the negative side of the transgender community

While we all try to remain positive, there's always that dark side of our world that we're all aware of but don't want to admit or talk about.  There was a post last week on fetlife that really affected me, at the very least never want to attempt to transition.  The post basically says they are done transitioning for good.  All of her online and offline friends have blackmailed and extorted her (including those in the trans community).  Her reputation and career has been sabotaged, and she has been raped 5 times.

Now granted, we have no idea what the backstory is, it's just a rambling post.  However if you follow trans social media and news, you know that being trans is an uphill battle.  If you do come out, you potentially lose a lot of family and friends that don't support your life choice.  The same goes for employers.  While many states have protection, many don't and can literally fire people for being trans.

My trans life is very secretive.  Other than this blog and my fetlife account (which does have photos of me dressed up), the only person that really knows about my lifestyle is my wife.  And we wonder why some of us stay in the closet?  It's that horrendous fear that someone in our circle will find out about us and not be on board with supporting our lifestyle.  This could be as tame as simply ignoring the elephant in the room, to full on sabotage of wanting to out us and ruin our lives.  You hear about people only dressing up when they travel and I can see why.  The odds of you running into someone you know is about .001%.  Dressing up in your own area the odds are pretty good.  I blogged about this before.. I decided to wear nails and go grocery shopping, and damned if I didn't see a co-worker shopping there.  Murphy's law isn't just a saying.. if things can go wrong, it will go wrong.

recurring dream?

So I vividly remembered a dream, but what was weird is I didn't remember I had a similar dream until I revisited the same scenario.  So the first dream that I'm now remembering was that I was a drag queen at some bar/restaurant somewhere in a mall.  I don't remember what I was wearing in the first dream other than I had on heels.  This second dream it started out as me walking through the mall with the thought that I was on my way to work but didn't know what the job was.  I looked at my watch and saw that it was 6pm which was when I started... I walked to where I thought my job was, only to find that the store front was covered up.  I was like "what the hell?  Did they close? what's going on?".  I walked around a few times and when I circled back I finally realized that they had covered up the entrance with a giant white wall with a subtle swinging door for the entrance.  Once I walked through there it lead me down a long hallway, and then through the front entrance.  As I walked through the restaurant I could see several drag queens walking around prepping for the night.  For some reason one of the drag queens was William Belli and as I walked by she looked up, said "heyyyy" and did a little jig and I did a jig back.  I walked to the back room where the dressing room was.  I had a coat on to cover up my yellow floral dress, and had on bright yellow nike gym shoes.  I started to get my heels on and get ready to do my makeup.  It felt like a newish job, and I wasn't really sure what my role was.  Was I a performer?  Was I a bartender? A waitress?  Hostess?  I was worried how tiring this type of job of standing for a long time was going to be.

I wondered this morning why I was having a recurring dream about being a drag queen.  I have been super busy lately and haven't really had time for dressing up, so perhaps this was my brain's way of dealing with not being able to do so in real life.