I've struggled with writing the next several chapters, unsure of how to create any sort of wholeness out of the chaos they are meant to uncover. They were written at different times and under different circumstances over the past two decades, give or take.

I should apologize in advance for any repetition that is bound to be. They all cover the same basic theme...which could even reveal a title for the book. I'm thinking it may end up being something like A Place where I Belong...because that is indeed what I have sought my entire life.

I shall begin with this chapter, written in 2006, about half a year after I joined Daily Kos.

In loyalty to their kind
they cannot tolerate our minds.
In loyalty to our kind
we cannot tolerate their obstruction.

Shortly after I came out, I was contacted by someone from the local paper. I was told, "We're going to do a story about you and wanted to know if you and your wife would agree to be interviewed." Clearly, they we're going to do the story whether or not I agreed to participate. I talked to my wife and she agreed that it would be better to do the interview so that we might have some input into how the story would be told. The article is regrettably not online. I spent the past two days trying to locate the "hard copy" I have somewhere, but haven't found it yet. That's okay, I would probably cringe at it today anyway. The point is that I chose to speak up for myself. I've been doing that ever since. I still do it here. Some people have characterized what I have been writing about as revelling in self-pity. I don't see it that way at all, because I have anything but pity about myself. I am proud to be me.

Having spent those two days poring over old documents, I am struck by how much I have forgotten. I was reminded that when I came out, it was in the midst of hate-filled rhetoric directed towards gays and lesbians, both on campus, in Conway, and in Arkansas. I had forgotten that a major reason I had come out when I did it was because I wanted to add my voice to "our" side. If we were going to have it out, I believed we should have it all out.

The week before I came out, there was an editorial in the school newspaper, Echo, rebutting an anti-gay diatribe in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. On the day I came out, there was a letter to the editor of Echo, affirming that discrimination against gays and lesbians is supported by God and should be affirmed by man

...lest His Wrath be kindled against America for its escalating deviate[sic] conduct and public official approval and should destroy us also.

Two weeks after I came out, the featured news item in Echo was about harassing and obscene phone calls made to the faculty advisor and president of the Lesbian and Gay Student Alliance. I would like to say that I believe that things have improved since then, but I'm not sure I would be speaking the truth.

Life is Change
How it differs from the rocks
I've seen their ways too often for my liking
New worlds to gain
My life is to survive
and be alive
for you.

I am also annoyed that most of the hard-copy documentation I have comes from the period 1996 - 2000, due to an abortive attempt to relocate to Seattle in the fall of 1995. While I was there, I was computerless. My documents from before that time are achived electronic files. I'm thinking that to really access them well, I should use the NSA data-mining software. Then I remembered that I should say something about e-space.

I had been using a computer for several years and even had a Prodigy account that I could never quite get to function properly. My daughter and her partner suggested that it was imperative that I get an email account, which I did. Almost none of the faculty on our campus had email in 1992. The first thing I learned was that I sucked at using the Unix-based email program the school as using, called Mail, but the school soon migrated to using Pegasus. I found my medium. I joined the Sappho list in October to learn what it meant to be a lesbian and learned in addition much about what it meant to be a woman. It was from that list that I learned about the email list Transgen. I became a member of that list in December, where I began learning what it was like for people to be transgender. Put together, what I was really learning was what it meant to be me. I was developing my voice. I will be investigating those archived Pegasus files when I figure out how to open them again. I also learned how to use IRC. It was there that I developed a sense of community.

Although transsexual people were few and far between in my everyday world, I discovered that there was a thriving transgender community online. That was due in no small part to the fact the our primary employment opportunities seemed to be the computer industry and academia. Of course, the fact that the medium we were forming community in was part of the Internet contributed heavily to that impression. But offline studies were done and this seems to actually have been the case.

E-space, as we called it, conquered the distance gaps to bring us together. Even in our disagreements, which were legion, we were still being brought together. What is fantastic about it is that in e-space, we were free to be our words, to be the thoughts we had and could express. Gender was what we said it was, both personally and politically.

Someone once asked me if they could print the following in a magazine or journal. I forget which it was and what its name was and don't know if it ever saw the light of day.

A Transition through Poetry XII

Bits and Bytes  E-spacing   There is no sound but the clickety-clack of fingers on the keyboard There are no sights but the electronically formed letters on the screen But there are people in my computer Riding the crest of the technological future And I have joined them We have stripped ourselves down to the thoughts we express Mind meeting mind with no distractions The carefully chosen phrase can be undone By the carelessly tossed word A misplaced comma may cost a friendship We become our vocabulary and our usage of it Our emotions are expressed only through punctuation Yet we bare our souls to each other And form relationships deeper than those in the real world Because we must always trust each other Finland, Australia, South Africa and Canada Maine, Virginia, New Hampshire and Kansas Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco and Boston I have trod on your virtual streets today And visited with some of your most caring inhabitants We embrace each other thought to thought And love each other's wisdom We share our joys and pain And support each other through our sorrows and triumphs This is life in e-space --Robyn Elaine Serven --June, 1993

(I also do not know why it is fighting my html changes. I hope to have it fixed by time to publish.)

After two months on the Sappho list, it occurred to me that I had left one closet only to take up residence in another. I came out about being pre-operatively transsexual. This apparently had not been done before. There had been and were transsexual members of Sappho, but almost nobody admitted to being transsexual and those who did were post-op. I suspected that anyone could have figured it out since it was on Sappho where my daughter's partner had inquired about resources for me before I joined and I made no secret about being her partner's parent when I did join. Be that as it may, I came out there and found some attack, but also some amazing support. When Sappho spun off Older Wiser Lesbians (OWLS) for lesbians over 40 in June of 1993, I was extremely pleased to be one of the founding members. OWLS is the only email list I have stayed a part of. Even when I went offline in the fall of 1995, my friends from OWLS were the people who were helping me try to relocate.

Since that time I have regularly added and subtracted email connections as my interests changed or my need to discuss different issues grew or waned. At various times I have been a member of tg-spirit, tslesbian, tsmenace, trans-theory, trans-academic, tgs-pflag (where I was a co-moderator), pflag-talk, and glb-math. I've probably left some out. Some of them probably don't exist anymore. But they were where I built community, not just for me, but for everyone.

I'm all about building community. And teaching people how to do that for themselves of course, because I am also all about being a teacher.

Coming to Daily Kos was just a continuation of that effort.

One thing I have realized is that I have come to a place where proceeding chronologically, even linearly, is no longer an option. Not only do I doubt my ability to align events in order, I'm not sure that putting them in order is appropriate. Learning how to be is done one piece at a time, whenever and however the pieces arrive. It is also the case that my life took on a different texture...or scheme, if you will. My life was operating on so many different levels, not unlike the channels I work with in my multi-media programs. Investigating the channels separately rather than the frames of time that cut across the channels makes more sense to me.