Transgender Greeting Cards

If there is a person in your life going through a transgender transition, it isn’t easy to find a greeting card to celebrate their occasion that meets them right where they are.

 

You won’t find any decent ones at Hallmark, that I know of. (I checked online and they were all pretty yawn-some.)

 

The place I landed on that I like best right now is RedBubble.com. (Lisa and I are going to see if we can come up with some that do an even better job. It shouldn’t be too hard!) I ordered eight of them to have on hand here in case visiting well-wishers want to pick the one that suits their personality to personalize… (The cards I chose are all blank inside: I don’t know if they all are at Red Bubble.)

 

Here are images of the ones I have on hand…

“Sometimes the people around you

don’t understand your journey.

They don’t need to,

it’s not for them.”

STILL ME.  HAPPY MANNIVERSARY!

“I don’t wanna be… I don’t wanna be…

I AM.”

This one is hard to read… 

“Free         dom”

is written in the scars below the masculinized chest

 

All of these cards speak to me as a transgender individual in different ways, but all are profoundly touching to me (okay, except for the funny one: “Does this shirt make me look flat?”).

 

The people who have chosen to read my book Womb Man: How I Survived Growing Up in a Booby-Trapped World understand me, as best I’m able to explain it to them.

 

Sadly, my younger sister has refused to read it (the only book of mine she has never read) because she says she’s afraid I badmouthed Dad in it.

 

And my older sister has read it and said afterward that we should discuss it sometime. (That was almost two years ago. I’ve met with her twice since then. Crickets about the book!)

 

(Maybe that’s how people of color feel about white people avoiding what could well become a difficult or confounding conversation. So, the elephant in the room gets walked around, instead of being addressed.)

 

I assured Jackie I  didn’t bad-mouth Dad (hell, he treated me like a boy–why would I?!), and she still hasn’t read it,so I guess that isn’t the real reason.

 

Maybe she doesn’t care to try and understand it, although when I told her I was transgender several years ago, she said, “That doesn’t surprise me; just don’t tell my friends.” (As if my transgender status reflects in some way on her! HA!)

 

That’s why the card referring to “the journey” resonates with me so much. I want my sisters to understand, but they avoid the topic.

 

Of course, when I decided to come out publicly with Womb Man, the cat was out of the bag, and every one of Jackie’s friends (that I also know) uniformly and warmly embraced my transparency.

 

Whether they embrace my truth, I don’t know, but they are warm and good to me, and that’s all that matters, really! (No one has “shunned” me, that I know of… but being pretty much an introvert and loner by nature, I may simply not have noticed!)

 

As I’ve mentioned before, one of Jackie’s friends since childhood (and mine), Judi Cooper, even wrote a note to me that became a preview of the book, saying she wanted copies for friends who would want to, or who should, read it.

 

She also confessed to me, “I always knew there was something different about you that I just couldn’t put my finger on, but as soon as you told me, I thought ‘Bingo! You’re a guy! That’s IT!'”

 

It’s stuff like that, that makes my heart sing!

My upcoming chest masculinization surgery is (in Joe Biden’s words, whispered to President Obama when the Affordable Care Act passed) ” a Big F******Deal!!!”  

 

It’s easily as big a deal to me as when I was baptized (as an adult) in 1999. (Sadly, I’m no longer a believer, but my Christian friends assure me that God still believes in me.)

 

I always have been, and forever shall be, a guy.

This is my declaration,

etched into my chest,

for the rest of my life.

 

Anyone who can’t see it after August 24th will be willfully blind, and that isn’t anything I have any further control over.

 

I’m doing all I can to reveal my true identity.

The rest has to come from someone else’s heart…

 

 

The ball is in other people’s courts,

and I hope they’ll reach out

and send it back to me!

 

Update August 20th: My older sister Laurel called yesterday afternoon to wish me well on my upcoming surgery and said she’ll bring me a home-cooked meal when she visits during my recovery period at home, as soon as I’m feeling up to having visitors (which I anticipate will be pretty soon after I get home).

 

We chatted for more than an hour, since I haven’t seen or talked to her her in more than a year. We caught up on each other’s lives and happenings.

 

She had no idea Jackie and I recently upgraded parts of our home, so she’s looking forward to seeing that, too. (I thought she and Jackie were in frequent contact, so it was a surprise to me that she didn’t know this.)

 

She, too, is very worried about what can still happen that’s even worse than what has already happened if Trump is reelected. I hope she mentions that to Jackie when she’s here. (I don’t talk politics with Jackie ever since the day back in February, when I asked her directly if she’d hire Trump in her bank (if she was still working) and let him hang with her teenage granddaughters for hours without supervision and she said, “Yes, I would!” (I hope to high heaven she said that just to get me to end the conversation, and she really wouldn’t do those insane things…)

 

That was a bridge waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy too far for me. I dropped it and just went back to my abode to freak out silently…

 

It’s a cult, I tell you, a CULT!