Caitlyn Jenner Enters The World

By now, you’ve heard that celebrity photographer Annie Liebowitz is taking shots of the most famous person currently undergoing a gender transition.  Her work is scheduled to appear in Vanity Fair.

I guess I am like almost everyone else in wanting to see what Caitlyn Jenner looks like.  But more to the point, at least for me, I want to see this next stage in her coming out into the world after spending 65 years living as a boy and man named Bruce. 

What I find interesting is that every news account I’ve seen and heard so far refers to her with feminine pronouns.  Until now, they had been using masculine ones.  It’s not a surprise, really, because when she announced that she was embarking upon life as a woman, she didn’t reveal her name.  She was still Bruce Jenner when Diane Sawyer was interviewing her just a few weeks ago.  It’s hard to call someone named Bruce “she”.

More to the point, she said that she still preferred, at that point, to be referred to as a man named Bruce.  I will not speculate on what her reasons might have been, but I know that all of us who have transitioned, or are transitioning, know that there is a moment when we are ready to come out into the world as the people we truly are.  For some that happens fairly quickly. I guess I am in that category, as I started living as Justine less than a year after I started taking hormones and about two years after I started counseling and therapy.  I’ve met others who lived years or decades longer than I did with the names and genders they were assigned at birth, for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes those reasons have to do with jobs, careers, marriages , family or other social relations.  Others simply have to become more comfortable with themselves in their new identities.

That last sentence might seem paradoxical to some of you.  No matter how early in life we realize we aren’t the gender we’re assigned at birth, and no matter how much we dream about living as our true selves, it still takes time to adjust to our new lives.  For some of us, the discomfort and self-loathing we felt in our old lives has shaped so much about our lives that it takes time—and sometimes brings us pain—to live without those things.  Also, those of us whose bodies don’t conform to our genders tend to be sensitive and vulnerable people.  Shedding our “boy skin” or “girl skin”, as it were, makes us even more prone to being hurt as well as experiencing joy.  Some, I believe, know they’re not ready for the intensity of the love and hate, the embraces and rejections, and the losses as well as the things we find and regain as we enter the world as our own selves, with our own names.

Whether she is experiencing all, some or none of what I’ve described, I am eager to see Caitlyn Jenner enter the world, and hope her passage is safe and joyous.

The Interview: Bruce Jenner

If you’re a trans person, your friends, family , co-workers and other acquaintances are probably talking to you about last night’s Big Event:  Diane Sawyer interviewing Bruce Jenner.

Some have said that Jenner’s “coming out” is a “tipping point” for public awareness and,  possibly, acceptance of transgender people.  For one thing, very few people who were as famous in their own right have publicly transitioned.  (Although he’s gained something of a reputation as an LGBT rights activist, Chaz Bono is known mainly for having famous parents.)  For another, everyone knew Jenner as the rugged and handsome (at least when he was young) Olympic gold-medal winner and actor.  And, as the twice-married media star revealed to Sawyer,  as a male he was never attracted to other males and now considers herself “asexual”.

In other words, the interview should help people to understand, as Jenner said, that gender identity is separate from sexual orientation—or, for that matter, proscribed gender roles.   Although most people thought Chastity Bono was a cute kid, most didn’t think of her as a “girly” girl.  When she “came out” as a lesbian, she fit the image of a “butch”, albeit a more glamorous version.  Thus, it didn’t challenge many people’s notions about trans people when Chastity announced she was going to become a man named Chaz.

That is not to say that Chaz’s public transition was not courageous.  In its own way, it might have been even more daring than Jenner’s because, even though only five years have passed since Sonny and  Cher’s daughter became their son, public awareness—and, I’d say, acceptance—of trans people has grown by leaps and bounds.  I’d say that we’re experiencing something like what gay men (and, to a lesser extent, lesbians) experienced during the years just after the Stonewall Rebellion. 

To be sure, there was still a lot of ignorance and hate that too often ended up in rejection and violence—as there is now.   But by the time the AIDS epidemic broke out, almost everyone in the Western world knew that he or she had a family member, friend, co-worker or other acquaintance who was gay.   As a result, people realized that being gay wasn’t a “choice” or a sign of depravity and much of the stigma around it faded.  To be sure, there are still folks showing up at funerals of murdered gay people with signs that say “God Hates Fags”, just as there are still people who say that we—trans people—aren’t human beings.  But such people are becoming the minority and, I hope, with people like Jenner going public, their numbers will shrink further. 

Who knows?  Perhaps in the not-too-distant future,  some celebrity will cause less consternation by saying, “For all intents and purposes, I am a woman” than for saying that she is a Republican! ;-)

"Coming Out" Opens The Door To Better Health

I often wish that I could have "come out" as trans earlier in my life--say, in my adolescence or even early adulthood.  I think of the years I "missed", being unable to live as the person I am.  And I always suspected that I would have had an easier time of living as a woman--especially in my early years in my true gender--had I started sooner.

Of course, there are many reasons why I didn't.  For one thing, I didn't think I was anything like Christine Jorgensen or Renee Richards, the only transsexual women I heard about when I was growing up.  I didn't understand that there were all sorts of ways of being a transsexual woman, let alone a woman, period.  Also, even though I have had relations with males, I always knew that my primary attraction is to women.  According to the conventional wisdom of the time, a "true" trans woman was attracted--and, for that matter, attractive--only to men.

Plus, there was a great deal more overt hostility toward people who didn't fit the prevailing notions of gender and sexuality.  The only reason why I wasn't bullied or harassed even more than I had been was that I was involved in sports and kept up a masculine facade.

One of the results of being in the closet was that I drank heavily and dabbled in drugs in my early adult life.  I also had difficulty forming and keeping relationships--a problem I still have now.

I don't think anything I've just said would surprise Stephen Russell.  He's an expert on adolescent mental health at the University of Arizona at Tuscon.  The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry has just published a study, of which Russell is the lead author, indicating that LGBT adolescents who are open about their sexuality and gender identity have higher self-esteem and suffer from less depression as adults. 

As almost everyone knows, depression can lead to other mental as well as physical health problems, including substance abuse, not to mention suicide attempts.  So, I think it's fair to say that anyone who "comes out" as a teenager is likely to be more healthy in general as an adult.

Stranded For Coming Out

People sometimes tell me I'm lucky to be a writer and in the academic world.  They believe--with more than some justification--that "educated" and "creative" people are more receptive, if not welcoming, to transgender people.

Now, if you think I've used a lot of qualifiers in the preceding sentences, you're right and I have good reason for doing so.  On the whole, I probably fared better after "coming out" and starting my transition than I might have in other work environments.  Still, there were people who said and did things that were inappropriate and reflected ignorance if not outright hostility.  Interestingly, I never experienced such treatment from students or fellow writers.  A few faculty members chilled toward me, but most of the difficulties I experienced came from administrators. That may have had more to do with the particular administrators in question than with any general principle.  

Fortunately, I have good relations with my current colleagues.  Some have known me "from the beginning", if you will, while others I met during and since my transition.  

So, perhaps, I can say--as Dan Savage likes to tell LGBT teenagers who are being bullied--"It gets better!"  At least, I'd like to be able to say that to Meredith Talusan.

I've never met her.  In fact, I learned of her only from a news item posted on ABS-CBN News yesterday. She's a graduate student in literature at Cornell University, where she recently applied for a professional position.  As a scholarship student, she's entitled to free on-campus housing and meals.

But now she may lose those--and, perhaps, her scholarship and standing as a student.  No, she didn't fail a class or miss a deadline.  Rather, she had the temerity to protest the harassment she experienced from her housemate and, apparently, others in the university community.  She says people heckle her with comments like "You're a man dressed as a woman!" and "You lost your penis!"

What makes her situation all the more disconcerting, at least for her, is that she's thousands of miles from her home in the Philippines. During an impromptu protest she and some friends staged against her mistreatment, they chanted, "This is what democracy looks like!"  

Like so many who come from faraway countries to work and study in the US, she works hard toward her goal of "a better life".  But her path to that life has been detoured, at least for now, as she was suspended from the house in which she'd been living and has been denied access to meals.  But she has refused to leave and has filed an appeal.

 

R.I.P. Leslie Feinberg

Sad news:  Leslie Feinberg has died.

Of course, she is best known as the author of Stone Butch Blues, the first coming-of-age story about an LGBT person many of us read.  But she also became the sort of scholar I admire most:  an independent one.  While her writings on gender identity and gender politics (Her last words were: "Remember me as a revolutionary communist!") are widely cited in academic circles, she herself was never affiliated with any university.  In fact, she stopped attending school around the 10th grade, but would still receive her high school diploma.

Her life and work gave us important lessons on how we can, and how we must, evolve in our sexual identities and gender expressions.  Though she, for years, lived  as a "butch" lesbian, she later identified as a trans person, though not as a trans man. Near the end of her life, she said she had "never been in search of a common umbrella identity, or even an umbrella term, that brings together people of oppressed sexes, gender identities and sexualities".  Instead, she believed in the right to self-determination for members of oppressed individuals, groups, communities and nations.

Her philosophy was encapsulated in her use of she/zie and her/her for herself.  As far as I know, she did not try to convince other people that they should use the same pronouns, though which ones they use are important.  Still, she pointed out, "people have been disrespectful of me with the right pronoun and respectful with the wrong one".  

I find such comments particularly interesting because when I first read Stone Butch Blues, years before I began my own transition, I was struggling, as I had been for a long time, to find a language and other means to express my own gender identity and sexual inclinations.  They didn't fit into the terms I'd been given--boy/girl, man/woman, marriage, even love--because such terms could only be hetero-centric because they were taught to me, however unwittingly, in hetero-centric ways.  As Jess, the lead character (and, some would say, a stand-in for Leslie Feinberg herself) in SBB says, "I need 'butch' words to describe my 'butch' life".  Jess's girlfriend, Theresa, understood as much but needed to hear it from Jess, who has shut herself down emotionally because of the brutality and violence she's experienced.  To Jess, like others in the lesbian subculture of the time (early 1960's), that lack of emotion is her butch identity and what gets her "props" in that world.  But it also led to the breakdown of her relationship with Theresa.

Even if you don't identify on the "spectrum", the book is interesting in all sorts of other ways.  For example, the story begins in Buffalo, where--at the time Jess "comes out"--there were still many blue-collar jobs to be had, and butches like Jess worked in some of them.  Jess would leave that city and move to the other end of New York State, to my hometown.   Later, when she returned to Buffalo, she found that her lesbian friends had died, moved away or married men.  There was no more blue-collar work; instead, her old friends were working as store clerks or night managers, or not at all.  

Aside from the history lesson, SBB taught me (and many other readers) much else.  When I read Christine Jorgensen's autobiography as a teenager, I was interested in, but not absorbed by it.  Part of the reason was (what I felt) her very mannered way of telling her story.  But more important, aside from feeling that I was male only in my genitalia (which I hated), I found little in common between me and her.  Most important of all, I didn't get the sense of Ms. Jorgensen's evolution, much as I hate to use that term.  I never had a real sense of how she came to see herself as the female she was, let alone how she explained it to herself or anyone else.  What I couldn't articulate then was that she eschewing one proscribed role (that of a man of her times) and taking on another (a woman of the 1950's).  Of course, it wasn't her job to instruct me or anyone else on how to perceive and express our self-identity.  But I would not find any insight on how I could define, let alone express, what I knew to be true,--or intellectual or spiritual sustenance for the journey of becoming myself.  Ironically, one of the first places in which I found such things was in SBB, the story of a butch lesbian who later comes to understand her own version of her trangender identity.

Then again, Leslie Feinberg and I were more alike than I ever could have realized.  After all, we are both transgenders who are attracted mainly (actually, in Feinberg's case, entirely) to women.  She identified as a transgender lesbian; I think of myself as a trangender bisexual with lesbian tendencies, though my lesbian tendencies are decidedly of Feinberg's butch variety.

And I'll admit that the one and only time I ever met her, I felt attracted to her.  Yes, in that way.  I mean, why wouldn't I be?  She was smart:  my first requirement.  And she was--at least when I saw her--disarmingly warm.  Perhaps her warmth disarmed me only because I was expecting to see the "stone" character she portrayed in her book.  And, finally, I will never forget the way her face lit up I told her my name:  One of her characters is also named Justine.

Declaring His Grandson An Equal

This 80-year-old man just did something I've never done and probably never will do.  

No, I'm not talking about having grandkids, although I don't, in fact, have any--and probably won't.  Rather, I mean something that, honestly, I've had even less inclination to do:  get a tatoo.

So why did "Grandpa Frank" get himself poked and inked?  Well, the design might provide a clue:  It's an equal sign--the symbol used by Marriage Equality acivists.

No, he didn't get hitched with one of his buddies.  "Grandpa Frank" got the image tatooed onto his wrist as a sign of support for his grandson, who recently "came out" and had the same image etched onto his wrist.


 

On My Way To Coming Out

The following is a journal entry I wrote during a flight I took to see my parents.  That weekend, I would "come out" to them.

                                                                   Prodigal

Just boarded Flight 2640, from Newark to Daytona Beach.  I’ve never been in one of these new planes before.  I’m in a solo seat: window to the left, aisle to the right.  Across the aisle, two seats next to a window.  (Funny, they call these windows.  They’re more like holes.)  A woman in one seat, probably a bit older than me, with the sturdy, earthy look of a peasant.  But also very intelligent eyes, and in our brief exchange—“I think we got the last seats.”  “Yes, it does appear that way”—revealed the clarity and precision of her speech.  I compliment her on her nails; “It’s something stupid, like olive gloss,” she says.  Another comment or two about the plane: anything to distract myself.

Nothing outside the window could do that.  Although this is my first flight in a long time, it’s all familiar: those open flat beds on wheels with a steering wheel and a dashboard but no windshield pulling trains of baggage cars with saggy curtains on the sides that make them look like toys left out in the rain; the beige and black aluminum panels that surround and shade windows kids love because on this side, planes come from and go to places they’d never heard of: planes full of people, some of whom look like no one they’ve ever seen.

Maybe I’m one of them; after all, hadn’t Melanie (Mark’s four-year-old daughter) pointed to me and declared, “He’s a woman!”?  I know I confused a lot of people today—including myself.  Tried to “butch up” so my parents will recognize me—or at least not start to ask a lot of questions—the moment they meet me at the airport.  But I also had to be femme enough to resemble at least somewhat, the person whose photo adorns the state ID card issued to Justine.

Taxiing the runway.  Even though I’ve flown a number of times before, I’ve never been so nervous.  The last time I flew, in August 2001, I was coming back from a bicycling trip in the French and Italian Alps.  It was only two years ago, but it was five or six weeks before 9/11.  But that’s not the only reason why that trip, and all the others I took before it, seem so long ago.  Now they seem like events that happened to someone else, in another lifetime.

That last trip, and all the others, I took as Nick.  And my parents think they’re going to meet him in Terminal #3 of DAB.  The plane paused.  Now it’s accelerating, darting past a control tower, and finally beginning its liftoff.  Less than a minute, and already we’re hundreds of feet off the ground, teetering in the high wind.  No way back now.  No previous liftoff ever gave me such butterflies in my stomach.  Yes, this one is rougher than others I remember.  But I still see all the same tract houses, parking lots and tank plantations one sees on any takeoff from Newark.  Yet they seem so alien—new without novelty or the freshness of a discovery—and vertiginous, at least to my eyes.

Now we’re bumping through he clouds, and the buildings and the New Jersey swamp are fading away.  I’ve never felt so cold in my life.  Cold, yet the beads of sweat cling to my forehead.  The bumps stretch into blips, and the clouds grow thick yet wispy in the intense sunlight.  I’m still cold and nauseous; my breaths shorten.  I close my eyes.  The sweat dries but I feel tears welling.  I take another swallow to unclog my ears.

One of my first discoveries in my transition was that I could cry in public.  When you’re a woman, some people seem to expect it from you.  But nobody looks at you askance.  Today, on the other hand, it seems that everyone has been doing just that, ever since I, butched up, walked out of my door.  What’ll I do now?

I cry.  I close my eyes.  Tears stop momentarily.  The drone of the plane mutters through my head.  Wake again: tears.  The woman in the opposite seat catches my eye for a moment and returns to her book.  The attendant—a pretty, round-faced ash-blonde with a slight drawl—rolls a cart up aisle to my seat.  “Cranberry juice, please.”  She starts to pour; the plane thumps again.  She apologizes.  “I don’t know how you do that,” I say, more as a distraction for me than a kudos for her.

Distractions are all I want now.  Like anything outside the window.  Like the bridge threading through eyelets of land wound by a series of streams or inlets—maybe it’s swampland, like the ground near Newark.  There are people who drive or walk or pedal across that bridge every day; this is probably the only time I will ever see it.  Nothing exceptional; it’s like a lot of other highway bridges: an asphalt platform propped on steel girders.  It’s probably no more unusual to the people who cross it than it is to me, and if there’s ever a last time for them to cross it, they probably won’t know it and they probably won’t realize that the bridge has become a part of their past.

As that land is.  And this plane, and the people on it, will soon be.  We’re over the ocean now, or some very large bay.  It’s odd, how much, from here, it looks the way the sky looks from the ground: white wisps and streaks in a field of blue.  Slender dartlike objects-- one red and white, the other silver—leave a thin white trail that dissipates in the currents.  I feel the plane beginning its descent; any moment I expect the captain to announce it and our approach to Daytona Beach International Airport.  Knowing my parents, they’re already there; if not, they’re on their way.

The final approach.  That phrase always seemed strange to me.  As if you’ll never go that way again.  As if neither he nor the attendant would go there again.  They’ll probably do this again tomorrow, or some time before the week is over.  They may’ve gone this way yesterday and the day before.  But it’s always the final approach.  Maybe this will really be the last one.

What a way to think when I’m about to see my parents!  Then again, it may very well be the last time I see them.  The rows of houses, the streets and the industrial-looking buildings are coming into view.  A sand-colored ribbon slices through a patch of swampland.  Clouds thin and swirl into mist around the wings just beyond my window.  Clumps of trees have the petrified green hues of the ones in dioramas.  We descend closer to the ground; now it’s possible to tell old from young, mature from dying, and sick trees.  A road rounds the field where we’re about to touch down; a red SUV and a white coupe make the turn.  The sun, low in the horizon, glares through my window.  The Daytona Speedway looms just ahead: rows of bleachers perched on seats I can’t see from here, not unlike the football stadium of a large college.  An African-American man in an airline-issue shirt and tie waves an orange cone in each hand, and the seatbelt signal is turned off.  All click, except mine.

                                                       --13 November 2003

Jay's House

Lately, I’ve been listening quite a bit to WBAI, the Pacifica Radio station here in New York.  I have gone through periods of my life when I have listened to no other radio station—sometimes, during times when I wasn’t watching television.

I started listening again a few months ago because there is so little on local radio or television I can stand, even as background, while I’m working on something.  At other times when I listened regularly, there were more intelligent, engaging or simply entertaining (by my standards, anyway) options in the media than there are now.  I know that I can find some favorite old episodes and programs on You Tube and other venues, but I don’t want to spend too much time on reruns.  Besides, it’s hard use You Tube or its equivalents as background.

Anyway, WBAI has an “OUT Radio” program, which claims to be the only LGBT-centered radio program in the NYC area.  Their claim is probably accurate.  I hadn’t tuned in specifically to hear that program, though:  I’ve had the radio on most of the day as I’ve gone in and out to shop for food and do laundry and other errands—all within a two-block radius of my place.  Still, I listened.  I’m glad I did:  the producer—I didn’t catch her name—interviewed Jay Toole.

Until recently, Jay headed Queers for Economic Justice.  However, the organization is dying because it’s lost its funding.  But Jay had been working on a dream, which is now coming into fruition:  Jay’s House, a shelter/community center for LGBT people.

Jay’s vision for it was borne of experience living in the New York City shelter system and, before that, on the streets.  Like too many other young queer people, Jay became homeless upon “coming out” as a teenager.  To be exact, Jay was 13 years old at the time and would live without a home for more than thirty years afterward.

One of the things for which I am thankful is that the most difficult times I’ve experienced are nothing like what Jay experienced every day for decades.  Another thing for which I’m thankful is for which I’m thankful is having met Jay, especially at the time in my life when I did.

Not long before I moved out of the apartment I’d been sharing with Tammy, I went to Center Care, the counseling center of the LGBT Community Center of New York.  Jay volunteered as an intake counselor and was on duty the day I walked in.  Until that day, Tammy was the only person with whom I’d talked about my gender identity.  Actually, I didn’t talk about it so much as I insisted that the clothing, the jewelry and the time I spent in them were things I could simply “walk away from” if and when it ever became a possible roadblock to her career—or, more precisely, her own life based on her defying other people’s perceptions of her real and  understandable wish to escape the pain other males in her life had caused her.

Living a half- (or otherwise partial-) truth really isn’t any better—or, at least, mentally and spiritually healthy—than living an outright lie.  Well, it might be better in the sense that sometimes it’s necessary to live that partial truth—which, really, is another kind of mendacity—in order to learn whatever one must learn, or simply to survive, before facing reality.

I knew I had to end those fictions—and the ones I’d given my family, friends and anyone else who knew or questioned me—on the day I met Jay.  As I sat in the Center’s waiting area, I thought about how I would explain myself to whoever I met.  (At that moment, of course, I didn’t know that person would be Jay.)  Until that moment, nothing made any sense to me:  I didn’t know, therefore, how I could make it make sense to anyone else.

The receptionist called my name and directed me to one of the Center’s narrow but well-lit offices.  “I’m Jay.”  “Hi.” 

At that moment, I forgot whatever I’d been rehearsing in my mind.  Instead, this passed through my lips:  “I’m a woman.”

“I know.”

I would later realize that, at that moment, I knew Jay, too, even though we were meeting for the first time.  You see, I intuited—and much later articulated—this:  I was, at that moment, an inversion of Jay, who was about as “butch” as anyone could be without having been born with XY chromosomes.  But, even more important, we had both been defined by our vulnerability and pain.  Both of us had experienced sexual molestation and violence; while Jay was cast out, I alienated myself because I simply could not relate to anyone else, not even members of my own family.  Jay had spent more than three decades without a physical home; I’d spent about the same amount of time, if not more, unable to be at home in my own body, in my own mind, in my own spirit, let alone in any physical environment in which I’d lived, worked or been inculcated with notions to which I simply couldn’t conform, no matter how hard I tried or how much I loved the people who were teaching the lessons they’d been taught and, in some cases, did not understand.

Jay and I would later volunteer on one of the Center’s projects and remain in contact, if episodically.  Although Jay is very busy, the time in which we didn’t talk or write much to each other was also my fault:  I withdrew from almost everyone with whom I didn’t have to be in contact when Dominick was doing everything he could to destroy me.  I didn’t have to make the apology I offered when we bumped into each other, for the first time in a couple of years, back in June:  After all, almost no one else I know understands what it’s like simply to survive the day and the day before as well as Jay does.