New Lease Form: Fill & Download for Free

Signing a new lease in no way, shape, or form alters your responsibility to pay past-due rent on a prior lease.

In the UK, gender dysphoria is recognized as a mental disorder. Says the question.That’s right. Gender dysphoria is recognized as such. And do you know what the treatment is? Transition. And even before transition we have to go to counseling. During transition we have to go to counseling. After transition, some more counseling.Transition is the treatment that saves lives.Suggesting otherwise is a form of conversion therapy. Suggesting this is saying that transgender people have a choice.We don’t.No matter how long counseling goes on, no matter how nice the counselor is. For some unknown reason I have a male structure deep within my hypothalamus. And female genitals. Talking at my brain and body won’t change that configuration.Transition has given me a new lease on life.

It wasn’t a pack of cigarettes, it was some cattle. But from the stories that have been passed down to me, this was pretty much what my great-grandfather pulled.I don’t know a ton about my Great-Grandpa Vedvig. I know that he raised cattle near Bergen, Norway, and that he was a true out-and-out alcoholic. He made his exit from my grandfather’s life at around the turn of the 20th Century and, in so doing, set my family on a course that would directly result in my being born in New York City about 85 years later.From what I hear, my great-grandfather was a rather miserable man, and his family did not lead a happy life. He wasn’t particularly good at making money but very good at spending it, usually on copious amounts of alcohol. My grandfather seems to have been largely unwilling to tell my mother much about him, but it is understood that he was abusive and egotistical in a way that made him utterly unprepared to raise a family.Sometime around 1900, my drunk-ass deadbeat of a great-grandfather left home to take his cattle to market and never came home. It is generally assumed that he drank himself to death somewhere secluded and alone, with no one to say a kind word or mourn for him.His family was left financially devastated. My grandfather was only about eight years old, and my great-grandmother didn’t have the means to keep their meager ranch and dairy operation afloat, and no money to hire any help.Desparate and out of options, my great-grandmother accepted help in the form of two tickets from a man named Thorbjørn Hals, and she and her son set out for the New World. At Ellis Island, as they passed through the immigration process, the name on the tickets was “Hals” and, as my great-grandmother felt little love or attachment to her departed husband's “Vedvig” surname, she and her son now found themselves in a new place with a new name and an opportunity for a new lease at life.The newly-minted Hals family would spend the next few years in North Dakota, in a community of other Norwegian immigrants. During this time, my Grandfather learned to speak English for the first time, though his mother would never fully grasp the language. When my grandfather was about 18, his mother would succumb to an outbreak of… typhus, I think. After that, my grandfather ventured further North, first to hire on as a farm hand, and then eventually to establish his own farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. It was on that farm, in a house that he’d built himself, that my mother would be born.My Grandfather's farmhouse, in which my mother was raised, as it stands today near Bengough, Saskatchewan.My grandfather never touched alcohol, and utterly forbid its consumption on his farm, for obvious reasons.I never got the chance to meet my grandfather, Johan “Johnny” Hals. Born in 1892, he would have been 93 when I was born, had he not fallen from the roof of a house that he was helping to build—in his eighties—ten years before I was born. From what I hear, he was a very stern and serious man who very seldom showed any hint of emotion or distress, a trait my mother still strongly associates with Norwegians in general. It is easy to see how the extent to which the course of his life, which had left him cast out on his own, beginning with the departure of his father back in Norway, helped to make him that way.Thanks for reading.