October 25th, 2018, that was the first time I did any public speaking on transgender issues. IT was at a local community college, College of the Sequoias. I was part of a panel where students were allowed to ask us any questions they wanted. I think I was one of about 8 people or so. The fist one woman speech I did was the next semester in March of 2019 at UC Merced. It was one year later when COVID hit and my entire semester of speaking, at about 20 different classes, was cancelled. Ugh!
I never really recovered in terms of my speaking gigs. I continued speaking at UC Merced, but pretty much everything else dropped off the planet. It was mostly because my personal health began to be more of a pressing issue. That caused me to use pretty much all of my leave time. Thus it was a bit more difficult to justify taking off all of the time to go speak, for free. Yeah let’s not forget that part. I have really only ever spoken for free. So um yeah.
Anywho, as you may have read, I have chosen to no longer be a middle school math teacher. Which means that now I’m going to have oodles and oodles of time available to start speaking much more than I ever have before. Thus it is that I have found myself writing a new speech over these last few weeks. And it has not been easy. I have multiple speeches already written so I wasn’t starting from scratch. But I needed to really get in there, update the whole thing, and go over in detail what has been happening in my life over the last 7 years.
Sure, I’ve updated my speech since I first wrote it in 2019, but I haven’t updated it that much. And much has changed since that time in my life. Let’s see, orchi, vaginoplasty, revision, fat transfer breast augmentation, being harassed out of my teaching position, hmm, yeah just a few things. As well, I am tired of avoiding the politcal shit storm that is the current conservative anti-trans crusade. So I’ve tried to detail the things that have happened here in the US since my transition started in 2017. And wow, that has been a lot. Like a lot a lot. I know, what a wordsmith, I’m a regular poet with the lexicon, I know, thanks for pointing it out.
So much of what I experienced in my own life and in the world of politics has honestly been immensely overwhelming. Add in trying my best to be a quality middle school math teacher and wow, I’m really impressed with myself that I have made it to this point. And sadly that goes for just about every single trans and gender diverse individual that exists on the planet right now. At time it just feels like a massive public outcry of anti gender diversity, and it just keeps getting worse.
However, having seen some of the best and the worst in humanity with working with 12, 13, and 14 year olds, I’ve come out the other side with an immense amount of hope within humanity. It is not our worst parts that define us, it is the soft parts, the caring parts, the loving parts. The gentle hug, the soft kiss on the cheek, the gentle wiping away of a tear from their cheek.
The speech has a start, middle, and end. I am still revising at this point. It’s at like 300 slides or so. The goal is for it to be a 90 minute speech. I haven’t tried to give the speech yet so I have no idea how long it’s going to be! It could be ridiculously too long, or too short, or just right. I’m going to go with just right, lol. Good luck to me on that.
Hope you are well!
ps – if any of you write in WordPress, do you have the Headline Analyzer? It is hilarious. Which is how I ended upon this title. It doesn’t write it for me, it analyzes what I write and give it a score. Today’s score is a 75, so I’m going with it!
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