Just when Konrad Adenauer left this world, I arrived. On my birthday, Hair had its premiere, but nothing of that reached the small Eifel village in Germany, where I grew up. That was a place where decent people lived, not some long-haired terrorists, who wanted to bomb all decent people out of this world! Which is why all long-haired guys belonged, for reasons of security and order, into working camps, anyway — and that was the liberal position. And that was the reason I asked myself rather early in my life whether I really belonged there. My whole bunch of relatives asked themselves the very same question, too. Especially since all attempts to make me into a proper girl seemed not too successful, either. They were right about that. They had no idea, just how right they were. Should have listened to me, I've always said so!

In the same year when half a million people protested in Bonn against the brilliant idea of both NATO and the Soviet Union to station cruise missiles in Germany whose main targets were in Germany, I moved, together with my mother, to Cologne, and with that into a somewhat more liberal environment. (For those who don't know quite so much about cruise missiles supposed to drop on my head, that was the year of the Falkland war, too.) Anyway, living in Cologne, I met strange people with long hair - at school! I started to listen to strange music - Stones! I encountered strange political opinions and made a brief excursion into communism. The strangest thing however was my brilliant idea that a lot of my problems came from being not feminine enough. The phase that followed looked, in retrospect, a lot like Drag. But nobody can say I didn't try!

While in the USSR Glasnost and Perestroika began, I got my own freedom, namely from school (and, Ms. Teacher: I never missed it - not for a second!), and I got my own flat, too.

In the following years I was a student of philosophy, science of religion and English literature. I spent a lot of time, though, studying music by listening to a couple of very good local bands, and studying social sciences by observing and interacting with people at a local pub. At that point, I was still trying to suppress my constantly growing discomfort with myself and the rest of the world by attempting to become my own ideal of femaleness. A goal I reached about the same time Yugoslavia began to break up. Because when I reached it, I realised that I had been on the wrong road all along, and my life began to break up, too.

As a consequence, my interest in general politics somewhat waned, while I stumbled headlong into (trans-)gender politics. Now mind you, nobody called it gender politics or transgender politics back then, at least not in Germany. At that time, you were either a proper transsexual, or you were nothing. I - and a growing number of other people, too - had a feeling that while it was a good thing to escape from one set of "proper behaviour" that just did not fit, simply dropping into another one, and one that was even more narrow into the bargain, was not a solution. That rather obvious realisation (obvious once you allow yourself to think about it, that is) lead me right into transgender politics. I even became a founding member of an organisation for transmen and have worked for changes in the German "transsexual law". Who could have possibly predicted that when I was born?

My Homepage

I used to be quite active in the German Wikipedia until I found the climate unfavourable to my health. While I used to stick to the articles listed on the List of transgender-related topics in the English one, by now I am a lot more active here.

Find here the ongoing series of /Edits that are so stupid that they deserve to be preserved

Thanks Alex Nice work (Wikifying Scrub) Rob

May I also recommend jEdit with the Wikipedia plug-in for editing Wikipedia? Java, so it should run on every computer, syntax highlighting for wiki markup (and lots of other stuff), shortcuts for formating, and lots more. No need of a browser at all, open and safe directly from jEdit. And of course it is free and GNU.

• jEdit
• Wikipedia plug-in