The Republican’s and the church going folk have added a new phrase to their list of all-time classics…..”Trump’s election has nothing to do with race.”

This wonderful insight joins such gems as “some of my best friends are black,” “God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve,” “the science in regard to climate change has not been settled,” and “the only way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons is to use them.”

I do know that in the end the rednecks, born-again yahoos, republicans, conservatives and racists (I know this is redundant with the previous four) will get what is coming to them.

But it is so incredibly hard to wait for that.

More than that it is terribly hard to handle the fact  that when these idiots meet God for the first time and he has a Gender Spectrum tote bag….I won’t be there top see it.

I like that somewhere within us is the solution to the problem.   My solution happened to be a pencil and paper, but I imagine the solutions are as various as the types of people in the world.   I think the answer when working with young people is to get them to just hang on until they find that solution.  We can support, facilitate, and identify but in the end the solution is in them.   My story may be similar to theirs but it isn’t the same.  Therefore the ladder they need to use to climb out of their hole will also be different.

It is so incredibly tempting to look in panic for an answer, and in not finding one to just give up.

But it is in there.  The answer is in there.  It took me decades to understand how I was different from those around me, and even longer to take my oldest crutch (a doodle) and turn it into a vehicle to move outside of myself and into the larger world.

Nothing is as surprising to me as how wrong you can be about who to come out too.  I would have bet my life on my brother being the safest bet to tell the truth too.  We are close enough in ages and had shared enough life together that in all honesty I didn’t think the TG thing would matter.

Good lord I was naive.  More than a decade later he is still good to his word that I am dead to him.  No one is better at holding onto hate than a born again christian that worked for the RNC.  The ability of Republicans to hold onto bias is almost an art form.  It’s odd that I know with all certainty that he and will never meet again in this life.  Having that kind of certainty about anything is unusual, but having that much certainty about someone else’s hatred is just plain chilling.

All that anger after I took the time to make a list (in descending order) of who in my life were the safest people to tell I was not a boy!  Not sure I have made a list for anything since then.  Lists and I are over.

With all the hundreds of doodles, and the thousands of thoughts that led to them this is the one at the core.  I like that Doodle has forced me to be more pro-active in regards to my life and my country.  If you can find something larger than yourself to be believe in, and not lose yourself in the bargain than you are fortunate indeed.

Not sure at this point if the rainbow is the LBGTQ community, the profession of teaching, or the TG label I was slow to wear.  But I am richer for Doodle having forced me to have a wider view of the world.

It is a bit surprising how something as simple as this can take so many years to understand.

Seeing as how late I stumbled into an understanding of it (my 40s) clearly it is not an understatement to say despite my Masters Degrees I am not a particularly “quick study.”

But of course none of that matters.  The point is I got here.

I have some places I need to see.  A broken down fence in Wyoming, a bar in Greenwich Village, and a bar in Florida.

I’ve done the America things….all the civil war battlefields, Valley Forge, Carpenters Hall, etc.  They were each moving and powerful in their own way. But they didn’t feel like they were truly mine.

I have yet to see the history that I truly consider MY history.

With my earlier doodles when I was “out” as gay but not trans I never let Doodle get into any sketch with a TG topic in it.  It was always sketched with generic characters or inanimate objects, but never with the doodle form of me.

My cowardice was amazing.

It feels good to be a link in this chain.  The community got me through the worst of times, and today I was approached by a student that is in a real mess trying to come out to her family.  The LBGTQ community saved me and now since then I have been a link.  As wonderful as it was to be helped I think this feeling is better.

The only thing that frightens me more than an egotist that has clearly run amok both legally and morally is a man that hates everyone that is not like him.  The Donald merely sees LGBTQ people as perverse while his VP believes he has heard from God we are all going to hell, and would love to send us there as soon as possible.  Clowns don’t scare me nearly as much as fanatics.