Category: Stories

Posted on

Transgender, Trans-Attracted…And…Over 50

Find love FB blog

Once when visiting The Philippines, I spied a man –– probably in his sixties –– who was walking hand-in-hand with a woman. Not only was this woman less than half his size (and a quarter his girth), she was clearly a quarter his age.

Now I don’t have any issue with people dating whoever they want. That’s not the point.

The point is, while some transgender women may think all trans-attracted men are looking for relationships with young transgender women –– significantly younger –– there are trans-attracted and transamorous men out there who would prefer a transgender woman from the same generation.

And, guys, there are transgender women of mature age looking for guys their age too.

I know for sure this is the case, because both groups are writing me emails.

And while it’s probably ego-boosting, guys, to think about being with a very young transgender woman for the sex appeal perhaps, or the beauty maybe, listen up.  A long term, meaningful relationship that isn’t based on some kind of unstated, commercial exchange, is more likely with someone who has some life experience. Someone with common beliefs, and, likely, common desires.

In other words: someone whose stories match yours.

It’s highly unlikely a 58 year old’s and a 20 year old’s stories are going to match.

Unless, again, a commercial exchange is the story bringing two together. After all, there are plenty of older men out there willing to pay for the company of a younger woman. Including a transgender woman.

Happens all the time, right?

 

I’ve commented on social media accounts featuring transgender women asking moderators how come they don’t feature older transgender women.

I haven’t got a response from any of them.

hearts

I speculate mature, senior transgender women are likely too busy living their lives to post as regularly as young ones do on social media. Perhaps young transgender women who are prominent on social media find telling their stories on social media as natural. About as natural as, say a senior transgender woman sharing her stories in person.

Maybe.

Whatever the case, middle-age and senior transgender women’s and trans-attracted men’s relative absence online may cause these groups to think their matches aren’t out there, when, actually, there are lots of women in that age range. And guys too.

Interestingly, research by UCLA’s Williams Institute found that there are almost as many elderly transgender people as young. The study estimated that 0.5% (or one in every 200) of Americans aged 65 or over identified as transgender, compared to 0.7% among 13- to 24-year-olds.

So there are bound to be transgender women of all ages in your town.

Same goes with trans-attracted/transamorous men.

And remember, guys (and gals), you only need one.

It’s not surprising older men (and many older transgender women) who write us ask “is there anyone out there for me?”

That’s why we don’t encourage online dating, cruising social media or trying to find your partner anywhere other than in your hometown. Or at least nearby. But always in person. Because online dating can be brutal to one’s positive stories.

CNN recently featured a story about a person who is photographing and chronicling the joys and struggles of senior-age transgender people (yes transgender men as well). I loved stumbling onto this article because it confirmed for me there are transgender people of all ages out there.

You don’t have to settle. You can have what you want.

Posted on

You’re going to love your love life

Xavier Sotomayor looking in the past never works.jpgWe know. It’s hard to love your love life when your love life seems absent, because you have no one to love in your life.

But that’s just the past staring you in the face.

Yes, that’s right. Your present moment that includes you NOT having a partner is the past. We can explain why that is, but it would make this post way to long. Instead, just take our world for it.

You’re creating your reality by what you put your attention on. So when you look at the past, whether you like what you see or not, you put more of what you’re looking at in the future for you to experience in future nows.

What does that mean? Put simply, when you complain about not having someone to love, you’re putting your focus on you not having someone to love. So your future moments have a very high probability of looking just like that moment in which you’re complaining.

That complaint is a story.

You have a lot of other stories going on all of which collaborate to create your now. So if you want to have a now that looks different from the ones you’ve always/already have, you have to start looking somewhere else for the love of your life. You have to stop doing what you’re doing (complaining) and start doing something different.

We suggest you start praising. Find every thing to love about your current situation. If you can do that consistently, you’ll notice some interesting things happening:

  1. You’ll feel better
  2. You’ll eventually forget about not having a lover
  3. That relief will open new possibilities because you won’t be focused on what you don’t want
  4. In the relief you feel, you’ll find yourself increasingly happy
  5. And if you’re paying attention, you’ll see signs of the lover you’ve been wanting coming to you.

Of course, step five there means you have to know what to look for. That’s another story. One we talk about in our Guides.

One way or another, you’re going to love your love life. We suggest you do that sooner than later. Life is much more fun that way.

 

Posted on

Men: you gotta understand your love stories

 

Men (and transwomen). You’re wanting a relationship. Essentially that means you’re wanting love. Do you know what you mean when you talk about “love”?

It’s an important question. Love comes in all kinds of shapes and colors. And definitions. Knowing what “love” is like for you can help you determine if you’re getting what you’re wanting, or what you’re not wanting.

For example, for a long time my “love story” told me that love included fighting, disagreements, coldness, periods of sexual expression, and a smattering of peace. As a result of this “love story”, guess what my relationships looked like?

That’s right, each relationship was incendiary, unstable, and fraught with drama. The sex was good…for a while. But the drama always overwhelmed good sex.

Later I learned a new love story. I learned that love and relationships were a forge designed to toughen and transform hearts into strong independent/interdependent entities capable of “standing on one’s own feet” instead of relying on the love and adoration of another. From that “training” one could love another unconditionally.  This story I learned from a book called The Passionate Marriage.

Unfortunately that story created relationships that were more learning laboratories than nurturing really loving ones. Learning 24/7 is not necessarily a fun thing to do. Especially with your intimate partner.

Today my love story is more akin to real “unconditional” love. It says I have the capacity to love everyone because everyone (including myself) is love. More importantly, the most meaningful love for me, and the least capricious love, comes from within. Not from another person.

That kind of love leaves me free to be. More importantly, it allows my partner to be whoever she is too. It allows me to not be affected by the love or the lack of love I get or don’t get from another person. Which leaves me happy and less susceptible to bouts of dramas, disagreements and misunderstandings. These things still happen sometimes, but I’m far less rocked by them. As a result, my relationship is more calm, peaceful and more joyful, mainly because I don’t look in my relationship to find calmness, peace and joy. Instead, I look within, where calmness, peace and joy is available 24/7.

Your love story is creating your reality in relationships. What is your love story? And is it causing you to look for love in all the wrong places?

Posted on

How to have a happy life: trans or transattracted

wishful thinking Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash
Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash

A few transwomen (and, admittedly, a couple trans attracted men) read our material or check out our videos, then claim that we advocate the “silly” idea that if you just think happy thoughts, you’ll have a better life. Or if you meditate you’ll “get everything you want”.

We don’t say that.

Well, we do, but that’s a kind of shorthand describing a much more detailed process through which you already are, right now, creating the reality you’re experiencing. What we do advocate is a process which involves examining the stories you tell about your world, your “reality”. Then, after examining those stories, we advocate using a deliberate, conscious process that leads to new stories. These new stories are part of a larger process we describe more deeply in our material, a process that does actually get you everything you’re wanting: more money, that lover you want, that fulfilling and enjoyable work you wish you had, a safe place to live…whatever.

But we can’t go through the entire process in every one of our shows. That would be too repetitive and b-o-r-i-n-g.

Instead, we use a shorthand. That’s why we harp on “telling positive stories”.

Quote Photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash
Photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash

Here’s a summary of the process. Again, it’s not as simple as this, that’s why it’s called a summary. Following this process will, guaranteed, produce a life where you have everything you’re wanting. No exceptions.

Let’s say you’re wanting to become a doctor. You create your reality. So to create the reality in which you are a doctor, here are the steps we recommend (and stand behind as guaranteed to work):

  1. You must realize you are creating the realty you experience. For many, this is the most difficult step.
  2. You must realize the creative momentum you have created up to this point. This momentum is creatively expressed as the life you currently have, warts and all. That creative momentum is strong and going against it, while possible, is going to take a while, just as it took a while to get where you’re at. So….
  3. You must then start changing the stories (beliefs) you have about the reality you currently have. The primary story needing changing is that you think the world just “happens to you” out of some random, uncontrollable set of criteria such as your race, location, politics etc (see step one). Another primary story might be that you think things can not ever change. That story sounds like this: “Life sucks”, “Men are always…”, “Transwomen are always treated…” “Transwomen are all….”…
  4. You must understand the nature of “momentum” (what it is and how it works) and begin creating momentum in the direction of where you’re wanting to go ( in our example, becoming a doctor).
  5. Then you must begin telling stories about why you want to become a doctor, stories that create certain emotional responses within you. This emotional response is your first indicator that you have begun changing your reality. Meditation is certainly part of the process because, for most people, the mind is unruly and seemingly random in its thinking. It must be reined in to serve the deliberate creative process instead of creating willy-nilly or seemingly randomly.
  6. Point five is a major milestone, known as the “Be” of the “Be, Do, Have” process resulting in becoming a doctor.
  7. You must then continue telling such stories and having these certain emotional responses while training yourself to become sensitive to your inner being’s guidance through quieting your mental activity (meditation). As you become more sensitive, you will begin noticing you are receiving impulses to think certain thoughts and take certain actions. One, thought, for example might be “what is required to become a doctor?” You might then be inspired to go to the library or get on the internet and start researching. This is the “do” part of the process. You are being guided by your inner being to have thoughts (stories) and actions (manifested reality) that accord with “doing” what doctors do.
  8. Over time, supposing you are consistent in the seven steps above, you MUST wind up in the “have” part of the “Be, Do, Have” process where you have, in actuality, your actual, real life, become a doctor.

That’s it. There is nothing magical to the process. It is not about daydreaming or telling yourself untrue stories. There’s a lot more to it than these eight steps because one must get clear on an accurate nature of “reality” and where it comes from for this process to really work, but that’s essentially it.

And it works.

Every time.

It is even working for you right now, although in a probably indirect, in-deliberate way. For many people, that’s why they have a life that is less than fulfilling. It’s not because of fate, or the circumstances, being born in the wrong place or even being trans or transattracted. It’s simply because people aren’t deliberately creating the life they can have. So they get the one they got.

That’s why we say everyone can have the life they want. It begins with telling positive stories. When are you going to get started?

Posted on

When trans exploitation isn’t

fullsizeoutput_20eaWe did a show recently about Rihanna’s statement about trans exploitation. It was taken out of context and reported that she would not hire transgender people as part of her cosmetic line’s marketing campaigns. She didn’t actually say that. But people in the trans community were quickly polarized by her comments. Some said her desire not to exploit trans people was spot on. Others, like the woman who wrote me personally about it, said Rihanna was a transphobic false ally like many other people in the world.

On IN YOUR FACE we talked about nuance of interpretation. How interpretation determines mind set and vice versa. Your perception of the world, in other words, is determined by your mindset. And, your mindset is ongoingly re-shaped by your perception. Since you can control your perceptions, you can consciously design your mindset.

However, most people live life unconsciously, focusing on nearly anything crossing their path, and allowing pretty much anything into their perceptions with little question as to whether those things are shaping the mindset they want to have or not. So, as one IN YOUR FACE audience member aptly put it: “Sometimes we focus on the negative out of habit”. So the question is, what is your habit?

There is no doubt in my mind transgender people are being exploited. The question is, is that exploitation harmful or not?

The woman who wrote me about Rihanna’s purported comments claimed I need to get better at “reading between the lines” so I could see what is really happening. What is really happening usually when people “read between the lines” is they are making up an interpretation of what they are perceiving, not actually reading between the lines. That interpretation is determining their mindset. So it should be no surprise that some people will see Rihanna as transphobic while other see her as an ally. Some people have trained themselves to see a mostly negative world, in which people are generally not very nice. Some see the opposite: a world where people are generally agreeable, happy and positive. And there are all kinds of shades in between. How you see the world is crucial, for it shapes your life experience.

Putting this in our language, the stories you tell yourself about life experience determines how you experience your reality. If you tell yourself the story that people are mostly transphobic, or that there are transphobic people in the world, then it’s easy to read a misleading story then conclude Rihanna is transphobic. Rather than, say, thinking critically about the article, doing some more research and thereby coming to an alternative interpretation. One that gives Rihanna more grace in the matter.

Same goes for how you see yourself. If you’ve been taught certain stories that make being trans-attracted a negative personality characteristic – one that is sinful, aberrant, gross, perverse, “gay” or whatever – those stories are going to shape your mindset of not only your world, but of you. So key to overcoming these stories is become aware of them, then create new ones that, over time, change the momentum of your self-perception and of the world. It’s not always easy…well it is…but it’s definitely worth doing. We talk about this in the show I referred to above as well. It’s really worth going back and watching if you haven’t.

There is no doubt in my mind transgender people are being exploited. The question is, is that exploitation harmful or not? I don’t think it is. In the end exploitation leads to more awareness and understanding that transgender people are human. Which by the way means they are capable of being exploited. Along with that realization comes something every human community can benefit from, particularly the trans community: compassion. Compassion for ourselves and compassion for others.

And maybe then, we in the trans community can extend a bit of compassion to those we think are transphobic. For even their transphobia promotes understanding and compassion for our transgender brothers, sisters, lovers and friends.