Transgender Friendship

photo from Johanna Saavedra
https://www.facebook.com/groups/392592660912333/

Like most guys, my interest in transgender woman started off because of porn. My first exposure was seeing pictures of Vaniity online while cruising sites in my early 20's. It was all rather arousing, and my artistic mind was piqued. I started drawing, and eventually posting my Tgirl art online, mainly through a site called Flickr. I have to admit, when I first started posting i didn't do it under my own name. I actually took on a female name, Kyla Von Tease, when I first started creating the art. In a way, I wanted to hide who i was, but also got the feeling that my art would be more accepted if it was coming from a woman.
I quickly found quite a few friends through flickr, many of which I still count as friends through facebook now, but for the majority of them I kept the secret of who i was. In truth, I had a second reason to keep a barrier up about who I was. Since the age of 19 I had been suffering with the mental illness, schizophrenia, and I found that the "regular world" could be a cruel place when it came to understanding of mental illnesses. I would watch tv and see mental illness depicted as a joke, or as something to be scared of. I was honestly freaked out to actually look people in the eye and tell them the truth of who i was. Having the female-self online made it all easy, i could create a back=story and be a different version of who i was.
I kept making more and more friends through flickr, and even chatted with people with yahoo messenger. I eventually became friends with a transgender woman who would change my life by the name of Sarah. Sarah was a dominant transgender who started chatting with me under my female name, and after several months i revealed the truth of who i was. Not only the truth about my mental illness, but also the truth about myself being a guy. She not only accepted me, but embraced me, teaching me a very important lesson, to never ever be embarrassed of who or what i was.
What started off as me just wanting to role-play with sexy TG women and Crossdressers slowly morphed and opened up my mind. I started paying attention to what other guys where commenting and saying to the women and TG friends that i had, and i also started to actually talk and listen, not just run around being "frisky". The more i talked, and listened the more respect i found for people who could actually relate to what i was, and still am, going through with my mental illness. I grew to trust so many of these strong women, and they were often the first people online that i went to with the truth about myself.
I started off as someone who merely saw the transgender women as a sexual fetish, and because of kindness i count several transgender women as my friends. I can not name each person, but i must say "thank you" to all of the women and men who taught me to be proud and strong. The person You see today, is because of YOU!

One of the photos of the beautiful Sarah <3