I ache for you, I feel your pain, I wish you happiness and peace. I am 58, I tried to transition in the 1990s and ran into different obstacles. I’m starting again, and I don’t regret the years in between because wobbly trans-acceptance is way better for me than generalized trans-hatred, which is what we had in the 20th century. Back then, no one wanted to take on the established dogma on transpeople or the women who had established it. Now there are few enough of them that we have a term for them, TERFs. There are sites I feel safe and happy on, like Autostraddle, because there are young lesbians and bisexuals there who speak out, loudly, about trans acceptance. They’re mostly under 40, I think, and they give me hope. I waited a long time before trying again, and I’m glad I did. I wasn’t strong enough then, but I may be now. And things are different now. And they keep changing. Since I just wasted an hour writing up something more detailed that got javazapped, I will confine my remarks.

Briefly:

The Dangers of Javascript: I just wrote up about nine paragraphs on this, bumped a button which led me to another page, and when I came back it was all gone. So, everyone, and I mean everyone: if you’re writing something to be posted in a javascript window and it’s taking you more than thirty seconds to write it, you should probably do it in a text file and then copy/paste it into the response window. I have known better for years yet I keep doing it. Learn from my examp

Cis and Trans: It’s Latin, everyone. Cis as in here on this side of something, like Cisalpine Gaul, Gaul on this side of the Alps (i.e., the Roman side; even then it mattered a lot who got to say where “here” was). To get to Cisalpine Gaul you had to ride for a few days to cross the Po River. Trans means across, over there, the other side from here. As in Transalpine Gaul, where the “Province” (Provence) was; this involved a long and uncertain trip over a mountain pass or, if you were feeling adventurous, by sea. Cis isn’t meant to be denigrating any more than trans is; it was an attempt to extend the metaphor so we could stop using unfortunate 20th-century expressions like “biological girls” or “genetic girls/GGs” to describe cis women.