Every once in a while, I meet a new transgender person that has read my journal or seen my old website. They are usually a friend of a friend of a friend, or so, but when I first meet them, they often have this little glimmer in their eye like, "Hey, I think I've seen you online."
It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen here and there. It's kinda funny, though, watching people try to place where they might have seen me before.
And yet, I know a few people in the area that show up here and there on the internet in all different types of news. Donna Rose and Cecilia Chung are everywhere. So is Mikayla, Aejaie Sellars, and Julia Serano.
The Friday night after the Trans March, I ate dinner with a number of people. As we sat down, one girl in our party points at me and says, "I think I saw your website. It was pretty good."
All I can say is thanks.
Claire mentioned before that her and a number of us all went through transition together, and we have this very close bond because of it. Sure, we run into a lot of others that transitioned either before or after us, but our group was sort of like a group that went through high school together.
I remember when a number of us had our intertwined lives blogged out for everyone to read. Claire, Amber, Anne.
None of them really post anymore, although Anne will throw something up once in a while.
We hung out a lot together.
I kinda miss that. I miss hanging out with my girls.
But we all moved on after high school and college. We found jobs. We found new friends. We found new lives. We found...ourselves.
But we still get together once in a while...like our own little class reunion.
I recently visited a recovering friend at Cocoon. I met Meghan and her close friend, Laci, at the Transgender Leadership Conference earlier this year. Both of them are from Southern California. Of course, I also ran into Charlotte and Carissa at Cocoon, as well. They are the latest class to be going through transition.
With this newer group of transitioners, I see another group of high schoolers filling the hallways. And when I run into them outside of the old school, I kinda feel like that school girl that never moved away.
There were a few others that showed up to see how the latest Dr. O patient was recovering. Charlotte had a few friends in tow and after the exchange of introductions, one of them mentioned he’d read my website before.
The old website was my pet when I was going through transition. I threw my heart into it and had fun putting it together with Dreamweaver and throwing in the little HTML that I knew. When transition no longer became my focus, I moved on to blogspot when I was able to emerge from my hibernation and finally explore the world as me.
Ironically, I ran into Kris Davidson on a flight back to San Francisco earlier this year. She was a photographer I ran across many years ago on craigslist that was looking to do a project on transgender people. When I saw her in the baggage claim area, I said hi. She said she saw me before we boarded and that she knew me from somewhere, but that she couldn’t quite place me (since I had since had FFS). We chatted briefly before each of us headed our own way.
I don’t remember exactly how I pulled up her pictures recently, but I ran across Kris Davidson’s flickr spread. She took a number of photos during my transition at a few different events. I won’t post the pictures here since she is an artist and has the copyright on them, but the links are posted below. I actually hadn’t seen any of them up until now, but wow, they bring back a lot of memories. All of these were prior to my going full time, so I still looked very male...and very awkward, but, they are, in essence, pictures from my high school yearbook.
Kris Davidson photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/krisdavidson/511379405/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/krisdavidson/508901610/
3 comments:
I'd have to agree - doesn't look anything like you. You've come a long way since those were taken, that's for sure! Wow!
As someone who followed you, Amber, Claire through transition on your sites and then met you all in 2005 it feels unreal for me that three years later I still have not transitioned. This is all completely my own fault but reading this post compounded the issue in my mind.
I can barely keep up with my own blog, let alone respond? =P
Seriously, though, transition isn't a race...it's something you do at your own speed. Even Amber took like 10 years from start to finish simply because she wanted to do things at her pace and according to her own rules. No one says you have to rush through it, and in fact, transition is really the exciting part.
So, anyway, yeah, it's your life...live it the way you want to, not how someone else says they think you should.
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