Fairfax, VA, USA.I am not the poster girl for polio victims who somehow survived the scourge to limp through the rest of their lives. I am not the surviving post-op poster woman born transsexual raging against life’s unfairness.

It is true that I had polio at two or three that almost killed me before I really started and left me variously limping with a slightly atrophied left side and a slowness of left leg muscle that prevented me from being a world class athlete.


That is life — and life only.

It is true that I am a woman born transsexual who made her way through childhood and half her timeline knowing her outward physical configuration was wrongly designed but with little she could do to make herself whole. A half-century late I survived transition and sex reassignment surgery and am the woman I see before you.

That is a small, if personally significant bit, in our brief passage through this world.

It is true that my multi-ethnic and questionable racial variances have sometime presented obstacles in my progression through time and space, but most times I have been read as Italian, specifically Sicilian, and that, in good times, is thought by most to be almost white after all even if we can’t get into certain country clubs still. [N1]

That is the way of the world. Outsiders are always set apart, looked down upon. Sometimes hated. But you can’t let the bastard grind you down or they will win. You can never let them think they are winning.

It is true that I have end up a bi-sexual woman married to another woman in a forever long-term relationship. It is no surprise that I am in a relationship with a woman, that is, of course, the first sexual preference I ever identified. When my external body was in my birth configuration, I preferred woman exclusively. Homosexual men did not and do not excite me.

Judging me solely by my outward configuration, the world around me lumped me into the great sea that is heterosexuality, passing me into conformity with the approved, general way of the world. That inside, where my I exists, I was and always had been female, was of little concern to anyone else but me.

I was, however, a woman who loved women. A lesbian who snuck ill configured beneath the great heterosexual continental divide. Or so I thought. Or alternately put

And then I transitioned

And my new world slowly expanded. Estrogen and progesterone flooded my body. Washed over my neurons and synapses. Soaked each cell and molecule. My brain rejoiced that female hormones finally rejoined my waiting gray matter.

Life changed, bit by bit.

The men I began to be attracted to were heterosexual. The young or middle-aged Sean Connery. George Clooney. Denzel Washington. Timothy Oliphant. [N2] The man buying me drinks at the bar. The cute Irish boy serving me Guinness at the pub.

My taste in men falls in line with the general preferences of all hetero-sexual American Women in my age group. I’m nothing special. I read romances about women whose lovers are virile men. Mystery novels with clever women detectives with good looking, sexy partners and boyfriends.

I watch films about girls who fall in love with bad boys who become promising men at the movie’s end.

A brown-eyed handsome man with style and manners could bed me quickly.

A twinkling, hungry eye and a smile with an agile wit can do me in.

A world class, well educated mind can be incredibly sexy.

An astute reader might notice that the last three are not necessarily dependent on the sex of the person I encounter. The sex of the potential lover is independent of my desire. Depending on the person. Taking the specific situation into account. Depending on my mood.

Many years passed transition, after tens of thousands of estrogen and progesterone pills, I find myself truly bi-sexual.

I like women.

I like men.

I like a world class brain best of all.

A vagina, a penis, graded by the speed of neuron and synapse. I am drawn to whom I am drawn. A woman, a man, everyone it would seem but a gay man. [N3] My fantasies are a woman’s sexual fantasies. My hopes and dreams are American. It is true that I am all of these but I would not let myself be defined by any one of them.

I am no one’s poster child.

No, I am not a victim or someone’s political cause.

Yes, I had polio, but I have overcome that. For the most part, my polio is history.

Yes, I was born transsexual but I have survived and moved on. My transsexuality is history, a point of distant reference seldom relevant to anyone but my gynecologist.

Yes, I have an admixture of Mediterranean, African, British, and Native American genes and ethnicity. My full lips, high cheekbones, and reddish olive skin only hint at my history. I am who I am and must needs live in the presence.

Yes, long ago I have been mistaken for a normal heterosexual male, albeit one who was always hit upon my gay men. [N4] I have successfully passed through that world and am now mistaken for a normal heterosexual female. The more things change, the more they are the same. Quello che sarà, sarà. [N5]

I am a woman. One with a transsexual history that now footnotes my distant past. A woman who finds herself truly bisexual and wishes she had known so and had been able to transition in her twenties when she was just learning the way of the world. But all that is part of some unreachable alternate history: if, could, and would.

The road seldom branches the way we might prefer. Life goes on as we all must or surely we are doomed.

I am no one’s poster child.

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