Whatever He Is, He Isn't A Joke

For too long, too many people have seen transgender people as a joke.

Through my childhood, the punchline was "Christine Jorgensen."  Later, Renee Richards became the trigger to the laughtrack.  

By the time I started my transition, Michael Jackson would fill that role.  Even though almost nobody thought he was transgendered, the first thing most people think of when someone mentions trans people is "surgery."  Cosmetic surgery, to be exact, as if it were all about altering our appearance.  

Now, it seems, the new punchline is Bruce Jenner.  Rumors have swirled that the 1976 Olympic Decathlon champion and reality TV star has begun to transition.  Not surprisingly, entertainment and gossip magazines have published Photoshopped portraits of Bruce.  One such publication has a cover of him in pink lipstick  a blowout hairdo, a silk scarf--and former Dynasty star Stepanie Beacham's body--grafted onto his head.

I will not speculate on whether Jenner is actually going through a gender transition.  Whether or not he is, he needs and deserves to be left to live his life in peace.  And, even though he is the stepfather of children who have made a career of being famous for, well, being famous, he should not be the newest butt of jokes about transgender people.

(Please don't take my use of male pronouns in reference to Jenner as a judgment on whether or not he is transitioning or even transgender.  As long as he doesn't announce that he is trans or transitioning, or any intention of living as a woman, he should be referred to as "he" and "him".)

 

From Christine Jorgensen To Jan Morris

It's been a while since I wrote about the Lost Generation of Transgenders.  In this post, I'm going to talk about something related:  Specifically, two of the world's best-known male-to-female transsexuals. One of them was at the vanguard of the first generation of transsexuals, while the other was its rearguard or, perhaps, on the front line of the following generation.

I am speaking of Christine Jorgensen and Jan Morris.  In reading an article about the latter, I found out that she's 87 years old and, interestingly, was born only five months after Ms. Jorgensen.  

The reason why those facts are interesting (at least to me) is that Jorgensen, being one of the first trans women to become publicly known, conformed completely (perhaps even more so than most cisgender women) to the gender norms of her time, while Jan Morris was able to define her own womanhood and femaleness to a much greater degree than Jorgensen could or would have.

Although they were born in the same year, they underwent their surgeries two decades apart.  The fact that gender roles had changed between 1952 and 1972 cannot be overstated.  What's even more important, though, is the way the generational difference affected Jorgensen's and Morris' paths to living as women.

Jorgensen began her transition just after World War II, in which she served as a soldier. She had even fewer precedents than Morris had, let alone than I or transsexuals of my generation had.  And, because the Internet was decades away, accessing information about hormones and surgery, and accounts of transgender people, was even more laborious than it would later be. 

That may be a reason why she modeled herself after the ideals of femaleness--or, more precisely, femininity--that prevailed in the immediate postwar years.  She studied to be a nurse because that was one of the few career options available to women of that time. Her mannerisms, dress and lifestyle were in line with what was considered "ladylike."  While she may have had the natural physical features to become the Marilyn Monroe-like blonde bombshell she would become, it's hard not to think she also did everything she could to enhance and maintain that image, especially after she found herself working as an entertainer.  Finally, she married a man and followed him in moves to suburban Long Island and southern California.

Morris, on the other hand, did not begin her transition until 1964.  By then, treatments--and, some would argue, societal notions about womanhood--were more advanced. Perhaps even more important, she had already established herself as an historian and travel writer, and had been married fifteen years, when she began her transition.  In fact, she went to Morocco for her surgery, which Dr. George Bourou performed, because in her native England she would not be allowed to have her surgery unless she divorced her wife, something she wasn't prepared to do at the time.  They eventually did divorce, but remained in contact and reunited in a civil union in 2008.

Christine Jorgensen died nearly two decades before that union was consummated. She was just three weeks short of 63 years old.  Somehow I have the feeling that the lurid jokes and other ridicule and ostracism directed at her shortened her life.  That's not to say Morris had an easy time, but even she has admitted that she didn't have to endure what Jorgensen and other early transsexuals experienced.

I don't know how much longer Morris has in this world.  Whatever the amount of time, I hope young trans people learn more about her, and the way she was a bridge between two generations of trans people who made their lives and mine possible.

Passing Into The Lost Generation

In yesterday's post, I started to describe some of the ways in which spending so much time and effort on "passing" has harmed trans people individually, and as a community.  I talked mainly about the ways in which it has held us back from gains other people, such as African-Americans, cis women and gay men, realized from the Civil Rights movement.  

Now I want to mention some of the ways in which society's demand to pass (which is also turned against us) helped to create a Lost Generation of Transgender People.

When I was younger I, of course, read everything I could find about Christine Jorgensen.  At that time, she was one of only two transgenders (the other being Renee Richards) of whom I'd even heard.  In my reading, I stumbled over the newspaper headlines and stories about her.  "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty", screamed the New York Daily News headline.  Others were more salacious, or simply more vicious.  They all, however, seemed to focus on her resemblance to Marilyn Monroe and other blonde movie stars of the time.  

What I have said, and will say about Ms. Jorgensen and her role in the history of transgender people is in no way meant to disparage her.  She was indeed a beautiful woman.  More to the point, though, she was also a very intelligent, talented woman who took great pains to educate herself, and always exuded dignity and class. On the other hand, she fit into every notion of womanhood that prevailed in 1950's America.  It was a time, of course, when the standards of beauty and glamor were almost always blonde and blue-eyed.  They also had hourglass figures with impossibly small waists.  Jorgensen fit that image to a "T".

What's more, though, she declared herself as attracted only to men--and, in fact, married one.  And, although she worked as a photographer before her surgery, she wanted to settle into a quiet life as a housewife.  Perversely, the very same sorts of people who would have demanded that she, or any other woman, lead such a life were the same people who "outed" her and kept her story in the public eye, to the point that she almost had to become the entertainer she would be for much of her adult life.

In other words, people accepted, or at least tolerated, Christine Jorgensen--who was probably the first transsexual of whom most of them had even heard--in wholly heterosexist terms. Some of those people may have been perfectly well-meaning; they may have "wanted to do the right thing" but had little to no understanding of what it meant to be transgendered or transsexual.  However, their understanding--and the way Ms. Jorgensen had to conform to it, whether or not she waned to--gave people a very limited way of understanding, not only transgender people, but of their own gender and sexuality.  

As I write this, I finally realize why the alliance--however tense and strained it may be--between trans people and lesbians and gays is not only beneficial, but necessary.  Trans people will never have equal rights, let aloneopportunities,  as long as there is so much pressure to confirm to traditional roles of one gender or the other.  

In some people, this understanding of gender and sexuality, as well as their expectation that trans women would conform to "traditional" female roles, were really just very thinly-veiled homophobia.  

So, three decades after Christine Jorgensen became a "blonde beauty", the pressure to "pass" was even greater than it was at the time she started her transition.  The AIDS epidemic had, by that time, exploded in Castro, The Village and other gay communities throughout the United States.  During that time, right-wing talk radio and other media grew exponentially in popularity. They famously advocated quarantining gay men, or even killing them:  One commentator went so far as to compare gay men to the rats that carried the fleas that caused the Black Death.   

In such an atmosphere, the pressure to "pass" must have greatly intensified. Who would want anyone else to know that he or she had  been, at any time in her life, a man--let alone a gay one.  

Having such heterosexist (and,I might add, Eurocentric) ideas about gender meant that only trans people who looked like Barbie dolls would be approved for hormones or the surgery.  It also meant that only those who met such standards would have any hope of affording it--or of marrying someone who could support her after she became a "traditional" housewife.

The conditions I've described had much to do with the Lost Generation of Transgender people, and how people (including cis ones) continued to hold onto their notions of gender and sexuality,and teach them.  So, during my first year of living as a woman, a prof who knew I was going through my transformation said I was "the last person she expected" to be trans because I had expressed interest in women--including her.

I wonder how many trans people gave up on their dream of transitioning as a result of what I've  described---or, how many people delayed their dream, or simply gave up on it altogether. And I wonder how many were beaten, killed or simply demonized because they were thought to be one of the vectors of disease--or because they simply didn't fit into feminist organization, let alone the white heterosexual organizations they represstn.

What I've Become, What I'm Becoming

It seemed that today everyone was having a crisis of one kind or another. Someone's dog died; someone found out her husband has been cheating on her; another's car broke down. And students got disenrolled from courses and were begging me to sign them into classes that are already bursting at the seams. Luckily, my department chair offered to be the "heavy" so that I wouldn't have to tell the students "no;" luckily for her, the college said I couldn't sign students into two of my courses because the rooms in which they're being held are small, and if even another student is added, fire code regulations would be violated. Not to mention the things a student (or his or her family) can do if something happens to the student and they find a good lawyer.

This was supposed to be my "easy" day this week. Do you wonder why I'm tired and cranky?

At least I had one really good conversation with Tess, an adjunct faculty member who's also teaching at another college, working on a PhD, taking care of her aging father and dealing with an ex-spouse. I guess my life isn't so hard after all.

Anyway, she and I have been having more and longer conversations lately. Well, as happens in conversations, "way leads to way" and she asked me one of the more poignant questions anyone has asked me lately. "Are you trying to 'fit in'?" she wondered. "Or do you want to live in a trans subculture and be an activist? Or something else?"

After thinking about it, I said, "All of the above." I wasn't trying to be ironic (As my Inner Valley Girl says, "I'm sooo over that!") or even coy. On one hand, everything I've done for the past few years, including the surgery, has been directed at my goal of living as the woman that I am. On the other, I've become the woman I am through some means that are very different from what those who have XX chromosomes must do in order to become women. I cannot live in my past, but I cannot deny it, either.

Plus, having focused so much on myself makes me want to help others, especially those who are following a road like mine. At the same time, although I have always been female in my heart, mind and spirit, the woman I am now is still fledgling, and will probably be so for some time.

I described some of this for Tess, and added: "Well, you know, I have been accepted by other women--and, for that matter, by men, too--mainly to the degree that I fit into their expectations of a woman who's more or less my age. And I feel that my presentation is, for better or worse, a pretty accurate representation of who I am."

"Well, you did get a chili pepper on Rate My Professors and were called 'the best-dressed professor at this college.'"

"I enjoy getting dressed. And I knew early on that it would help me to 'pass," and, later, to be accepted."

"Well, that's generally true. You dress for the position you want."

"True. And I don't want to live in a gender subculture. But I also want to have the choice to become who I need to become. And I'm still learning what that is."

"That's what life is."

My conundrum is this: Because I'm a transgender woman, I have to learn about and redefine, not only myself, but what's around me. Sometimes I even have to create the terms by which I define myself because even the terms of other women won't always do the job. And, as near as I can tell, other women must do the same thing.

Also, while other transgender women have shown me that it's possible, if difficult, to do what I've been doing, I can't always use them as models. Christine Jorgensen tried to fit into society's expectations of a woman in the 1950's, going so far as to study nursing because it was one of the few professions available to women at that time. She looked like a movie star of her time and married a handsome man--just as women were expected to do in those days. That meant, of course, that she had to be a heterosexual woman, as that was understood at the time.

Following her, Jan Morris and Renee Richards were able to continue in their careers after their transitions and surgeries. They had a few more liberties than women of Jorgensen's generation had, but they still saw--as society saw--their "success" as women in terms of how they were able to blend seamlessly into the female race, and into society generally. Of course, Richards' fame (or infamy, depending on how you look at it) prevented her from doing that, at least to some degree. Jan Morris was never quite as famous, so while people who heard of her knew that she was a transsexual (That was the term used in those days.), she wasn't seen in terms of her past to the degree that Richards and Jorgensen were.

I don't have the looks that Jorgensen or even Morris had, so in that sense, I wouldn't be seen as "successful" in my transition as they were in theirs. But I have more options and terms for defining my womanhood than they had. The question Tess asked reflects a way of seeing my gender identity that is changing and even passing: I think that within my lifetime, it won't have to be a choice between being a "woman" and being a kind of genderqueer. I'm still learning what I will become; perhaps it will help someone else learn about his or her path. Within my lifetime, perhaps, someone will be making choices and defining him or her self in ways I can't even imagine, and someone will ask that person about something that has yet to be named. Perhaps I will have had something to do with that, if only in the smallest and most peripheral way.

A Bike Ride Into Change

I just had to get out of the house and on my bike, even if only for a little bit. And even if I still had a heavy cold.

Today I pedaled somewhere I haven't been in quite a while: the Williamsburg waterfront. It's not far from where I live, but it seems like an accomplishment, given how little bicycling I've done over the past few months.


Plus, I had a feeling that my lungs and sinuses wouldn't clear themselves much more if I stayed in the house. So I took my trusty Mercian fixed gear bike, which made me feel as if I'd ridden only yesterday.


It's only been about six or seven months since I've been there, but in some ways I could scarcely recognize it. Oh, the amazing views of the Manhattan skyline haven't changed. Nor has the metallic yet briny smell of the mist from the East River about half a mile from the Williamsburg Bridge.


One odor that's gone is that of a freshly-opened box of Domino's brown sugar. That smell filled the air near the factory that made the stuff, next to the river and practically at arm's length from the Bridge, even after it closed a few years ago. Now that the aroma and the jobs that made it possible are gone, I wonder what will happen to that building. If a structure can be beautiful in a Dickensian way, that factory building is. Will some developer turn it into a condominiums?


If it were to be converted, it certainly wouldn't be like the condo buildings that stand along the waterfront now. Construction on those condo buildings started about two years ago; they have been completed for several months now. They are much like others that have been built in the last ten years or so along the city's waterfront: rectangles of steel, mortar and glass that are meant to be stopovers for the night for young professionals who work, and young trust-funders who do whatever they do, in and among the famous buildings they can see from their apartment windows. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I have a hard time imagining them as places of rest, much less living.


Even more noticeable was the new bike lane along Kent Avenue--and the absence of trucks. I have long enjoyed cycling there after business hours and on weekends, when the formerly industrial landscape became strangely serene. When I rode there on weekdays, I was never worried, not even when the trucks came and went: Most of those drivers were considerate and curious. All you had to do was make yourself visible and not do anything stupid, and all was well.


It was even quieter there on Saturdays than on Sundays because most of the small factories and warehouses that lined that stretch of the river were owned by Hasidic Jews. Although I have seen them only from a distance (As I understand, their religion frowns upon communication with outsiders unless it's absolutely necessary.), they were part of the landscape, if you will. It was odd, to say the least, not to see any along Kent Avenue today.


In a way, it's surprising that these changes didn't happen sooner. The part of Williamsburg along and near Bedford Avenue has long been a hipster haven, and many of the lofts near it were artists' and musicians' studios. As happened neighborhoods like the Village, Soho and Park Slope in past decades, what follows young creative people and wannabes is young money, whether of the yuppie or the preppie variety.


Now, I don't mean for this to be a sociological analysis. Instead, I just want to describe a change I've noticed. Even though I hardly ever had contact with the Hasidic Jews, I somehow felt a kind of kinship with them. As best as I can tell, it has to do with the fact that they're survivors, and I can say that I've had to be one. So, even in my lycra-clad racer-wannabe days, I felt completely at home when I rode through the Hasidic Industrial Zone, if you will.


Plus, they were, I now realize, among the last holdovers of an old way of living and thinking in New York. They worked at the waterfront. They weren't there for the views or the prestige of a waterfront address, mainly because, when they were there, a waterfront address had no prestige. Maybe it's because New York has so much shoreline that residents of the city didn't value--and, it seemed at times, denigrated--the water's edge. The most prestigious addresses in Manhattan (along upper Fifth, Madison and Park Avenues) are the ones furthest from the water. And in Park Slope, the further up the slope--and the further from the water--you go, the more elegant and pricey the brownstones become.


Meanwhile, the waterfront was for laborers, like my uncle who worked at Bush Terminal in Brooklyn. This seeming disdain for its shores was perhaps best seen in this city during the 1950's and 1960's, when the NIMBY projects, like public housing and waste disposal plants, were built along the oceanfront in Far Rockaway and Arverne and along the Hudson and East Rivers in Harlem.


So...I grew up among people who made their living--and, in some cases, lived--by the water. I still feel drawn to it, and to the kinds of people I've talked about, today. Perhaps that is the reason I've connected more easily with my students than with my colleagues.


But today, the few people I saw were at the water's edge, not to work, and not even to play, but for the relative proximity to the skyscrapers they can view from their windows. For some of them, it could just as well be part of the decor, as the remaining piers may as well be.


Don't get me wrong: I met a few people who were friendly enough when I stopped at the pier and went into the Duane Reade store at the base of one of the buildings. Admiring a baby's big blue eyes got me talking with his young parents; a young woman struck up a conversation over my bike when I propped it up by the pier. They all seemed nice enough and if I spent more time with them I might've found common ground. But I have seen the place in which they're living in a way they never could, and they could not even know that the eyes that allow for that way of seeing are fading; no new ones are being born to replace them. Of course that is inevitable: The world has changed, and so has this city and the neighborhood in which those younger people are living.


Jobs like the one my uncle worked no longer exist; the places that employed people like my uncle for those kinds of jobs--some of them located, only a few years ago, where those condo buildings now stand--are also gone. Gone, too, are the expectation that people like my uncle would work in such jobs (or that they would work in a factory, as my father did when I was a kid) and that their wives would stay home with the children they bore, as my mother did until my youngest brother went to school.


Part of me says, "Good riddance." After all, most people wouldn't want to work those jobs if they had other choices. And women, save for ones like the Hasidim, don't have to have children as soon as they're old enough to bear them or marry men so as not to compete with them for their jobs. Plus, if a woman is going to work, she doesn't have to be a nurse, secretary or elementary school teacher, as honorable and necessary as those jobs are.



In some way, I've come to realize that those changes have made my changes possible. I am not bound by those expectations that people once had for males like the one I portrayed or for the woman that I am and have become. So I had the option--though I had to wait many years for the opportunity--of leaving the constraints of my male body without dying. And I did not have to become the sort of woman Christine Jorgensen, bless her soul, became.


That is because the world in which I lived not so long ago no longer exists. Of course, that is a good thing in many ways. But sometimes it's still jarring to see so much change, and that it seems to have happened so quickly, even if I had to wait a long time for it. But here it is. I'm still finding my way around it and getting to know some of the people in it--and myself.

Giving Birth To New Definitions Of Ourselves

When I began my current life, I had assumed that there were two things I would never have: XX chromosomes and a uterus. Somehow I had the feeling that even though I never would have either one, sometime in my lifetime some trans woman would be fortunate enough to get them.

Well, it seems that the dream of a uterine transplant will come true for a trans woman even sooner than I imagined it would. For the past few days, I've seen stories about Sarah Luiz and her belief that she will become the first transgender woman to give birth.


More than one commentator has said that Ms. Luiz was to the '80's as Christine Jorgensen was to the '50's. She knows this, which is the reason why she has applied to become the first trans woman to receive a uterine transplant. She figures, and she believes the doctors at Downtown Hospital know, that her ability to garner publicity will help them get the money they need to do the research necessary to refine their techniques.


Actually, if any transwoman were chosen to be the first recipient of a uterine transplant, that would generate much more publicity than if a non-transgender woman were to receive it. When I read about the surgery, I had a fleeting temptation to apply for it myself. But I've decided not to, mainly because it's hard for me to rationalize giving birth to a child at this point in my life. After all, by the time that child is a sophomore in high school, I will be eligible to collect Social Security--if indeed it's still available.


Also, I'm not so sure that giving birth will make me more of a woman than I am. Many other women are no more capable of having babies, for any number of reasons, than I am. Yet almost nobody doubts that they're women. Some--including some of those women themselves--may consider them as somehow incomplete or defective women. But in a world--or, at any rate, in any country in which people don't have to give birth to ten children in the hope that four of them will make it to an age in which they can help to support their parents--no one has a responsibility to have children in order to continue the species. Furthermore, women today--again, at least in modern industrial and post-industrial societies--have roles other than those of birthing and nurturing.


One thing I've come to realize is that I am part of what may be the first generation of people to be free of the notion that sex can be justified only for procreative purposes. Some may think it's caused a decline in morality; somehow I get the impression that morality never existed, or at least wasn't as widespread or ingrained as some people seem to think it was. Anyway, I think that being freed of the notion that love must lead to marriage and sex must lead to babies has given us more freedom to define our sexuality and our gender identities--and what those things mean to us--in our own terms.


I think now of how Christine Jorgensen tried so hard to be what women in her place and time were expected to be: As she was researching the new science of gender reassignment, she was also studying to be a nurse because it was considered to be a "woman's job." I also think of how being able to "go stealth" was considered the sign of a successful transition, and how I believed I wouldn't be able to pull it off. And, naturally, my self-esteem rose faster than a rocket Amanda Simpson helped to design whenever I "passed." What that meant was that I seemed more or less like what people expect a woman of my age to be.


Another thing I've come to realize is that, just as the definitions of sexuality have expanded with every person who defines him or her self in his or her own terms, each of us who decides to live by the gender of our mind and spirits rather than what's on our birth certificates is also expanding the definitions of "male," "female," "man," "woman," "boy" and "girl." Even the ones about whom people marvel, "I couldn't tell" change our ideas about gender.



So, it's a most interesting irony that Sarah Luiz is trying to become more like what people have traditionally defined as a woman and that in doing so, she's actually helping to change the definition of "woman, " just as "the man who had a baby" will have contributed to such a change.



As for me...I don't think I need to have a baby in order to feel complete. Perhaps I will feel differently as I spend more time in my new life. But I never before had any wish to have a child, mainly because I felt that someone as conflicted and as full of self-loathing as I was would not make a good parent. I don't regret that decision; I've seen too many kids who were born to such parents (or, worse, to parents who didn't want them). Still, I think it's great that I and many other women (I'm not talking only about trans women.) may soon have yet another choice to make--and another opportunity to define for ourselves what it means to be a woman or man, or, perhaps, something we haven't named yet.