Thanks all. I didn't know Al in the SO but I do know that gender reassignment can be a hard slog, so anyone who has the courage to go through with it, I takes my hat off to them.
It took great courage for Kate to do what she did.
If you read the book you will see many of the horrors she went through, the frequent times she contemplated suicide and all the rejection she had to bear especially from those who were supposed to be her closest loved ones. She even kept a special suicide packet of supplies.
Petey it is really hard enough without scientology involved. With scientology involved it can almost be impossible.
I know three ex scientologists who are transgendered woman and all went through and are going through so much.
I can tell you that sometimes not a week goes by that you don't at least think of suicide at the rejection and loss you can feel combined with raging hormones that sort of make you feel like a girl having a really hard time going through puberty COMBINED with a woman going through menopause. What a trip! At least that is how I have heard it explained by two experts in that field.
You can cry at just so many happy things and sad things. And while I think it is indeed great to be a loving person who cares for others, sometimes it gets almost unbearable when you see so much hatred, prejudice, ignorance and ill-will in the world. And it does not even have to be directed at you. You just want to love and, hopefully, be loved and you want others to love others but that is so often not the case.
You can be incredibly loving, like Kate, and just not be able to understand how it is that so many others are not so loving towards each other.
It's sometimes like you are looking at a world you can't understand and you feel like you really don't belong in it as you desire to just "go home" to a loving place you somehow just know exists.
As hard as transitioning can be, not doing it is even worse. It's like you have no place of respite where you can be yourself at all.
It is my belief that Kate has been experiencing something like this for decades. And to think she doesn't even have the ones she most loves (her daughter and grandchildren) to care for her at all is, well IMO, pretty much unbearable.
And I somehow suspect that Kate rises up from all this regularly, she understands this hell and strives so very hard to help others in a similar situation. She even has spoken about and written a book just to appeal to our transgendered or otherwise different youth not to kill themselves.
Kate is one of the most loving people I have ever had the privilege to know. I love her. She is beautiful in every way.
Definitely read that book.
And anyone studying the effects of scientology should especially read it to see yet another important example of what can be done to people under the banner of scientology.