just thought i'd share with you if not the whole book then part of this book that i read like it's my bible.... i take to heart and to mind and almost depend on it at times...
"Today could be the last day of your life. whether or not you're thinking of killing yourself, you could die at any moment.
Still here?
Excellent! That's called staying alive.
Considering that these could very well be the last few moments of your life, why are you spending such precious time reading this book?
And just who am I, trying to creep inside your head and talk to you about staying alive? You have every right to know more about me. So, here's me coming out to you: My name is Kate Bornstein, and I'm a Transsexual.
Still here?
Excellent! That's called being interested in life's possibilities.
I'm not exactly a transsexual. A transsexual is a man who becomes a woman, or a woman who becomes a man, and I'm not a man, and I'm not a woman. I break too many rules of both those genders to be one or the other. I transgress gender. You could call me transgressively gendered. You could call me transgender. Me, I call myself a traveler.
I'm traveling through all sorts of identities, picking and choosing what works and leaving the rest behind. I shift and change in order to make staying alive more worthwhile. I shift and change in order to keep myself from getting stuck someplace where I'd rather be dead, or might as well be.
Sometimes I'm aware of shifting my identity, and other times I shift identities without even thinking about it, like a chameleon skillfully morphing its colors and markings to accommodate an ever-changing environment. They're not multiple personalities, they're all different ways of expressing me in the world.
Are you exactly the same person today that you were seven years ago? That day could have been the last day of your life, but it wasn't. Does it seem to you that you're different than you were then? In point of fact, you are a completely different person at this moment than you were even when you began reading this book. On a submolecular level, nothing about your body is in the same place as it was just a few moments ago. And then there's your heightened awareness that you really could be dead at any moment. So, are you the same person? I'm not saying you're not. I'm just asking: do you ever consider what it is that makes you the same person now as you were ten minutes ago, when so much of you is truly different?
Still here? Are you sure? Just kidding. That's called coming to terms with life through a synthesis of postmodern theory and Zen Buddhism.
I was a boy who didn't want to be a boy, and in the either/or, gotta-be-one-thing-or-the-other modernist world of the 1950s, the only alternative to boy was girl, which i wasn't allowed to be. No on talked about the possibility of being neither. So I worked real hard at being a boy. It was something I was conscious of doing all the time. I watched other boys and did what they did. I did what all the ads and movies and school textbooks told me that boys do."
will continue soon...
(no copyright taken.)
-[Pd]-
