Chaz Bono and Me: Hey, You Never Know!

I'm thinking now of a man who was a colleague of mine back when I was the "before" photo.  Tall, portly and with an easy manner, he's one of those guys who's avuncular at 50 and is now almost grandfatherly.  I'm guessing that he's about 65, give or take a few years.


Anyway, back in January, I bumped into him.  We hadn't seen each other in about a dozen years.  He had heard about me because I stopped at the college where we used to teach and where his brother was still teaching.  His brother seemed more bemused, but he--I'll call him Jimmy--was actually quite sympathetic when I bumped into him.  "I was surprised, really," he said.  "I thought you were straight, you seemed pretty masculine and you were so athletic."


He thought for a moment and added," I guess you just never know who is."


I thought of that when I was talking with my mother today.  She saw Chaz Bono on a program--I forget which--on a cable network.  "She, I mean he, has such a big neck," she said.  


"I know.  It's a linebacker's neck."


"Yeah, you're right.  She, I mean he, really changed."

I then explained some of the effects of taking testosterone, and the fact that, because it's a stronger hormone than estrogen, the changes in female-to-male transsexuals are usually even more pronounced than those in male-to-females who take estrogen.


"But he really looks different from when he was Chastity!," my mother exclaimed.   Then, she paused in a way she rarely does; I guessed that she was trying not to mix up the pronouns.  "You know," she said, "Chastity was really cute."


"Yes, I remember her from those old Sonny and Cher shows."


Chastity, as I remember, really was cute, in an almost Shirley Temiple-ish sort of way.  But even then--about four decades ago--I saw something unusual in her.  I couldn't articulate what it was, but I somehow had the feelng it had to do with whether or not she would like boys when she got a little older.



And now he's one of them.  As they say in the old country, "Hey, you never know!"

Thirty Years Later, It's Our Epidemic

Thirty years ago today, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published by the Centers for Disease Control, included a piece of information that was little-noted at the time but would, literally, change the world.

Five previously-healthy men, ranging in age from 29 to 36, were diagnosed with an illness that had been all but unknown in the United States, save for people with compromised immune systems.  About all these young men had in common were that they were treated in Los Angeles hospitals and were said to be "active homosexuals."  They had no known common sexual contacts.

The illness for which they were being treated was pneumocystis carinii. By the time the MMWR announcement was published, two of the men had already died. Within a year, the other three would be dead.

About the only people who knew about their illnesses were those doctors and researchers who read that issue of the MMWR.  However, stories about a "gay cancer" in which victims had nearly identical systems to those of the five men in the report had been circulating, mostly by word of mouth (Remember, there was no Internet in those days.) among gay men.

That so-called "gay cancer" and the previously-rare form of pneumonia that killed its victims was, of course, what we now know as AIDS.  

What few people knew was that many, many more people were carrying the seeds of that illness within them.  In fact, a little less than two weeks before the MMWR was published, I was--unknowingly, of course--among four of them. It was the last time I saw any of them alive.  I was twenty-two years old, and those people I saw were around the same age.

Eleven other friends and acquaintances of mine have died of the illness.  Five of them--including my first AA sponsor--died between Memorial Day and Christmas one year.  

That was also the year--eleven years after I completed my B.A.-- I began to teach at the college level as a graduate assistant.  I saw, immediately, a dramatic difference between the freshmen in the first class I taught and my undergraduate classmates--or the kind of person I was in as a freshman.  Even those of us who came from relatively conservative environments were still shaped, in various ways, by the various forms of sexual liberation that had washed over college campuses and other segments of society for nearly a decade before my first day as an undergraduate. 

We may well have been the first generation of undergraduates who weren't hiding our sexual experience, desires and proclivities from each other, let alone those who had immediate authority over us.  In fact, said authority figures--and the parents and guardians of some students--almost seemed to expect that sexual encounters would be part of our undergraduate experience.  I recall one classmate being told, by his father, that he needed to "get laid more often."  That young man's father was one of the so-called pillars of his community.

The freshmen I was teaching nearly a generation later shared none of those attitudes.  In fact, I could sense it even before they wrote or voiced their attitudes about sex and intoxication.  

At first I thought that they didn't value those things as much as we did because they were on a non-residential campus, in contrast to the residential campus I attended.  Then I thought that they were more conservative because they had grown up with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as their Presidents, and the resulting conservative values expressed in the culture. 

But one day I thought back to something else I'd experienced about two years earlier, near the end of the 1980's.  I had been working as an artist-in-residence with the Poets In The Schools program here in New York.  One of the schools in which I'd been working was in the East New York section of Brooklyn.  It was considered, along with the South Bronx and possibly East Harlem and South Jamaica, among the poorest and most dangerous parts of New York City.  (The following year, the precinct that included the school recorded more homicides than all of France or the then-West Germany.) 

One day, in that school, an eighth-grader asked how old I was. When I told him I was thirty, he asked when I would turn thirty-one.  I told him three or four months, or whatever it was.  "Then you're the oldest man I know!"

Mind you, that boy was thirteen years old.  "No, that can't be!"

"My Uncle Henry was thirty-one when he died."  And, that kid added, it was AIDS that claimed him.  I would find out that about at least half of the kids in that class had a family member who died the same way; everyone in that class knew someone who died that way or was murdered.  

The students in my freshman class were only two to four years older than that boy in East New York would have been.  A couple of them grew up there; a few more grew up in neighborhoods that weren't much different.  I guessed that their comparative circumspection about sex and drugs may well have been shaped by their experiences of seeing friends and family members succumb to the ravages of AIDS or as a result of the so-called War on Drugs.

During that semester, Magic Johnson announced that he was HIV-positive.  Of course, he was very quick to assert that he is heterosexual.  While nearly everyone believed him, many of us thought he "had" to say that in order to cover himself.  Being the great NBA player he was, he had access to the best medical care available.  But he could very easily have been misdiagnosed or mistreated in some way had he not made that assertion.

On the other hand, his announcement of his "normal" sexuality turned out to be a good thing in the long run, for it helped to change a lot of people's perceptions about AIDS--and, perhaps, homosexuality.  No longer could people equate one with the other.  

So, in that freshman class at Brooklyn College in 1991, I believe I saw an interesting and, on its face, counterintuitive change take place.  Along with their more conservative and restrained attitudes about sex, I was also seeing, if not tolerance, at least an acknowledgement that people they knew and loved are gay and were not, as one televangelist claimed, like rats during the time of a plague.  That is not to say that there weren't homophobic students:  I recall comments scrawled on the door of Allen Ginsberg's office at the college.  But other students, including most in my class, were ashamed and embarrassed that one of their peers could be so ignorant.  And a few students and faculty members openly mentioned their non-heterosexual inclinations.

I was not one of them.  I still feared how people might react had I openly discussed my gender identity, much less manifested it.  Years later, when I "came out," I experienced some of the things I'd feared--though not from my students.  

So I can understand why too many trans people kill themselves or stay "in the closet."  Too many of us lose families and other networks, and jobs, as a result of finally reaching the point at which we could no longer live lies.  The loss of our lives as we knew them drives too many of us into sex work and into other kinds of risky work and behaviors, and the resulting loss of income and insurance keeps too many of us from getting the diagnoses and treatments we need.   

Thirty years after that MMWR report, HIV-positive people are living longer and, sometimes, not getting sick at all.  That is true, anyway, for those who have good incomes and insurance policies.  For everyone else, the disease is just as terrible as it was then.  The difference is that its victims are poorer and more likely to be female.  Male-to-female transgenders just happen to fit both descriptions.  So, thirty years later, the AIDS epidemic is ours.

The Birthers and A Transgender President: Donald Trump Should Be So Proud!

Donald Trump is proud of himself.  He said so yesterday, after President Obama showed the world his birth certificate and Trump claimed that he forced the President to do so.

Of course, The Donald had to say something like that.  He is just smart enough to know how stupid he seemed in light of his claim that Obama was born in Africa.  Well, at least now we know that TD/DT is in the 25th percentile in intelligence:  One out of every four Americans still believes that the Obama wasn't born in the USA.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised.  After all, four centuries after Galileo and Copernicus, and five centuries after Columbus, we have a Flat Earth Society.  They might be jokers, but they're not kidding.

The whole (non-) controversy about Obama's birth certificate got me to thinking what might happen if we ever have a transgender President.  Let's say that person has been living "stealth":  His or her previous life is unknown even to his or her friends and closest work associates.  How long do you think it would be before someone with too much money and too much time on his or her hands finds out that Madame President had been a dude, or that Mister President had been a mistress?  

Would the President ignore the rumors, as Obama did about the birther's claims?  And, if he/she did, for how long?  Obama held out for two years?  Would our tranny president ignore the demand to know about his or her past?  

Would someone demand to see the original birth certificate of our great two-spirited leader?   Remember that in most states that issue new birth certificates (including Georgia, from which I got mine)  keep the original on file.  The original, of course, includes the gender to which the baby was assigned and the name he or she was given at birth.  So, even though my current birth certificate has the name by which you know me and an "F"  for sex, in Atlanta there is still a copy with the name I was given on the day I was born and an "M" where there always should have been an "F."  So, if I were to be elected President and someone who hasn't read this blog (How likely are both of those to be true?) heard about or suspected my past, would he or she demand that I show my original birth certificate?

Hmm...What if we were to re-fight the Civil War and I ran for President of the Union?  Would the fact that I was born in the Peachtree State make me ineligible?  

And would Donald Trump (or his future equivalent) be proud of him (or her) self for "forcing" me to show a birth certificate that indicates my birth as a boy named Nicholas in the state of Georgia?

I think he would.  I would let him be.  

When Girl Meets Girl

When you're a performer of any sort, someone in your audience is going to have a crush on you.  Anyone who's a singer or musician knows that.  So do actors and dancers.  Also, I've discovered, it's equally true for professors or teachers as it is for preachers and politicians.


Now, if that has happened to me both as Nick and as Justine, I know it can happen to anyone who teaches!


Anyway...One of my students, it seems, just can't stop looking at me--with a longing, winsome smile.  It's funny that, even though this is not the first such experience I've had, it seems even stranger--yet, in some odd way, more gratifying--than any student crush I've experienced before.  


Not to boast, but I am one of the few faculty members I know who has been the object of longings from both male and female students.  So no such attention should seem out of the ordinary by now.  So why am I talking about this particular student?


I'll call her Matilda.  She was born in Venezuela and came here as a teenager. In one of her papers, she described the day she realized she had sexual feelings for women.  She mentioned it in relation to something we'd read in class,  and she's older than the "traditional" college-age student (though she's very youthful-looking).  So I didn't regard it as a "coming out."  In fact, I somehow felt that her sexual self-identity was normal, perhaps even routine, to her.  I daresay that the way I relate to my own gender and sexual identity is probably newer for me than hers is for her.


In another assignment, she said (again, in relation to something we'd read in class) that she never has never been with a man, and never had interest (at least sexually) in them.   Before she realized she had feelings for women, she said, the other girls in her class had boyfriends and she tried to believe what her family told her: that her "turn" hadn't come yet.  


Now, when you teach a work of literature, your students (at least some of them) are sure to relate something or another about it to some experience or another in their own lives.  I do not discourage that, for that is often the "gateway" for students.  Some have told me some very personal stories.  So, in a sense, what Matilda did wasn't so unusual, at least to me.  Still, I somehow felt that she was revealing even more of herself to me than students normally do.


Then I started to think--especially after I noticed her gaze and her smile--that she was trying to tell me something more than the connection she found between her experience and the reading.


Of course, I have no intention of pursuing a relationship with her.  Certainly, I would never do it while she was my student.  But I wouldn't go on a date with her even after she has completed the course with me.  For one thing, if she's still in school after that, it would definitely lead to some awkward moments.  And, for another, I realize that my allure (such as it is) would probably be gone once I'm not her prof any more.  The fact that we are in the same class (albeit in different roles) might be the only thing we have in common.


But, even so, I find her attraction to me even more affirming than the first time a man was attracted to me after I started living as Justine. (At least, he was the first one that I noticed.)  He was a Puerto Rican artist, whom I'll call Dario,  about a decade or so older than me.  When I "confessed" who I really was to him, he said he was willing to stay with me until my operation--which, at that point, was still well into the future--and beyond.  In fact, he said, he wanted me as a woman.


Dario also insisted that, sexually, he was interested only in women.  I had my doubts then, which were later confirmed.  That wasn't the reason I didn't go out with him, though.  I just didn't sense that we were terribly compatible in other ways.


On the other hand, I am sure Matilda has never been interested in men.  I wouldn't care if anyone I dated had relations with both genders, as long as he or she were honest and disease-free.  But I know--or, at least, I've surmised from what I've seen--that she isn't interested in any manifestation of my Y chromosome.  I've run into a few women who seemed to want me to be a boyfriend, only better.  That's not what I'm sensing in Matilda.


So, as strange as this attraction is, I'm enjoying it.  We probably will never see each other again once the course is over.  Perhaps one or both of us will have come to know ourselves better as a result of this.

DOMA: Defense of What?

Imagine this: According to the laws of your state, you are married.  But, according to the Federal government, you're not.

For anyone caught in that predicament, it's more than an inconvenience.  It could mean, among other things, a denial of benefits to the one who's committed his or her life to you.  

That is exactly the bind in which some people have found themselves for years.  While a few states have legalized same-sex marriages, most haven't.  Nor has the Federal Government.  In fact, homophobia is, in essence, encoded in Title 3 of the odious Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  It specifically does not recognize unions between people of the same sex.

Now Attorney General Eric Holder has said the Department of Justice will not defend that statute of DOMA.  While I applaud him on his stance, I wonder how much effect it will really have.  After all, Congress can still uphold it.  And that's what the House of Representatives will almost certainly do.  

So, while I hold out hope, I won't hold my breath.

Finding Out About Lola

Today I heard the Kinks' Lola on the radio.  That, in itself, is not so unusual:  "oldies" and "classic rock" stations play it all the time.  


I heard it over the PA system in a cafe where I stopped for a cup of tea on my way to my part-time gig.  Two young guys were working behind the counter.  One of them nudged the other:  "Yo, ya hear this song?"


"Yeah, so?"


"It's about a cross-dresser!"


His nomenclature may or may not be accurate.  Some think that "Lola" is a pre-op trans woman.  How would we know, just listening to the song?


But I couldn't help but to wonder how many times that young man heard the song before it occured to him that it's about a guy's encounter with a girl who turns out to be a guy.  I've heard other people say they heard the song for years before they actually listened to the lyrics.  They can be forgiven:  The song has a catchy tune and opens with some pretty good guitar work.


What's interesting about the song is that, near the end, the narrator says "But when I looked in her eyes, I almost fell for my Lola."  But, in the end, he avers, "Well I'm not the world's most masculine man/But I know what I am and I'm a glad I'm a man/And so is Lola."


Given that the song was released in 1970, it's amazing that there's anything at all about a cross-dresser or a trans woman.  Still, it's hard not to notice that the narrator goes, in the space of a stanza, from an almost-tolerant attitude to   one who doth protest too much, perhaps.  

Sean Avery Speaks (Up) For Us

It's been said that politics makes for strange bedfellows.


Well, let me tell you, I've had some pretty strange bedfellows.  And I've never been (and don't intend to be) in politics.  


But I digress.  I can think of something else that makes for some really strange, or at least unexpected, alliances:  the issue of LGBT rights.  Barry Goldwater, that bastion of conservatism, supported them.  A couple of years ago, Dick Cheyney came out in favor of allowing gay marriage.  


Now a hockey player who once described his ex-girlfriend as "sloppy seconds" says he's willing to support any player who's gay and is worried about the consequences of "coming out." 


In a news conference, Sean Avery, whose behavior has caused a couple of teams to trade him in spite of his talents as a player, said, “If there’s a kid in Canada or wherever, who is playing and really loves the game and wants to keep playing but he’s worried about coming out, I’d tell him to pick up the phone and call (NHLPA executive director) Donald Fehr and tell him to book me a (plane) ticket.”


Now, if he's sincere--and somehow I suspect he is, believe it or not--I think that it's an example of what will really propel acceptance and rights for LGBT people.  When a macho-guy hockey player like Avery is willing to stand beside a gay player, that just might influence others to do the same.  We need him for the same reasons why we need the support of conservatives and of what is sometimes called "Middle America."  When some churchgoing parent accepts his or her--or someone else's--gay kid, that example resonates more powerfully for most people than it does when it comes from some former ACT-UP member.  


Of course, I don't mean to say that we don't need the support of our more traditional allies.  But when the Sean Averys and Dick Cheyneys of the world put in a word for us, they're not preaching to the choir.

Giving Up What I Never Had

The other day I was talking--about what, I don't recall-- with another faculty member.  All I know is that it had to do with things we were teaching because she related a story about something that happened to her in a class once.  And I mentioned--I forget why--that once, when I was conferring with a student about her paper, she blurted, "When you were teaching A Doll's House, you were teaching about yourself, weren't you?"


I hadn't mentioned it to anyone in a long time.  I also hadn't mentioned that I had that conference with that student during my last year of living as Nick.  In fact, not much more than a week after that conference, I took my first dose of hormones.  


All of that meant, of course, that the answer to that student's question was an emphatic "Yes!," even though I hadn't realized it until the student asked.  Just four months before I had that conversation, my life was different:  I had to leave it in order to do what I needed to do.  I had to give up relationships, a cozy living situation and a lot of other things in order to make my changes.


But as I was talking to that faculty member the other day, I had a really odd sensation.  I felt, not that what I gave up was insignificant now, or is less than what it seemed to be at the time.  Rather, it felt as if I never actually had the things I gave up.  


Perhaps I never had any of it.  At least, I never had--among other things--the love of certain people.  I lived under the illusion I did; so did they.  However, whatever relationships I had with them was built on a false pretense because I never was the person they thought I was.  And, ultimately, I never could be that person.

Protesting Undercover in Egpt

According to Scott Long, the LGBT coordinator for Human Rights Watch, "a large number of LGBT Egyptians have joined the protesters who want to end Mubarak's rule in their country.


Long was quick to point out that they weren't marching and demonstrating as lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgenders.  Indeed, they aren't marching under a rainbow flag, or much of anything else that would identify them by their sexual orientation or gender identity and expression.  That's not surprising because Egypt, like most countries in that reason, isn't exactly known (at least not officially, anyway) as a bastion of tolerance for LGBT people. 


So, while they are taking part in the protests and are often welcomed by the protesters and their supporters, they aren't doing so because they are LGBT people.  At least, the would never state publicly that they are.  But I can't see how an LGBT person can fight for human rights without making his or her identity or expression a part of it.  After all, if you're working for human rights, you're working for everybody, including LGBT people.  And we are affected as much as anyone by those rights we have and which are taken away from us.


But that's not the reason for my admiration of their courage or ambivalence about their role in the protest.  Nearly all are anti-Mubarak.  As well they should be:  Not only does he have a terrible (though not the worst) human rights record, he is basically a puppet of this country.  And this country's de facto colonialization of the country and the region are not going to win him any friends, particularly among the young.


What happens if or when those young people, like so many of their peers in other countries of that region, express their anger and disdain for "The Great Satan" of America by joining groups like the Muslim Brotherhood or immersing themselves in the more fundamentalist or militant sects of Islam?  Or, if they become so radicalized if only because they're young and have nothing to lose?  (Egypt has the highest percentage of unemployed college graduates of any country in the world.) Just as Communism can be very appealing to hungry people, so can any doctrine that posits itself as the foe of that which is destroying young people's dreams.


Remember, Egypt is in the heart of that part of the world where people believe that the enemy of your enemy is your friend.  So they'll work with the Muslim Brotherhood or some other such organization if only for their opposition to the US.   


And if groups like those gain power, where does that leave LGBT people?

Getting Over "Saturday Night Live"

It's been decades since I've watched Saturday Night Live regularly.  So I would never have known about a sketch they did last week if someone hadn't alerted me to it.


On SNL, there's a longstanding tradition of satirizing commercials--or, more precisely, the tropes of commercials.  And that is what SNL's producers and NBC executives claimed they were doing in making and airing a mock-commercial for a product called "Estro-Maxx."


But it seemed that transgenders were mocked more than the product.  The males-to-females were depicted with the old stereotypes:  exaggerated walks and voices, and obsession with clothing and makeup.  The "commercial" could just as easily have been made thirty or forty years ago.


Now some people are accusing us of not having any sense of humor, and telling us to "get over it."  Well, you don't just "get over" being attacked, especially by established and respected institutions and people.  A man with breasts?  That stopped being funny around the time of Tiresias.  So, for that matter, did Saturday Night Live.

What You Don't Have To Prove

One of the wonderful things about getting older (Notice that I didn't say "old"!) is that confessions don't seem as self-conscious as they do when they're made earlier in one's life.  That may be the reason why they seem more organic, and simply truer, and why people who know you well aren't surprised--or, at least, aren't taken aback--when you make them.


And so it was when I talked to my mother today.  I said that some people--actually, two in particular--seem annoying, if not spiritually and intellectually vexatious to me now.  At one time, I was grateful for them--at least, that's what I told myself and others--because they at least talked to me and seemed to be making efforts at maintaining relationships with me when others fled.  But when I talk to those two people, I hear the same things over and over again.  Whenever I talk to either of them, they seem to have the need to show me how easily they can spot gay people and that they "have nothing against them" although they will adamantly insist that they themselves are straight.


About their claims:  I really don't care.  If they are straight, gay or whatever, it simply doesn't matter to me:  I'm beyond, or at least past, caring about that.  


Now, if either of them wanted to tell me he is gay (and, yes, I have my suspicions), I would be willing to listen and to give advice, if he wants it.  I've had students and other people "come out" to me, or simply confide what others may have already known about them.  One thing I've learned is that when someone like that confesses his or her deepest desires to me, he or she is looking for, or looking to me as, someone who will not be judgmental and who will simply accept what they say.  On the other hand, people like the two I mentioned aren't looking for anything like that:  Instead, they're trying to prove something they wouldn't have to prove to me if it were true.  No one has to prove that he or she accepts someone else; he or she simply accepts that person, or doesn't.  


Perhaps I am being harsh or cruel in thinking that the two people I mentioned--both of whom are known to everyone in my family--are annoying and, worse, willfully unaware of themselves, when they did, in fact, spend time with me early in my current life when other people abandoned me.  Perhaps I am being ungrateful for the small acts of kindness, or at least courtesy, they performed on my behalf.  But now I realize that not only are they annoyances; they can't be trusted.  Their behavior shows a lack of emotional, if not spiritual, integrity.    Being around them could actually be dangerous for me.


My mother told me not to feel guilty.  "You have a few really good friends," she  said.  "And you could make others, if you want to."


Maybe that's what I want.  I feel ready to make a few changes in my life.  My therapist suggested and my social worker (who is a trans man) said that a year or two (or three) after my surgery, I might experience something like what I've just described.  I know that in going through my transition and surgery, I have had to know myself in ways that most people don't have to know themselves.  Others have tried to tell me not to trust my perceptions; they--at least some of them--are the only things that don't fail me, ever. 


Someone told me that I have a kind of integrity that no one else in her life has.  Perhaps.  What I do know is that having had to ask myself some of the questions only I could answer makes the person I once was seem foolish to now.  And, having had to question absolutely everything in my life--and give up much of it--made me realize that the only thing that actually matters in life is life.  That is exactly the reason why I can't see living in any way but one that's true to who and what I am.  


As far as I can tell, the best definition of courage is a willingness to take a stand on one's own life.  I mean, if you won't stand up for that, what else will you stand up for?  I've also learned that truly courageous people don't have to prove their courage to those who have it, and don't expect it of other people.  Instead, it's something one lives by.  I guess I'm just losing my patience with those who won't.  That's the real reason why I find the two people I mentioned so annoying.

Unemployed and Homeless LGBTs: How Many?

The weather forecast is calling for the coldest night in six years.  

I can recall that cold spell.  It was like that winter:  It was brutal and seemed endless.  As I recall, the spring was just a brief respite--a truce, almost--between the cold and snow that seemed to blitz us every day, for longer than they should have,  and the blasts of  heat that came only a few weeks later.  

Back then, I was co-facilitating a group for young LGBT people.  What struck me then was how many of them had no place to go after that group.  A few went to the shelters; others wouldn't because of the violence that, when it didn't erupt in screams and blows, seemed to murmur in rumbles like fighting just on the other side of the line.  Almost no one chooses to go into a line of fire; no one should be foreced to do so.

Unfortunately, for some of those young people, the only alternative was another battle-zone:  the streets. Some spent the nights on them--under highway overpasses or in doorways, until they were chased out. At least three (that I knew of) went home--with whoever paid them, however little, for their bodies.  And one didn't even get paid:  All she got was to lie in a bed but not to sleep in it.  

Except for the times I've gone into a shelter, I never saw as many homeless people in one room as I did during those group sessions.  And, I certainly never saw so many young people who were so desperate.

I won't try to extrapolate what percentage of transgender youth are homeless or what percentage are unemployed, or whatever.  After all, nobody has an accurate count of how many of us there are.  Lots of us--like some members of that group--drop out of school and run away from home because of the beatings they got at school--or on the streets, or even at home.  They are known as boys or girls when they disappear from view of their peers and elders in their communities; they are not classified as transgender (or, for that matter, gay, lesbian or bisexual) in any of their identifying documentation.  They "fall between the cracks" of society's various systems.  

Plus, almost no one, it seems, agrees on who should be classified as LGBT.  If we count only the self-identified, we will miss many more because, if for no other reason,  so many fall "off the radar"--as some members of that group did--and therefore cannot be reached by researchers.  

From what I've just said, such statistics as the unemployment rates of LGBT people cannot be accurately measured  because young people who leave school and home have probably never worked, and therefore cannot be counted as unemployed.  Still others are, like a few members of that group, sex workers of one kind or another.  That's the only work some of them have ever done; tragically, it's the only work that some of them ever have the opportunity to do anything else.  Of course, anyone doing that kind, or any other illegal, work is, as they say, "off the books."

It's widely known that the US Census misses a lot of people.  Many others don't comply with it, and still others give only the barest minimum of information on the Census questionnaires.  So if one of the largest and best-funded operations of its kind can't even find all taxpaying citizens, how can anyone hope to do an accurate count people who never had the opportunity to participate in the legal economy?

So, no one may ever have an accurate count of us, never mind how many of us are homeless, unemployed or victims of crime, including murder.  I am almost entirely certain, however, that we are overrepresented in those categories.  

Along The Way

The strange thing about goals is that, so often, when you reach them, they turn out not to be goals after all.  You realize that they were just landmarks or mileage markers.  Or they were just check-points in which you had to get some imprimatur or another before proceeding.

I'm thinking now about the stages of my transition, and my early life.  I mean what most people would call my current or post-transition life.  Before I came here, taking hormones, getting my name changed, and various other events leading up to my surgery, seemed like destinations at which I'd arrived.  Of course, I always had a longer-term vision of how I wanted to live, as a woman.  But each of those events and accomplishments seemed, at least for the moment, to be like grand train or bus terminals.  Of course, for some people, they mark the end of their trips.  But, for many others, it's just a station on the way to someplace else.

One of the office assistants at work--at the college in which I'd been moonlighting last semester--helped me to realize what I've just said.  The surgery and the events leading up to it were just preludes or prerequisites to what I would do next.  They were not goals unto themselves.  


In talking to that office assistant, I realized that if I'm not at a goal or destination, I'm at least on the road I hoped to take.  Or, at least, it bears a strong resemblance to what I hoped to have.  


I asked her whether the department chair would think I was doing something shady when I talked to a young woman who'd come for an interview.  She was in the office; I asked if I could help.  I forgot what she asked, but I sensed that she just wanted to talk to someone who's encouraging, or at least friendly.  The assistant and the department chair both saw me talking to this young woman.  "I hope she doesn't think I was coaching her or doing something I shouldn't be?"


The assistant's looked at me with a touch of pity.  "We're not like that around here," she assured me.  I wondered if she knows about some of the experiences I've had at my other school.


"I'm sorry."


"Don't worry.  You'll get used to this.  Besides, I think what you did was nice.  And she seemed happy about it," referring to the young woman.


But something in that assistant's tone told me so much more.  I hadn't heard anything like it at work in a long time.  I realized, then, the real reason why I like this new school:  I don't have to explain or defend myself.  To her, to the department chair, to my colleagues and students, I'm just a middle-aged woman who's teaching there.   There aren't any qualifiers, from me or them. And, best of all, I haven't encountered the sort of people who wants me to talk about my history and share it with my students precisely so they can use it against me.  


Just a woman going to work.  Maybe this isn't the goal or destination.  But I'd hoped to come this way.  Even so, every once in a while I need someone to remind me of where I've come.  

Third, Or Not Specified

Lately I've read a couple of interesting gender-related stories.  One comes from Nepal, the other from Australia.


In the conservative Himalayan nation, which was a monarchy less than three years ago, this year's census will include a "third gender" category. This action came as a result of an order from that country's Supreme Court  mandating that the government encact laws to protect transgender people.


I think it's interesting that such things should happen in such a conservative country.  Then again, Spain, which was considered one of the most conservative and staunchly Catholic countries in Europe, if not the world, legalized gay marriage a few years ago.  So, a couple of years ago,  did Iowa, which--depending on whose definition you accept--is at least partially in the Bible Belt.


So why would jurisdictions not known for being avant garde do something that sanctions what many of its citizens oppose, at least in theory?


I think that answer can be found at least in part in something a Nepalese official said about being able to count and locate transgender people.  Governments everywhere like to keep tabs on people. And conservatives like order, or at least the appearance of it.  I am reminded of something that a Dutch minister once said about his country:  Its "liberal" policies, like the legality of marijuana, are actually rooted in the deeply bourgeois Calvinism that defined the country for centuries.  Nobody, he explained, likes order more than a Calvinist, or someone who's been influenced by Calvinism.  So, he said, by legalizing marijuana and prostitution, providers and customers are no longer criminals and are instead citizens who are bound by the responsibilities of, and entitled to the protections of, Dutch civil law.  In other words, the government can keep some kind of control over them.


That, by the way, one reason (along with having a gay daughter) why Dick Cheney has voiced his support for gay marriage, while Barack has not.


Speaking of control:  How much of it can anyone have over someone who's gender is "not specified?"  That's the case of  Norrie, a 49-year-old Australian who was born male and had gender reassignment surgery twenty years ago.   Norrie, who goes by only one name, was "ecstatic" about surgery but frustrated over having to take hormones and over dating men who, when they "found out I was a trannie, told me I wasn't female."  Some of them threatened violence.


Finally, Norrie decided "Nobody can define me as male, and nobody can define me as female."  Two doctors agreed and, as a result, Norrie now has papers that say "Sex Not Specified."    


In one sense, I'm happy to see this.  I have long felt that there are more than two genders.  While I am female in my mind and spirit, I know that some things about me are, and will always be, male.  Some have to do with my experiences, but I think that others have to do with innate characteristics.  I am content, and in many ways comfortable, in living as what most people would see as a straight woman (even if I am, in fact, bisexual).  I claim my right to so live; at the same time, I support the right of people to be more androgynous or to live by whatever else their gender identity and sexuality might be.


On the other hand, the ruling puts Norrie in a bind:  Her gender identity, while unbound from the gender binary, is still defined by the government, which could (at least in theory) change Norrie's status as it sees fit.  Keeping Norrie and other people dependent on a government to define who they are can't be anything but limiting.  Under those circumstances, how does one travel, particulary to a place that rigidly enforces the gender binary and still outlaws all forms of sex that don't involve a man getting on top of a woman.  


Still, I think that the Australian Government's issuing documents in your name without the gender distinction is one the better things that could have happened for a lot of people.Some day, perhaps (though probably not in my lifetime) people will have the liberty as well as the means to live by whatever they think is right for them. 

He Had No Future; I Have No Past

Not long ago, in the course of a conversation, I recalled something I hadn't thought about in a long time.  During my senior year in high school, I was on the committee that planned and arranged our class's senior prom.  I think I got involved with it because the faculty advisor taught a course in which I needed a grade I couldn't earn otherwise.  

That class wasn't required for graduation.  However, doing well in it might have helped me to get into a few schools and programs other people wanted me to get into.  I had no other reason to take that class or, truth be told, to be on that committee or to do almost anything else I did that year.  

I knew full well that once I graduated, I probably wouldn't be back.  My guidance counselor, who might not have been useless if he hadn't tried to drown sorrows that could swim, said as much.  It probably was the one useful or relevant, let alone prescient, thing he said to me.

What I also knew, somehow, was that I wasn't going to the prom that I was helping to plan.  Of course, I didn't tell anyone that; it wouldn't have made any more sense to them than it did to me.  If nothing else, I was learning one of the most important lessons of my life:  What makes sense and what's true are not always the same thing.

And the most essential truth--or so it seemed-- about me made absolutely no sense to me at that time.  I'm referring, of course, to my gender identity.  Nearly every day, I had to play that mental game of ping-pong:  "Your'e a man.  No I'm not.  You have a penis.  It's really a big clitoris.  You like girls.  Yes, but not only in that way.   You're an athlete.  Just like how many other women?

My understanding of gender and sexuality was so primitive--though not any less advanced than that of most people in that place and time--that I simply could not even think of showing up at the prom with another girl.  No girl in that milieu would have done that.  And I couldn't have gone with a boy, either:   No boy, no matter his identity and orientation, would have gone with another boy, even if he was really a girl who just happened to have a boy's body.

That, by the way, is the main  reason I didn't date when I was in high school, in spite of my father's and other adults' efforts to hook me up with someone or another's daughter.  My status as dateless became my ostensible reason for not attending the prom I helped to plan.  In addition, I told myself that it was silly to spend lots of money and energy over people and a place I would never, and had no wish to, see again.

I am just starting to realize how that experience affected me.  It's a reason why there are so many things to which I woulfddn't commit myself: I so often feel as if my efforts were for things of which I could never partake, and that I was always serving people who were living lives completely different form any I could, or wanted to, live.  

Every LGBT person has felt, at some time or another,  something like what I've described.  We are paying for, and in other ways serving, a society and economy that supports institutions--including marriage, as the law and most people define it--in which we cannot participate.  And I have often felt that my job as an educator is to prepare people to live in that sort of familial and societal arrangement.  

It's difficult to be involved in organizations and institutions when you know that you cannot benefit from the fruits of the labor you put into it.  It's impossible to have any enthusiasm for more than a relatively short period of time when you don't even have the right to be yourself as you're helping others to realize their dreams.  And it's none too encouraging when you can't get the people with and for whom you're working that they are operating from, and their expectations of you are therefore based upon, privilege and a sense of entitlement that they very often don't even realize they have.


I'm thinking about all of this now after learning that someone with whom I spent some time--a friend of an ex--died recently.  He was smarter, and far more creative, than I or almost anyone else could ever hope to be.  Yet he never went to college, in spite of offers of full-ride scholarships from very respected institutions.  He did well financially, and in other ways, and he wasn't boasting when he said he succeeded without much planning.  In fact, very little in his life was premeditated.  


The reason, he once told me, is that he knew that, for one thing, as a gay man, he wouldn't be able to live the sort of life for which schools and other institutions would have prepared him.  (That, interestingly enough, is the only way in which I ever heard him talk about his sexual orientation.)  And, for  another, he knew--not expected, knew--that he wasn't going to live to be fifty.  All of the men in his family had a congenital heart condition that killed them before they finished their fifth decade.  That condition is one of the few things, along with bloodlines, that he shared with them.  


So he knew that he wasn't going to be part of a nuclear family and collect Social Security in addition to a pension.  You can imagine how he must have felt about paying into that system, especially because he always was a business proprietor or an independent contractor of some sort.  


Why should I prepare for a future I won't have?, he asked.  Had I been more aware and articulate, I would have been asked that same question.  Why am I helping to plan a prom I won't attend?  


The difference, of course, is that I did have a future.  It just wasn't the one anyone was planning for me, or preparing me for.  Some of what I did to prepare that future has been useful to me; so much else wasn't.   But I can say that I do have a future of some sort, even if it isn't a very long one or one that nobody can predict.  Now, in some way, what I don't have is the past--or, specifically, my past.  Preparing for someone else's life, of course, meant that I was living someone else's life.  And there's never any future in that.

Momentoes and Memories

Last night, my mother told me she'd found a couple of things and was going to send them to me.  But she decided to ask me first.  "I didn't know how you'd feel about them," she explained.


One of those items is an envelope that contains a lock of my hair.  However, it's not just any lock of my hair:  It came from my very first haircut.  


The other item is a crochet bootie from a pair my great-grandmother, who died just before I turned seven, made for me. I remember the other bootie of the pair:  It was attached, along with a similar bootie for my brother Mike, to a frame around a photo of the two of us.  That photo was taken not long after Mike was born, which means I was about three and a half years old.  In that image, I am "holding" him in my arms:  In reality, he was propped on something and I wrapped my arms around him.


Funny, how I can remember that photo even if I haven't seen it in at least thirty years.  Even funnier is that I can remember, albeit dimly, posing--or, more precisely, being posed--for that photo.  That is certainly one of my earliest memories, if not my earliest. 


Today I was talking to my cousin--who was born a couple of months before I turned thirty--and, in the context of something entirely unrelated to this blog, he said that he could remember when he was two years old.  One memory of that time, he said, was when his mother--actually, my cousin; I refer to him as my cousin because, well, what do you call the child of a cousin?--took him to see The Little Mermaid.


She died when he was four years old; from then on he was brought up by my aunt and her sister.  But he still has vivid memories, which he's shared with me, of his mother.


I suppose that if I were to clear my mind, I could remember to when I was two years old, perhaps even earlier.  If I did, how would that change the way I see myself--or other people?


Anyway, my answer to my mother's question:  "Of course!"  Just as there's no denying who I am, there's no denying who I was.  

I Wanna Get Better Already!

I can't believe I've been home, not working, for a whole week.  Not that my "time off" has been fun and games, or whatever cliche you care to use.  


At times like this, I understand why doctors refer to us as "patients":  They're just as prone to wishful thinking, or simply being unrealistic, as the rest of us.  We have to wait until we're better to do all of the things we normally do; some of us are better than others at waiting.  Me, I'm not so good at it.


The funny thing is that I don't recall being this impatient when I was recovering from my surgery. Then, I couldn't stretch too far, lift anything more than a few pounds or, of course, ride my bike.  But I could take walks, at least, and I could spend lots of time reading and writing.  During those first three months, I had to dilate three times a day and soak twice.  That limited my travels a bit, but I hadn't expected to be a globetrotter during that time anyway.


Also, it was actually easy to see the progress of my healing.  It was exciting, too:  After all, I was healing to complete a process that gave me something I always wanted.  On the other hand, I didn't ask for this eye infection.  And, even though my eyes look better than they did the other day or a few days before that, they still have a pink hue.  Now, I have nothing against the color per se, but I didn't want it in my eyeballs.  Besides, there are other shades of pink on other parts of my body that look a whole lot better!


At least my eyes aren't as irritated as they were.  They're still not entirely comfortable:  Reading or writing for more than a few minutes at a time is still difficult. But they don't feel like they've been sandpapered and torched.  


I have said that I was beginning my life over again--or beginning it, period--with my transition and surgery.  I hope it doesn't mean that I'm going to get all of the childhood ailments now, at my advanced age.  (From what I've seen and read, it's usually kids who get "pink eye." )  What next?  Measles?  Does that mean I'll get acne in a few years?  Or is it like those other childhood diseases to which you're immune if you've had them before?


Hmm...I haven't been depressed since I started my transition.  I still experience temporary bouts of sadness--who doesn't?--but nothing like the decades-long trough I had to trod through. Maybe all those years immesed in the abyss have given me immunity.  

Growing Old As We're Starting To Live

I've been asked to co-facilitate a transgender forum on aging at a conference for LGBT older adults next month.  I've agreed to do it, knowing that my qualifications to do it consist of the following:

• I am trangendered
• I am aging.  (Then again, I guess we all are.)

The invitation got me to thinking, though, about what aging means for us in the LGBT community, and for transgenders in particular.

So far, the most trenchant thought that has emenated from my pretty little head (ha!) is this:  Aging in the LGBT community has everything to do with its youth-centeredness.  In fact, the way we age is the very reason why the LGBT world is as youth-centered as it is.  It's not so much that we're trying to avoid or fight back our aging; it's the fact that we--most of us, anyway--only get to live as who and what we are at a realtively late age that causes us to live in such a youth-centered milieu.

Even with the increased acceptance of LGBT people (the recent hate crimes notwithstanding), very few bisexuals, fewer gays and lesbians , and even fewer transgenders, have the opportunity to spend our adolescence and early adulthood as the people we actually are.   Most gays and lesbians live closeted lives until they are old enough to move out of their families' homes, and some continue to deny their need to love and be loved in their own ways long after they have become independent of the families, communities  and schools that gave birth to and reared them and inculcated them with their communities' and cultures' values about families and other sorts of relationships--including the kinds of relationships people should have with themselves.  

Even gays and lesbians raised in the most loving of families and in the most accepting communities face hostility somewhere, some time. The result is something I've seen in those students of mine who grew up with violence, whether it was physical, verbal, mental, emotional or spiritual, and whether it came from their peers, members of their families or communities, or their governments and their agencies of enforcement.  Some people come out of those experiences shell-shocked; others are very canny or what people would call "street-smart", and still others are formed or deformed by their anger and resentments.  But nearly all of them do not have the opportunity to learn how to develop or maintain relationships in ways that their peers from more secure and stable environments learn.  And, because so many of them also come from homes that are dysfunctional in one way or another, they may know that they want something different but have not had any models from whom they can learn how to build it in their own lives.

Most gays and lesbians don't grow up with any models of how they can build their relationships and their lives.  All most of them see when they're growing up are heterosexual relationships, and some of those aren't very nurturing of the spirits of the people in them.  And, of course, nearly all of the love and familial relationships depicted in popular, and even higher, culture, are of that variety.

What happens, then, is that gays and lesbians start to learn how to express love and build relationships that suit them later--sometimes much later--than heterosexuals do those things.  Most teenagers have some experience of dating members of the other gender; many (I won't venture a guess as to how many) have sex and some actually learn what it means to love, and be loved, in an intimate way by a member of the "opposite" gender.  Most gay teens and adolescents don't have those experiences; those who do almost never have the opportunity to have those experiences publicly.  If you are a boy dating a girl or vice-versa, even if your family, friends and others in your community don't like whomever you're dating, they still support your urge to date members of the "opposite" gender, mainly because they're seen as stepping stones to marriage and family.

So, what a straight sixteen-year-old experiences is not a part of a gay person's life until he or she is in her twenties, thirties or even later.  And for transgenders--and, interestingly enough, bisexuals--that sort of experience may come later still.  I began to live as the woman I am in middle age, and I have been living my life only for seven years now.  That means I am just beginning to learn how to relate to people, and express love (which includes, but is not limited to, sexuality) as a woman, rather than as a female who had to channel herself through a filter of maleness.  

That, by the way, is the reason--I think--why one can't predict the sexuality of a person who transitions.  One of the reasons, along with finances, why I didn't start my transition earlier in my life was that I thought, as most people thought, that a true male-to-female transsexual was attracted to men.  It happened that the first male-to-females who had sexual reassignment surgery did indeed date, and in some cases married, men.  Christine Jorgensen comes immediately to mind, and it's hard to imagine how she, not to mention society, might have been different if she didn't fit into the roles that were considered acceptable for women in the 1950's, when she made her transition.

So I had to spend  a lot of years, not only alienated from my own sense of who I am, but also of how to relate to anyone else, whether in a sexual or more platonic way.  The sense of myself I could and would have formed in my teen years, and the kinds of relationships I might have developed as a result, are parts of my life I'm only beginning to discover--at an age when my parents were already grandparents.  

Of course, there are many other issues involved in aging for LGBT people, and transgenders in particular.  But I never realized until now that the youth-orientedness of our community was really a manifestation of the fact that we, in essence, start our lives later than straight people and cisgenders.