First, please take a deep breath.

If you're here out of an honest curiosity and desire to understand me better, please don't be afraid to speak to me directly. All you have to do is ask me if I know someone named Ginger and I'll know what you're talking about.

If something about all of this troubles you, then no doubt there are a thousand thoughts racing through your head right now. Remember, you can always come to me with questions. Until then, please keep the following things in mind:

• I am the same person who has always treated you with respect, dignity, and friendship.

• I don't know absolutely everything about your private life, and I don't spend my time making sure everyone knows absolutely everything about me. If I did, I probably wouldn't have any friends because I would have bored them all to death.

• Please have some respect for the fact that I am pursuing a lifelong dream against overwhelming challenges. You may also think someone who is tossing aside a career to sail around the world is nuts, but would you openly deride them? And what have you done recently to challenge your limits and fulfill a dream?

• What I do in my spare time, whether it's finding my gender identity or eating anchovies (not that I like anchovies), has no affect on your life.

• I do not claim to be a woman. It's a very sensitive subject for many and I do not purport to have the experience of growing up female, to have suffered the innumerable injustices, to comprehend the bodily experience, or any of that. What I will say is that I have discovered a manner of being and a personal style in which I feel very comfortable and the personal interactions I have, especially with women, are now much more rewarding and all the pieces "click" at an emotional level much better than when I struggled to play the male role that was so carefully spelled out for me by society. Many of my female friends accept me as a girlfriend, and I'm honored to be accepted as a sister. I am simply who I am...that's all...I claim no more than that.

• I do not do anything that hurts anybody. I do things that half the world does, it's just that some people feel uncomfortable about it. However, gun lovers and tree huggers don't let anyone else's moral outrage stop them from doing what they want to do, and for that same reason I cannot allow other peoples' discomfort to prevent me from living my life. If I did make sure no one in the world was offended by my daily activities, about the only thing I could safely do would be to sit still, shrivel up, and die...and even then I'd still probably offend somebody. The only impact I have on the world is that I boost the local economy by buying a lot more clothes than the average person. I'm clean, discreet, don't drink, don't do drugs, don't spread disease, don't have illicit sex, I share the variety of skills I have with others and help them become productive people in our high-tech world, I recycle, and I give back extra change when I've been given too much. In every measurable way, I help make this world a better place to live. You pass by thousands of people every day and don't let the details of their daily lives bother you. If by merely knowing about a vibrant and harmless part of me you suddenly consider me a problem, then the logical source of the problem is you, since I haven't changed in the meantime. Think about it.

• I do not seek to corrupt your children or family members. If that were my goal, you would have known about me many years ago. Please keep the notions of ideas and actions distinct; while I do embody ideas which may be challenging to understand, my actions are very discreet and circumspect. And the ideas I present are not unlike any challenging idea found in poetry, politics, art, or debate...they give adults as well as children the opportunity to think and grow and learn to see people as kindred souls, not a box full of stereotypes. I will never promote the specifics of my life as any kind of role model, but I do have a message I want others to take from my experience: "to thine own self be true." I think it's safe to say that we wish everyone in our lives the peace and joy that comes from living a life that honors your true self rather than someone else's collection of dusty and intolerant messages...a collection of messages that may have been meant more for assuaging the fears and insecurities of the original speaker rather than bringing greater happiness to anyone else's life.

• If your objections are religion-based, I will gladly discuss your objections after you've made an honest evaluation of the matter. That means that I'd like you to go to your favorite religious bookstore and read books that defend the opposite of the position you are taking. I don't mean the usual books that treat someone who is different as a pariah who needs to be cured with proper moral guidance and lots of prayer. I'm referring to books which argue that the traditional gender roles are not as clearly defined in the religious writings as most people would like to believe. Many such books exist; they are written by religious scholars, are extremely well-researched, and make very compelling arguments which cast much needed light on dusty conventional wisdom which is both inadequately questioned and inaccurate. If your bookstore is unable or unwilling to carry or obtain such books, then you may want to consider abandoning that bookstore. I would hope that you would consider a bookstore which tries to control your acquisition of knowledge unworthy of your business. If you are unwilling to partake in a reading of such books, you need to ask yourself whether your beliefs are grounded in a considered weighing of the entire scope of religious and philosophical arguments or whether you are merely using selected religious opinions to rationalize your own personal discomfort. Religion has a proud legacy of fostering deep thinkers throughout history; I think it's a shame to see religion used by so many as a reason to stop thinking. And I won't waste my time on people who are unwilling to think.
  
  Not to pick on Christians, but I visited a large Christian bookstore recently. They used to have a large section dealing with family issues such as homosexuality. Sadly, that whole section is now gone. I would have preferred an openly discussed Christian solution rather than the implied hatred resulting from the obliteration of the entire subject. If something about this really bothers you and if you are willing to be intellectually honest, then you should visit and have the courage to read in its entirety this thoughtful website by a devout Christian named Jade Devlin (or any other website that comes up in response to a search on "Christian transsexuals or crossdressers"). I will say no more.

• You may ask why can't I simply be satisfied with who I am. Well, I am happy with who I am. I'm certainly happier than when I was trying to be the person that everyone else wanted me to be. If you're happy to hand over that piece of your own dignity to any passerby and invite them to hurl judgments at you when they decide that you aren't who they think you should be, go right ahead. As far as I'm concerned, it's up to me and no one else to decide who I am and what I'm going to do about it. We happen to live in an age where medicine offers tummy tucks, nose jobs, breast enhancement, the barbaric practice of orthodontia, and other body modifications which somehow manage to escape criticism, but bring up the subject of gender and somehow these procedures all of a sudden become immoral.

• For those of you with strong opinions about what is "right" and what is "natural", I point you to a John Hopkins University site which describes some of the known conditions which shatter the simplicity of the XY-XX boy-girl categories. Nature has decided that variation is what's natural and that the world is much more complicated than stereotypical men and women. There are countless subtle conditions of biology, genetics, and hormones which are known to have powerful effects on gender, sexual identity, and behavior. Numerous mainstream conservative doctors attempt to dismiss the biological underpinnings of gender and sexual identity and immediately assume that the person suffers from a weakness of character and lack of behavioral control. However, the facts show that it is folly for anyone to assume and justify by external appearances alone that they can correctly determine what someone's gender identity "should" be. For example, if you objected to a balding husky man holding hands with another man, wouldn't you be forced to retract your objections if you learned that the balding husky "man" was a genetic woman who had an unfortunate natural hormonal condition? Would you then go so far as to leave this woman no place in the world by condemning her for being a lesbian if she married a woman just to escape the harrassment from people who walk past them on the street? These facts of nature thus beg the question: how do you justify judging anyone on appearance?

• Please respect my privacy. This web site exists so that I can communicate with my friends, not so that I can be gawked at by everyone you know. Please afford me the same decency and privacy that you would expect people to give to you.

• And finally, as someone very dear to me once said, "We judge in black and white, yet everything we love is in color." You have to admit, I'm very colorful!