Being Me

  Yesterday I made the third significant step in my transition and now I wait.

I was very deeply honoured and, I will admit, not a little frightened to be asked to share my story for #IWD2021. This was a work event, and so I can't share the video replay on here, but I can share the text of what I had to say today.

There’s been some recent news around the rebranding of the Mr. Potato Head line to drop the “Mr.” as a part of the overall branding strategy. The characters of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head would still exist, and be sold, but the overall branding is being changed to be more inclusive. All in all, a pretty innocuous change, I think, but not to the world of social media. I hesitated to post this, I'll be very honest, but I cannot begin to change my corner of the world without making some, who are closer to me, a little uncomfortable. So, yes, some who read this may well read themselves into the post, but before you get defensive, please ask yourself why you are feeling that way. The reason it’s on my mind at all, despite being well past the age of actually caring about a toy potato, is the casual transphobia that arose as a result of the news. Whether it was meme jokes showing a confused Mr. Potato Head unable to pee at a urinal or a collection of posts and comments along the line of “He...

The other day, in a discussion, a member of the group I was with commented, "We're so lucky to have Jo here, she can give us the male perspective." Sigh.

I'm sure there's a fairly decent chance that you've seen that meme, the one with Archie Bunker and George Jefferson laughing it up and lamenting the fact that we can't make jokes like we used to. Well, keep lamenting as I, for one, have no desire to return to those times.

I had a moment the other day, one that I seldom recall ever encountering in the past and that was, quite simply, a moment of belonging.

I tweeted the other day “one of the things that feels really good about being out is that I feel like I can finally react to things from friends and family like I always wanted to.” I don’t think I can overstate the sense of emotional happiness that stems from that simple truth.