Trans Universe

By Monica F. Helms

As an activist for the transgender community, I never know when an opportunity will come up to educate a company or an organization. Sometimes it’s by accident and other times it’s intentional. However way it comes about, myself and others have to take the time to help them understand. To me, the opportunity happened with Boost Mobile, whose parent company is Sprint Nextel, the company I’ve worked for nearly twenty years.

The education of Boost Mobile on trans issues started with this commercial featuring Danica Patrick as their new spokesperson:

As you can see, this commercial just looks plane dumb on the visual level, but it also uses men in women’s clothes in a negative context. Trans people who saw this commercial went ballistic. Even though the commercial does not specifically make fun of trans people, out of the 300 million Americans, many will use this as another excuse to discriminate and hold back equality for Transgender Americans.

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By Monica F. Helms

Others have been doing this, so I thought it would be interesting to do the same.

Then:

1.) I liked girls and women, but also liked what they wore.

2.) I loved science and science fiction.

3.) I launched model rockets and even started a model rocket club.

4.) I was very mechanically inclined and loved building things with wood, plastics, metal and various moving parts.

5.) I was a wimp. I didn’t play sports except Little League, because I had good hand/eye coordination when batting.

6.) With my friends, I was the follower. No one would listen to my suggestions or my opinions.

7.) I was a mediocre Navy person and employee, doing the least I needed to do to get by.

8.) I loved wearing dresses whenever I could, and for as long as I could.

9.) I did not care about causes or what happened in our country politically.

10.) When making love as a man, it was too short and I wasn’t very thrilled with what my part was in the “process.”

(The first picture is me at age 8 and the second picture was when my captain gave me my Dolphins, April 1974.)

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(This piece is what I submitted for the book called “Trans People in Love,” published by Routledge, June 6, 2008.  The editors are Tracie O’Keefe and Katrina Fox.  “Sex and the Single Trannie” is Chapter 12, on page 111.)

By Monica F. Helms

“NO! I refuse to believe you!”

“Sorry, Monica. Once you start hormones, you’ll lose your libido.”

“I will NOT let that happen.”

“You’ll have no choice.”

“We’ll see about that.”

One may ask, “What does libido have to do with love?” This is, after all, an anthology of transsexuals and love and very little about sexual desires. That maybe so, but I cannot separate the strong connections between all of those parts of my personality.

Most people understand that humans are extremely complex biological organisms that have the capacity to experience a large range of emotions, including the elusive one known as “love.” They also can feel a multitude of physical sensation and understand what they all mean, especially sexual pleasures. Over the course of the last decade, I’ve experienced love and sexual pleasures on so many levels that it would be hard to isolate one special moment or one special person. Others in this book may have a partner or someone special, but I don’t. Yet, I have loved and lost enough times to know what the experience feels like.

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By Monica F. Helms

The music changes to deep bass tones and the woman on the screen backs up slowly into the dark living room of her dark house. The kitchen door window shatters and the door slowly swings open. In the opening stands a silhouette of a figure, outlined by the lighting strikes behind it. Something ominous can be seen in the hands of this figure. The scene cuts quickly to a close up and when the next lighting strikes, we see an ax with fresh blood on its blade. The woman has plenty to fear.

One of the most debilitating emotions that can grip a person’s heart and freeze a body in an instant is fear. Everyone of us fears something, be it spiders, rats, crowds, small spaces and even death. These fears don’t last long, and we can easily get past them, with the exception of death. We’ll all go there, eventually.

Yes, we all experience fear, but for many in the transgender community, fear becomes their constant companion. Society gave us a lot to fear and because of that, some trans people have raised fear to an art form. For many, fear has kept them from realizing their potential in life. It serves as their crutch, their excuse, their way to avoid growing as a person. “No. I can’t do that. It scares me.”

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By Monica F. Helms

The country’s fifth largest city, Phoenix, AZ, served as my home from 1953 to 1961, then again from 1966 to 2000. I arrived there because my military father received orders to Luke Air Force Base, located west of Phoenix. In that year, the city’s population had only reached 100,000 people. My parent’s bought their first (and only) home in 1955, in an area that later became Maryvale. This predated John F. Long, the builder who pretty much created Maryvale, and since no one else had moved into any of those other homes yet, we were the official very first residents of this new tiny section of tract homes.

In 1997, my life as Monica began, changing not only the obvious, but internally as well. I started my activism for the trans community in 1998 and by the time I left in June of 2000, myself and a few others had accomplished enough to give the gay, lesbian and bisexual people of Phoenix a new respect for transgender people. However, shortly after I left, activism in the transgender community came to a halt. “Why?” I don’t know.

It didn’t stay that way.

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