He is the Lights of the City ...

I have thought a lot about what I feel about transgender people lately.  Before knowing that I would find myself thinking about this nearly all the time, I was like most people, I think, that rarely had any thoughts.  It was something I found strange.  It was something I would only see on television.  It was something I did not understand, nor did I ever take the time to understand or feel the need to dissect until I understood.  It was something that really did not touch my world.

After visiting New York for the first time last year, I told people how much I loved it and how, for me, it was either exactly like I imagined or better.  I had only ever heard about New York through others or seen it on television; depicted romantically or negatively in movies, sitcoms or documentaries.  A lot of negative has been said about New York over the years, and yet, I guess, I always chose to ignore the negative and view it romantically, as when I visited there (many times over the last 18 months), I seldom saw or experienced anything that did not support my romantic feelings about New York - even though negative existed.

That's how it has sort of evolved for me - my relationship with transgender people.  I guess I chose to view them as a part of life I had never experienced but somehow accepted as a unique, yet strange, population of people that helped to form humanity into something greater than it already was.  When I found out that Chris was transgender I forgot that I had these feelings.  When I found out that Chris was transgender all I was consumed with (even now, sometimes) was how do I stop trying to dissect this thing to the point to where I truly understand it?  Now that I am intimately entrenched in a community and the experience, with a child, that has pulled me out of a pixelated world of television and movies and into a reality that is not romantic at all - forced me onto a journey where I have spent months mourning one child so that I can openly embrace another - now that I am here, I am doing my best to fight off the negative that tries to drown me and only focus on how to help make this story end happily.  The problem is I often find myself on my tip-toes struggling to see past the crowd of people in front of me so I can see the beauty of the city lights.

I am the crowd in front of me.  Chris doesn't even know how much I am coming to realize that he is the lights of the city ...