Stuck In The Middle Again

How to start? I said long ago when I made my choice to back our new President that when he did things I felt were wrong I would call him out on it.

Today is the first time I’m ready to speak against him on an issue dear to my heart.Most of you who know me understand my past and my hopes for the future.

While then Mr. Trump campaigned He said over and over he would be the president of all the people and wished to unite us again.He has now embarked on a clear violation of his promise to do so.

I fully understand those on the far right who feel that Transgender people are trying to push our way into their strict view of bathrooms ,on the other hand I understand those on the far left who feel it is their right to do so.

My mind lives in a place somewhere in the middle of these groups,a place that tries to see gray and not black and white. A place where all peoples rights are honored no matter of their views.

Clearly there needs to be a national policy that provides a clear solution to the rights of all,this is not a states rights issue it’s a civil rights issue period. All persons have the right to safe bathroom rights.And there needs to be national standards that protect everyone’s rights.

Especially the young,I was young once my self and these things can have life long impressions,with unintended consequences in later life.

Some many years ago disabled persons were shut out of much of life,Americans rose to the challenge and we gave the  rights they were not afforded by creating the ADA (Americans with disability’s Act ) while some of still bitch about all the empty parking spaces in the front of the the places we go, America moved forward ,stores,public places,and building codes transformed  our lives by making ,ramps accessible bathrooms homes rest parks and on and on available to millions of Americans who were denied these services before and we are better for all these changes.To that end I think we can find the compassion as a nation to apply this kind of common sense to this issue we have proved through ADA that we can change bathrooms to make them accessible to all. Love each other enough to bring a commonsense change That protects everyone’s humanity.

 

Hugzz to all

Butterfly

Unknown

So many years ago when I fought so hard to hide my reality,because even I had no true understanding of why or who I really was I just succumbed to showing a picture I wanted others to see.

During  some of that time I manifested a gruesome military warrior ,hell bent on being seen as the complete antithesis of my inner reality,and yet a successful warrior none the less,as I felt failure of my male persona  was somehow a brand I might carry into my unknown future.

Years kept clicking by , and my reality continued to elude me,and any cognizant answers just seemed like a never ending pit from which I would not emerge.

Thirsty for anything that would bring some understanding to my never ending search to my blindness I felt would never reveal any answers,and then the world by way of computer knowledge ,allowed me find out that many others in this world,had also experienced the unknown.

I soon began to realize that the known was  the  teacher ,I had looked for with no map.

Answers came flooding into my mind and I soon found ,that the unknown was completely available,if I only knew where to look.

While looking may be a never ending quest it brings me to a better understanding everyday.

Hugzz Butterfly

Invisible Love

Some years ago when I started this process I guess it was a medium to try to explain my sometimes dramatic experiences in dealing with the difficult  trials of letting the rest of the world know how difficult it is to succumb to the only life saving path I felt I could possibly use to salvage my existence here on earth, or choose to let the invisible powers that my  religious teachings have held on me,and bring an end to my misery,by disavowing,and dissolving all ties with my known reality.

I  guess in the end my will to survive,and believe in a better time,overcame some of the worst of all episodes it can produce .

It never ends there it’s not that easy,in fact it can continue to be more and more complicated as time passes.

An example is my son,while he expresses love to my face,I must remain invisible to those in his life,and not be his friend on social media,while I adore him on all levels of life I also feel a great deal of pain,in this circumstance.

Tables being reversed I would be 100% behind him and to hell with anyone who wouldn’t,support him……………………

I can’t know how he feels especially since he never expresses his true feelings,and possibly can’t because he is unable to know his feelings, in this very difficult,experience of life,I can only say it is a very uncomfortable place for me,I feel very unaccepted. at the most extreme layers of life.

He has also completely disengaged from my mothers side of the family,a family I embrace with all my heart and soul,they connect me to all that is good and to my GOD.

Love to all Butterfly

Just a chance & some confusion

I recently came across a product that claims to remove  hair permanently  after 5 weeks,I’m taking a chance that it might work I will update as the weeks progress,today was week one,of 5.

Next the confusion: I have been looking into Life Insurance , as a transgender it’s just plain confusing,because after many years on female hormones my body is less than male and less than female,yet when you need to choose a rate that applies to you there is no in between,I’m certain that no medical  statistics have been kept on the lives of people who have been using hormones for multiple years.

The cost difference between male and female is significant ,there is no in between,for folks like me,I took a long survey last year that I thought would by now shed some light on some of these issues but not a word yet

Hugzz Butterfly

Thoughts

I’m mostly silent on the political scene except with friends and family,but tonight I just feel a need to speak my piece about the bathroom issue .

 

until the State of North Carolina brought the issue to public view little had ever been mentioned about the bathroom issue,as for myself always presenting as a women ,I have for years used the ladies room without ever a bad experience.

Now however I feel concerned about my safety in doing so,

However let me speak to what I feel  is overreach by Obama in regards to the school bathroom order yes I feel what you do in your own stall is private and should be a non issue, the fact that pre-op transgenders should share shower rooms and lockers is not a good thing,I base this on my own thoughts as as teenager who still was exploring my own gender or failings of understanding it.

 

So let’s put the bathroom thing back as it always was without problems and have a common sense discussion about the shower and locker room thing.

 

Thanks Butterfly

How do we get to a place of mutual understanding?

I hate to keep going over an issue that really seems to get little coverage on transgender blogs but,when you have first hand experiences that affect you in personal ways it’s something worth mentioning.

What you say am I talking about? it’s the distance between the lgb and the T as much as anyone wants to say that we are somehow in locked arm on issues that concern us all it’s really just an illusion,with most Gay people and particular,those on the male end of the spectrum.

They really have about as much understanding of Transgender persons for the most part as Cis people do.While this isn’t true for all, it tends to be more than not.My peronal dealings with a great many of them,leaves me feeling that they are for the most part a very self centered group of people intrested in moving their own interests forward regardless of what is truly the civil rights movement of our time.

I don’t make these claims lightly  it’s the culmination of years of interaction with gay men,I don’t however find this to be true of  the lesbian community,guess it’s just a girl thing,can’t pin that down for sure,but they just seem more tolerant than their Male counterparts.

Most of you who have followed me for any length of time know that this has been an issue that has had a cumulative part of forming my way of thinking in regards to the LGB—-    T,experience .

Personally I find a gap that lacks very much respect in most of the male gay community  and those of us who are Transgender definitely the struggle is much different for lots of obvious reasons.

I don’t expect this gap t close anytime soon as the goals are far apart,in reality.

As for me I will try my best to close the gaps between all people regardless of their preferences in life.

But I often find some of the LGB   T community out of sync with the real goals of humanity at large.

thanks to all

Butterfly

Just a few things on my mind

Hello dwellers

I know it’s been a while since I was here to provocateur in  your world .

I have been busying myself with being stealth,and just living life as the person I am.

There are as usual things that keep stabbing me in life and so are hard to ignore.

1. It seems the religious right who seem to have taken over an entire party of our politics in the U.S., I must say to them you don’t represent  how all conservatives feel,while I’m conservative in my beliefs that the Federal Government should get the hell out of our lives and stop creating new programs that never work ,with the thought they know better how to live my life than they do.
2. Let’s just get back to basics  and realize that the Christianity does not own the political system and that “the rights rights of all people come from our maker and not specifically from their God but from the one and only deity. whom ever that may in the end be,we all have our ideas and ingrained,beliefs on this, and all should  given reverence regardless of what lives in our own hearts.Does Buddha or any other God have the answer ,I think not ,I happen to believe in the teachings of Jesus but there have been profits way before him,or are any wrong or do they all just compel us to be decent to one another as a sign of mature understanding?
3. While I support the LGBT community as a whole I have to say through experience that  it’s more like this LGB    T.
4. You can’t always assume that the gay community has your back as a Transgender person because it is just not so. Their political philosophy does not always align with mine and I might add with a vast majority of  the conscious world. They are mostly concerned with their own agenda,and have little if any understanding of what my life has undertaken over decades of misunderstanding.
5. Being human and nothing less should be the goal of  the world,And that seems far off to me!

Falling Leaves and Family Love.

Well here we are deep in  the month of October out here on the prairie of the southern great lakes. 

The Gods paint their last picture as we near the winter  solstice, soon the tree’s will be bare as will all the fields that produced the plenty of another harvest in the life of this rare girl who continues to recollect the love of family and the security it brings to my reality.

On Yesterday I had the occasion to attend a remembrance service for my fathers wife of over 50 years.

 Mrs. Juanita {Bailiff] Iles

I will try in some short words to define how I thought of this grand lady,as I grew up in the home of my mother ,God Bless her she was always very bitter of my father and Juanita’s relationship and  I get a women scorned is not likely to forget the ones who wronged her. the circumstances were as I can collect not very pretty. I was very young at the time ,but the consequences did and do have an effect on my life. But this isn’t about me or my circumstances,it’s rather about my fathers wife and my extended experience of  motherhood.

This was a Lady of the finest degree,who came from very humble beginnings,on a poor farm in Western Indiana ,who grew up with a not so very great childhood ,and moved to my home town at the age of 16, I was not privy to any of this at the time of it’s happening as I was very young,she met my father and for reasons I may never know caused the eventual end to the marriage of my Mother and Father. Learning to love them in separate family circumstances was a bit confusing as I began to come of the age understanding, because I was beginning to understand by no means meant I had an adult understanding of  the situation,it only meant that I had to make decisions about my reality of the experience

Facts are facts I was as a teenager dealing with the hard reality of knowing  that something was very ascue in my own life.I had know Idea of how profound this was to my life back then as I only knew something was seriously not right with my mind and body.

Not sure if it really was the reason for being very rebellious ,or if it just came along with the lives of all teens,

I was about as confused in life as a butterfly that couldn’t escape my cocoon,at around that time in my life,my Mother and Stepfather confronted me about being adopted and losing the what I considered was my last and only ties to my birth father,who for all intents and purposes had been only a memory that came from brief encounters of visitation on  birthdays and whatever other times were suitable between the feuding parties.

All I can say is teen years are a collective fog that rarely lifts until you are in your late twenties,or later. which leads me to my first encounters,with my fathers wife, rebellion was my middle name around that time of life and rebell I did, I left my mother’s home to experience first hand my father’s life,truth is I was about the last thing my stepmother needed in her life about then and I was about the last thing I needed in my life too just then, that being said she welcomed me and my stupidity into her life without question,I saw almost immediately a woman that was as selfless as any I had ever met,in order to help raise the Children my father and she produced she gave very much of herself,taking on babysitting of other people’s children while they worked, to doing laundry and ironing for others, she never had a complaint,and always put my father and his children all of us first before herself, never a day you would ever go hungry around this lady no matter who you were .

She remains a lady of my highest regards and will live as a good memory to me,as she gave my father over 50 years of never ending  Love and Happiness To this I salute her a true soldier of life.

Along the way She and Father gave me a generous group of brothers and sisters ,they are all of great quality,with kind and generous hearts,on this occasion of the remembrance of their mother’s life is the first time any of them or their Mother’s family had ever met the lady I have become in recent history,not a single one treated me any different than ever ever and none failed to embrace me as the human being they grew up with.

I think for most girls(Ladies) of my age group and circumstance the fear of losing family and loved ones is our greatest source of anxiety in life,I have been so very fortunate to have the love of ALL my family still with me. I am truly Blessed,and grateful.

With a Happy Heart ,

I wish all Love and Happiness

Butterfly

Septembers saturday night post

Well as I have spent sometime today finally updating my windows seven device to windows 10, I began to reflect on a time when I had no concept of the internet or the working’s of a PC.

I harkened back to when my Son first encouraged me to purchase a computer in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s,at the time it was a frightening and very strange thing to me, a foreign concept that I only feared because of my ignorance of something I had absolutely no knowledge of.

We assessed  what we thought my needs were at the time and he ordered and had sent to me a marvelous new thing that I   only looked at for a few days and then began assembling it per the instructions,once hooked up again I just looked at this electric monster afraid that if I turned it on I would somehow destroy it instantly.

Via phone conversations with my son I was finally convinced that I could in fact turn this behemoth on and not destroy it with my ignorance.

So forge ahead I did only to open up a grand new world of information that would eventually ,render knowledge that I wasn’t crazy and that there was an explanation to my condition.

I wasn’t nut’s or going out of my mind,I was gaining the knowledge I needed to heal a life long struggle I had no way of learning about it until this point.

And learn I did I must have and still do seek out understanding of my life ,the pain and the part’s I seemed to understand but not fully.

It eventually led me to seek the treatment I desperately needed to end my, in and out desires to end my life out of the total confusion my condition seemed to leave me in,at many junctures of life.It opened doors I would have never gone through without out this fabulous tool,I had now discovered.

And so with this and my very Happy new life I say to you all who have been beside in my journey ,God bless you all and many thanks for your undying love.

Back soon Butterfly

Across The Rubicon

As most of you know already,last year before our Family reunion I made the decision to no longer hide who I am from my people. This has resulted in the biggest and best turning point of my not so young life.

It has allowed me to forge better and stronger relationships with members of my family and their friends as well,without doubt it has lead to a relationship between my youngest sister and I that I  dreamed about but never thought would exist, we have grown so close and formed the most wonderful bond It’s like it was somehow destined to have happened.We have become inseparable friends. It makes me cry sometimes knowing how long I kept myself from the fruits of love my family had to offer.

As with most Like me in my age group we began our journey with very conflicting and confused views of our condition,and over time we confronted nearly every emotion and self doubt that anyone could conceive,most going through periods where we thought we could defeat the reality of what we are by as many methods as our twisted understanding could dream up,as with myself I went the whole gambit ,practicing  immersion therapy thinking if I could just do the most male things possible It would somehow go away or at least I would be invisible and no one would discover my socially abnormal lust to be what my brain kept telling me I was. 

Well as it turns out,after a few years now of consistent hormone therapy I threw caution to the wind in favor of living as the person who had been trapped by utter fear of discovery and just began reconstructing what I had left of my life as just me. A me even I wasn’t sure I really was after these long years of confusion and lack of understanding my true self.This round of things is much different than my previous temporary jawnts into womanhood this time I went in with a commitment  to never turn back again but always continue moving forward no matter how frightened or difficult it might get.

So many times in my life I built wardrobes of womens clothing only to lose my confidence,or out of fear of being discovered and having to face what I thought would be the true end of life.I purged so many wardrobes only to begin again within a few months this time I did a reverse purge and rid myself of every piece of male clothing I owned with the solid mindset that this time a permanent girl would appear and grow and keep growing and never again look in the rear view mirror.

This time I have truly crossed the Rubicon, for those who have no knowledge of the term briefly it was a river in Italy that was forbidden to be crossed by Armies,and Julius Caesar crossed it with his army it was a point of no return just as I have finally reached the point of no return in my transition,I have truly become something completely unique to all previous versions of myself,It has been so powerful a change that I’ve completely released my mind from all that seemed to clutter it with doubt about my true identity,I no longer even, but on rare occasions  think of being transgender I’m just Shelle.

Some new reality has set in on me I used to be very focused on every article and piece of information that had anything to do with being transgender that I just couldn’t get a grip on working hard on the individual I wanted so much to be.Truth is the best and most motivating thing I ever did was to trust my family with what I had been facing all my life,guess had I should have trusted in the fact that I came from pretty strong people who have known how to deal with diversity and personal struggle from the time our people landed on these shores from England. I guess that learning all I could about my condition was really a right of passage in most ways a trail to be traveled,to a destination that was far from sure in the beginning.Truth is I have gained more strength and clarity in life by reuniting with my loving family than I could ever have pictured in my mind,being able to look in eyes of the people you grew up loving all your life and feeling comfortable and loved is a priceless gift only they and God can bestow on you.

I know it’s been a bit since I last updated my journey but frankly real living has overcome me,I’ve been so engrossed in living that I really forgot to be concerned about the lost soul I once was. I don’t feel anything but normal these days,something I have never known in my life,there was always that heavy hand squeezing the life out of me.I guess being recognised as yourself and being comfortable there is pretty intoxicating to someone who really hasn’t known it in an entire lifetime.Feels kind of like I need to sprint toward the finish line as there are not many ticks of clock left in my life,like I must cram every wonderful moment of a finally happy life into the small place left to fill ,before leaving this new found peace. Relationships I once thought would be burning pieces of coal,have now turned into precious diamonds,and I’m blinded by the glitter so much that I’m just living free from all the burdens I once heaped upon myself.

Seems like Shelle has become the most normal person of my life,a girl that can be best friends with my sister,hang out with the girls go shopping and just hangout, there are so many new  things in my life I’m just drinking it all down with a very humbled heart.

Back real soon sorry for being away so long,

Butterfly