Wait until they are out of High school to come out

My Dear TJF,
As I read what I have written I realize I have barely begun to cover the simplistic, not well thought out and not well written first paragraph of your commentary.  I have decided to submit it as I have written it.  In re-reading your entire commentary I am so very tempted to respond to each of your statements, line by line and word for word.  I sense that this would be too long for a reply to the forum.  This is a forum and if there are those who would like to see a longer  more complete reply to your commentary they will say so.  I doubt this will be the case.  Simplicity, being what it is, the ultimate complexity, therefore WYSIWYG!

How nice it must be to live in a perfect world...or is it those rose colored glasses you have on.
This might be sage advice, except that one's sexual awareness which includes ones gender awareness and ones awareness of sexual desires that may or may not coincide with a person's church and society, rarely wait until they are "out of High School."  These issues are usually played out on the panorama of school beginning in Junior High School and they are rarely able to be hidden from others and certainly if they are it takes a very focused and very fearful  person to do this.  These years are, for the human child imbued with much, fantasy, feeling, experiment and learning in all areas of life that will ultimately lead to a life, if one is very lucky, that is inherently acceptable to the individual, regardless of societies mores, and is a life lead with out fear or shame.  As far as I am concerned, forcing any young person to wait until they are out of High School is sentencing them to those years filled with shame and fear, "Will I be found out?"  There is no conceivable way that you can convince me that those years I spent in Junior High School and High School and the thirty years afterward that I lived in abject fear, often paralyzing fear, and turmoil of someone finding out I was transgendered was better for me than if I had had some form of outreach in school that helped me to accept myself and showed me how worthwhile I was.  Coming from one who survived this I will tell you that you are SIMPLY WRONG, and because of this blood was shed and lives were lost.  Understanding and compassion DO NOT happen in a vacuum, especially the false vacuum you espouse when you say, "Wait until after High School."

I also absolutely disagree with and take supreme umbrage at this opening statement of yours,

>> "I have a different perspective on the role of Gay/lesbian support groups. I think too many of them are filled with activists using schools as a social petrie dish. Children need to be protected from the realities of this imperfect world.">> 

This is a purely homophobic comment that comes straight out of the church and societies first mantra...do not be different, do not be a blip on the screen.  You are imperfect and you are not worthy, you are different in a shameful way and it will not be tolerated.  Oh would that it were so that children COULD be protected from the realities in this imperfect world.   Bull puckey, when then is it that a child is to learn that this is an imperfect world and when then is it that he is to trained and given the tools to participate and survive in "this imperfect world."  Pity the poor soul (and I mean their Soul) that reaches the world as an adult after High School, and then having no tools, training or survival skills, has to navigate successfully through this tainted world.  Do you propose, perhaps, an extra year after High School when we break the news to them..."Oh, by the way, we didn't give the whole story to you; now that you are out of High School we need to tell you the world is imperfect, not nice, terrifying and just simply doesn't give a tinker's damn about you as an individual.  All you queers, trannies and lesbians are not accepted and you are probably in a group that has one of the highest suicide rates and you will live in stultifying fear for the rest of your life as a result of simply who you are.  TJF, I come from your training program and I am, thankfully, a two-time suicide survivor.  I know many just like me and I know more that did not fail in their suicide attempts brought about by fear, lack of understanding, lack of compassion, lack of love, browbeating, beatings, and most of all an inability to reach that awareness that they were loved and were worthy of love and that this had to start with them loving themselves FIRST and ABOVE ALL, BEFORE ALL!  This path is more correctly begun early on as one is discovering those things about themselves that society and the church may condemn and heap shame upon.  It is here in those tender, immensely expressive, exploratory and provocative years of the formation of their sexual drive and identity that they need to begin to understand the pain of the real world and given the tools of love and compassion for all in order meet the onslaught of your "imperfect world."  The foremost tools for survival in this uncaring and imperfect world are acceptance and love of oneself, which lead to acceptance and love of others, whomever they may be and a well developed sense of compassion for all, (this is true Christ Consciousness) and forgiveness.  These are the only tools that can stand against the onslaught of hate and aggression that those of us graced with difference have at our disposal.  It is with these tools that those of us who are graced with difference will ultimately move the world away from hate.   These tools are very contagious.  These are the tools I have had to learn to use, I could have learned them in Jr or High School if there had been a single caring individual who would have been willing to mentor me from their heart at that age.  Instead you demean it and fill it with the hate of the church and determine that these are breeding grounds promulgated by people who have an agenda to create more of us.  I am WHO I AM!  I have always been so.  No person could have influenced me to become transgendered I was simply created this way by the Creator and First Source of all life and spirit.

Lastly, you say you are a teacher.  This scare the hell out of me.  I don't want this to be an ad hominem attack of you; but, I find your inability or unwillingness to use proper punctuation a bit boring and gets in the way of my belief that you are a teacher, at least with any real training... perhaps it is just a lazy style of writing that you have developed for situations such as this.  In any case, for me, it diminishes your argument a great deal.

All of us, you included, and the hate makers whoever they are or will be, I believe are only asking for a safe place to simply be...to be free to express our core self, the self that is the self of our soul.  I think you sense this and in your own way you are trying to do this.  In that I applaud you, I just think the sooner one understands the difficulties the sooner one is capable of coping and surviving and moving forward.

A'A I ka Hula, Waiho Ka Hilahila, I Ka Hale
("Live with passion, EMBRACE CHANGE, Do not fear it" )

BRIGHT BLESSINGS,

Amanda