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Showing posts from August, 2012

Understanding Identity as Both a Binding and as an Exclusionary Force

What is your identity? What does it mean when someone asks who or what you are? How do you answer them in a single word, a single phrase, a single sentence? Perhaps how you answer is dependent upon who asks you and what context or situation you are in at the time. If you are being asked this question while attending a Church, you might say you are Greek Orthodox or Catholic, or Protestant or Baptist, let's say. If you are asked who or what you are outside of a voting booth, you might say you are a Democrat or a Republican, or an Independent. If you are, let us say, attending an ethnic festival, you might say that you are Greek, or Lebanese or wherever mother country your descendants harken from. And if you are a newborn baby, your mother or father will speak for you and say that you are a boy or a girl....and that is who you are. But who one is, is so much more than just being a label or a conglomeration of labels  One is so much more than simply a concatenation of

Moving Beyond Pride

Saturday, August 11th was to be a day of unity for all as we were to attend, participate, educate and celebrate the diversity of being transgender as part of the LGBT population in New Hampshire. The first organized Pride Event in the city of Manchester was occurring on that day and our leadership team at TransGender New Hampshire (TG-NH) had been busy working steadily toward creating a space for ourselves at this event and in securing attendees to assist with our campaign.  Our theme was to be one of information and education and to dispel the myths and perceptions which many still hold in their mind's eye of the transgender population at large and to bring about awareness of what protections were lacking for the population in regards to lack of civil and human equality and fairness rights such as employment and housing discrimination. As the event drew nearer and the time to the event itself closer, we began to realize that there were too many unresolved concerns that were no

Those Who Dwell in Glass Houses Should Consider What Stones They May Throw

It is with a weighted heart that I write this entry in my blog. It is not one I wished to write, nor one that I would have ever preconceived from the deepest recesses from my mind. Nevertheless, the gnawing which I have felt for sometime through endless innuendos and disparate pieces have become too numerous to ignore any longer. Although I have felt these feelings, and dismissed them, for some time, it was my spouse who manifested the reality of what I felt was happening and which I tried to brush under the table... to ignore.... for some time now. It is something that, like a cancer, has grown in time to a point that it could no longer be ignored. It had grown to a point where it began to tear at the very fabric and intimacy of our own relationship, threatening, in the process, to tear it apart. Let me be perfectly clear what this is