Esprit always pull together an impressive slate of speakers and sessions and if you go to the web site you'll get a sense of the scope of topics covered during the sessions, everything ranging from basic beauty tips to feminine deportment to counseling sessions to medical presentations. The sessions typically ran 3 or 4 abreast from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. (with a lunch break) so it was impossible to catch everything. I ended up choosing "beginners" type classes since I figured I still needed all the basic help I could get. It just seemed premature for me to even think about attending any of the surgeon's presentations. In all honesty it was just like being back in college, cramming my little brain with things that were very important to know or things that deserved to be thought about...things girls have the luxury of spending a lifetime absorbing and experimenting with.

It's hard for me to choose a favorite session; I enjoyed all of them for very different reasons. So here you go...a few thoughts on some of the sessions I attended. By the way, nearly all of the sessions were presented by GG's (with the exception of the medically related sessions and some of the sessions dealing with the TG experience). That was important to me because it lent a greater sense of "reality" to the information.

The makeup and color analysis workshop was conducted by Rita Jacobson. Rita brought a trunk full of BeautiControl cosmetics to Esprit as part of her makeup workshop and to use for the endless complimentary makeovers she seemed to be doing from morning until night. I don't know much about cosmetics, but from what she showed me, this seems like a great line of products. Rita was delightful to spend time with and genuinely cared about providing the best makeup analysis and tips for each one of us. It was such a pleasure to sit across from Rita during my makeover and watch her excited smiles as she admired her handiwork.

Karen Brown presented a pair of sessions on wardrobe planning and accessorizing. These were both pretty broad topics and could have easily used a few more hours, but the information she was able to share was very valuable nonetheless. The jewelry collection she represents is fabulous...tasteful, appointed with nice details, and very beautifully made. There's nothing like having a fashion consultant and jewelry store right down the hall when you're in need of some advice and a set of earrings for a new dress.

Mariette Pathy Allen is a photographer and producer whose works really touched me, and she's a great dancer, too! I especially enjoyed her Opening Shutters presentation with Niela Miller where she showed a variety of her photographs taken over the years and asked us to reflect on what emotions the photos evoked in us. Most of the photos were of TG people, but in some cases the photos were innocuous photos such as a flower bud or her daughter in a garden. The range of emotions people expressed startled me. At one point during the presentation we were asked how we viewed our relationship with the camera. That got me thinking...and I told a rather long story about the deep feelings I experienced during my first childhood experience in a wig and the scratchy black and white Instamatic photo my sister took of that event. Nothing meaningful transpired in my gender journey for many years until my recent photo shoot which revealed to me that some dreams were possible and that I could be seen by the world as the person I was inside. I closed with the following thought..."the camera feels like a window that I want to dive through, for the real world is on the other side." It just came out...I don't really know what it means, but it made a few people ooh and ahh.

Elaine Lerner gave a thorough presentation of the biological, psychological, and evolutionary basis of sex and gender. All of the old-school thinking about gender were discovered...oh...a couple thousand years ago. Those ideas are about as dusty as using leeches to balance the bodily humors and not much new science has appeared in support of that position in the meantime. In contrast, the understanding of the complexity of human and animal sexuality continues to grow by thousands of pages of research a year. When doctors actually see babies with ambiguous genitalia, when geneticists see chromosomes other than XX and XY, when a slight hiccup in the elaborate dance of timing and intensity and duration of hormones and chemicals in utero causes observable changes in the sexual physiology of a baby, when gonads and hormone levels and brain chemistry and genitalia and body chemistry and sexual orientation don't always handily line up into the simplistic "male" and "female" categories, how can one possibly still believe that sexuality is black and white? Or more specifically, how can one defend the position that sexuality should be black and white when we aren't even born that way?