About Kristin

My name is Kristin Despina, and I’m the founder/creator of the acceptance revolution.

I’m also a daughter, sister, friend, yogini, burgeoning mental health counselor (and otherwise longtime clinical observer of the human condition/listening ear/unofficial advice guru/crying shoulder extraordinaire), and lover who’s willing to fight for what and who I love unequivocally and unconditionally. You’ll notice that I don’t mention my sexuality anywhere in there, and that’s because I don’t choose to define myself that way; I believe human beings are fluid and constantly evolving, so much more than just the sum of our parts, and that our human sexuality is part and parcel of all that.

Described by a friend once as “the ultimate queer” when, for the better part of a four year timespan, I happened to find myself primarily dating transmen, I’ve been telling people for years that “the only label I really subscribe to is ‘human.'” I love quotable quotes and song lyrics, and can pretty much find one to apply to any situation, and this one is no exception: “It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.” ~Chuck Palahnuik

But thanks to social and cultural wiring, that perceived “need” is thriving. When I first started dating my FtM ex-boyfriend, I got my first taste of the conditional acceptance that seems to exist in the LGBTQIA community in the form of girls in gay bars asking me, “Why are you here if you’re straight?” And those were the polite ones… some just shot dirty looks our way and grumbled to each other – within earshot – about the “f**king straight people in the gay bar.” Such encounters were, sadly, “all in a day” for many of the transguys I’ve known; it was my own personal bite-sized sample of the loss of community many of them had faced post-transition.

I, too, eventually came full circle, adopted a “water off a duck’s back; I have nothing to prove to anyone” mentality, and carried on living my life without giving much thought to those experiences when they arose. Until recently… one of my best friends has been on a journey of self-discovery and dealing with her own struggles with and fears of loss of community in the lesbian world as she begins to explore dating men. She shared a prose piece she had written in an effort to sort through her thoughts with me, and reading her words, my wheels immediately started turning. Everything she had to say was so on point and relevant, down to a simple but beautiful closing statement that, at the end of the day, no matter who she may end up with: “I’m just me.” It brought back my own experiences and those others had shared with me in a rush, and I realized that this was part of something so much bigger than just her or me or any other single individual; this impacts our community as a whole. I wrote back to her expressing my feelings that “It’s sad that a community that’s supposedly about acceptance and tolerance and being who you are can so often become anything but for so many people, and how awesome would it be if we could somehow shed some kind of new and meaningful light on things?” This site is my first small step towards achieving that goal.