When I came out 44 years ago, I set out to follow in the footsteps of the social change agents I admired. I had a real and personal cause. Not that I'd been looking for one, I'd mostly been drawn towards social justice movements to distract me from dwelling on my personal life dissatisfactions so much; it felt good to care about someone else, ( Read more... )

I did not go through a phase as a child where I resented not getting dolls as presents or where dolls represented a girl world I was cut off from. It wasn't like that. First off, I got to play with some girls I was friends with, and some of that play involved dolls. Second, when I lost that, when we all became older and I no longer had a ( Read more... )

As author of autobiographical nonfiction, I'm occasionally questioned and challenged about my recall. I even once had a potential publisher tell me I could not market my book as nonfiction at all, since human memory is so unreliable ( Read more... )

I go on Facebook and encounter an image of an (apparently) male person staring in the mirror, caption says this person is trying on his mom's clothes while she's out; reflection in the mirror shows an (apparently) female person in bra and briefs staring back; thought bubble says "Wow, I look BEAUTIFUL"; caption below says "... and then she knew who ( Read more... )

In last week's blog post, I noted that I need to rework portions of Within the Box to include more tension between me and the staff of Elk Meadow around being gender-atypical. As it stands, I've got Derek thinking a lot about gender inside his own head, but you really have to read between the lines a lot to get any sense of Elk Meadow as sexist or ( Read more... )

I've said before that in an intimate relationship, there is often a power inequality -- not so much because someone is seeking it or deliberately weilding it, but because intimacy creates vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to not be in control. There's no way to structure vulnerability out of intimacy, so it's there; and vulnerability is the risk ( Read more... )

Folks seem to think I need their acceptance, that I need them to think of me a certain way in order for my identity to be valid ( Read more... )

From Within the Box -- my third autobiographical book and current work-in-progress -- this snippet is a stream-of-consciousness monologue ( Read more... )

This is an internal-thoughts monologue excerpt from my work-in-progress Within the Box. Since Derek's mind and overall life-competency are being scrutinized throughout this book, there is a lot more focus on his thoughts and feelings than in the prior books ( Read more... )

Here's a short bite from Within the Box where Derek is thinking back to some interactions with one of his LPN classmates earlier in the spring ( Read more... )