Month: March 2018

Visibility

Today is the Transgender Day of Visibility. Its purpose is to raise awareness of the trans community and the continuing marginalization we face. It’s unfortunate, but true, that people are more likely to support oppressed groups if they personally know members of said group.

Sadly, today is for the lucky ones; November 20th is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. On that day, we honor our dead, murdered for daring to be themselves.

For a while now, I’ve been sorta out, but lately being closeted has bothered me more and more, so here we go: My name is Leola and I use she/her pronouns. I’m a homoflexible trans female. I’m early in my transition and still present as male at work and family functions.

I haven’t legally changed my name yet; because I haven’t decided on exactly what I want to change it too. I’m definitely set on “Leola Jane.” The question is whether to keep my birth surname or to drop it and add “Temperance” as a middle name.

The first option has the advantage of keeping my initials (which I rather like) the same. The second add my favorite virtue name and drops the name of someone who’ll probably never accept me.

  • Leola Jane Aho
  •  Leola Temperance Jane

Let me know which one you prefer.

Vox Dysphoria

In middle school, when my voice started changing, one of my classmates gave me a hard time about it. He told me, “Don’t use that voice, use the other voice.”

This upset me. Firstly because I had no effective control over which voice I used. But secondly, and more deeply, because the voice he prefered, the deeper “masculine” one, wasn’t the one I wanted.

This is one of my earliest dysphoric memories and I’d nearly forgotten about it until it all came flooding back the other day. I still don’t like my voice and am finding voice training to be one of the most difficult aspects of my transition. Nevertheless, I’ve made some progress and at this point (if I focus on it, which is hard in real social interactions) I now do have control over which voice I employ.