GenderEvolve - Transgender Transformation

(By Brianna Austin) Fear can singularly be the most debilitating emotion we as humans experience. And, to bare one’s soul may be the most frightening of all human endeavors. Fear is instinctive. We sense it when we are in immediate danger. But what about long term danger, do we sense that? For most of my 47 years, my life was molded by a quiet, undetectable force of expectation – both my own and others. Are the goals we strive for really our own? How do we know? And, what if you dream of what your life should be, only to wake up one day to find out that what you’re living is not it? Can you change who you are, should you? I’ve been transgender since - well, long before I ever knew what that meant. Slowly, I’ve come to learn what certain meanings represented, only to realize that being transgender means much more than the box people tried to get me into. After a lifetime of internal conflict, I began to recognize certain truths that were about to change my life in profound ways. Like ma...

(by Michele Angelique) Many transpeople find themselves changing employment at some point during their transition. Often it’s been lamented that the only opportunities for t-people are in the entertainment business. Obviously, this situation has to change. Unemployment can be a source of added psychological stress during transition, a time which may already be fraught with challenges. This issue must be addressed in order to find ways in which transgender people can be financially secure, either through employment or entrepreneurialism. Let’s examine various sides of the issue, and find progressive ways to facilitate solutions. *** Trans-Friendly Employers Whether or not to transition “in the workplace” is a question facing many transpeople. The answer often depends upon the employer’s perceived tolerance toward such a change, the peer culture within the workplace, and how financially dependant the transperson is upon the employer. These factors lead many transpeople to remain “in th...

(By Brianna Austin) I was walking down Broadway -- a small group of friends in tow – when, just as I crossed West 22nd Street, I heard a voice shout, “Hey, beautiful, is that an Adam’s Apple you have”? With a chuckle I turned and saw four or five guys in their late-20s, sitting in their compact car (no doubt part of the “bridge-and-tunnel-crowd” that descend upon Manhattan from New Jersey, Connecticut and the other New York boroughs each weekend) laughing as they waited for the light to change. “Honey, that’s the least of what I have,” I said with a giggle, prompting them to laugh once more. We then engaged in a playful banter for the next few moments. Were they initially laughing at me? Perhaps, though I wasn’t sure, but, now, they were laughing with me. As the light changed they pulled off with a parting, “you’re pretty cool, have a great night!” And so I did. Since I had walked out of the closet so many years ago, encounters like these have become a regular occurrence for me. I don’...

Finding The Balance, Honoring The Feminine The goddess is the female divine being, the Mother, the Amazon, the healer, the lover and the Queen. To speak of the Sacred Feminine is to speak of the innate divine qualities of women throughout the ages. It harks back to all times when power manifests as a positive attribute, not associated with control or supremacy, but rather potential and strength and the earthly powers of sun and moon and nature. Examples of suppression, even unintentional, of natural feminine instincts abound. Women can be ticketed for breast feeding in shopping malls. The fact that twenty-eight days in the lunar calendar and twenty-eight days in a woman's cycle is treated as hardly more than a coincidence. The rich and hugely interesting pantheon of female mythological characters and deities are not practiced with great regularity. But to a well-tuned eye and ear, signs of the archetype of the Goddess are apparent and abundant. The concept of the Sacred Feminine en...

(by Michèle Angélique) As discussed in my recent article , the Transcendental movement was sparked by a progressive literary guild in the 1800’s whose writings led to freedom for the slaves and uplifted the status of women. We at GenderEvolve are similarly, a literary guild writing to influence freedom for transgendered people and continued improvement of status of women. It is appropriate to renew the legacy of the Transcendentalists by forming a similar paradigm. Let us direct our efforts to sparking the “ Transcendgender ” movement. To “transcend” is to rise above, to go beyond, to surpass. Applied in present context, it means to “rise above physical gender”. With this, let us define what holds us together as family and friends, sisters and brothers, for the common purpose of influencing a shift in societal perceptions about transgenderism. A “Transcendgenderist” believes that all people are gifted with an inherent combination of feminine (Yin) and masculine (Yang) characteristics,...

The French language has this peculiar structure of attributing gender to just about everything. A simple apple is no longer just an apple, it's " une pomme " in the feminine sense rather than " un pomme " in a masculine form. Who ever decided that an apple should be feminine rather than masculine goes back to a time long ago and hold no logic whatsoever. Who are we to argue the roots of a language that has evolved for thousands of years like everything else, right?. When referring to some animal form like a dog, it usually take a specific gender name like " un chien " and " une chienne " for a male and female dog respectively. The same holds true for humans, " un homme " and " une femme " are grammatically correct in their gender assignment. The same gender attribution is also found in Spanish, Italian, German and many other Indo-European languages. If you think the French have a hard language to learn with two genders, Ge...

(by Samantha Leigh) One of my deep ponderings of the latter part of last year relates to 'Chelle's recent post of spoiling the pass and this recent hair removal "Why' question. I've been working on being the best possible version of me, which of course would be different at the end from anyone else, but our quest might be similar enough. The short answer to 'Chelle's question, in that I think she is similiar enough to me, is that she wants ACCEPTANCE. Accept me for who I am, come after me with pitchforks; because of who I am, but do not waste my time with false premises wrong ideas, even if they seem helpful in the short term. Love me or Hate me but please do it for the right reasons. There are many pieces of extra baggage that "We" crossdressers pick up along the way. Skills we are not necessarily aware of. We are experts at concealling who we are, from other people and from ourselves. Most of us here have been experienced earlier in life at port...

Each of us has been blessed with unique qualities. No one else has lived through precisely the same circumstances, possesses exactly the same qualities, or thinks just the same thoughts. We love, appreciate, and hold dear vastly different things. Because of this, it is nearly impossible to justly compare oneself to others and yet so many people stake their happiness on how they fare when measured against a neighbor, a coworker, a sibling, or Hollywood star. It is easy to think that if you had her eyes, his house, her job, or his money, that you'd be truly happy. Your value as a person has little to do with what you look like or what you possess and comparing yourself to someone else denies your own wonderful gifts and talents. Everyone has worth, but the source of that worth is individual. Learning to stop comparing yourself to others begins with accepting your worth, because your own acceptance is the most important. Regularly assessing your worth in terms of other people's gi...

(by Alexis Rene Jones) My thoughts have been revolving around a subject regarding acceptance from significant others to those trangendered for the last few weeks, regardless the stage of transistion mentally or physically. I have not been able to make heads nor tales of my thoughts at all. As this is all speculative at best as I am single. However this impacts many. As with anything, When I am trying to comprehend thoughts or feelings I try to view introspectively and objectively and hopefully garner an outside point of view as well. So with that, I put my mindset back to about ten years ago when I was married and denying my own feelings of what was within. When I say "denying feelings", That is putting it lightly. I was burying them with a vengence as I just could not bear anyone to know or try to accept what was me. I mean how could I think someone else could accept what I would not about my own perception of who I was. After trying to place a bearing on all of this I tried...

(by Marlena Dahlstrom) “It’s not the clothes.” How many times have I said that when the lament of “women wear pants, so why can’t I wear a dress” surfaces with clockwork regularity on online crossdressers’ groups I belong to. Usually it’s in the context of making the what-ought-to-be-obvious point that women wearing men’s-styled clothing aren’t trying to portray themselves as the opposite gender, as crossdressers typically do. And yet, after reading Anne Hollander’s fascinating “Sex and Suits,” which looks at the evolution of modern men’s and women’s clothing, I wonder just how much of my crossdressing is in fact about the clothes. To briefly summarize, Hollander convincingly makes the counter-intuitive argument that since the late Middle Ages men’s clothing has been the fashion innovator—and that women’s styles have been both imitating it and borrowing from it for centuries. Before the 1200s, both sexes wore roughly the equivalent clothing: bag-like garments that were variously wrap...

(by Michèle Angélique) GenderEvolve can be compared to the Transcendentalists (tran·scen·den·tal·ists), a progressive literary group in the 1800's whose influential writings during the period 1840-44 led to emancipation of the slaves and achievement of significant rights for women. Similarly, 160+ years later, we at GenderEvolve are writing collaboratively with the goal of influencing the social emancipation of Transgendered people, and achievement of true equality for all feminine beings. The Transcendentalists advocated equality, human rights, social acceptance, and expanding human consciousness, just as we do at GenderEvolve. Although mostly comprised of men, the Transcendentalists also held the belief in the "spiritual eminence of women" because they highly valued the traits of empathy, introspection, emotions, sympathy, compassion, all deemed to be strengths of the feminine. Similarly, the GenderEvolve group is comprised primarily of male-to-female (M2F) transgend...