Hello Russia!

Russia is the nation with the second most views of my blog for all time after my own country, the USA. For the past month, I've had 600 views from Russia, not many less than my own country's views.

As an amateur student of Russian History and Russian Literature, I am curious about what it means to be a transsexual or transgender person in Russia or in Eastern Europe and in the former member states of the former Soviet Union.

My interest in Russia goes back to my adolescent years when I first saw the movie Nicholas and Alexandra. In my undergraduate studies.  I took a course in Russian History. I began to read literature by Dostoevsky, Chekov, and Solzhenitsyn. I found Ayn Rand on my own and have embraced many) of her philosophical ideas in my own personal philosophy (along with much of the philosophy of B.F. Skinner and Behaviorism). I was also fascinated by the influence of Grigory Rasputin (referred to as the "Mad Monk" over the Czarina Alexandra as well as his own story.

I grew up in the 1960's and 1970's in the era of what we call in America "The Cold War". One of my earliest memories was of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here in the USA, my early childhood memory was of the adults fearing we were going to die at what seemed to be the beginning of World War III. Thankfully, that event would not become the catalyst of the destruction of two great countries and perhaps the entirety of Western Civilization.

I was a young adult when Ronald Reagan implored Gorbachev to tear down the wall separating East Berlin and West Berlin and saw that wall fall on television along with the disintegration of the United Soviet Socialist Republic, or as we called it, the Soviet Union.

 As an American transsexual who is a mental health professional, my practice is partly devoted to working with transgender people. I am quite interested in how people such as myself fare in other countries. My audience for this blog is truly international. I have readers in every continent, even from Middle Eastern countries and African countries where people such as myself suffer unspeakable persecution, to the point of torture and loss of life because of who they are. There are things worse than dying for who one is or one's religious belief, though, such as being tortured or living under extreme oppression.

I seldom get comments from people from foreign countries who read my blog. My guess is that in some of the countries my readers come from that they dare not leave a trace that they have read what I have written.

As I mentioned, I am quite interested in the lives of transgender people in other countries and other cultures. I would like to invite my Russian readers to participate in commenting on your lives, your struggles and your triumphs to live an authentic life.

Thank you my Russian friends!