Thank, thank you Donna. I'm learning every day about what life must be like for a transperson. I've had the pleasure of knowing friends before transition and after.
I can only imagine still, what tremendous courage and patience it takes. Having said that, I can only hope to be a supportive and understanding friend.
I grieve with you. I grieve for a talented person lost to us now.

Donna, I am so sorry to hear of this passing and it grieves me deeply that Christine's journey was cut short and so alone. So much like so many of the people in our community that I have met and befriended over the last 45 years of attending endless support group meetings where the same stories are told over and over again.

Often we hear that people are mad at us for being to radical about wanting change in the Transgender Community. Oftentimes being radical is the only respite and attitude that one has to be able to vent their feelings about some of the atrocities that are experienced by our community. From having to listen to name after name and candle after candle being blown out each year at this time at TDOR ceremonies, to going to another support group meeting and hearing the same stories about rejection, always knowing that those who express themselves and their losses, are living candidates for the same thing that happened to Christine. The sense of urgency that courses through the veins of activists, is pumped by the losses that they have experienced like the one you describe. The senseless loss of good people and successes in every other way, courageous people who are just trying to live their lives, hurts so deeply that given any opportunity to scream out against the unfairness of it, any decent person must do just that.

I have often said that for those who do not understand our angst and impatience about things like ENDA and other aids to make our lives a bit easier and stop the carnage, all they have to do is attend a few Trans support group meetings and sit and listen to the palpable loss told about.

I compliment you in being able to express this loss so calmly. After 45 years of this type of experience, I continue to be anxious, outraged and with just as little patience for this as when I first started. It has always been the driving force and the energy behind my involvement as an activist. I wish it were not that way.

It's a big mistake for "the community" to jump on and mass celebrate high-profile transitioners merely because they're well known. The reality is, they're just in the beginning stages of their transitions, really don't know that much about the realities of transition nor the community and putting them in the forefront in their fragile place isn't fair either to the people who are looking to them for wisdom (because they really don't have most of the answers) or certainly, groundedness or strength. I have to imagine had Christine been able to deal with her transition in a more low-key way it might have minimized some of the stress in her life.

Thanks for sharing some of your own experience with detransition. People approaching this complex passage need to hear more of those messages that detransition isn't failure, mean you're broken or the end of the line.

I don't know why you refer to Mike as "Christine." At the time of his death, he wanted to be called Mike and he identified as male. Whatever the reasons behind that decision, it was his decision to make. If I refer to a transitioning person by his/her former name and gender identity, it is considered offensive and disrespectful. I don't know why that same standard should not apply to the above post. Maybe there is a separate standard that applies to trans activists.

Also, however nice a person Mike was, I don't see how you could possibly call him a "hero". That word has a meaning and it doesn't cover everyone who takes personal risks in their own self-interest. If that were the case, then everyone is a hero. And if everyone is a hero, then the word is meaningless.

Mike chose to become Christine b/c that is what was right for him, and then he reversed that decision again based on what he felt was right for him. While these may have been difficult personal decisions, they are not acts of heroism.

Ginasf, total agreement on your first paragraph comment, it's a "big mistake".

I prefer the collective story of us all, rather than the continuing desire to find that one person, that one story or incident to explain it all.

Donna, that was a very good article on Christine and for others who just don't fit into other peoples way of life. She made people uncomfortable and in a job that is in the public eye, it has more pressure. I had pressure to stay in the gender that the doctor said I was but I can't imagine the pressure that some go through, being in the public eye and especially in a more male dominating job. I have known other celebrities that have died, maybe not directly by their own hands but it might as well been. I knew a girl in High School, who became a singer, and in order to keep up what they expect from female singers she became anerexic. She wasted away and finally her organs shut down. We need not to judge people in the public eye for how they look or live. They do a service for us and we should appreciate the work they do and not their public image.

FYI, I referred to Mike as Christine simply out of trying to imagine her at the point she felt the need to detransition back to him. I think it's hard to know what to learn from Mike Penner's experience because we have a very incomplete view of what actually happened. Suicide is a complex act usually made up of multiple strands of stress and personal conflict. Whether his journey was "heroic" or not is kind of irrelevant.

While I overwhelmingly heard support and empathy from the trans community for Mike's decision to detransition, I still think many if not most transpeople want to distance themselves from the intense feelings of shame and failure which some detransitioners go through. Perhaps it's having gone through enough shame and feelings of failure themselves or maybe cold fear they could end up in that place and do what Mike did. Or the idea their outward womanhood (which people have worked so hard to attain) could be quickly removed, like a costume. Perhaps it's being linked to some socially oppressive feeling that "if transwomen would just come to their senses, they could live once again as men." There needs to be more of a "village" for people who are actively going through this passage but, even then, there will be those who sneak out of the village, want to put on a brave face or feel they no longer belong for a variety of reasons and it's certainly their right to leave.

I find some of the comments regarding referals to Christine as being incorrect to be very incorrect themselves, and they point out one of the big problems that we have in this community.

That of having to be gender specific.

No amount of transitioning and all the things that go along with that depending on the individual and their circumstances, justifies having to declare that one person has to be one gender or another and it leads to the internal minimalization, segregation and intolerance that achieves only one thing. That of telling people that they have no choices about gender, it's got to be one of or the other
This attitude is coming from one place and that is from people who have transitioned and need to justify their new position is society as women. I do not hear this a lot on the men's side of this because they seem to be more accepted, and that is really the crime in it that drives people to desparate acts. I also do not hear it in Donna's words either, because she addresses this as a friend talking about another friend and human being. Something that she has a habit of doing, judging people by who they are not how they look.

By drawing those lines of comunication that are dependent on a person's expressed gender at the time, and not considering that Christine can no longer be called Mike, or that Mike cannot be called Christine any longer because of detransition, is like telling every gender diverse person who is not planning on transtioning that they cannot ever be all they wish to be. No one has the right or should have that right, because it hurts people and it hurts them so deeply sometimes that they feel they have no other choice but to give up on themselves ever being who they want to be. And in some cases that just might be both genders, even though others think they must commit to only one or the other becasue that is what they felt they had to do. Placing those kinds of pressures on people, to choose or be wrong, is exactly what leads them to their premature end.

I wonder what Christine was going through? It must have been overwhelming to lead her to take her own life.

While I don't plan on transtioning, I know people who have. It's a journey with perils and life changing decisions.

Transitioning is something you have to be sure about. Transitioning is as much emotional as well as physical.

The issue of suicide in the trans communities needs more attention. A few of us in MA, with leadership from MTPC, Samaritans, Fenway, and the Dept of Public Health, published what seems to be the first brochures specifically addressing suicide in our communities. They can be downloaded from this page: http://www.masstpc.org/publications/suicideprevention.shtml

@capitalist piggy: I've never seen accurate statistics about detransition and I doubt reliable ones exist. On the MTF side (don't know about FTMs) I've always heard 1-2% regret among people who've had SRS (and, again, many transitioners don't have SRS or can't afford it). Most of the people I've known who detransitioned did so either within the first year of their transition or at the one year mark. This makes total sense— they're experiencing the new realities of what their transition brings. The first year is also often the hardest in terms of integration, not-passing, dealing with personal loss, unemployment and job stresses and being overwhelmed by the financial and personal costs of transition. It's not for the faint hearted and can often feel like being between a rock and a hard place—damned if you do and damned if you don't.

One of the other key reasons I've heard for people detransitioning is, on some level, transitioning for the "wrong reasons" (according to therapists, anyway). The biggest issue I've found were people who transitioned as a way of finding love (ie being attracted to men and thinking it would be easier if they did that living as a woman). Other people come from the crossdressing community and mistake transition as a more extreme form of crossdressing. They quickly learn there are profound and core differences. I've met some people who transitioned because they didn't feel comfortable as men, but then learned they weren't comfortable as binary women either and, perhaps, tried to find some middle, Genderqueer place. I think there are others who just break from the social pressure and condemnation... perhaps they look somehow "identifiably trans" and have a hard time dealing with the realities which, sadly, come with that.

What isn't often discussed is how many people attempt retransition again after detransitioning (as Donna did). There are many who ultimately transition after several prior attempts. I've heard people detransition trying to save a long-term relationship, because of financial fears, as an attempt to regain custodial visitation of their children, concerns over personal safety, getting involved in *ahem* certain religious groups and, of course, just not initially feeling 'it's right.' But, as I suspect happened with Mike Penner, detransition usually doesn't eliminate the original identity issues which drove one to transition in the first place nor the frequent suicide ideation which often (but not always) accompanies the need to transition.