Coping and dealing with the slings and arrows

In this weekend's article I cited an example of a comment that had been made to me by another. I wrote "The first by a guy I've known for quite awhile and has been quite the sparing verbalist in the past came up and in our conversation made a comment about my thinning hair and that instead of paying for augmentation (which has never been any part of any conversation that I have ever had with him) that I should spend the money on a hair transplant.
It made me wonder just how accepting someone really is. The damage that this causes is that I will never quite trust him quite as much anymore. I would like to think knowing him, that he intended it to be a joke."
One of things is that if I were to turn something like this in as a violation it would create a situation of distrust on others part about me. There would be a concern that if they said something to me even off hand, without malice or even factual and I ran off to HR every time I was offended, then I would find myself with very few friends. As I have said often that I have to be very aware of where that line is and what to do about it and like many things in life not everything is as black and white as we would like to think it is.
Yesterday I had a talk with him and yes it was a bad joke on his part and he apologized and had hadn't thought as he spoke, especially now that things are different now.

I also wrote, "That the whole thing that gets me is that if this is in the work place it is considered taboo to talk about others in these kinds of ways, but as human beings we do it even though there is always the risk of being reported to HR or management. Then there is the whole new can of worms to be opened if something is reported to management."
The reactions I received were from talk to him to turn him in and as I said I talked to him first to find out if it was just that a slip of the tongue or something more and like I said he apologized and said that he is still working at seeing the difference between the new me and the old me.
So what does this indicate to me? Well, first off it says that we still consider ourselves as being friends and that on his part he is trying and that he will work on being more aware of the fact that things are different now. So even though he had crossed a line according to policy I'm glad that I talked to the person first and give them a 2nd chance.
There is very good reason for doing it this way. As a transgender you are pretty much under the microscope with people even though you may not think so, they are going to still have their opinions about it and you. So it is very important to be aware of this and to be a little more forgiving than usual especially in the early stages of coming out at work. It doesn't mean to let others just walk all over your feelings, just as anyone shouldn't let that happen, but have a little more patience than usual, especially in the beginning.
And to those folks that see and deal with the transgendered person it is important to remember that we are our own harshest critics about what we look like and it isn't necessary to be pointing out something that is obvious to us already even if it is just being honest. (All Rights Reserved)