Why You Stay Stealth

There are several reasons you do not come out, do not become public and do not announce it on Websites unless you have no choice. The risk far outweigh the price you can and often will experience which sometimes results in violence, even death.

The first is that you open yourself to public harrassment through the various social network Websites. The anonymous people who think it's cool to harrass, threaten and imitidate other people, especially transwomen and more so post-transition women.

The second is that your Website will be trashed if you allow anonymous comments, questions, or posts, and may be hacked if you don't allow them. I don't allow them in hopes that anyone who wants to comments has to have an account and be a real person, or at least someone I can check them from their posts.

The third is if anyone posts a photo of you or information about you, you will be a target and may be attacked for just being yourself. You risk being a victim, being a patient and being a corpse.

Don't do it. If you are stealth, stay stealth. Protect yourself and stay silent and quietly live your life with your work, your loved one and family, and yourself.

Don't listen to the transcommunity and those in it who espouse coming out and being out. Ignore them and better forget them. There are far more stealth (trans)women than out women, by several orders of magnitude, so you are not alone in your decision to stay stealth.

Your safety and security are far more important than being out. Stay stealth.

Passing

Why is it that only those (trans)women who pass, and usually pass naturally most if not almost all the time, are the only ones who think the term passing is irrelevant and should not be used by transwomen? Isn't it the same privilege they argue ciswomen have and use over transwomen to distinguish between the two?

Passing has two parts, personal and public, which is obvious and known, so I'm not covering new ground (there's no new ground on transgender issues anymore anyway), but I get tired of hearing the public transwomen acting like men and determining the issues and defining the solutions or answers.

And I get tired of this rhetoric. Yes I agree with her points, but no I don't agree with the last sentence, "I think an important step is to drop “passing” from our collective vocabulary." It's arguing about the word and then saying it's useless and irrelevant today.

No it's not either of the two. Many transwomen face the moment of personal acceptance where they see who they are, know it's true and real, and know it's right. But not all transwomen have the public acceptance where they can get through life outside their home without being questioned, feeling embarrassed, or risking harrassment or even violence against them.

Those who pass, rarely know this life, and only in a few moments where they're outed or exposed in public, but their passing always gets them through any problems. It's the very thing, passing, they argue doesn't matter, when it's the very thing that allows them their freedom.

And that's the real issue here, passing is freedom. Don't take it away from those who struggle for it, for any reason. Don't take away the right for any transwoman to get that moment when she realizes she can and does get through life safely, she passes. She has her freedom too.

Can't Imagine

When transwomen want so much just to be a woman and female, they can't imagine, let alone understand, what it is like to be a woman and female and still hate your body. It's the difference of wanting to be something and being something.

They're not the same, the former only wants to be and the latter already is and hate being. Any would be remiss if they assumed all women like the woman they are and be remiss if they didn't think of those women who don't like the woman they are and hate who they are, hate their body, and even hate their existence.

It is what some transwomen learn after their transition to realize being a woman and female wasn't what they dreamed and wished, and learned the reality of being a woman and female, and hopefully realize those women who have their own issues with themselves and their body.

Or so we can hope we will and do.

The Worst Feeling

The worst feeling is coming to the realization you've reached the end of your transition, when hormone replacement therapy has reached the end of the physical, physiological, mental, and emotional changes to your body and mind.

So all you have left are the surgeries to finish the last of your physical changes and legal documents changes to be legally recognized as a woman and female only to discover the health insurance won't cover any of the surgeries, you don't have any financial reasources to pay for them yourself, and you aren't earning enough to get a loan.

You're stuck in limbo at the end of one stage and the beginning of the last stage. You could just live as you are awhile longer to solve the financial means, except you don't pass and no one believes you're a woman when they always see a man.

Can you live in between for awhile longer? How long? And is there a worse feeling in a transition than the realization you're stuck, and for awhile, maybe a long while, like 2-3 years, as someone you hate because it gets you through life without problems but you can't be the person you know you are because of what you'll face?

Can you set aside the feeling to finish and work on the in between life? Would it be enough to comfort the feelings of change or to change? Or not, as anyone who has transitioned knows it won't, because the decision has long been made to finish and feeling to postpone it doesn't and won't last long.