U-Turn: a UU transman ponders sex, spirituality, and the power of stories

This is the season for looking back, right? It has been an interesting year, to say the least... truthfully, the best year of my adult life. On March 2nd, 2014, I stood up in front of my entire UU congregation and outed myself as being Trans, via the following reflection. Rereading it has made me cry. I've come quite a distance since that moment. At that time, it was all very raw, very full of questions without answers. But being willing to start from there, openly - from a place of no assumptions or expectations - is what has made me able to move forward as honestly as I have. Looking back, I can see how far I've come in such a short time, toward knowing myself. So today, again, I share this with you. I've changed only one thing, the name - I used my "mundane" name on that day. I'm still choosing for now to not include that information in this blog, though I suspect I eventually will. Some of you were there. Some of you are "hearing" this fo...

Ah, another Christmas approacheth! And I’m remembering the Christmas maybe ten years back when I came out to my mom as gay. I had always wondered why, in heaven’s name, so many people seemed to choose Christmas or some other big family holiday as their moment for coming out. (It’s even become a standard warning, included in just about every list of what to do and what not to do when coming out: whatever you do, DON’T do it at Christmas!) I can’t think of a worse time, except possibly at a funeral - and I admit, I’ve done that, too, sort of. Go figure. What I finally realized is that there are simply certain times of the year, certain types of events, that automatically create, well, definitely not a good environment for coming OUT, but quite assuredly a horrible environment for being IN. People end up throwing wide their closet doors at Christmas because that’s when it suddenly feels the most stifling to be locked inside. At other times, closets merely feel small and cramped; but a...

Sometimes these things are hard to write. And not always for the same reasons. Sometimes, it’s because there’s too much deep emotion involved, serious personal stuff that has to be wrestled with. Other times, it’s because I’m trying to tackle a subject that just isn’t finished cooking yet, and I finally have to put it aside and try another. And then there are times like this past week, when the difficulty is simply that I enjoy the act of writing too much - the delving for bits of truth, the complex interconnection of ideas and questions, and ideas that breed new questions, and questions that breed new ideas... Realizing that I was behind schedule posting (not surprising during this month full of holiday-busy-crazy), I started to toss off something simple and straightforward about my pleasure in being part of my church’s abridged “readers’ version” production of “A Christmas Carol” - the satisfaction in finally getting to test my theatrical “chops” (for various complicated reas...

So today I am looking at a complicated question head-on. It’s one I’ve meant to tackle for a while now: explaining, or at least trying to explain, exactly why it is that I’m choosing to make an actual, medical, physical transition from female to male. Not all Transfolk do. And when I first came out as being Trans, I wasn’t even remotely thinking about this issue; I knew it was a question that would come up sooner or later, but hey, later felt just fine to me! I was still busy wrestling with far simpler questions: Whether I wanted to ask my community to make a change-of-pronoun for me (a hard thing to ask, since pronouns are so ingrained). Whether I was comfortable continuing to use the gender-neutral short form of my given name. Whether, for God’s sake, I owned a single piece of clothing that I could comfortably wear, now that I had stopped pointedly ignoring this acute internal/external clash. Arrghhh! There was still a lot of static on my radio station, so to speak. So I put th...