I should rename this blog to “My Mid-Life Dumping Ground”.

My grandfather passed away about a year ago.  He was 90.  He lived a full life and old age simply caught up with him.  Living to around 88-93 seems about the norm in my family, although there are a couple outliers who made it over the age of 100 and one who made it to 105.  Anyway, I think Grandpa’s death brought home the fact that, barring accident or illness, I’m at my mid-life point.  Maybe that’s why I’ve been more reflective than usual the last few months.  It’s been an interesting year.

Simple reflections.  I haven’t tried to assign meaning to my life.  I’m not thinking “Oh, that was a good decision…that was a bad decision…this other thing needs to change going forward.”  As I’ve gathered my thoughts on life so far, putting them down on paper makes sense.  If I were a better writer, or maybe just a faster one, all these themes would be woven into a more interesting fictionalized storyline.  Maybe I’ll get those stories written some day, but for now I’m going to exhale the thoughts out of my head and into this blog.

Today’s reflection was prompted when I heard from someone I first met a good dozen or more years back at a support group for FTMs.  At the time I met LJ, I was a couple years along and wasn’t even going to the group that regularly anymore.  I must have been talking about my process of transition – the steps I took like finding a doctor to work with and filling out paperwork for the DMV and for a passport.  Real nuts and bolts stuff.  LJ was young (17 years old as it turns out).  Anyway, I went to 3-4 more meetings over the next year and LJ was at most of them.  I didn’t interact with him too much until a meeting about a

year after we’d first met.  At that point, he came toward me pulling a couple of older people. 

“Hey, Percy!  I want you to meet my parents.”

“Mom, Dad.  This is the guy I was telling you about.”

WTH?  As it turns out, LJ had come out to his parents in high school about being transgendered and they had been supportive of him going to our meetings from the start.  Apparently that support group a year earlier, the one where I’d been talking about the various steps I’d taken with transitioning, had made a big impression on LJ.  As he told me, he “took notes on everything you said.”

When he told me that I thought, “Holy shit, Kid, I barely know what I’m doing myself.  Don’t use me as a template for ANYTHING.”

Still, here he was, with parents who wanted to support whatever it was he was about to go through.  His goal was to transition to male before starting college.  Which, he did.  He’s now in his early ‘30s with a successful career in government, newly out of a long-term relationship but overall doing really well.

Hearing from LJ got me thinking about that support group I was part of so many years ago.  Until I sought out other transgender people when I was starting my own transition, I wasn’t really in contact with any queers.  Certainly, I wasn’t associated with the LGBT community and I knew of few gay men or lesbians among my acquaintances.  My 20s were marked by marriage and immersion in a career I loved. I’d been researching the whole process of sex reassignment on my own, had separated from my husband and was at the point where I felt it necessary to make contact with other individuals like myself.  I went looking for community.

Specifically, I went looking for other FTMs, and I did find a support group close enough to make the drive once a month. I went mostly seeking answers to some specific medical questions I had.  However, once I got there…once I went to a few meetings…I realized it was something special to be in a room with people who’d experienced life the same way I had.  That confusion as a child, trying to fit in, trying to conform.   I realized I didn’t have to explain myself because they got it.  They’d lived it.  It was a first for me just feeling like I belonged somewhere without trying.  Me, with no pretense. 

Out of a dozen or so regulars in the group, there ended up being three of us, similar in age and transition goals, who developed a close friendship.  Even with my soon-to-be-former husband, I had never felt a closer bond to anyone than those two guys.  Within that little group, I’d found a community for myself, and I’d found a couple of friends.  It was the first time I realized the importance of community or just the value that being part of a community can bring to a person’s life.

Even amidst that comfortable support group though, I was still an outsider.  Maybe it’s better to say that I was still in the minority.  No one there was coming out of a marriage or even out of the straight world.  Everyone, except myself, had identified as lesbians before landing there at an FTM support group.  I was the only one, at least when I first started, who went directly from straight girl to gay man without touching down for a little girl/girl action first.

All this led up to my reflections this week on what makes up a community?  I can’t give you any sort of anthropological answer.  Never even took a Level 101 course in college.  I guess I’d define community as a group of people with some commonality that draws them together.  You’d think in a population as small as female-to-male transsexuals, it would be easy to identify that commonality and create community. 

In fact, it can be surprisingly difficult.  LJ and I are good examples of why.  We’re both FTMs, but he transitioned at the start of adulthood and I transitioned after living as an adult female for a number of years.  That experience, going to college as a woman and building a career as a woman, does make up part of who I am.  It’s part of how I experience the world today as a transgendered individual.  LJ, like an increasing number of transmen, won’t experience adulthood as a woman.  They’ll experience their entire adult life in their correct gender. 

The transgender population seems to be growing every year and with the greater population is greater variety in past experiences. Correlative to that is less obvious commonality. Despite drastically different ages of transition and stages of transition, I hope that every individual who goes seeking community support finds it.  My hope is that we, all of us other queerly gendered people, focus on our commonalities and not our differences.    However gender expression is pursued, it’s important to have a place to go where you feel supported.  Not just supported, but understood.  Finding that place where you’re no longer an outsider.  We all do this alone at some level, but finding like-minded people can be a huge comfort.  Maybe that’s the best definition of community.  Community is a comfortable place to be.