GenderLife Forum: The Information Exchange

One death can mean two losses

It is so sad. I found a Wikipedia entry on Christine but the info kept saying "he" and "him" so I edited it to all female pronouns! Christine was "out" so I have no problem in honoring her Journey this way. RIP Christine.

Ratshit.

But, Mike Penner went back to being Mike Penner, apparently expressing the identity of Mike Penner, possibly making male pronouns appropriate.

Moral of the story:

For all potential young transitioners who read these forums, get everything done while young, and the sorts of pressures that likely dominated Mike Penner's life won't be part of yours. Getting things done while young has its own obstacles and pressures, but those pressures are rarely public, and they don't involve the consequences associated with creating a decades long ostensibly fake life that then needs to be dismantled at age 40 or 50.

Don't you mean Christine and NOT Mike Mixie?

Old Mike, new Christine coming out article she wrote.

I think in the absence of a suicide note we should treat this respectfully and not argue the point - use the pronouns you see fit, but it's still a horrible story.

To go from quiet, to bubbly, to quiet to dead says a lot without us overlaying stories.

It was a moving eulogy.

Bump:

Public triumph, private torment

My perception, and speculation, is that Penner was someone who spent so many years within "private torment" that the specious "public triumph"(not really) was way too much of a challenge (like dropping a twelve year old into an adult medical career or something), and the return to "private torment" with tail between legs was even worse.

So called "transition" just isn't something to do in public, in a fish bowl, IMO, and people who try to do it take on far far more psychological stress than they can possibly imagine, or than people who have actually been there and "done that" and "have the t-shirt", try to counsel them against. It is NOT a time to "tough it out", which is really just some "macho" mystique to begun with anyway, but a time to seek a supportive and nurturing environment, which is what is needed for puberty, and a "public" career just isn't that.

Meanwhile, Andrea James keeps saying that the current generation of "middle aged bloomers" is likely to be the last. But somehow, I suspect that despite all the information available in the world, which has actually been around and readily available for forty years anyway, won't keep yet another generation of ts-people from cowering in "private torment" for forty years until their midlife crises drive them to do what they were too afraid to in their teens or twenties. I predict that the cycle of "middle aged bloomers" will be here once again a generation from now, along with the ones who managed, at some teen or college age to just blunder along through, oblivious to whatever obstacles might face them in their youthfulness, and do what they do, despite that situation's own trade-offs.

As for Penner, that one is a "fait accompli", split milk, a done deal, for which the "literal" post-mortem seems likely to go unheeded by those who might benefit from its lessons the most.