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Okay hey yeah! Hell yeah! Transgender Day of Visibility and Easter, co-occurring? With a compatible color scheme, no less? WHAT A DELIGHT.

This TDOV is the first holiday observation I've genuinely felt. Milestone! An autism thing I think: holidays have always been a psycho-emotional chore. The lack of practical relevance of them (as perceived by me, myself) made the occasions artificial for me. It was always an exercise in trying not to screw it up for everyone around me, everyone who was making it very clear that the occasion was important and enjoyable and that there was a certain way to experience it.

I need to note here that this was my experience through my own complex inner lens. I grew up with rich love and honest acceptance and earnest interest in my genuine well-being. But without samples of healthy social outliers, I had no way to experientially learn that there were more viable ways to be.

I'm not mad. :) I'm excited, point of fact, but anyway, returning to the occasion today, today I have come far enough that I can honestly test occasions for the merit they have for me, without running it through the filter of societal practice.

And this International Transgender Day of Visibility is something I find myself honestly joyously celebrating. So cool!!!!! How wonderful that the first holiday I can feel is this one!!!!!!!!! SO PUMPED.

Visibility changes everything. It must! It's the total network of life gaining a new input — a new signal, a new transmission (hehe) that has an almost physical impact on the entire network. The network adapts, and the organism of life evolves.

There are layers of visibility: it begins in the mirror, with oneself. That's the smallest germ of visibility (in the botanical sense, as in a seed or a beginning). There's no telling how long it takes for that seed to begin to stir. It's an intensely private and personal affair, a totally opaque period of suspense. I have deep, (dare I say) earned respect for this process. It took me 20 years to learn why I didn't feel comfortable sexually, and another 10 after that to learn why I didn't feel comfortable in my brain. To learn that you've been handed the wrong gender, where the only such signals for that revelation come from within, in a society where you're given few (if any) examples of healthy divergence from gender norms? Fuuuuuuuuckkkkkkkk.

That initial miracle of auto-visibility is ... I don't have a word for it. It just is, I guess. Nothing for it but to point at it and say holy shit that exists and is distinctly its own thing. It's an edition of the miracle of consciousness.

A birth always involves some degree of trauma. With a healthy and soft mindset, and a gentle, well-resourced setting, and with kind, well-informed assistance, the trauma can happen relatively peaceably. The moment is met. With immediate soothing, the recovery begins.

The spectrum begins there, in the light, and from there stretches very far into the dark.

This world is known for birth in the dark. It's where you come for that kind of thing.

The celebration I feel in my soul for this day is all about the moment of emergence into the light, wherever and whenever it happens for you. If you were born seeing yourself, and if you learned nothing but loving acceptance for yourself from day zero, hell fucking yeah let's get that story told. If your first true glimpse of yourself was traumatic, if the first time you caught your own reflection in the mirror was met with your own terror, I fucking feel you and I hope that even some trace of the love I feel for you right now can make it back in your timeline to reach you there. I don't know. I hope. <3 To then live in knowledge of what you've seen and cannot un-see, and then to travel in whatever way to a place where you can step out into the streetlights where other people can see you, fuck fuck fuck fuck that is an epic beyond Homer.

I cry for safety. We are all the same heart: every last person and blade of grass seeks relief in duress. Only at some threshold of relief (and it is different for absolutely every unit of life, large or small) do we begin to glimpse the glory of expression that this form has kept tucked away in the hull of the seed, waiting for water and light. Its expression is critical for the wheel of life. Visibility must come. It always does. It can be easy, it can be hard, it can emerge after generations of schismatic divide or it can unfold as an age of abundantly diverse unity. It can be all of that at once.

Your presence here is monumental.

Your honest visibility with yourself is monumental. If you can swallow those words, you'll already have accomplished the impossible. Nothing was ever required of you; it is certain that nothing more is. So for you to go further, within a single life? It's like being born again and again, without even the relief of forgetting.

But then, you already did the impossible once. Recognition of the self cannot be manufactured or prompted or forced or done the same way twice. Impossibly, you are. Again and again.

It is wild that my inner experience is meeting the holiday today, lol. I am honestly feeling the thing that the day has broadly been labeled for. This is a rarity for me, across the calendar of my life to date. Feels awesomely appropriate for this to be co-occurring with Easter, that traditional celebration of Jesus becoming fully, openly, freely, inarguably visible. This couldn't be more appropriate. Jesus was/is 🏳️‍⚧️ pumped 🏳️‍⚧️, by all accounts.

A truly heartfelt happy International Transgender Day of Visibility to you, my friend. I'm so glad you're here. <3