Five years ago I began serving as the editrix of The Wild Rose of the Chesapeake.
My first official act was to invent a term of my choice for the position - "editrix".
You won't find editrix in any dictionary, but I hold that it is the proper feminine form for the noun, editor.
These past five years have been an extraordinary time of discovery for me.
It has been a great privilege for me to share much of that discovery through The Wild Rose.
I've known I was different from most people since I first realized the difference between boys and girls. Like many of us, I suppressed my feminine identity most of my adult life. It was not until January 1998 that I began to openly celebrate that identity. I started participating in Chi Epsilon Sigma shortly after that.
The same month that I began serving as your editrix in May, 1999, I met Nicole Thomas and she became one of my very best friends ever. We have shared an extraordinary journey of self-discovery through some wonderful times - and some trying moments. Together we explored the life of transgenderism. We learned to express ourselves in the feminine ways we had until then denied ourselves. We came out to our spouses, learned we really do enjoy shopping, went on several weekend adventures, and got to know a diverse number of people in the transgender community. We both found that writing about our experiences for newsletters like The Wild Rose provided us a way to clarify our own thoughts about who we are. Through this process we learned to understand who we are as individuals.
