A Real Homecoming Peach

Is she a Georgia Peach?  A Southern Belle?

Whatever you want to call her, she's Sage Lovell.  But she's not just any 16-year-old girl.

You see, her classmates in an Atlanta-area high school elected her to represent them in their homecoming court.

That's a big deal for any teenager.  It's an especially big deal in Georgia.  As in other Southern states, people take this stuff as seriously as they take beauty pageants, football (American) and church.

But what makes Ms. Lovell truly special is that she's the first known transgender to be elected to a homecoming court in her state. 

  CBS46 News

CBS46 News

He Would Have Had An Easier Time In Georgia

The State of Georgia actually makes one aspect of life for transgender people easier than the City of New York does.

Yes, you read that right.

How did I learn that?  Experience.

You see, I was born in Georgia.  I spent only the first seven months of my life there and have only been there once, for a few hours, since then.

After I had my surgery, I had to send my birth certificate, a certified letter from Dr. Bowers and a certified copy of the court order for my name change, along with $35.  Within two weeks, a new birth certificate with my new name and true gender arrived in the mail.

Compare that with what happened to Louis Birney, right here in New York City. Around the same time I had my surgery, he had his.  He is nearly two decades older than I am.

He sent the letter from his surgeon to the City's Department of Health, which issues birth certificate.  (In Georgia, they're issued by the Department of Public Records.)  In response, the DoH demanded a psychiatric report and detailed surgical records in order to turn the "F" to an "M" on his birth certificate.

Manhattan State Supreme Court Justice Paul G.Feinman has ruled that the Health Department should re-evaluate Birney's case.  The judge also questioned the Department's understanding of "the lives and experience of transgender people," noting that "It does not seem likely that an individual would go through all the required years of preparation for surgical transition, including psychotherapy, undergo major surgery, assume life under his or her new gender, and then decide it was all a mistake and change back."

Feinman faulted the Department had provided a "clear, straightforward list" of requirements for changing his birth certificate.  To their credit, the Georgia officials provided such a document for me.  So did the State Department before I applied for a new passport. 

It's about time for the city to catch up to Georgia and the State Department.  
 

Georgia On My Mind in The Salt Mines

"Another day in the salt mines."  That is what one prof says every time we are about to begin a workday.  He said that today, too, even though most of us didn't have classes.  We have been meeting with students, a few of whom begged us to accept assignments that were due weeks or even months ago.  In between, we're reading and grading said assignments and doing various end-of-semester paperwork.

I feel fat, ugly and tired.  Well, how does that saying go?  "Misery loves company."  Others here at the college would probably say the feel one, all or some combination of those things.

At this point of every semester, I think of what it must have been like to be in one of Hitler's bunkers.  We're in a very institutional setting in a post-industrial landscape.  That's a fancy way of saying the college is in a blue-collar neighborhood without the jobs.  This part of Queens has the highest foreclosure rate in the city, and, according to one report, the greatest concentration of foreclosures outside of  Florida, Arizona or Las Vegas.  Maybe it's not quite as grim as, say, Elkhart, Indiana, or what the media would have us believe about it.  I've never been there, so I wouldn't know for sure how it really is.

When I was checking my e-mail (Students have been sending me assignments that way.), I saw a link for a listing of faculty openings at a place called Georgia Highlands College.  It's in a town called Rome and has satellites in other nearby towns.  Now, I know about as much about that area as I do about Indiana.  I couldn't tell you where in Georgia Rome is.  I've been in the state of Georgia only once since I was about six months old. Dad was stationed in Albany, in the southwestern part of the state, with the Air Force,  and as a consequence, I was born there.  Halfway through my first year of life, or thereabouts, they returned to Brooklyn.  And, of course, I went with them. 

So, let's see:  If we'd remained there, and I had been born with two X chromosomes, I could be a Southern Belle.  How would my life have been different?  Somehow I get the feeling I would've been very, very bored.  Then again, I might've been one of those Southern country girls.  If I became an educator of any sort, I probably would've been an elementary school teacher.  And, if I wrote, would I have been like Eudora Welty?  Carson McCullers?  Or, perhaps, I'd've had a bunch of kids, and the males would've played football.

I wonder what it would be like to move to Georgia.  No one who doesn't work for the Office of Vital Records would know that I'd been born there unless I mentioned it.  So I'd be "going stealth" in more ways than one!

If I could get to do some more cycling, and writing, it just might be worthwhile.  A Southern Belle Biker Chick?  Hmm....