If I only have one message in this journal, besides that of perseverance, it would simply be “Transition or die”. I put that in quotes because it’s not my original words of wisdom to claim authorship. I was first told those words of wisdom by Cassandra, in an America Online chat room called “Transexual Menace”.
I believe it was 1991 when I would sit up late at night and spend hours and hours going from one chat after another. All of America did the same at different times of the day, but in the middle of the night creatures like myself took to the chats, searching for others of a like mind. AOL was the easiest way to access this new phenomena called the Internet, just in its infancy for home use.
When I finally stumbled upon the Transexual Menace chat I finally felt like there were others out there exactly like me. I finally found folks with the same issue. People with this same “condition” of having a disconnect with your physical self and your psychological gender identification. It was easy for the uneducated to confuse the condition with crossdressing, which is simply a sexual fetish, a turn on for those who enjoy it. But so completely different from transexual.
Although the word “transgender” had been coined 30 years earlier, you didn’t hear it being used in the 900’s. Not by the medical community nor by the people it was supposed to define. My family doctor, the endocrinologist I was referred to, and my therapist didn’t know the term, nor what it really meant to be transexual. It was new to all of them.
It didn’t come into common usage for another 15 – 20 years, and the only thing that defined being queer was LGB. Long before the T and Q and the rest of the alphabet came into play.
The LGB label didn’t define us though, we weren’t bothered by our sexual preferences. Ours was an issue of sexual identification, which became the T in the equation years later. The word “queer” was about as derogatory as saying fag or faggot.
For those of us regulars in the chat, our bodies did not match our brains, and that’s a terribly lonely place to be in. But here they were, another twenty or so folks like myself in many aspects, but the commonality was this disconnect we all shared. Karl was Cassandra, and she led this loosely tied group in stating our cause.
The chat had it’s share of haters, or people interested in sex, but all were dealt with swiftly by the moderators, or mods. A simple “eff off”, then the boot and banishment? No, that’s where the “Menace” came into play. We were very polite and cordial to each other, and those with a legitimate curiosity, but interlopers beware, you were about ready to face the wrath of 20 angry queers who were tired of having sand kicked in our faces. Strength in numbers…and anonymity. The haters and sex trolls got a full tongue lashing of verbal abuse, then booted.
Cassandra used the term “transition or die” quite frequently, and I never understood its true meaning until two decades later. Two decades spent fighting with my own self, in constant denial, as I continued to try to drink the problem away.
The “or die” part didn’t necessarily mean one’s actual death, although the suicide rate in the Trans community is estimated at nearly 30%. If you don’t transition to a place of self acceptance, you’ve wasted a life fighting with yourself.
Transition is a strange concept, because no one actually transitions the same way, and sometimes transitioning is a work in progress that is never fully completed. Other times it’s simply an inner peace that doesn’t require coming out, or surgery, or waving the rainbow flag. You can get to a place within yourself where you no longer suffer from gender dysphoria, a place where you can be at peace with yourself.
You either accept yourself for all your uniqueness, or waste your life in denial.
If only the world was accepting.