Thought for the day

[Lorileah]

It won't change anything and I know I am preaching to the choir here, but this is something to think about.

How do you as a transgendered person change the world around you in such a manner that it would effect how people live.

In other words, would your coming out change how the people around you make a living, go about their daily lives or survive. Not the little short order things that are based in hate or fear, but the world in general. Deep thinking here.

Would you being out in the world as you want to be ruin the economy or make it better? Would there be more wars and conflicts, or less? Would the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse reign down from the sky (sooner)?

This is just something I think about when someone tells me that what I do is "wrong" or "Perverted". Did anything, in the grand scheme of things change after they knew? Not talking about specific people not ever speaking to you again (except family I don't care if they don't). The big picture. Does my wearing a skirt take food from someone's mouth? Money from their pocket? Love from their life?

And to think, I never took philosophy in college

[Christinedreamer]

Lorileah I have asked that same question ad nauseum about my many gay friends fighting for the legalization and acceptance of gay marriage.

I ask people to tell me in specific A to Z terms excatly what measureable and provable damge is done to ANYONE else. It cant be done.

Then I usually make a reference to the Biblical parable about the splinter in another while ignoring the beam in your self.

[Kate Simmons]

Who we are and what we do balances the energies Hon. Can you imagine what the boys playing in the sandbox we call the world would do without us there to manage things?

[TGMarla]

Well, I don't affect it much. But I do retain and present an attitude of tolerance towards transgendered people and their issues to those around me. A drop in the bucket, perhaps, but a positive drop none the less. As for the four horsemen, the apocalypse, and ruining the economy, I'm not bringing on the world's demise, and I'm contributing to the economy in that I have a clothing jones that loves to be fed. I need cosmetics and pantyhose, and all the other consumables related to crossdressing. So overall, whether people can see it this way or not, it's a positive thing.

[susandrea]

[SIZE="3"]A society improves when the majority of it's citizens have open minds, healthy curiosity, and a tolerant -- even supportive -- attitude toward the differences that naturally occur in human beings.[/SIZE]

[SIZE="3"]Transgender has been around since humans began walking upright, and it's here to stay. The sooner the human race understands and accepts that, the better off they'll be.
[/SIZE]

[SIZE="3"]So, as I said in a post several days ago, the transgendered people of today will be regarded by future generations as the pioneers of the movement -- those who dare to move forward and live their lives as they were meant to be lived, at a time when it is often difficult to do so.[/SIZE]

A Man Named Sissy
Proper Dress Required? For Larry Goodwin, That’s No Problem.

By Lloyd Grove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 21, 1997; Page C01
The Washington Post

The tourist formerly known as Larry Goodwin is most people’s idea of a man’s man — in every respect but one. Chatting this week during a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and then over lunch at a Washington restaurant, the broad-shouldered 51-year-old described himself as an ex-Air Force enlisted man (crew chief on C-130 transport planes flying from Guam to Thailand in 1965-67) and a onetime rodeo cowboy back home in Wyoming (his specialty: bareback bronco-riding).

He builds aerobatic biplanes in his spare time at home in Douglas, Wyo. (population 5,000), volunteers in worthy causes and Democratic Party politics, and has worked for the past 23 years as a highly paid technician at a coal-fired power plant in nearby Glenrock. He’s also the proud father of two grown children (a 25-year-old son, Travis, and a 23-year-old daughter, Kristi: He keeps snapshots in his wallet) and has been married to the same woman for almost 29 years.

“We’ve been together a long time, because I love him,” said his wife, 49-year-old Vickie Goodwin, who accompanied him here. She was a waitress at the Pink Kitchen in Casper when Larry, then a college student on the GI Bill, first asked her out on a date. “He is,” she added, “a really good person.”

A really good person who shaves his legs, favors pink Magic Kiss lipstick and, on this particular August day on the Mall, was wearing an accordion-pleated gray and white tennis skirt, a frilly puffed-sleeve pink blouse and — he lifted his thigh-high skirt to reveal — lacy yellow panties. At 5 feet 10 and 170 pounds, accessorized with a green leather handbag, ladies’ watch, sparkly ring and slip-on tennis shoes, he introduced himself as Sissy, the name he’s been using for the past two decades.

“It’s not so much a fashion statement or a political statement as a fully realized expression of the fact that this is the way I am,” Sissy Goodwin explained in a quiet, aw-shucks voice that might have belonged to Gary Cooper. “I’m heterosexual. I’ve been married for 29 years,” he continued. “But I’ve been this way since age 4 or 5 probably.”

With his short, graying hair and moderate beard, Goodwin was clearly making no attempt to fool anyone. He was, unmistakably, a guy in a skirt. When first spotted Tuesday afternoon by a photographer for The Washington Post, he was browsing through T-shirts and souvenirs on sale near the memorial. But he gladly stopped to discuss his appearance with a reporter.

Vickie Goodwin, who is co-director of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin Resource Council, a nonprofit environmental group, was off making a fund-raising presentation to potential donors, he said. Sissy, for his part, had just finished participating in the annual convention of Veterans for Peace, an anti-war group that had been meeting at the Arlington Hyatt. It’s just one of the causes that Goodwin — who was treasurer of the Wyoming American Civil Liberties Union and a Carter delegate at the 1980 Democratic National Convention — has embraced over a lifetime of political activism.

“I’m very well known in Wyoming,” he said with just a hint of braggadocio. And, especially in Democratic circles, he is.

“Larry’s a guy I’ve known for a number of years, and he’s always been interesting and engaging, but I’ve never talked to him about his . . . uh . . . give me a word,” said former Wyoming governor Mike Sullivan, who served from 1987 to 1995. “I can tell you his wife, Vickie, is really bright and public-spirited,” the Democrat said from his law office in Casper. “I’ve never seen anyone hassle him or reflect a lack of tolerance. I don’t think people in Wyoming respond to him any different than they would anywhere else. At the same time, I know people are puzzled.”

“Sissy is a very warm, a very sweet person,” says Wyoming civil liberties lawyer Laurie Seidenberg, past president of the state ACLU. “He’s a delightful person to be around, and a genuinely peaceful person.”

Said another ACLU friend, state Executive Director Marvin Johnson: “Frankly, Sissy’s got a lot of guts to be dressing like that in a state like Wyoming.”

“I’m actually fairly open with my mode of dress,” Goodwin himself said, ignoring the drop-jaw, bug-eye, whiplash reactions of passersby on the Mall. “I really love the feel of women’s clothes. That’s really all I ever wear anymore.

“But I also think it’s a survival mechanism. My sister and I grew up in an extremely hostile environment, with both our parents alcoholics and my father very abusive.” His sister, he said “has been in and out of mental institutions. I haven’t. I believe that my transvestism is my way of dealing with stress.”

Transvestism remains mysterious in origin despite decades of scientific research into the behavior and its causes. Along with Robert G. Peterson, a Wyoming psychologist he saw for therapy, Goodwin authored a research paper on the subject, published seven years ago in the Journal of Applied Rehabilitation Counseling. Titled “Psychological Impact of Abuse as It Relates to Transvestism,” Goodwin and Peterson’s report argued that “transvestism is maladaptive addictive behavior” often brought about by childhood abuse.

“Transvestite behavior later in life, although pleasurable for the subject, is a continuation of abuse,” the paper argued. “This is due to the negative social pressures and humiliations by peers and others. This humiliation and rejection creates stress that the individual feels can only be eliminated by cross-dressing.”

Maybe; maybe not, said clinical psychologist Richard F. Docter, whose book “Transvestites and Transsexuals: Toward a Theory of Cross-Gender Behavior” is well regarded in the transvestite community.

“We all strive to make sense of our lives and our experiences and our feelings, but the causes of this are a totally open question,” said Docter, a professor at California State University at Northridge who has been studying the phenomenon since 1979. “The two explanations that are favored are, first, a biological theory — that is, something influenced the central nervous system, possibly in utero,” he said. “The second theory is that you can learn this behavior through your own social experience, which somehow makes you need to express a different gender.” Goodwin’s theory, Docter added, is in the second category, “basically kind of a trauma model.”

To hear him tell it, Goodwin has endured more than his share of trauma. At Kinkead’s restaurant — where an outwardly calm busboy kept splashing ice water onto the floor in his attempts to fill two glasses — Goodwin explained that he took the name “Sissy” after being called that as an insult. “It’s kind of self-imposed,” he said. “Somebody called me sissy one day, and I thought, I guess I am. It signifies what I am, being effeminate. . . I also hear a lot of `faggot’ and `queer.’ ”

In any event, Docter said Goodwin’s very public brand of transvestism, in which he doesn’t seem to be trying to pass as a woman, sounds highly unusual.

“In my opinion he’s a very small fraction of 1 percent,” Docter said. “If you stood at the Vietnam memorial every single day till next winter and beyond, you might find some other cross-dressers there, but your feet would get cold indeed before you’d find another like him. . . . If this is a man who cannot make it in his appearance as a woman, he may be engaging in a little defensive behavior — by letting the world see that `I am really a veteran and a guy, and I really have nothing to be ashamed of.’ ”

Goodwin, for his part, said he was born in Casper, the son of a hard-drinking waitress and a harder-drinking oil roughneck who imposed a cruel, nomadic existence on himself and his younger sister. His father’s demeaning nickname for him — which the old man used instead of his given name — is unprintable in a family newspaper.

After surviving childhood, part of which was spent living in an abandoned railroad car, Goodwin enlisted in the Air Force during Vietnam “because I didn’t want to get shot at.” But he said he was kicked out early — although discharged honorably because of an exemplary record — after a sergeant found him in bed wearing a “frilly blue nightie.” He was awakened by the enraged sergeant’s terrifying roar: “AIRMAN, WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?”

After returning from Guam, he tried the rodeo circuit for a while and took courses at the University of Wyoming before settling with his new wife in Douglas and getting a job at the Dave Johnson electrical generating plant operated by Pacific Power and Light. He had told Vickie of his cross-dressing compulsion a few months into their romance.

“I don’t recall that it was a crazy shock, but I was surprised,” she said. “At the time he was very undercover, so to speak. But as he came out, and became more and more public, it was very difficult for me. It was difficult to understand and to deal with. For a long time I refused to go out with him in public.”

There were also mounting problems at home and at work. The Goodwins’ house was vandalized more than once — windows shattered with a baseball bat, trees in the front yard uprooted. Once, right in front of his house in Douglas, Goodwin got into a brawl with an abusive stranger who kicked out two front teeth (he now wears a dental bridge). Police officers in both Casper and Laramie, where he would go to shop, arrested him for his cross-dressing, notwithstanding the absence of a law against it. In the mid-1980s, his supervisor at the power plant (where today he often wears a ribbon in his hair) threatened him with dismissal if he didn’t change his style.

“That was when I had a nervous breakdown,” Goodwin said.

Therapy sessions helped, he said, and the utility workers union protected his job. In the end he received a promotion to the position of control operator — in charge of one of the plant’s powerful turbine generators. He said he earned about $69,000 last year.

“They’re used to me now, and I’m accepted,” Goodwin said. Officials at the power plant didn’t return several phone calls.

These days, Goodwin involves himself in pacifism, politics, cross-dressing. For his 25th wedding anniversary, he renewed his vows with Vickie, inviting 30 friends to witness the ceremony, for which he wore a white satin gown.

He visited the Vietnam memorial this week to see the name of a close high school friend, Army communications specialist Jose Leo Lujan, who died in a helicopter crash during combat in 1968. Goodwin said that when he discovered that Lujan’s name was initially omitted from the wall, he toiled for more than a year to push the military bureaucracy to include it. “That was the most unselfish thing I ever did,” he said.

He returned home yesterday to Douglas, where, he said, he lives happily, occasionally stopping by the College Inn, a bar frequented by bikers, to have a beer. “It takes a real man to walk into the College Inn on a Saturday night wearing a dress,” he said.

[Angel.Marie76]

In the time that I have begun coming out to my friends, and soon my family, I would only hope, like a never ending set of dominoes, that for everything I do I have a positive chain reaction that will hopefully give people a slightly different thought on the people and places they interact with on a daily basis..

In perhaps a simple view of that I might say:

So, I've come out to my friends. Great. 3/4 of them have already met a gay, lesbian, or transgendered person before in their lives.. makes my job kind of easy. I'm just another person to them, albeit their friend, who's decided to show their inward strength and announce my real self to the world. That takes guts. Sometimes those 'guts' can be very inspiring to another, perhaps, less vocal or outward or personable than the average joe or jane. GREAT. If one person sees the energy and force of nature that it takes to, you name it, /not/ just step out of the closet but anything else their heart desires.. take a leap of faith, ask a girl out, take a new job or quit while they're ahead... the sky's the limit! OUTSTANDING!

The reality of, perhaps, my perspective on this 'What we do changes the world' is that, just dressing or coming out to the world as a crossdresser, transgender or transsexual is not really the key - the belief in yourself, your wellbeing, and DRIVE to BE or DO the things that mean the very most to you are often the things that empower the rest of us or them to do the very same. Courage is often something that people lack from time to time and day to day.. seeing someone they know standing strong against the face or force of uncertainty will sometimes give them the drive to stand up beside those that force or fight against it.. others will see it, I'm sure of it.. many others will just 'know' of it..

But if at least one other person on this planet says 'You know, if he or she can manage to stand up to all that bologna and I'm just sitting here b!tch!ng about blah blah blah.. what the heck does that make me for a person??' Then you've done it. Even if they don't even get off their butts and step up to whatever challenges them.. maybe they'll just tell someone else...

Is it idealism?? Maybe. Is it reality, absolutely. 'Can it happen to me?' It just did. ;-) I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for soo many of you (as an example).. and my friends have now seen a side of me that I hope empowers them to think about the struggles they face every day.

[deja true]

Angel... this post of yours is brilliant ... and exactly the way I've been thinking about this question.

Well put, darlin'...

I've found that I often out myself on purpose these days, often when I don't have to. It's important to me for some unexplainable reason to engage store managers and waitresses and cab drivers in a social and educational conversation about people like us. KInda like those dooor to door missionaries that want to "dispell the confusion" about their beliefs.

I think it works well on that kinda one to one basis, 'cos I get a lot of smiles and thank yous and "hope to see you again!"s.

[tricia_uktv]

Way girl, serious stuff. I don't know the answer but I am going to try to find out

[sterling12]

I think The War gets won by thousands and thousands of small battles.

It is very edifying to go to D.C. and testify and be a "very large frog," but to gain some type of tolerance, we need to have thousands and thousands of encounters with other people where we PROVE that we aren't much different from anyone else. Each time a Trans Person goes out on The Street, has dinner en femme' with a friend, attends a rally, a Pridefest, a Whatever, we are showing The Colors and making it just a little bit easier for others to start getting used to us being around. Every time, you make a call to a sponsor, because some jerk in The Media was "Trans -Bashing," Every time, you let a politician know that you want some rights for EVERYBODY in The LGBT Community, you have done "something," and it's something important!

I went to a new place over in Tampa, last Sat. Night. It caters mostly to Fetish Folks, BDSM Types, Swingers, and a little bit of everything else. (Scouting for a new place that people in my group might like) The people were surprisingly accepting of Joanie. Did they know anything about being Trans before that evening?....very little. But, we talked until the wee hours, exchanged ideas and Emails, and I like to think that maybe another dozen or so of these folks might have just a little better opinion about us. All because I tried to be friendly and "wage a small battle" that night.

I reckon you get The Idea. EVERY little thing helps! You don't have to be a "big deal," it all contributes to The Cause.

Peace and Love, Joanie

[Teri Jean]

Lori, you are so right and did you know if we do dress in a skirt the world as we know it will turn over and we will be crushed like a bug. Time to do the scientific test, where is my mini. LOL

Keli

[Miranda09]

That's an interesting question Lorileah. Basically I would have to say that if our lifestyle was considered as normal as any other lifestyle, I would like to think that it might make the world a better place to live. It would encourage, maybe, embracing our diffferences rather than fighting over them, and let's face it, that's why we just can't get along very well because someone is always trying to force someone else to conform, and that there's is the only "proper" lifestyle. I know one thing, it would certainly help the economy with all the clothes all of us would buy....openly!! But I'm generally an optimist about people, that taken individually, they'll accept just about anything, but taken collectively, that's a different story!

[Chrissie P]

Heck, we are helping the economy right now. How many people do you know outside of us who have two completely different wardrobes...

[LisaM]

Lorileah,

That is a wonderful question with no easy answer.

Gay people have been discussing the same issue for years. Would 'coming out' help the group gain acceptance? Some people favor forced 'outing' which I strongly disagree with.

I think along the lines of Sterling12 where the war can be won along the lines of a thousand battles. Some people will choose to 'out' themselves while others will remain hidden. Those who are hidden can find other ways to help the cause--financial support or just being accepting of TG people when out with others.

We all need to choose our path and our own battles but hopefully we can all contribute.

[Jennifer_Ph]

I'd say it makes the economy better. We have to have two sets of clothes. Not to mention all the shoes! I bet if you could nail it down, crossdressing is a multi-million dollar gig.

[gender_blender]

I think alot about how my being openly transgender AFFECTS the world around me and, at the very least, hope to be a source of inspiration for all who wish to achieve their dreams or force some to be a little more openminded.

[janelle]

For me hun, I am just being myself & those that know & love me know that the person they knew is still inside, so that world keeps turning. As for the goverment & wars, I do not think we change a thing. Most of those people are interested in"making themselves" rich or protected. Yes we may get some help here & there but remember it has been said," all men are created equal", so our rights or whatever else you would be looking at should be a no brainner. Is that changing the world, I guess yes because I could see peace come from it if others never got put down for whatever reason.
Think about it, no more putting colored peole down or a small person, a gay or lesbian or anyone else does that not say peace in the worl? Yes I know that is a far fetched dream but that is what this country was meant to be. For me, its time people think of others & not themselves & the world will be fine & we won't need to worry about the rest.
Thats my feelings, & i am sorry if I hurt anyone here.

Hugs,
Janelle