Today on
transition radio tv my guest is Autumn weisz she was born in east Texas back in
1946, the offspring of a local member of a prestigious family and a Hungarian
émigré. She quotes My mother, a
Christian, was a musician and my father was Jewish. They met in postwar Chicago
where my mother was a professional entertainer.
Growing
up back in the ‘50’s there were no transgender role models. There was barely
television and certainly no internet. I knew from day one that I was
‘different’ than everybody else but didn’t know why. And what 6-year old kid is
going to ‘compare notes’ with their friends wondering if they felt the same way
inside? I didn’t think I was crazy, but for God’s sake, I was 6! How did I know
how other people felt, ya know? Looking back on the situation, though, at this
point, I recall that most of my friends were girls even though I was extremely
athletic and played in several team sports, excelling at little league baseball
and football. We had a segregated elementary school of sorts with boys on one
side and girls on the other. Invariably, yours truly would get in trouble
periodically after being found playing games with the little girls on their
side of the school. It was never deemed to be anything ‘serious’, but it did
happened quite a lot. I just felt more comfortable and ‘closer’ to them than
with the boys with whom I played sports.
I kept
this pretty much under control while in school. I never really crossdressed and
didn’t exactly date. I had a couple of female friends that I would be seen in
public with, but they were seldom, if ever, ‘dates’. I was a three-sport
letterman, and practically ANY girl in my high school would’ve wanted to go out
with me. More than a few have confessed that to me at some of our class
reunions.
As the
years progressed, though, I became increasingly angry toward my situation and I
utterly despised my body. During my junior year in high school, I decided to go
ahead and immerse myself fully into weight training just to get my mind off
things as they were. And when football season began the very next year, I was
ready. I had bulked myself into a 238-pound middle linebacker, who, when the
season was all said and done, ended up as a third-team All-State selection.
Andin Texas, that speaks volumes. I could’ve gone practically anywhere in the country
to play football. I chose instead to put an end to all the crap I endured for
so long.
The day I
graduated and received my high school diploma, I went right down to my local
United States Army recruiter and signed up for Viet Nam. I had all intentions
of stopping a couple of bullets and coming home in a box. I just couldn’t deal
with all the confusion and frustration any longer…
I’m
stopping this narrative at this point. Obviously, God has an incredibly strange
sense of humor, and I wasn’t killed in southeast Asia.
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