My Subconcious communicating through dreams: The relationship gardens

     Today was a good day. Robin and I took our eldest dogter to the Texas Reds Festival in downtown Bryan. Pictures will be posted here and on Facebook as soon as I can get them off my phone.
      Afterwards, we were exhausted. So I ran an errand and then ending up going to sleep till now.

     In the stirring of my subconscious mind as it spoke to me through dream I went to the past with a mixture of characters in the present to learn a lesson about relationship gardens.
     The setting seemed to be a bar, having drinks with friends and considering dinner and desert. My date was the partner I had when I began transition or an avatar for her at best. Deliberation at the end of dinner had to do with getting the drink that my other friends were getting or not with limited funds. This seemed more like a avatar, metaphor, or symbol for something deeper though as the conversation seemed to go back to our relationship and the discussion of allowing me to date someone else as well, to the point of fact that the decision at hand was to open the relationship and date someone else.
      In the waking world, I should say that in 2002 I asked permission to leave the long term relationship I was in since 1994 to play house with another. I had made it utterly clear to the person I wanted to play house with that I did not want to leave the friendship I had with my long term partner and still wanted to have connection with her - though I would be sleeping with this new partner. One might have thought this simple since the person I wanted to play house with - let's call her Barbie for simplicity, had a history of dating multiple women at once. It did not play out simply. As the dreams today made me turn a critical eye on the situation - it was ok for Barbie to date around, but she wanted strict control over whom I was allowed to visit with and who not. Even though I entered playtime with Barbie with a certain understanding that I would remain in friendship and connection with my former lover, within 3-6 months that degraded to the point that Barbie said I had to make a choice.
      A smart woman would have said, "Whoa, wait a minute. You came to play with me understanding that the sandbox has some rules that I had set down as well and I want to play tractors and sand castles with my long time friend and mentor" I was not a smart woman at the time though, I was a woman who had a lack of gender confidence and has moments of ego weakness. I had gone to play with Barbie because she was funny and seemed attracted to me as a girl. I did not know whether Suzie (my long term partner) saw me as a girl and still wanted to play house as two girls or missed playing house with a daddy and a mommy. I had confronted Suzie about the concern and was assured that she liked playing both kinds of house, but something in me was till not sure. Barbie had come in, come on strong, and seemed to really want to play "Debbie has two mommies".
     So, Suzie and I parted ways in a way where I wanted to cut things cold as directed by Barbie. I have regreted that decision ever since, as part of me loves and always will love Suzie.
   
     Which brings us to my garden now. Hypothetically I have a garden that is a secret, happy place, but that cannot grow tomatoes. It is not so much that the other gardener and I don't want tomatoes, as they would be a healthy addition for salads, sandwhiches, etc. It is that the soil just cannot grow tomatoes. So, we are left with three alternatives.

1. Live without tomatoes
2. Walk away from the garden to one that has tomatoes and become gardener there.
3. Visit another garden with tomatoes, enjoy those tomatoes there and form a bridge between both gardens.
4. Seek a Master Gardener to help us grown tomatoes, to change the soil so that tomatoes may grow.

Well, I cannot live with 1) and option 2) ignores the fact that my current gardner and I have built this garden together and have the joyful sound of young gardeners running around (though they are rather furry). Option 3 has been discussed and my co-gardener seems open to the idea but there are risks to personal feelings and the neglect to some degree of the garden we have. One would have to proceed with much love and careful insight to make sure garden 1 remains lush and healthy while visiting market for tomatoes.
 Option 4 has been suggested, but not all gardeners are willing to attend classes taught by a Master Gardener.



What was my mind unveiling to me? Well, she was tearing away a level of guilt and understanding not thought of before with Suzie and Barbie. Barbie liked playing house with several ladies at once. However, Barbie did not like any of those ladies playing house with other ladies, as was the case with me.
Now I seem to be entering a path in life where I am going to be playing with other gardeners. What if my co-gardener also wants to go to market for produce we do not grow in our garden? Will I be prepared to be ok with that, or will I become Barbie myself?

Treatise: How should we live in community with one another

"Whether you are a lefty leftist, a righty rightest, or politically diverse our first duty should be to community and specifically to caring for each and every one of our citizens. When those living in a land are free from constraints of fear then the government can justly respond to the people." - Me

Free from constraints would mean many things:

1. To not be tied down because of fear of lack of healthcare. Ex. not being able to leave a job for better opportunities because you need that health insurance. Universal health care lifts up all of our citizenry and is preventative to the spread of vectors relating to bad health.
2. Unshackled by constraints on justice. Specifically, the ability to bring to justice those who have caused damage against you without limits such as proposed by tort reform or tort caps. You should have your day in court where a community of peers weighs all the proper evidence and fairly distributes judgement.

When it really comes down to it....perhaps we should look at what our priorities are as individuals and as a people. Perhaps our priorities should look more like:

Community - that is the only priority.

When one takes care of community, one must take basic care of oneself and family in order to be able to then care for others and the community.

Other's may list God or religion as their first priority. I believe Jesus taught, and many faiths around the world teach, and my own relationship with the compassionate divine (whom I often refer to as Goddess though zhe really has no gender - God or Goddess or perhaps God and Goddess), teach that our communion and relationship with others is in itself honoring that holy essence. After all, is it not the divine spark in others with which we relate when we are in community?

I have to reveal though that I have thought for a long time that one's first priority should be self and that this is the best motivator. My position was that when one took care of self, then one could better take care of community. However, this often becomes abused by greed so that taking care of self is not done in a way that then engenders taking care of community.

At work my attitude has taken to point of  "If I am sick, or feeling unwell" then I should take off, I try to honor this with my co-workers and their individual needs with school, crap of life that happens to us all, and illness. In a real sense, taking care of self means that one takes care of the team by not spreading illness and being able to focus on the team tasks at hand.

At the same time, I have some times put community above my family and individual basic needs to the detriment of home, partner, lovers....and most of all....canine children.

I guess my spirituality is community....in a way.
And, for me community is often stratified - for good or bad, in the following way:

1. Transgender
2. LGBT
3. Allies
4. Diversity
5. Those who are overlooked - immigrants, etc. - basic social justice
6. Environment
7. Greater homogenous community.

So, I ask the question:
What are your priorities? How do they make the world a better place for our ancestors and our descendants (heritage)

Texas A&M George Bush School of Government and Public Service

Watch about 1:15 in. I was honored to be a part of this video for the Bush School after receiving my Graduate level Certificate in NonProfit Management

What does it feel like to be a woman?

     This evening I posed an interesting question to myself in introducing myself to someone new, someone I hope will become a friend. I asked myself that age old question, "What does it feel like to be a woman"

     I started this gender path as Katrina Dawn Stewart on April 10, 2001. Ten years later I am not any closer to an answer for you. Then again, as sure as I am about many things in my "know it all" life, I look back and realize that many things I "knew" at the age of twenty or even thirty are not so certain now. Life is muddy, mucky, dirty, and complex...there are no simple answers and our culture does not really provide the answers though it tries to assert it does.

     There is no existential/essential way of being a woman, there is no way of feeling like a man. I know I am me. I know that the path for me to take hormones and become Katy was life changing, upsetting, wrecked my life, destroyed my privilege, and cost me authority and positionality in management where I work. I also know that nothing I could have imagined at the start of April 10, 2010 would have prepared me for where I am ten years later, or where I will be ten years from now.

     I feel I am more "woman" now than I personally was then because the slow fires of life seem to have purified me in some ways. I feel I am more authentic as a "woman" now, though ...again...that essential category holds no water, no real value. I am my woman and I claim my identity as a woman as something so unique and special in how I wear this skin that no one else could really know.

     It is not the clothes, it is not the breasts - though the perspective of hormones has changed my life in a womanly way in some dramatic ways. It is not the way I talk or the way I act at times - because my brand of femininity is fierce, stubborn, messy, and yet extremely sensitive and caring. I would not go back. In fact, I look forward to more changes on my horizon. At the same time, I regret what has been lost, I mourn for better planning, and I know that no amount of planning would have ever been enough.

     Being a woman, like being a man is complicated, complex, and there are no real guidelines. Sure, there are cultural scripts, there are proper ways of living in gender...but those don't reflect who we really are, what we really do at all waking moments. We are each a spark, a flame of uniqueness in the world that adapts culture to us as much as culture adapts us to itself.

     I am a woman, but how I have come to my womanhood has been my gendered journey and that is ever evolving, I still wrestle with nightmares, with fears.

     I also still have many dreams in which I am a male character. Does that somehow mean I am not a good candidate for surgery, that at some subconcious level I am really a man and not a woman at all? One might argue that. Consider this though, I lived 29 year of my life as a man...those records, memories, and subconscious life...however much I strived to be a woman still were very real man experiences. In other words, I have baggage. I also still wrestle with my own hangup on the male bits I still have. Why can I not accept myself as a woman with these bits. After all, those I love who have the same bits and are women are only women in my eyes. Is it internalized transphobia? Maybe? Perhaps.... Or, is it that for me, for my path, I want that surgery that confirms my gender. In other words, I can accept another's decision one way or another, but for me what is right is to have this surgery.

    How can one prove something so personal to a therapist without sounding wishy washy or conflicted? I don't know. I don't know because there are also artificial complications to the matter - costs of surgery, fear of results, fear of the unknown, hope for what will be and realism for what might not be.

     Still, having had my orchie in November, I am amazed at some things...I am amazed at how my libido is either gone or changing...how I am not feeling a constant thirst that cannot be quenched and a constant attack of need or desire for sex. I really am calmer in that regard...and there is peace in that. Perhaps there is a lesson therein for the fears and unknowns of my goal?

Wayne Christian and his Senate Bill

For context, please go here:
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-legislature/82nd-legislative-session/video-pansexual-amendment-debate/

"While you were sleeping last night, State Rep. Wayne Christian, R-Center, resurrected an amendment to SB 1 that would ban colleges from using state funds or university facilities for gender and sexuality centers. This is a must watch series of videos!!"






  I would like to take a few moments of your time to set the record queer and correct:
While I was growing up my mother often told me that "I didn't understand, I didn't have the whole story" when quite often with my dragon heart and genius mind I often saw the complex mess of life more clearly than many.

Of course in his testimony Wayne Christian took things out of context. So, let me please try to attempt to put them in context.

The questions he read off from a handout (from UT) were most likely a visualization, guided thinking technique often used to create empathy and understanding for what another goes through. One takes a predominant audience identity and questions it in the same vein that LGBT identities are questioned every day.This creates a cognitive dissonance and dissociation that can be used to highlight how others feel.

As a sidenote, I find it interesting that the honorable Wayne Christian could not speak his own gender identity.

The video taken from Texas A&M's Cay Crowe presentation....ooooh, where do I begin.

1. The student who took this video violated the sanctity of a safe space in the same manner of those people who videotape visitors to planned parenthood. This student took a sacred trust and betrayed his/her fellow aggies and the environment created
2. The student violated copyright law by not getting permission to tape and rebroadcast
3. The student created terror by posting to YouTube showing he could get into a sacred space of fellow students and reveal to public what was private. Safe spaces are not safe when people feel that their identities, what they are learning, etc will be broadcast to the whole world
4. And finally, Cay Crow did this safe sex presentation free of charge as a service to students before break. In my mind it is better to teach a student how to operate heavy machinery (ie anal sex) instead of just letting them go at it without any guidance. We know students are going to have sex, we know they are going to have all different kinds of sex, the best method for their own safety, the safety of their partners, and the safety of all of us (STI's to name just one effect), is to give them practical, sound, safer methods of doing what they are going to do in the healthiest methods possible.

So, it is late....but my brain was burning as Wayne Christian used that crap out of context.

And with that I have to applaud Lowell Kane and the Texas A&M GLBT Resource Center for all they do to provide safe and nurturing environments to students that I love and care for so very much.

I may work in the community, and not at A&M. I may not experience some of the fallout of this first hand. But, my roots in this community have grown deep. My love of TAMU's potential has always been strong and the antics of Wayne Christian and also what has been going on here at A&M are sad, abhorrent, and have lighted my ire.

Wayne wants equal treatment. Lifting up diversity is not a zero sum game honorable lawmaker. When GLBT students get something, it does not automatically take away from straight students who are reinforced with heterosexual teaching, training, reference, and health care centered on them and their "lifestyle" every single hour or every single day.

When are we going to stop this damn debate that by thinking of others we somehow hurt those who are in the majority.

Depressed - beauty demons sitting on my heart

     This morning I looked through some pictures of myself at the 2nd annual Austin Harvey Milk Commemorative March. True, I chose not to wear makeup, still pictures - any pictures lately spin me into a confidence down spiral.
http://www.farrisfoto.com/GetEqual/HarveyMilkConferenceAndMarch/index.html

Here is what I see when I look at these pictures. A passionate, angry woman with hair that seems to move on its own because of the goddess aura surrounding her. A woman who is fat, doesn't have a very pretty face (and having a pretty face means a whole lot to me), and whose hair is stringy, old, grey and belongs in a horror flick.

Robin looks at me and tries to comfort me by saying that I have just as beautiful a face as they day we met.
Sweet, nice, and helpful....something I will remember and cling to as a totem as I try to claw my way out of this dark place.

Still, I see a woman who is not as pretty as someone like Nikki Araguz and who has over the years gained an ever expanding girth.

I hope that yoga will help with the girth. The reality is that I eat too many sweets and have little self control. The yoga is better for the stress detox and the alignment of my body and soul...peace within rather than with easy, rapid weight loss.

Can I hold on long enough for the yoga to be of weight loss benefit.
Can I stop thinking of myself as this ugly old woman whose angry all the time.....

I don't know, this hole I fall into seems to be a cyclical one.


Much love, to a day or moment soon out of this darkness to a sunlit, cool beach.

Presentation Anxiety - opinions welcome, only if they are positive.

I am worried about my presentation at the Harvey Milk Conference this weekend. 


So, some critics (who are good friends I trust) say I put too many words on a slide. Others (also good friends and mentors) say I "read" too much from my slides. Both are true to some degree.


What is left out is that the detail I put into slides is to help me remember what in the heck I am supposed to say when I am in front of an audience. Also, my natural inclination is to read and react to the audience and build from there.

So, what do I tell myself? Perhaps that they have valid concerns, things I can work towards, but that I also have to be fair to myself and my way of doing things. If I clam up worrying about "did I put too many words on the slide" I cannot grow as a presenter through observation of how "better" presenters work the craft.

Also, in order to present I have to be relaxed enough to put those concerns "on the back burner" and engage the audience.

I like and need the structure of powerpoint. Perhaps sometimes I lean on that too much instead of using it as a visual aid. If I were teaching in the classroom, what would I be doing? Well, I would have an outline with the information I want the students to learn, those key points are what I would write up on the board - isn't the same thing I am doing when crafting the powerpoint ?


I cannot undersell my own flexibility though. Earlier this year I did an "off the hip" presentation with a good friend and mentor to a PFLAG chapter. The conversation had was pretty darn good - made better because the friend was there. But, I did "hold my own"


It is late, I may be over thinking this. 
I say, go with what has been built.
Some are going to think I am reading from the slides, some are going to like the slides, and some are going to say, "Hey, that Katy Stewart is pretty good at what she does."


Your comments appreciated.

Virtual BBQ Benefit

More to come, but please stop by a good 'ole Texas BBQ Benefit, done virtually for my friend Lou Weaver

http://louweaver2011.eventbrite.com/

Today only, zero-calorie, free virtual PECAN PIE with purchase of any BBQ plate.

Katy reveals all - A Gender Project featuring me.

Andres did a wonderful job piecing this together...I am both honored and blushing about the video.

Equality Texas Lobby Day - Katy Stewart