s life since her last TGF blog. She legally changed her name, came out to just about everyone and started working at her job as Christine. In between all that she attended family events, conducted seminars for her clients and managed to fit in some trans community events. Find out what’s been happening in the past few months on Christine’s Journey.
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Dawn, a cisgender woman, helped Hannah to become the woman she was inside. Hannah and Dawn split up when Hannah left to walk her own feminine path. Dawn documented their one-year relationship here on TGF. Now she is offering advice and inspiration to others who are beginning to become who they really are. Today she advises that you should be you, not who someone expects you to be.
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Colonel Amanda is waging a war in California, against California. Despite the many advances in treatment of trans people it’s still not a paradise and the enemy keeps putting up defenses that thwart Colonel Amanda’s sorties into enemy held territory. Can she hold out till reinforcements arrive? Will she have to fall back to her home base. . . or even further? Read this latest dispatch from the front and decide if she can win this war.
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TGF member Emily Ott was questioned about “what drives these (specific) transgender people to want to drastically alter/damage their bodies?” Her response was so strong that she decided to become the newest Contributor to TGForum and offered her reply for publication. She calls her answer “Sehnsucht.” Is it another word for “dysphoria”? Give it a read and decide.
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Last week our Sophie Lynne turned two. It has been two years since she came out to the world about her true gender. On her second birthday Sophie responds to a friend’s question, “And looking back on it all, would you do it the same?” Sophie admits to being happy with her decision to transition, and she credits it with keeping her alive, but would she handle it the same way? Read on and find out.
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The Breast Form Store was asked to provide a few pairs of their Aphrodite self-adhering breast forms for a “Sexperiment” in which cisgender men were asked to wear the breasts and talk about how having realistic breasts made them feel. The producers of the video below present their subjects with the Aphrodite box and ask […]
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There are many things people expect in life. Often times not getting what they expect causes problems. Their expectations don’t become reality. A son can grow up to become a daughter. A father can stop being a man and become a woman. Adjusting to the fact that accepting people in your life for who they are and not who you expect them to be can be hard. Cate O’Malley has some thoughts on the subject. Along with her impressions of Kinky Boots.
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A wise man once said it’s important to know your enemy. While there are many people that could be considered enemies to members of the trans community the hardest ones to understand are not those who are totally ignorant. Ignorance can be a factor in why someone would treat trans people badly. The ones that are hard to understand are those who have been a part of the community and left to advocate for laws allowing discrimination against trans people and telling the world that there is no such thing as transgender and trans people are deluded and sick. One such person is anti-trans activist and writer Walt Heyer.
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Diane Hutchinson transitioned in 1999 and has been using the lady’s rooms in public spaces for years. She doesn’t often think about the ginned up “controversy” over trans people using the restroom that matches their gender. She just walks right in when she must. But recently she had the experience of hearing two people she knows and likes talking about the issue in a misinformed manner. Find out what she purposes as one way to attack the bills being introduced to ban trans people from the restrooms that match their gender in her opinion piece, Can We Just Pee? Please?
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Children With Ambiguous Genitalia Should be Given Time to Decide Which Gender They Identify With (Philadelphia, PA) – Children with intersex conditions — those born with genital ambiguity – should be allowed time for their brains and gender identity to develop naturally before their gender is decided, says Dr. Sherman Leis, renowned transgender surgeon and the founder of The Philadelphia Center […]
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If blending in and passing is what you strive for when you’re out and about in public then this column is not aimed at you. Cate O’Malley has made a decision to not adhere to the dictates of fashion or to just blend in. She has firm likes and dislikes and when she dresses to go out for the day she dresses the way she likes. She also urges others to do fashion their way. Will that approach work for you?
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Sophie Lynne has been wondering whether people who tell her they know how it feels to be treated differently because she is transgender means can really have an understanding of what it’s like. As a trans person she admits that she doesn’t know what it’s like to have been born with a female body. How can cisgender people have a clue about what it’s like to be trans? Sophie has one idea.
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Decisions, decisions, decisions. For trans people there are decisions to be made at every step of their life journey. Should they start to experiment with crossdressing? Should they tell people close to them that they have these feelings? Would it be a good idea to go to a trans support group? Should transition be a goal? In order to make any of these weighty decisions Dr. Dana Bevan urges you to get information from different sources and make the best decision from an informed position.
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Life is complex and life can be hard. Sometimes people meet and it seems like they are fated to be together. But sometimes their fate is something else entirely. Dawn and Hannah met when Dawn was hospitalized. Hannah was living as a man and keeping her femme side hidden. Together they unlocked Hannah’s femme side but in the process, over the past year, they have moved apart. Was it Hannah dealing with her new gender expression? Was Dawn to confident that they would stay together?
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Dickens Christmas tale has Sophie musing about the ghosts that all of us are haunted by. Some of those ghosts are good and some are bad but they all affected us as we traveled though our lives. Sophie points out that while these ghosts of people in our past, and in our present, can influence us and push us one way or another, in the end we make our decisions and are responsible for them.
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The GLBT National Help Center, which operates, among other programs, the GLBT National Youth Talkline, is excited to announce a new transgender youth program that will begin January 6, 2016, called the Trans Teens Online Talk Group. On their national hotline, they receive calls from young trans people from all over the country that don’t have access to […]
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