“How do I balance my need for genuine self-expression against the fair consideration owed to loved ones sharing my life?”

“To what extent have I been openly accountable to others for the loss of trust created by my failure to disclose the full extent of my lifelong gender conflict?”

“How do I find the courage and entitlement to embrace my authentic Self, in the face of all the real and imagined consequences”?

“What am I willing to give in my effort to repair damaged trust without sacrificing my claim to wholeness and integrity?”

“How, despite my personal suffering and that potentially inflicted on others as a result of my gender conflict, do I measure the worth of the positive contributions I have made to my family, friends and colleagues?”

“If I do move forward with gender transition, what changes are necessary for me to fulfill my ongoing commitment to children and others who have relied on me”?



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“…We spend our whole lives feeling awful about who we are…feeling a need to apologize to humanity for breaking the most basic social norm. Then when it comes time to empower ourselves and rise above every social teaching that has metastasized from society to our consciousness, we feel a great ache in our solar plexus – guilt. And ironically enough, the people who want to block us realize this better than we do, and they dig in for battle, throwing back at us our greatest fear…”How can you be so selfish???!!!” I say, how can we be so SELF-LESS!! We have spent a whole life trying to ease the sense of comfort in others by sacrificing our entire identity. If you don’t believe you are justified in being yourself, why should anyone else?”

“The pitfall…is that the selfishness/self-esteem balance tends to be a floodgate instead of a rheostat. In the past, I had built up tremendous resentment toward the world over not being able to be myself. The funny part is that the world had no idea that I was not being myself…the joke was on me. I created 30 years of negative energy…this was my own baggage that wasn’t going to fit into my overhead compartment on my new journey. The party was over…the pity party. I did this awkwardly, as I think many of us do. In order to mount the courage to overthrow this wave of guilt, it is easy for us to call upon the natural power of this negative energy…resentment and anger…which gives birth to self-entitlement, i.e., not me, not me…becomes me, me, me. I think we are truly entitled to a period of me, me, me as we go through transition…with one very important caveat…intent has to be in the right place. To fine tune that balance is the key to finding grace in gaining the respect of others in your transition…solving a problem requires different thinking than the mind set that created it. So keep your minds open, trust your intuition, and the rest will fall into place.”

Not my own words, but I refer to them once in a while...