I thought that I'd use my first diary to thank people for the immediate acceptance here. I've been out of any kind of LGBT activism for some years, burned out gradually on the prejudice and hatred. There are times that I've felt out there by myself and a friend compared me to a “sorrowing banshee screeching mourfully into the wind.”

Being away for a few years made it a bit disorienting for me when I returned. I had never participated in blogs before though I am mastering all of the buttons and functions gradually. Many of the issues remain the same. Some of the issues, though, have changed and radically so.

Hate crimes coverage and full employment and housing rights remain elusive. Trans people are still dying, but now there seems to be the beginning of accountability for that horror.

There are still the shrill voices of the Christian Right to contend with. There are still radical separatists who loathe trans people with the same kind of fervor. And the trans-community itself is riven with a separatist issue “in house” that did not exist when I bowed out previously.

I'll catch up on the politics of it all graually. If I seem naive on some things intitally, please be patient with me. In the meantime, thank you for being here and not dismissing a newbie out of hand.

And Pam and Autumn, thanks for helping us to cease being invisible or the subject of a footnote in an LGBT spokesperson's newsbriefing