I first visited the Transsexual Counseling Center of San Francisco when it was still on Mission and Third in San Francisco. That was in 1969. At that point it was being run by those who founded it.
A couple of years later I went back because I needed to speak with Elliott Blackstone about some legal matters. The original folks were gone.
The Center was now run by Jan Maxwell. I became friends with her. I started working at the Center with her and we got a grant to move it to the Tenderloin.
It became the National Transsexual Counseling Unit and I worked there for a year during which time I got my sex change operation.
My interst in running the center whose main objective was assisting others through the process waned. In part because once SRS is a done deal continuing to deal with folks who are in the same frantic position can start feeling like a rut.
At the same time I made a number of friends who I continued to be friends with. Most are dead now. Hard lives and poor medical coverage if any shortens life. But I occassionally added some other post-op sisters to my circle of friends. These are people I talk to on the phone at least once a month.
We tend to feel we are still having to cope with some things but at the same time surgery talk can be very boring and most of us are so out of touch..
Community.. Maybe we are someones idea of a community but it feels more like a small circle of friends.
Even helping some one through the process of getting SRS presumes there is an end to the process.
Transgender seems stuck in a rut of forever. More of interest to those who are in that position than those of us who are past it.
Women Born Transsexual 