Transgender Awareness Week

This year, for Transgender Awareness Week, I ran a series of posts on LinkedIn describing my experiences of #TransJoy. I’m consolidating them here for posterity and ease of digestion. If you’d like to connect on LinkedIn, you can find me here.

Day 1:

Today marks the beginning of Transgender Awareness Week, an international, annual event to bring awareness to the transgender experience, to humanize those of transgender experience, and to remember those we’ve lost to transphobic violence. The week culminates in the Transgender Day Of Rememberance, where we mourn our losses. But in the meantime, I’d like to spend some time this week sharing with you some stories of transgender joy. MY transgender joy. So often the narrative of the trans experience centers on misery, and for good reason. But at the heart of it all, at least for me, lies, ultimately, joy. When you think of me, and my trans experience, I don’t want you to think of pain, or misery, or of childhoods lost, but as you’ll hear, those things paved the path to my joy. It is that joy I want you to know about and to associate with me.

I came of age in the 1970’s, and that’s critical to understanding my journey. I won’t share with you how I became aware of my desire, my need to be a girl… the details are quite intimate. some of the people involved are still in my life and I don’t have their consent to share those stories. Suffice it to say that I was in my late-single-digits-age when I realized it.