I was yanked out, actually, against my will. Though it all ended happily. Thanks for the “famous and accomplished,” and I will assume the “trannie” was meant affectionately, like black people calling each other “niggah.”
Sorry, KellyM and Eve. I’m new at this and still learning my way around. I went to web sites and message boards, and found them calling each other “tranny.” I didn’t know it was a bad word. Up until now I had thought it referred to the transmission in my car.
<David Bowie singing>
Transmission…
Transition…
</Bowie>
In England, it’s slang for transistor radio, giving me an awful start when a British friend e’d me that “the builders are here and they brought their loud, blaring trannies with them.”
Honestly, “tranny” is somewhat like “fag” or the N-word: acceptable within the group, poisonous outside it. It’s best avoided.
There is, however, no excuse for “shemale”.
Wow, Jomo Mojo, what you said in your post about when you were younger is exactly what I went through! 
There seems to be quite a few of us here on the board.
As for the T-word, personally I don’t like the way it sounds. Just MHO. (This would be the right forum for those. 
) I don’t remember if I’ve ever replied to any of our many past threads about whether it’s okay for a word to be acceptable in a have-to-be-one-to-be-able-to-say-it context but I consider that to be a form of discrimination, so I’m in agreement with avoiding the term.
I always say “lugbutt”.
Heh. I didn’t even talk about the genderqueer part.
matt, like I was saying, it would be nice to have another thread all about gender identity.
I can hear you saying, “So go ahead and start one already.” I’m such a newbie at this and still kind of shy about it.
Well, you could look at this thread, this thread, this thread, this thread, this thread, this thread, this thread, this thread, or this thread. For starters.
And for something a bit more focussed on genderqueer, this one.
Reading this thread, I realize once again how lucky I am. For me, being bisexual was and is almost completely undramatic. I’ve always just not cared very much about whether someone was a boy or a girl. It just didn’t seem to be a big deal to me and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why everyone else seemed to care about it so much.
Around fourteenish I realized this meant I was a bisexual and I told a friend. I guess that was my first “coming out”, but it wasn’t a very big deal either. No fear, no anxiety, nothing. As I grew older I cared less and less about it, and have been lucky to have friends who see it as something completely natural. I have few friends who call themselves totally heterosexual (for that matter, I have no friends who call themselves totally homosexual). Call us open-minded or something.
Then, at a family dinner a few months ago, my big brother said something really stupid (as he is wont to do) about gays or homosexuality, and I told him in a loud clear voice that I’d been in love with one guy and made out with another guy. This shut him up rather quickly. Since the rest of my family was present, I suppose I came out to them then, but no-one has said anything about it. Feels like a nonissue, really.
Something like that. To make a very very long story as short as reasonably possible, being social when I was a child was a painful experience, so naturally I got more from sticking to myself. After more than ten years of that, I figured it was just who I was.
Past six years have shown that not to be the case.
Minor hijack, dear – I knew you went into retreat mode for a while about the time of changing from Flora McFlimsey to Eve – and then came out in a rather memorable thread. But I was not aware of your having been outed against your will. Are you willing to provide the background on its happening?
To add my story to the mix, even though it’s not strictly a LGBT come-out instance: I was forced by my feelings for my ward to admit to myself – and to him and my wife – that those feelings were not strictly paternal but more of a romantic nature – I fell in love with him – given that nothing about that relationship fits anybody’s definition of “normal,” including the standard gay come-out process. The results, in the long run, were two stronger and more solid heterosexual marriages and a philia relationship of extreme closeness and deepness between him and me – and between our wives and each of us. And I “came out” about it on the boards in one of the threads where Snark was dealing with his sexuality, which TubaDiva recently linked to at the time vanilla was banned.
I won’t even think of offending you transgendered individuals by defending it, but I do see a rather restricted use for “shemale” – in the identification of pre-ops who undertake the making of porn in which what they present as does not match what they have by way of external genitalia. It is, of course, a demeaning term under any circumstances, but just as the woman who decides to portray, in a porn flick, a woman with enthusiasm for being ejaculated over, on, in, etc., by a variety of men, will be marketed under a less-than-polite-language term, and chose to do so, so likewise those women who make use of the dichotomy between what they present as and what their genitalia suggest to make a living in a particular form of niche porn, are agreeing that their performance be marketed under that term.
Courteous? Absolutely not. Proper within the limited sphere of porn? Maybe.
Sorry, I see “shemale,” and I hear, “It’s a an original Shemahlee,” from Arrested Development.
Honestly, I don’t know the whole story myself—all I know is I found out at some point that certain Dopers “knew” and were discussing me with great relish at Dopefests, which no one bothered to tell me till a year or so later. I’ve never lied about it or tried to hide my past—why on earth should I?—so at that point I started my All About Eve thread to just clear the air.
Ukelele Ike told me he found out at a publishing conference, when he mentioned my name, and some editor said, "Oh, did you know that . . . " I was actually rather flattered that I’m well-known enough to be gossiped about at NY publishing to-dos!
Having never attended a Dopefest and not knowing any Dopers well enough to gossip, my first exposure to you was through the ancient prophecies (though they got the time of your first posting wrong). How exactly you’re the avatar that was formerly incarnated as Jean Harlow AND Marlene Dietrich AND Dorothy Parker as the faithful insist I haven’t figured out yet, but I’ve no doubt it will be made clear to me when I’m more devout and the monastery receives its tax-free credit.
And don’t forget Bert Savoy!
So, the second person I came out to was my very close friend, Jason.
Last night, I had to come out to him again. He thought I was joking the first time.
This is more complicated than I thought.
Oh, and congratulations to Ms. Mojo!
A friend of mine asked in a excited way if I thought my conversations with a male friend of mine were developing into a relationship, after I’d told her I thought I was a lesbian.
She’s one of two people I’ve told.
I don’t know if my parents have any idea or not. To answer the other question I discovered it about a year and a half ago, maybe less.