LISA SALAZAR — BLOG

The year 2011 was a challenging year for me. It marked the end of my almost thirty-seven-year marriage, making Christmas and the year-end festivities unbearable. I was most grateful to my friends, especially my immediate family, for their sensitivity and love during those difficult days. The year started on an urgent note after reading my friend Kathy Baldock’s blog post, which spurred me on to advocacy. Becoming an advocate was a new experience for me. The stories of persecution, beating, and killing of LGBTQ+ persons in Uganda were saddening and heartbreaking. Though advocating for others did not remove the sting of my own experiences, it helped me see my life in a larger context. So, what did 2012 hold in store? Concerning Uganda’s Kill the Gays Bill, as I summarized above, had stalled mainly due to international pressure, but that was small comfort, given the intensely homophobic mood of the politicians and the country as a whole. Homosexuality had been illegal since colonial time...

Unsympathetic book reviewer comes out — to my surprise! "Look, I desperately wanted to have been born female. That didn't happen and I didn't do anything about it to change that. I'm not a victim. Let me just live out my life in the physical self that I am, and just be happy with what I have. I have a family and it's no longer all about me." A few days ago I went to the Amazon.com page for my book, Transparently: Behind the Scenes of a Good Life, and was dismayed by a less than favorable review. I have thin skin, I have come to realize, but I was mostly upset about the quote above, which was his opinion of how I should have dealt with my gender dysphoria at my age. I wondered how this particular reviewer could be so harsh and insensitive, especially in view that he had over seventy reviews on books dealing with gender dysphoria and transsexualism. Surely, I reasoned, if this person has read this many books on the subject, how could he still be making this...

Interview with Author 1. Is this your first book? This is my first book. The longest document I had ever produced prior to this book was a universtity term paper! 2. What compelled you to write Transparently? Just after Christmas in 2009, the sister of one of my late brother's friend posted about her own brother's untimely death in 2007 on our high school's Facebook. I wrote her a short message expressing my condolences and she replied a few days later. She was equally saddened to learn about my brother's death in 1985, and over the next few weeks we engaged in an intense correspondence—she remembered my brother well. In her first reply, she wanted to clarify if I had attended the same high school, because she said, she had looked up all the Salazars in the yearbooks and didn't find a "Lisa Salazar." I wrote back explaining I was not Lisa at the time and told her about my gender change. This threw the doors open to all kinds of questions—she wanted...

Connecting the Dots to Charlotte Pride About the middle of May 2011, my friend Kathy Baldock invited me to be one of the directors for her recently registered non-profit, Canyonwalker Connections . She told me she had been praying for the right person to represent transgender persons and that my name kept coming to her mind.  Kathy laughs when she recalls a conversation I had with her a while back and kids me about it. I told her I had this notion that after my surgery at the end of March of 2010, I hoped to simply live a life in quiet anonymity, flying under the radar, a private person who would not have to be talking about where I came from, that I had been a man. etc. Only my family and those who already knew me would know this about me. For everyone else, it was none of their business. She laughs when she points out that if that is what I envisioned, then I had obviously gone about it the wrong way. One doesn’t accept an invitation to address two-hundred people to tell t...

Dr. Brown is organizing to sabotage the Charlotte, NC Pride event on  August 27, 2011 and set up a Facebook page for that end. He has allowed me engage him on his views regarding transgender persons. So far, he has not censored the stream.  Just in case these get deleted from the FB page at GHABW http://www.facebook.com/pages/God-Has-A-Better-Way/235562896484049 Lisa Salazar ‎"…we do not celebrate the fact that some people choose to surgically mutilate their God-given organs and must take hormones for the rest of their lives just to be at peace with themselves…" As a transsexual Christian woman, I also don't celebrate the choices I had to make, but I am grateful I was able to make them none-the-less. Your assertion that gender reassignment surgery is mutilation is sadly misplaced and by extension, using the the same logic, one could argue that all surgeries are acts of mutilation of some God-given "tissue." I'm sure the cancer patient who h...