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Great job Chrissy with your presentation. My thought for trangender medicine are as follow. The body with introduction of hormone of opposing sex make things to happen regardless of personal beliefs. There are cases when thai boys are given estrogen and sold as lady boys into prostitution at young age. Because of the suceptible nature of children and the growing popularity of the internet and a growing amount of transgender people as a result, i question if this is awareness as much as it is going be about issues like insecurity, being bullied, or blindly following others down a long road that unwittingly lead to sterilization. It's also possible that the awareness has made it easier to talk about. Had things been different for me, maybe I would have fathered children. Given my roll of the dice, I dont think that going to happen. Medical tests that should have been perform for me, were not and i had to live in secrecy for year and years afraid to tell anyone. Because of the length of time I have not been expose to tetosterone (almost my entire life) and the already existent amount of estrogen within my body, it easy to see why I chose the latter even though I am biological male. I do not want to put myself through the upheaval of dealing with large amounts of testosterone now when i have lived my life without it. That why I am a TransWoman because I choose to be it. It makes sense to me why I could not be a man and why I dont want to take the elixir of T. Whether my identity as a transwoman arose at young age due to the lack of testosterone or was inherent in me since birth is a mystery. I'm not focus on that. I'm happy to live as I am now. The estrogen was scary for me as well as changing genders, but illusions fall aside and the truth reveals itself. This internal conflict of living a false identity resolved itself and I felt PEACE. I did it for myself and not others. I hope those who choose to transition, consider the same. The estrogen gave me confidence in myself and made me love who I am and I never experience this when i identified as male.

So day 1 is done - such a long day! I volunteered to help with set up, so I was there starting at 6 a.m. But all totally worth it :-) On a matter of personal achievement first - during one of the panels I actually spoke during the Q&A. Perhaps seems small, but 3 or 4 years ago there's no way I would have done that - it was a fairly large room with about 50-60 people. No way. So that's a nice sign of what transitioning has done for me :-) The most interesting/controversial part was a lecture on "The Biology of Gender." It was a single presenter discussing the science and theories behind gender identity and gender variation. During the Q&A several people criticized it from the perspective that it was very binary - and he generally agreed (that the research itself tends to be biased in favor of the binary). Fair enough. However, I think this is an area where science and culture get conflated sometimes. Leaving aside the terms "sex" and "gender" for a moment - in my view there are 2 things going on: (1) there is what we are born, physiologically, biologically, neurologically, etc., and (2) there is the social construct that got built on top of that - sometimes with some basis, usually not. Regarding #1, I think we all exist on a spectrum from male to female - some in between, some "mixed" at birth (at least I think that's the prevalent theory about being transgender - genitalia developed one way, the brain the other). I also think that most reputable scientists - although they shorthand it as "male or female" - acknowledge that it's a spectrum and not a binary (they don't, for example, deny the existence of intersex individuals). Anyway - I'm not sure why I just started that, but curious if others have thoughts :-) xoxo Chrissy

So I need to start going through my house every coupla years and just looking at the stuff that is lying around/saved somewhere. I have saved some really useless junk over the years. Anyone remember the Isle of Lost Toys from the old Christmas specials? Apparently we are running the Sanctuary of Lost Cords. Which of course Nikki won't let me throw any of those out because we might need them some amorpheous day in the future. Fine, he let me throw most of the rest of the junk out, and we can do a great device to cord matchup event when we settle to be sure what is junk beyond doubt I guess. It really is amazing the accumulation of things in an average life. We're not shoppers, we go outta her way to not do that. We're not garage sale hounds, or antique hunters, or any sort of real collectors of anything. I can only imagine how much more stuff people who enjoy those things either have to dispose of often or build up. Well, back to work. At least until the Cheeto declares everything in the country as his. I'm surprised that man hasn't tried to pass an act yet that he owns everything and we have to pay rental on our things. After the pay to have them in the first place, of course.

So I just saw photos of St. Maarten after Irma passed through. On top of the horror for those people, there is this creepy feeling. I was there, in March, with Ashe. We lounged on a beautiful beach, we had lunch at this awesome open air restaurant right on the beech and iguanas joined us for the lunch, there was a drive through the beautiful now underwater streets. It just feels weird when it's somewhere you have been. Like when I see flood photos from the one we had here. It's not a feeling of extra bad, it's just oddly disorienting to me and I have no idea what my brain's issue with it is. I looked at the livestreams on Key West, another place I've been and enjoy watching on cam when I'm far away, and it's just so eerie to see how deserted it was. Also reassuring that the people have gone to safer ground on the mainland. The storm has not yet hit key west, but the winds are already amazingly and unusually loud on the cams that have sound. I can only imagine what it will be like when the actual storm hits. There was a collection truck near the Kroger's by us collecting for Harvey, and I found myself wondering how long til it's for both. And then I further wondered how bad it's going to be. I remember how bad Katrina was, with the Fema director really nepotism-based friend of bush's and no clue how to actually handle a disaster, and Harvey is in two separate states, with Irma barreling up to take on a third state. I'm not really confident our current dysfunctional government is going to handle this well. And I'm not sure what is going to happen to the insurance companies. They function based on the idea that these massive disasters are few and far between, and it hasn't really been all that long since Katrina. I also worry what else the Caribbean is going to shoot up our way before the end of storm season. And Houston/Harvey is also a glaring warning of another issue that I fear people will ignore. A group of scientists warned them they were paving over too much grassland several years back, explaining that it was going to magnify flood issues in the city. They were ignored, the grassland was paved over because "what do you science guys know" and now they are paying for it. New Orleans kept trying to get federal aid to fix the aging levees prior to Katrina, and were ignored. Safety and infrastructure have fallen by the wayside in favor of legislating morality and corporate profits in my opinion, and it's only going to get more dangerous as time goes on. ​ I really worry for the future generations. Heck, I worry what is going to happen in the next forty or so years while I'm still here.