I had a thought while I was working on replying to a thread on whetherwoman's journal.

What are the things that you think most define how you interact with the world? As an example, “I'm a woman” is particularly relevant in that discussion. What informs your reactions to the world?

I have a list that feels as long as my arm in my head.

I live in a small town, and I actively try to keep the good parts about small town culture alive wherever I go. I'm acutely aware of the amount of interconnection between people in any group, and I'm happiest when I can either be in an internally well-connected group, or one where I'm introducing people to each other.

I am a comfortable, confident, happy transsexual woman, who feels no need to play a game of “passing” as a XX-chromosomed woman. It affects nearly every interaction I've had in the past years. It's made my sex life, my love life and my body something that seems very public, and that people are quite willing to start a conversation on.

Within the queer, and especially within groups of transgendered folks, I find that my tendency to be calm, a peace-maker, and my willingness to be out without confrontation is distinguishing.

I'm a spiritual person, and I have a deep respect and interest to understand religious and spiritual traditions. In my teenage years, I'd taken my family's habitual bashings of all things Christian, and it left a hole in my willingness to understand people, to feel and to relate. Now I'm finding that I have more in common in my thought processes and feelings about things with the average religious person who really thinks about their faith than I do with the atheist liberal culture I grew up in. My own beliefs align relatively well with a lot of Quaker beliefs, and a lot of the traditions speak to me deeply.

I'm white, of a lower-middle class family. My parents have no college degrees, though they're very smart and well-educated.

I have cultural associations to Argentina, latin in culture and racially white.

I grew up in a family where taking care of things oneself was the normal way to do things. My father can fix most anything around the house. We never called a plumber, handyman or repairman for anything. We educated ourselves, we designed our house ourselves, we built our house ourselves. I've watched my father repair cars, roofs, sidewalks, computers, desks, faucets. My mother made a lot of our clothes when I was young. Asking for someone to do something for me is not something I think of first.