I wanted to cry tears of joy last night and thought I'd share with the rest of you.
I'm a graduate student right now and I tend to have classes with a lot of the same people. One of the women in my program is an older woman who I haven't really gotten to know but who I've had classes with in the past. I said something in class last night while we were having a discussion about diversity (I think it had to do with "heteronormativity") and she told me in passing that I reminded her of her daughter. We ended up talking after class and she told me that she's not sure where her daughter is right now in terms of gender and sexuality because she's really private but that she wishes that she would just be open about so that the family knew how they could support her. We started talking about my mother and how she's been dealing with my being trans and the conversation just went from there. She mentioned that she had a friend in high school who had transitioned later on in life and how surprised she had been when she found out at a garage sale of all things. What she said gives me hope for the rest of the world. Here's as close to a transcript as I can get:
Her: "I went to this garage sale and there was this absolutely stunning woman sitting next to Jim's* sister. When I went to leave she followed me to my car and said, 'You don't know who I am, do you?' Well, I felt really bad because I knew that she looked familiar to me but I couldn't place her. So I apologized and she said, 'I graduated with you. My name's Carol*.' I went to a really small school and I know everyone I graduated with and there wasn't a Carol*. So she said, '[Jim's* sister] is my sister.' And I was like, 'She doesn't have any sisters. She has two brothers.' And then I stopped and I was like, 'Oh my God, Jim*?' I don't know who the doctor she had was but whoever it was did a really great job. She was beautiful.
Me: "I want to cry right now because you keep saying she. I've talked to other people who refuse to use the persons preferred pronoun."
Her: "Are you kidding me? When you go through something like this, you ARE the gender you've become. I would never call her 'him'."
This woman proves to me that not everyone sucks as a human being. She gives me hope.
In a related story, as I'm typing this there's a news story on CNN about a male to female transsexual and the girl behind me was like, "Oh, wow, it's a transvestite." *face palm*
