"A Journey To Self Love- A Southern Trans Woman" with guest blogger Jaisee Alexander

       How does one encapsulate their entire experience of life onto a few written pages?  I’m not sure that it is possible, but I am going to give it my best.  I was born in 1988 in the state of South Carolina.  They deemed me male at birth and that was a mistake that would take me my entire life to reconcile.
       As a child, I was quite content with life and myself.  I was caring, light-hearted, spirited, and loving.  I was quite feminine naturally and my parents took notice of it.  At the age of five, they put me into Tai-Kwon-Do in hopes that I would be able to learn to defend myself physically from those who might want to do me harm, due to my feminine nature.
       By the age of seven I was still sucking my thumb (my first addiction, one of many to come) and my parents made me an offer.  They said that if I quit sucking my thumb they would buy me a Pocahontas Barbie doll!  My father reconciled this by stating it was NOT a "real" Barbie doll, but a Native American figurine.  You see by this time, most of my friends were girls.  We always played with Barbies and I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to have one.  You better believe that I quit sucking my thumb, and so that Pocahontas Barbie doll was mine.  It is important to note that before I even left my mother I was using external means (my thumb) to bring about internal peace.  This is a behavior that I’ve carried ever since.
       By the age of eight I realized that the way I behaved was contrary to what others expected of me.  So embarked my journey on how to become a boy.  By middle school I was completely isolated from the male population.  I tried to imitate the behaviors of males, but to no avail. No one was buying my act and I’m not sure I did either.
       I began to struggle, as I could not harmonize my religious beliefs with my growing sexual desire for males.  I tried to throw myself deeper into my faith in desperation that if I just loved God hard enough my profane desires might be alleviated.  My teen years were filled with hazing, isolation, self-hatred, confusion, and so on.  Spring break my junior year in high school, I finally agreed to try marijuana.  It was magically incredible and I was temporarily relieved of my suffering.  Within a couple of weeks I began using cocaine and then alcohol.  So began my decade of using mind-altering chemicals in order to avoid and alleviate suffering.
       Puberty came late and so did the most unexpected.  I had been waiting with such hopes that puberty would save me.  My body would masculinize so that I could finally fit into this binary system of sex and gender.  That was not what happened.  I began to develop fat tissue in my chest.  As my nipples protruded a pain began to develop.  As the months continued, so did the pain.  After a year plus, it was unbearable.  I used to walk down the halls of school pulling at the bottom of my shirt so that no one would see the development of my breasts.  I had to walk down stairs so cautiously because it hurt unbearably.  One day I pushed back on my chest and, much to my surprise, a liquid substance secreted from my nipples.  Thus began the draining of my breasts.  The pain became greater than my shame and I finally told my mother.
       My senior year of high school, I under went liposuction surgery and removed all of the breast tissue in order to make my body resemble a male.  I am an intersex person, but I didn’t even know what that was at this time.  I wanted so badly to be “normal”.  I didn’t realize what a mistake of understanding that was.  I was normal.  I was intersex.  Intersex people are normal and are naturally occurring with biology.  I eradicated my experience and natural state.  If only I had had the understanding of loving myself for myself rather than what I believed others wanted me to be.  Now I see that I dismembered my body due to fear and the hopes of acceptance of others rather than my own.
       I’ve always had this skewed idea that this next thing is what will bring about peace.  I went to college and thought education would save me.  I then graduated and traveled Europe.  I thought traveling would save me.  I went to California and thought being in the LGBT community of San Francisco would save me.  I worked on a hippie farm on Mount Madonna and thought that I could find myself under the tit of a goat and chasing chickens.  Since that didn’t work, I decided to go live in a hippie commune of two hundred plus people in the forest of Guatemala!  That surely should do it.  Nope.  So on to Santiago, Chile to teach English I went.  That wasn’t as successful as I had hoped either.
       My life began to unravel in 2012 and I could no longer keep up my appearances.  I became fragmented in mind, body, and spirit.  My addiction to crack and alcohol had consumed me and I was the hostage.  Something came to me in my crack and alcohol induced narcosis and revealed to me that, in order to ever find peace, I was going to have to transition.  My pain was so grave that I tried to take my life for a third time to get away from the suffering.  I was clearly unsuccessful as I suck at killing myself.  I ended up going to rehab and began my transition to female.
       My sobriety date is October 25, 2013.  Within this time I have done many things, such as work on a leadership board of a non-profit directly giving aid and financial grants to transgender citizens in the state of South Carolina.  I’ve held a few jobs but mostly being employed within the sex industry.  You see, internationally the sex industry is the #1 employer of transgender people, as many places will not higher us knowingly.
       I got lost.  Fell off the path and so found myself again using external factors to create internal peace.  I stayed sober from mind-altering drugs, but found other ways to get high.  I bathed in the attention of males and their attraction to my body.  I felt validated in the way I had always craved.  I gave my power away and became dependent on their attention and validation.
       In January 2017 love found me most unexpectedly.  I met with this guy who said that he was looking for a domme trans woman, and I said that I was looking for a versatile submissive male.  At the time we had no idea that we weren’t really looking for that at all.  He peered straight through all of my masks.  There was no deceiving him.  He saw my pain and instead of running in the opposite direction he held it.  This changed everything for me.  I no longer had to carry it all on my own.  So I met again since I was a child, what it meant to be vulnerable.  Having this man love me showed me all the ways that I still came up short in loving myself.
       After he left and returned to his country I was at such a loss.  I no longer had the attention of males and no longer had his love by my side.  After tasting love I no longer wanted the instant gratification of male sexual attention.  I was stuck with the wreckage I had caused.  Again pain became too great to bear, and so I cracked into fragmented parts of myself.  As I did in 2013, I was able to construct something entirely new from the destruction of my own creation.
       I now have a daily devotion to a daily reflection, sending inspiration to over fifty people daily, practice guided and silent mediation daily, practice yoga a couple times a week, attend recovery meetings weekly, focus on a healthy and nourishing diet daily, and aid those that are suffering when presented.  I am finally able to see that craving has been at the root of my suffering in life.  Unless I work to remove it through compassion and love it will continue to limit my fullest potential within this life.
       -Jaisee Alexander
What's your journey to self-love?

Photo by Nic Pilch

Jaisee is a Charleston native with a traveling soul.  Forced to carve out a reality for herself, she lives within alternative planes of existence finding what is meaningful and purposeful for her.  She’s worked in F&B, taught English in South America, WWOFed, been a small business owner, worked in theater, and currently is developing a career in adult entertainment.  Struggle has been the majority of her life until she was able to untangle the twisted worldview that had been given to her.  She strives to empower others through her experience. 
- Jaisee Alexander

The Intolerance Of A Nation

       All too often I've sat and felt the weight of the world on my shoulders and wondered why there is so much pain.  I have come to the conclusion that it is all because of hate and intolerance and fear.  Why do we hate?  Why do we judge?  Because we are afraid.  We refuse to accept that other people of the world are different than we are because we don't understand them.  We push away people of a different sexual orientation because it's unknown to us.  We think that everyone with a different religion or belief than our own is wrong because we are afraid for our own souls.  In a nation where equality and freedom are supposed to be household staples I find that preachers teach against homosexuality and varying spirituality.  The Catholic believe one story while the Mormon believes another.  The Buddhist trusts in one way of life while the Orthodox practices another.  "Our way is the ONLY right way to eternal life!" they yell at each other, while deep down that belief is only breeding hate and fear.  Why do we need to do this?  I choose to simply accept that every person has their own diverse and individual belief system.  Each person has their own God.  Every single person on earth believes in a God that makes them feel safe and loved and we should not take that away from anyone or tell them that they're wrong.  I would consider myself a Christian because I love the way that Jesus taught.  But Jesus taught the opposite of what a lot of pastors teach.  If you read the Bible carefully enough you will see where Jesus taught differently than even the other apostles and church leaders taught.  But that is MY bible, and if someone else has their own then that's great too!  Come close and I'll tell you a secret...did you know that the traditional tale of Buddha says that he was born in the wilderness while his mother was traveling?  The Queen Maya was visited by four angels in her sleep that told her that she would bear a son who would become the "Enlightened One".  Sound familiar?  Don't be mad!  My point is that the world is so much bigger than we think it is.  There are thoughts that one of the wise men who visited baby Jesus was a Buddhist, or at least a "distinguished foreigner from the East".  There are so many beautiful and peaceful spiritual practices that do no harm: Hinduism, Taosim, Jainism, Judaism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, etc. but we can only see as far as our own noses.  But we do that because we are afraid!  We are afraid that we will lose our own place in heaven, our own morality, and our own faith if we don't impose our faith on others while those others are sitting there thinking the same thing about us and our religion.  WE ARE ALL THE SAME.  We are all human, we all believe in something, and we will all someday turn to dust.
What's your belief?