LISA SALAZAR — BLOG

September 26, 2012 — This story had been previously posted in June of 2012 but was pulled after concerns were raised over some of the details shared. The story has been edited to address these concerns and names have been left out or substituted for security reasons. ____________________ On January 2, 2011, a young Ugandan lawyer, Tom, intercepted an email addressed to the Ugandan president, prime minister, cabinet, and all elected members of the Ugandan parliament. As a political aide in the Office of Presidential Affairs, it was his job to vet emails intended for the president and prime minister. The email was sent by Lisa Salazar , a Canadian Christian transsexual. In the email Lisa voiced strong opposition to Uganda’s pending “Kill the Gays Bill” (KTGB), challenging Parliament to reject the bill and work instead towards the protection of human rights for Uganda’s sexual minorities. That night after work Tom sent Lisa a private message from his home computer. He related ...

The headline reads: "Tea party radicals paralyzing U.S., GOP veteran says." The story is about the longest-serving Republican, Richard Lugar, who got bounced for being too moderate. Lugar is critical of the Tea Party’s influence in the GOP, which can be summarized as a purge of anyone who would dare compromise with the democrats, further polarizing American politics. For his part, Lugar has a record of working for the best of the country, even if it means making compromises to get things done, which is not an unreasonable and unrealistic position to have. I have always been somewhat dismissive of anyone labeling a person or group (political, religious, or otherwise) as “scary.” I’ve heard liberally minded persons call conservatives “scary,” and I’ve listened to conservatively minded call liberals the same. What bothers me about such labels is how they can sabotage intelligent dialog. Saying we fear the “other” is an admission that we don’t understand, and as we all know, fea...

Enough is Enough.  We live in a world with a deep need for repair, full of people born into or with many difficulties they never chose for themselves.  Whether it be same-sex attraction or gender identity, or any one of the thousands of things we humans struggle with, it behooves us to be radically involved in building up rather than tearing each other down—and to do it out of love and respect for the person, without judgment and condemnation.  Scott Lively has made it his mission to tear down and incite fear and to do so with discredited studies and sources to bolster his theories, which he peddles as the gospel truth. If Intolerance and discrimination were not enough, bullying and even death are the fruit of his labors; we need to go no further than Uganda to see the negative impact Mr. Lively's twisted teachings have made.  As a follower of Christ, I am tired of self-appointed arbiters of God who claim to speak for him and all believers. Mr. Lively's gospel is...

I share this story because I want to honor my friend Tori in recognition of her role in my life as I emerged anew.  In 1999, about the time I was being assessed and diagnosed at the Vancouver Hospital’s Gender Clinic, I made a couple of calls to a support group in the area. Their brochure listed a phone number and stated calls could be made on Thursday nights if you needed to speak to someone. Otherwise, you could leave a message, and someone would get back to you. The woman who answered was friendly and explained the group’s purpose and how one would attend their meetings and other events. Membership was reserved for those who had been vetted and approved by the membership committee. Confidentiality and security of personal information were very high on the group’s priority list. Given the group’s stated purpose was to provide a safe place for heterosexual men to cross-dress and socialize, learn from each other, and support each other, I never did follow through with joining or e...

Do you ever get a song stuck in your head, and no matter what you do, the melody or the lyrics keep playing repeatedly like a broken record?   I just dated myself. How many people still remember broken records? The closest equivalent in today's parlance is when a CD player continuously goes into a digital bleep or a sound file loops. Mister Tambourine Man has been looping in one part of my brain while in another region. I have been considering a conversation with a new friend,  Alexandra Henriques , director of Generations at Qmunity, BC's queer resource center. I met her at a recent workshop at the University of British Columbia. As we were learning about each other, she shared a bit about the sensitivity training workshops she gives at Seniors' residences and care facilities. Until then, I had never really thought about aging lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender seniors and the challenges they may face when they move to one of these homes. The reality is that there i...

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...