Thanks for all the great responses to my blog about hope. I will never give up hope nor my way of viewing the world as a big interconnected system.

I wrote that blog because I was observing the inevitable workings of this sick system of ours. First let me remind you of the summary of our book:

Author's note: This book review was published 16 February of 2011, and I'm surprised it went through over at Orange without comment, as Lance Selfa does reveal in detail how insidious the Democratic Party really is.

I hear it all the time. We transgender people just have to wait for our time; We're just too new.

A team of trans people are busy putting the lie to that. We've Been Around is series of documentary shorts that chronicle the lives of Lucy, STAR, Albert, Little Ax, and Lou. They are directed by Rhys Ernst, produced by Christine Beebe and the narration is done by transgender people. The team includes Transparent actress Alexandra Billings, writer and filmmaker Susan Stryker and trans historian Monica Roberts.

I know it's terribly bad form to write a diary that asks the readers to go somewhere else and then come back. But I sure hope you do. The videos do not embed well.

I hear it all the time. We transgender people just have to wait for our time; We're just too new.

Esquire magazine has an article about a time long ago: 5 Transgender Americans on the Hardships of Transitioning, Then and Now.

Transgender men and women have lived openly for decades in America. Most of them transitioned before it was remotely acceptable to the wider culture—and so made possible the social transformation in gender identity that we are seeing today. The three women and two men on these pages lived much of their lives as one sex and then, along with thousands of others, have lived long, accomplished (and dangerous) lives as another. They are a comment on the abiding nature of the human impulse to change sexual identity (at a moment when it's almost regarded as a fad) and also emblematic of those who did so when it was so much harder.

Full disclosure: The author of this diary began transition 23 years ago.

Since cavemen sat around a fire, the primary entertainment of mankind has always been storytelling. As any English teacher can tell you, there are only two basic stories: a) Hero goes on a journey, and b) Stranger comes to town. The former is usually the favorite, and for good reason.

370 years ago a fleet of Spanish warships sailed into the harbor in Naples, Italy, and ended the first real experiment in popular democracy in the western world since dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla marched his armies into Rome seventeen centuries earlier.