Exporation of Self

[txdoc]

It is interesting how we find our ways to ourselves, and what may wholly fit for a time, may no longer. We become uncomfortable in our skin as change and growth is always thus. Looking back at over half a century of life, I see clearly the pattern of it and am at last comfortable with me. I grew up in an environment with no models of how I was to be or how I fit. I remember wailing at a world where I did not see me in books I read or people I knew. So, I stitiched together my place. It was not until later that I discovered the writings of a woman who had taken a similar path. I wish I had found her when I was younger and desperately needed that mentoring. It is ironic that she and I were conceived in the same small Alabama town. Something in the water perhaps? What she wrote as introduction to one of her publications resonates soundly with me, so much so that it could almost be part of my story. "Now here I stand, far from where I was born. from the small segregated hospital in Alabama where a nurse checked F and W on my birth certificate. Far from my first tomboy girlfriend and the ways we played together, splashing barefoot in rainwater. Far from who I was as a wife and mother, almost twenty years ago, when I began to question the destiny I had been assigned as a woman. I have lived my life at the intersection of great waves of social change in the United States in the twentieth century: the Black civil rights and liberation movements, the women's liberation movement, the lesbian/gay/bisexual liberation movement, the transgender liberation movement. The theory developed by each has complicated our questions about the categories of race, sex, gender, sexuality and class. And these theories have advanced our ability to struggle against oppressions that are imposed and justified using these categories. But we can not move theory into action unless we can find it in the eccentric and wandering ways of our daily life." - Minnie Bruce Pratt

I would like to know where others have found a connection and possibly a model for how they have grown into themselves. Please share...

[Julien]

The exploration of self is so unique for each individual and I believe is an always ongoing experience, at least it is for me. Role models were something lacking as I was growing up and I didn't know(or was unaware) of any lesbians let alone trans men or women. I felt so isolated as a teen and never really comfortable with who I was becoming. It was not until I began research for my dissertation that I really came to self acceptance and realized I was doing more than just researching an academic topic. I was getting to know myself and who I was meant to be. Interestingly clarity came while watching the film Boys Don't Cry. There comes a moment in the film when Brandon is punched and I recoiled in my seat thinking that could be me there. My thoughts about my own transgender status and this film did not make me frightened, but made me want to be the man was becoming. My exploration has come in bits and pieces and only now at the age of 50 am I comfortable with me, I am at peace with my thoughts about being transgender. I may not be physically were I want to be as an outsider looking in at me, but I understand me and what my journey will be.