I'm Being Who I Needed When I Was Younger

Earlier today I had the opportunity to talk to my sis Raquel.   Needed to get her perspective for a trans person from India considering attending the University of Georgia for her PhD studies about the campus climate as a recent UGA grad. 

And besides, I'd had so much fun talking to her when I met her at a trans anti-violence conference in Chicago back in March  So after we handled the business end of the call, we spent the next hour pleasantly catching up and discussing our current lives.

After I hung up with Raquel, I sat back and thought about the conversation I'd just had with her and wished I'd been able to do the same with my trans elders at the time when I was Raquel's age.

While there are a lot of things I love about being a teen growing up in the 70's, one of the things I lament and I'm happy about at the same time is the societal knowledge that we have about trans issues is light years different.  

We also have the exponential growth in Trans World of possibility models that our trans teens, trans twenty somethings and trans thirty somethings can look up to and be proud of.

We are getting the opportunity to have much needed intergenerational conversations about a wide variety of subjects.  We get to talk about things like our transitions in different decades, passing the community history down to each other and most importantly, get to build community.

And we trans elders learn just as much from those intergenerational conversations as our trans younglings do.

As a trans elder, I consider it an honor, privilege and a pleasure to share a portion of my day with our trans younglings. I also have the responsibility of being the person I needed and wished I'd had when I was younger and searching for knowledge of how to navigate being trans. 

I suspect our trans younglings need us just as badly to be the trans people we needed when we were their age.

Being who I needed when I was younger is an ongoing and evolutionary process, but it's a process that I'm blessed to have the opportunity to do, revel in and accept the challenge of making happen .

And I hope I'm successful at accomplishing that task.