< 24 hours to go.

Okay, so I have less than 24 hours to go before I go see my nurse practitioner tomorrow to start on Hormone Replacement Therapy.

Many years I have waited for this.

Always something in the way.

Work.

Ghosts from my past.

A 13 year battle with the Canadian Armed Forces.

Have to take things one day at a time.

Transitioning is hard enough, but thankfully I’m no longer a military dependent.

If Captain Terry Totzke tried to destroy me because of the homosexuality that I had exhibited when I “allowed” myself to be molested by the babysitter and Captain McRae, just imagine what would have happened if I had told Terry if I felt like I should have been a girl.

My father’s disdain that he exhibited towards me after the CFB Namao fiasco and the absolute silence he directed towards me after I sent him the letter in May of 2008 explaining why I had changed my name tells me exactly how Richard would have reacted to me as a kid if I had declared that I wanted to be a girl.

And the fact that the community that I lived in and grew up in was governed by Canadian Forces Administrative Order CFAO 19-20 should explain to you that growing up as a trans kid on base would have been absolutely impossible and not tolerated in the least.

I honestly don’t know what things are like on base these days. I moved out of the house when I was 16, and except for two months in 1990 I have never lived on a Canadian Armed Forces Base since.

Sure, the Canadian Armed Forces have attested that things are different these days. But they’ve been saying the same thing about their flawed military justice system since the days of Somalia, and they’ve been saying the same thing about sexual assaults in the military since the ’80s.

The Canadian Armed Forces is the penultimate “old boys club” and they’re used to getting what they want and they don’t and won’t tolerate what they don’t want to.

DNA TESTING

On another front:

I honestly don’t know what to expect from this.

My mother is potentially Chinese on her maternal side and Quebecois French on her paternal side, I expect to see some of that. How strong the Chinese ancestry will be is anyone’s guess. I never met my maternal grandparents. And Marie never spoke about her mother other than to say that she died young from an epileptic seizure in the bathtub.

On my father’s side I expect to see Cree ancestry and some Irish. My paternal grandmother was Swampy Cree and my paternal grandfather was Irish.

It’ll be interesting as mammals share more of their DNA with their mothers than with their fathers, but the father’s DNA controls the expression of some genes.

All humans carry the mtDNA of their mothers. That is the mitochondrial DNA of our cells come only from our mother, which they got from their mother, and so on and so on.

As I said, it will be interesting to see what my lineage is.

Also, I’m curious to see how many half siblings I have.

And how many extended family members there are.

Now, bear in mind this will only be as successful as the number of relatives that have also completed a DNA test.

So, May will be an interesting month.