After my surgery and later issuance of a new birth certificate last November, I wanted to apply to the Department of the Navy (DON) to change my recorded gender. The Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) keeps track of servicemembers and retirees genders, so I wanted, for gender affirmation and DOD acknowledgement, my gender reflected in my Department of Defense (DOD) records.

There is no gender marker on military identification cards, so it’s not an issue of being outed by any gender marker on it. But, it still was important to me — every other government database records my gender as female, and the DOD showing me as male just bothered me.

One of the very first books I read after beginning my transition in 2003 was Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw. My first thoughts were “She is so wrong about transsexual people — we are NOT in between male and female! I know I’m a woman!”

And I still know that as truth about myself, and it’s a different personal truth than the personal truth Kate has embraced for herself. But what I’ve come to realize is that Kate, through that book, taught me that there is no right way to be trans.

Quoting Jos at Feministing from her post entitled Netroots ’12: watch Blogging for Transgender Equality: I’m on a panel at Netroots Nation this morning about blogging on transgender issues, and you can watch the panel right here – it’s streaming live at 10:30am. The panelists are a badass group I’m proud to be a part [...]