Today I’m having lunch with my older sister Laurel. We will walk at Dune Peninsula in Tacoma afterward. It will be another unseasonably warm day, so it’s another good day for a walk. (I walked yesterday, too.)

This may be my last chance to see Laurel, ever. Unless she flies down to see me in CR, it will definitely be the last time, because I have zero plans to ever come back.

Laurel and I are not close, but whenever push came to shove, she has always had my back, and I’m grateful for that.

When I told mom that I was a lesbian as a young adult in the early 1970’s (because I didn’t know the term for transgender then), Laurel says she rallied for me and helped Mom come to terms with it.

I think Mom would have been delighted to learn I was trans, because she always wanted a son. Well, she essentially had one after I was born, but neither of us had the words for that then. I’m glad she allowed me to be a tomboy and to dress like Roy Rogers.

Laurel up front, me on the side wearing my robin’s egg blue Roy Rogers cowboy outfit

I’m so glad that today’s kids have a vocabulary that helps explain who they are. I think knowing about the gender spectrum would have made life soooo much easier for me, had I known the options available to describe myself, and had I known for sure there were others like me.

As a transgender child and teenager, I felt alien and so alone. No mere words can take you where I was then, but this quote from Theodore Strugeon from “A Saucer of Loneliness” comes close:

There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable,

so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings.

Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you.