The following rather vile comment was posted in response to my post "Sometimes you need to poke the animals" which was a title not directed at any individual but a metaphor because I felt uncomfortable replacing animals with transsexuals. June Hingle made the following comment and for all concerned she was never part of this conversation or discussion but decided to interject herself.
@Anne,
This appears to be someone's very ignorant comment about you:
"I gather from your comment on Aria's blog that you were into girls before you started transitioning which puts you in the Aria camp and means you never felt the intensity and discomfort the majority of Type VI felt."
So she (or "he" for that matter) has the divine ability to know what others have internally gone through. Amazing!
How about this one:
"At least you had an outlet which those that were attracted to boys did not have."
...And (He) didn't? He had his gay friends. He was able to act out the part of whatever he felt he was by being with another "gay boy", and playing the girly part. Some of us didn't have that "luxury". Some of us fought those feelings inside, as painful as it would get. Some of us were so conscientious of the bodies we were born with that we would push the boys away, even when the "urge" became overwhelming.
These generalizations about people, the bashing, calling names, the acting as if she(or he) knows it all are sure signs of an internal conflict within (his, or her) own being.
Anne, you have never said anything demeaning about Liz (or me), but Liz has no qualms about expressing whatever comes to mind without even the slightest worry that she (or her) might have stepped on someone's heart, or innermost feelings.
Good going Liz, you once again showed face.
I made a misinformed comment after a comment by Anne on Aria's blog and deserved to be criticized for my error and apologized but it was between Anne and me and not Miss Hingle who enjoys playing fast and loose with her homophobia and her vile comments about me along with her perceived delusions about herself. I realize she is mentally ill so I will not attack her personally like she has me unless it gets worse and then I do reserve the right to respond but I am going to tell you the true story about that boy she calls gay and a terrified and confused child that began in 1958. I will leave it to my readers to make the decision.
I was very young when I entered High School in 1958 but I was as tall then as I am today at 5'-8" and didn't weigh much more than 115-120. I had no idea what I was but from my tenth birthday on my gender discomfort just got worse and worse and I spent a lot of time crying and begging mom to let me be a girl but it was the 1950s and that was not going to happen. I did try to fit in for my mom but it was senseless. I had no idea I was transsexual and had no idea I had low testosterone and slightly elevated estrogen levels but my body was just weird. By the time I reached High School I knew I was attracted to boys but only as a girl and that I want to make sure is clear. I could never have been with a boy as a boy as Miss Hingle claims.
I had been tutoring kids since the 8th grade and it was no different in High School. I guess I was not very threatening because I was and am a good teacher. I was assigned a boy that was an athlete and a junior. Actually he was the star athlete and he needed to be kept eligible.When he walked into the Library late for our first meeting I admit he made me gasp because I had never really seen him and he was just so fine. Our first session was uncomfortable for me because I had never been near a boy I was attracted to and I was forceful when telling him not to be late.
The thing that I noticed early on was he kept peeking looks at me and we had to sit close together to go over his lessons. I was terrified of boys. I was terrified to walk the corridors between classes. I was terrified to go near a bathroom. I was terrified on the way to school and on the way home from school because it was more like a gauntlet and I got hurt a lot. Between my 10th and 14th birthdays I made 17 trips to the emergency room at the local Hospital. Only 3 or 4 of those trips were for my suicide attempts. Between being deliberately pushed into a peat-bog fire by a neighbor, an attempted rape gone wrong, and assaults by confused boys that thought it was good sport to beat the shit out of the kid that was different I got hurt a lot and not one time did the police or anyone help except this one nurse that kept telling the Police they will kill this child unless you stop this which brought about the "boys will be boys" and "he asked for it being that way" like I really had much of a choice. Among the injuries was a broken arm, a broken wrist, a dislocated shoulder, and sundry minor cuts and bruises.
I was so scared of boys that if one said boo I jumped and tried to run. It did not help that this boy Kevin's friends were 3 of the boys that hurt me all the time. I was in the state of constant terror and I was not running around chasing boys and I disliked girls because they had what I wanted more than living. That picture of me on my profile was me only younger. I didn't do boy that well and in honesty I had just stopped trying to be what I was not when I reached High School. It was the beginning of my open rebellion against being what I was not.
A short time after I began tutoring him he noticed me peeking a look and asked in a non threatening way why I was staring at him but there was no such thing as non-threatening if a boy asked me anything. My instincts when I thought I was going to be hurt was to find a spot against a wall and curl up and cover my face to protect it and I did this asking him not to hurt me. I wore glasses then and they flew off when I moved to safety and I can still remember so clearly how kind he was in telling me he would never think of hurting me and his brown eyes were just so kind and he said something weird like 'you have such beautiful eyes" and caught himself in mid-sentence.
My first year in High School resulted in everyone figuring I was a "fag" and other pretty nasty words. Kevin tried to be my friend but I would have none of it. I was so fearful I built a stone wall around myself and the only people let inside those walls were my brother Ray and my mother. I did not know at this time that mom was writing to Harry and I was not told about the results of the tests run on me at Children's Hospital in Boston. I was a good mushroom because I was totally in the dark and I had enough water to survive.
School was easy and Kevin's grades rapidly got better and as the school year ended I was 13 1/2 and almost paranoid about being caught alone by boys. Kevin had talked with me in the school corridors but I pushed him away hard. I will not go into the event but his friends basically threatened to maim me permanently if I did not do something for them and Kevin actually stepped in to protect me which made me say yes. It ended up with an amazing kiss and believe me by I responded although it was unexpected.
He would not let them hurt me and I broke down and told him everything about me and I mean everything from believing I am a girl to I will die before I have to be a boy and I learned a lot from him about the weird confusion he and his friends had over me. Other than him being the first person to ever see me as a girl literally we developed a boy-girl relationship that never went to far.
My mom and my brothers and I went off for a planned family vacation in Europe and I have read all the early letters between Harry and my mom and he told her she would lose me if I continued down this path to certain suicide. My mom got a up close and personal look at what life was like for me on the flight to London and then at British Customs when a Heathrow Immigration official refused to believe I was her son and there was a very public dispute that left me crying, my brother ray ready to punch a Brit, and my mother shocked at how cruel people could be. She knew I had physical altercations but except for the attempted rape I never ratted out anyone because it would have just been worse.
Things happened on that trip that began the process of saving me from me really and from being intensely transsexual at this time. By the time we returned home in late July mom had decided I needed to meet with Benjamin but again I was not informed of this for family reasons and I was never good at keeping secrets.
When we returned home I had spent the majority of the trip as Elizabeth because it was just easier that way on everyone. I was registered in the hotels and flew that way and we never had another issue. When mom handed our passports and said she was with her three children nobody thought twice about checking the passport of her children. I had no idea what would happen between Kevin and me and was quite grateful for him just believing I was a girl so when I met with him the first Monday back home I expected nothing and figured why would a boy like him give a shit about a freak like me.
It was 1959 and my mom knew I was not going back to playing boy. I was a failure at it so why waste the effort. I think Kevin noticed the changes in me immediately. Mom had cut my hair so it looked beautiful and I was so happy he still liked me I was afraid to ask him how he could like a freak like me. I know it was because I was afraid of the answer but Kevin never pushed things or tried to go to far.
That Monday he had his parents car and he drove me to Duxbury Massachusetts to a secluded section of the beach where he had a picnic planned and I was emotional because it was actually sort of a date and we walked the ocean front and we stopped to talk with some clammers and we held hands and I guess everyone thought i was his girlfriend which is a pretty powerful feeling for a kid as screwed up as I was. He bought some clams and we had fresh raw clams and some coca cola and a wonderful picnic and some nice necking for dessert.
That was the best summer of my life. My brother Ray was the star athlete of the other High School and it turned out he and Kevin were good friends and I eventually learned Kevin's mom Mary was my mother's best friend when they were in High School. There were two other times when we were able to get away together and he took me to a drive-in in Brockton Mass and I got in big trouble because i got home long after my curfew but I was not grounded but then I didn't know what everyone else knew around then.
I wanted Kevin as a girl wants a boy and I would have been gone in a second if he had pushed things. I was a girl of my era. I wanted children, a husband, and a home with a white picket fence which was how most of us were brainwashed back then. I wanted to save myself for marriage which was about as dumb as it gets because at that time I had absolutely no idea I could be helped.
When High School started again in September it was hard. I craved his attention and I detailed every flaw of every girl I saw him speak with which is humorous since I had the biggest flaw of them all or the wrong bits. I met with another shrink beginning in November because mom may have eased the restrictions on my expressing my girl side and may have decided it was a good idea to meet Harry at some point but a "cure" and a return to her son was still the first best option although my mom never said a hurtful thing to me in all those years.
This shrink came highly recommended and even though Harry wrote mom and said it was ill advised we met and this clown set me up for a nasty fall. He was a bastard and i was so depressed come Thanksgiving 1959 my mom told Kevin's mom Mary and everyone to keep an eye on me because they were worried. everyone went to the football game on thanksgiving morning but my relatives deliberately left me behind to be harassed by members of my extended family that considered me evil and a degenerate and it got ugly and I snapped basically and walked away from my home around 1 PM in shorts and a shirt neither of which were too masculine and made the very long walk from our home to the Atlantic Ocean and walked down the beach towards the tidal marsh that was guarded by the man-made jetty that created a massive outbound cauldron about 3-4 hours after the tide had started outbound. A lot of kids had drowned in it because we swam there.
It was November in Massachusetts and the weather can turn on a dime and it was very warm in the morning but a cold front was approaching and by the time I reached the place where I decided to throw myself into the water it was in the 40's and raining and it was well past sunset but the tide was just starting out so I had to wait. I waited under the bridge that ran over the jetty and when the time was right as I was about to end it because once in the water any swimmer would be carried 1/2 mile into the bay and the water temperature was in the 40's. I was pulled off the rocks by Kevin who remembered seeing me swim there and he knew how dangerous it was.
Funny thing is I almost succeeded anyways because I developed double pneumonia, I already ahd a bad cold, and was in intensive care for a while and was given the last rites by Kevin's parish priest which infuriated my grandmother since we were congregational. Her priorities were a little skewed then. Kevin saved my life and actually risked his own to pull me off. It was a pretty big event and by then everyone in my home town knew from the previous June that I really wanted to be a girl.
I knew by then mom knew something was going on between Kevin and me because he was there every day and when I returned to school just before Christmas I heard the rumors about us which was scandalous for 1959. Mary's two brothers were noted surgeons in Montreal where she was originally from and it was they along with my mom and Mary that arranged the meeting with Benjamin which took place outside the US in Canada for my safety and Harry's. Parts of my family could be evil and they would have hurt me and Harry.
I transitioned that Christmas vacation and started hormones around 3 AM on December 28, 1959. Kevin knew me as both the androgynous kid in High School and as Elizabeth from that time forward until his death. hen I was raped by my neighbor in February 1960 it was Kevin that tried to kill my next door neighbor rapist and I spent two weeks in the hospital with a fractured skull and bruises and bleeding from places I would rather forget about but Kevin was there for me.
Kevin's dad was a US Ranger on Normandy during the invasion and despite scholarship offers he went into the US Army and became a Green beret eventually. I still had one more year in High School and Kevin had told me we should go to his Senior Prom and I could go as the real me but I was afraid to do it but I should have. After the rape everyone realized we were an item and it was weird but OK. I think by then everyone realized I certainly wasn't a boy and was more than likely a girl as estrogen began to change my body even more.
It was lonely without Kevin around but if he got leave he came home and we were able to spend time together in Quebec with his family and it was apparent to all things were serious but it never went too far. It was Kevin that put the breaks on and we never went to far. I started college in the Midwest in the fall of 1961 but not before I was put through every gender test in existence along with a battery of medical tests. They confirmed girl but Harry wanted tests by people he trusted and he knew people there.
Kevin was my boyfriend and I was totally in love with him but I never expected him to love me because even though I knew surgery was on the horizon when I turned 18 why would he want to be with a freak like me. Kevin removed those fears I had in February of 1963 when he visited me at college and he asked me to marry him and believe me this 17 year old said yes so fast it might have been supersonic when it came through my lips. We planned on getting married after surgery which was to be done around Christmas or early in 1964 before I returned to school. We planned to meet somewhere and consummate our love because what I so wanted was him.
His Green Beret team was one of the early ones into Southeast Asia and that shit hole known as Vietnam. On May 15 1963 the helicopter his team was in was shot down on a clandestine operation in a nearby country not called Vietnam and that beautiful caring brown eyed boy died along with his friends and comrades defending his country like his dad only he died in a place that can best be described as the asshole of the universe.
He was a kind decent boy who saw something good in a really sad, scared, and terrified girl and the only reason I am alive today is because he cared about me. I loved him and he loved me and I wish I could have spent my life with him as his wife because we would have made each other happy. I was always Elizabeth or Liz to him and he never used anything but female pronouns in my company. He was a few months short of his 21st birthday when he died in the Service of his Country and he did not deserve that.
Some of you may believe that was a gay relationship but it never was. I barely survived his death but I did and maybe his death is why I do not handle loss very well but as they say it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all and I do not regret one single second I spent with Kevin plus that boy took a huge risk with no fringe benefits and he had more faith in me than I did in myself. I was 17 years 4 months and 15 days old when he died and he will be in my heart to the day I die.
