The internet changed everything. You can separate time into, BI and AI, before the internet and after the internet.
50 BI or 1959
I felt alone, I thought I was the only boy in the world that thought I should have been a girl. I was isolated. The first time that I thought that there were other kids out there that felt the same way was when I heard the song “Lola”, “Boys will be girls and girls would be boys”… I was not alone!
20 BI or 1979
I just bought my first computer, an Apple II+ with 64K of RAM and two 5 ¼ inch floppy drives and I could reach out to the world through a 300 BAUD dial-up modem. I used a network called Delphi. There wasn’t very much out there just mainly news and sports, and it was a long distance call to East Hartford for the nearest portal.
It you wanted to find out information about anything transgender (The word “transgender” was just being coined by Virginia Prince) you had to physically go to the library and look it up. However, there was very little information out there on the subject and what there was called us abnormal and Transvestic Fetishism. There were some support groups and they use to leave their business cards in the card file (a large file cabinet the held 3X5 index cards with the book information on them.), until the librarian found them and tore them up.
1 day BI or spring of 1999
We just got our own computers at work that were connected to the internet and my boss asked me to use this new fangled device to find a replacement transformer for a circuit board. I used one of those primitive search engines, I think it was called Lycos, and lo and behold what came up, but crossdressers. There were all these sites about crossdressers, transgender and transsexuals…Wow!
1 day AI or spring of 1999
I went home that night, bought a computer and ordered the internet.
11 AI
Where would we be without the internet? I found a community out there in the ether, I found the web sites of Melanie Phillips and Dr Becky, along with all the support groups. It was one of those support groups that I found on-line that I went to, Connecticut Outreach Society, which I eventually became the Executive Director, that gave me a sense of community. It was because of the blogs of other trans-people that I was able to summon the courage to go to the first meeting and it was through email that I contacted COS. It is because of the internet that I became an activist.
I now communicate with other trans-people from around the world and I can keep up to-date on events happening in and to the trans-community. With a click of a mouse I can find the current laws on trans-rights in England, with a click of a mouse I can find out that a transgender judge was elected in California.
The internet transformed isolated enclaves in to a community. Through the internet, a child can now communicate with other children from around the world and learn that they are not alone in the way they feel.
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