Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Voices...

No, not in my head, I'll talk about that some other day! :-D The voices that I mean are the voices here in Blogistan. One of those voices is Gin's. This post began as a comment at her blog but kept growing like Jabba the Hut on an all chocolate diet and was achieving truly monstorous proportions. Thanks for the idea, hun! :-D Another voice is Halle's I showed my support for her yesterday at her blog and I'm doing so again here today. That she thought that she was any less trans than any of us because she hasn't transitioned and that she thought that she wasn't qualified to comment at our blogs truly hurts my heart.


We are a community who are seperated by age, race, religion, education, occupation, distance, nations, and even languages but are joined by the core reality of who we are. While our lives are all different we all finally reached the point where we reached out to each other over the internet to find a connection to others like us.


I've noticed in the time that I've been here that although we have people here who are from large cities like NY a great many of us are in places where we are somewhat isolated from others like us. The internet has been a godsend for those of us who would otherwise be living life in almost total isolation as we were before the internet when information was hard to come by and connections to others was almost impossible.


Every voice counts! Every story counts! Every opinion counts! Those who are telling their stories and giving their opinions are helping all of us now and are helping those who will tell their stories tomorrow!


Dani xxx

5 comments:

- said...

Well said, Dani!

Amy K. said...

You're absolutely right. Where would we be without the internet? Isolated and alone, for the most part. Heck, I found out what sort of person a transsexual really was back in 2002... on the internet. How surprised and pleased I was when I saw they weren't like the 'Sweet Transvestite From Transylvania' on The Rocky Horror Picture show. Then I began to wonder... y'know, I'm not sure I'm a crossdresser after all!

I started by reading Becky Allison's blog, back when they were called "online journals" or something. ("Blog? What's a blog?") Now people are reading my blog, and yours, and so many others'.

Information is power. Pure and simple.

Leslie Ann said...

I think the internet has saved many of us from lives of quiet desperation. Now we have the option of a life of loud desperation, infinitely better. What I have lost in privacy, I more than made up with true friends.

Like Amy, the internet opened my eyes to the fact that I was more normal than I ever would've thought.

Nice post, Dani!

Dani said...

@ Gin: Thank you, I'm glad that you liked it!


@ Amy: Isolated and alone very well describes my situation pre internet. Growing up in NH in the 70's and 80's there was no information and no support and I was truly flying blind. I spent years thinking that I may be gay, and then spent more years thinking that I was a ''transvestite'' but neither definition fit the way that I felt. I finally realized what I was when I saw an episode of Sally Jessy Raphael that featured the very beautiful Sarah Luiz. It struck me like a lightning bolt!


I think that the internet is the reason that we have so many young transitioners nowadays. They have access to information that we never had when we were younger. Oh, to have had the internet in 1983! Thank you, Amy!

@ Leslie: Loud desperation, I like that! :-D I would agree that it's infinately better than the deafening silence of quiet desperation. If you're screaming in a crowded room someone's probably going to answer, if you're screaming in an empty room all you'll ever hear is your own voice echoing back at you. I spent my growing up years thinking that I was some kind of a freak! Later, I found that I wasn't alone and others felt the way I did but it wasn't until the internet that I found, to my delightful suprise, just how many of us there really are! I haven't had any privacy issues...yet! I try to be pretty careful in cyberspace but I'm pretty new at this, too. I think that the connections are well worth the risk to my privacy, so far, anyway. Thank you, Leslie!


Dani xxx

Halle said...

"The internet has been a godsend for those of us who would otherwise be living life in almost total isolation as we were before the internet when information was hard to come by and connections to others was almost impossible."

So true Dani! Being alone and "feeling like a screw-up" is the best way to describe the situation before this world opened up to me.

Keep telling your story Hun!