Welcome home, Alex!
I mean that literally. If you were here in the late 1990s as TracyTX, then you were part of this community when it was still young, and I'm genuinely delighted to see you find your way back.
I founded this place in 1995, so when you say you remember the early chat rooms, you're talking about rooms I remember too. Thirty years is a long road, and the fact that Susan's Place was still standing when you went looking for it again means a great deal to me.
A long distance marriage, caregiving for a 99-year-old mother, mostly in the closet but getting out part time. That's not a complicated situation, that's a life, and a lot of members here will recognize pieces of it in their own.
Five years with the same gender therapist, low-dose hormones keeping the dysphoria manageable, and now the readiness to take it further and be out in public more. You're not starting over. You're continuing, and you'll find people here at every point along that same road.
The safe places you've built — the support groups, the affirming church, the coffee shop, the club — tell me you already know how to do this one careful step at a time. This can be one more of those places.
I do want to gently address the comment that led you here, because there's an irony in it worth naming. Yes, our membership skews older, but part of the reason it skews older is that younger folks read comments like that one and stay away, which makes the skew a self-fulfilling prophecy. The truth is we have members across the full range of ages, and everyone is welcome here.
As for "old fashioned viewpoints," our views aren't fixed, and neither is the conversation. People here discuss anything and everything, disagree with each other, change their minds, and learn from one another. That's the whole point of a peer support community. What we ask is kindness in the disagreement, not conformity in the opinions.
That said, I understand exactly what you mean about wanting to be around people who share your frame of reference. There's something that doesn't need explaining when you're talking with someone who came up in the same era you did, and you'll find plenty of that here.
So pull up a chair. The coffee's better than it was in the nineties, the community is still here, and we're glad you are too.
Welcome back,
— Susan💜
