Recovered From A Trash Can

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.

This day was first commemorated in 1999,one year after African-American transwoman Rita Hester was found murdered in Allston, a suburb of Boston.  

Since then, hundreds of other trans people have become homicide victims.  Most of them--92 percent, to be exact--share something with Ms. Hester:  their killings have not been solved.  

One such murder is emblematic of the reasons why we have TDR and why we have to continue to draw attention to the ways in which we are killed, and the official response--or lack thereof.


On 8 November--less than two weeks ago--a woman's body was found in a trash can in Detroit.  While investigators do not have her name or other details of her life and death, they have identified her as a trans woman.

A woman and her son found the body when they were scavenging for cans, bottles and other scraps.  They made their gruesome discovery behind a bar.

From what you've read so far, you may have guessed--correctly--that the body was that of an African-American trans woman.  That, the way she was disposed and the way her body was discovered tell you much about the dangers we face, and the undignified ways in which we are treated in life and death.

I can hope only that someone gives her the honor and dignity in death that she did not experience in life--during the last moments of it, anyway--and that Detroit police are more diligent in investigating her murder than too many other law enforcement officials in other places are when the victim is a trans person.

After all, even though she--and Islan Nettles of Harlem--are trans women who were murdered, not all anti-transgender violence happens to people because they are transgendered or even to people who are transgendered.  You see, someone who kills someone over gender identity makes a judgment on his or victim's identity and decides that person is somehow lacking.  So a man who is not deemed "masculine" enough or a woman who doesn't seem sufficiently "feminine" can fall victim in exactly the same way as someone who is indeed known to be transgendered.  It almost goes without saying that someone who cross-dresses in public can meet a similar fate.

So, on Transgender Day of Remembrance, we're not only mourning people like Rita Hester, Gwen Araujo, Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar, Islan Nettles and the woman whose body was found in a Detroit trash can.  Rather, we are acknowledging the fact that someone who doesn't fit into someone else's notion about gender can end up in a trash can behind a bar.

A Sad Anniversary: My Grandmother and Gwen Araujo

This date, 3 October, has been a sad one for many years, at least for me.

On this date in 1981, my maternal grandmother died.  As weakened as she was from her illnesses, she fought death until the end.  With her dying breaths, she called out the name of my grandfather, who predeceased her by fifteen years.

I was twenty-three at the time she died.  She was my last living grandparent. But that is not the only reason why her death affected me as much as it did. Probably the only person in this world who knew me better was, and is, my mother.  She died at a time in my life when I was angry, confused and scared.  I simply felt that I could not bear the prospect of any life that seemed available to me at the time:  I didn't want the careers, family structures or lifestyles that, it seemed, other people wanted me to want.  That strained some of the relationships in my life, including those with some of my relations.

My grandmother offered me a lot of emotional support, and sometimes advice.  The latter, I didn't follow most of the time, mainly because I almost never followed anybody's advice. (Some might say I'm still guilty of that.)  But she did listen, and sometimes helped me to see situations with my family and other people that, really, I otherwise couldn't at that time in my life.

Twenty-one years later, on this date, there was a death that has affected me ever since.  It was very different from my grandmother's, which came in a hospital room with my mother and other family members around her.  This other death was brutal, violent and spurred by anger and hate.  

Yes, it was the murder of a transgender girl:  Gwen Araujo.  Ten years have passed since she was beaten and strangled at a party in the working-class San Francisco Bay-area community of Newark.  Her killers then dumped her body in a shallow grave about three hours' drive away, in the Sierras.

While not as widely publicized as the killings of Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena, it did start some discussion of the frequency and intensity of assaults on, and killings of, trans people.  Now it's fairly common knowledge that such crimes against trans people tend to be particularly brutal and even grisly:  Those who investigate them say as much.  Also, you could see the "learning curve" about transgender people reflected in media coverage. Most initial reports identified her as a boy who liked to wear girl's clothes; as more became known about her, some changed their portrayals of her.  (What that meant, of course, is that many of those reporters, editors and commentators were starting to learn that transgenders and cross-dressers are not necessarily the same people.)  

But one reason why her death affected me is that it came just when I was about to embark on my transition.  Tammy and I had split up, and I moved to a neighborhood where I knew no-one, only a few weeks earlier.  I was attending support groups as well as going for therapy sessions and medical evaluations.  On Christmas Eve of that year, I would begin taking hormones.

What happened to Gwen Araujo did scare me, at least somewhat.  I was going to work as Nick, and the friends and acquaintances I knew from my previous life still knew me as him. I was not "out" to any of my family. But I was going to various events, and roaming about during some of the free time I had, "as" Justine.  Sometimes I worried about people who knew me as Justine finding out about Nick, and vice-versa.  And, truthfully, I wasn't yet sure--even a little--about how anyone would react.

But I knew I had to do what I was doing.  Gwen knew she had to live as the girl she really was, or not at all.  Knowing about her life and death thus gave me a kind of hope, or at least the knowledge that I couldn't be anybody but who I am, and do anything but what I needed to do.  


My grandmother told me something like that.  I never discussed my gender identity issues with her. (Then again, I hadn't discussed them with anyone else.)   But the encouragement she gave me about other things, and her advice that, in essence, bad situations don't have to last but good people can, and do, has been about as good a legacy as anyone could have left for me.

Beating and Killing Ourselves

Tis the season.


A couple of weeks ago, Tyler Clementi committed suicide.  Last week, in the Stonewall Inn, two young men shouted anti-gay slurs as they beat up a man.  And, this week, nine young men--who claimed to be part of a group they called "The Latin King Goonies"--beat up two gay men in the Bronx.


I used to think summer was the time when LGBT people had the greatest chance of meeting our end, or simply getting the shit beat out of us, by someone (or, more likely, a group of thugs) who hates us simply for being who we are.  But now, it seems, there are more--or simply more gruesome or pointless--attacks in the early fall.  I'm thinking now of Jack Price, who was beaten to within an inch of his life just a few miles from my apartment  at about this time last year. I also recall that last week, the third of October, was the date on which teenaged transgender Gwen Araujo was murdered in 2002 in Newark, California.  And, the other day--the seventh--marked a terrible anniversary:  that of the 1998 murder of Mathew Shepard in Wyoming.
AWhy is it that so many anti-gay or -trans attacks happen at this time of year?


I believe that it may have to do with a particular quality of the season itself.  On some level, I think that however much we may love the crisp air, the foliage and the sunsets that reflect them, we sense our own mortality, or at least vulnerabilities.  After all, those leaves turn all those beautiful colors because they're dying. Facing our own mortality causes us to realize that, perhaps, we weren't who we thought we were--or, worse, that we are something that we never wanted to believe we were.


Those Latin King wannabes in the Bronx found out that one of their recruits was gay. Gwen Araujo's was killed by someone who was attracted to her and, upon realizing that she was transgendered, said something like, "Shit! I can't be gay!" as he beat her.  Matthew Shepard's killer claimed that what is now known as the "gay panic" caused him to act as he did.


And what, pray tell, were those two young men doing in the Stonewall Inn? What kind of people did they expect to meet there?


Well, I think you know how I'd answer that question:  The same person Dante met in the middle of the journey of his life, or whom Marlow meets in "Heart of Darkness."  That is to say, the same person I met when I saw a middle-aged woman walking home from work in St. Jean de Maurienne.  


Yes, we all encountered ourselves.  And we were all, in David Crosby's immortal words, "scared shitless."  


I know I'm not the first to say this, but I'll say it anyway:  Crimes against LGBT people are particularly brutal because the perpetrators are flailing, beating, kicking, shooting, stabbing or hanging a reflections of themselves.  And they are attacking in the hope of extinguishing, in themselves, what they see--of themselves--in their victims.


A corollary of this applies to Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, who videotaped Tyler Clementi.  Why did they record him having sex with another man and post it for all the world to see?  Could one or both of them have been "coming out" in his or her own way?  Or, perhaps, were they simply doing what so many straight people do to LGBT people:  Assume that our lives begin and end with sex because they themselves can't think about anything else.


The reason I don't condemn them, or any of the other perpetrators, more than I do is that I understand the enormous, gnawing spiritual and emotional poverty of anyone who commits the kind of violence they committed.  In brief, if those people loved themselves, they never would have acted as they did.  That's the ironic thing about selfishness and self-centeredness:  They come from a sense of feeling worthless, or simply wishing they weren't so.


I know that because I've been in their shoes.  At least I learned, however late in my life,  that I didn't have to walk the same path.  And, hopefully, others won't have their journeys end in the same way as the journeys of Matthew Shepard, Gwen Araujo or Tyler Clementi, or that it won't include what Jack Price or that gay recruit in the Bronx experienced.  

A Post-Mortem for Amanda--and Gwen and Yusuf

I'm still thinking about Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar, and the vigil I attended for her.


You might say I'm feeling a bit of survivor's guilt right now.  I never met her, but I couldn't help but to sense that she was actually as beautiful a person as her friends said she was.  I say that because, in spite of her violent death, everything about that vigil--from the way people spoke of her to the makeshift memorial by her apartment--radiated serenity that, because it was the reflection of a soul truly at rest, left us with more than grief.


Why was she killed so horribly, and at such a young age?   I guess I could answer that question as a Buddhist would and say that whatever she had to learn in this life, she learned, and it was time for her to pass on to another life.  But why was her exit such a house of horrors?  


Of course, it's terrible when anyone is murdered.  But it's been a long time since I've been so affected by the killing of someone I never met.  Probably the last time I felt as I do now was after I heard about the murder of Gwen Araujo.  And, before hers, there was the death of Yusuf Hawkins.


I actually met Yusuf's grandfather once, briefly.  There really wasn't anything I could say to him.   He probably heard "sorry" more times than anyone should.  And what good did it do him, his family--or Yusuf?  If I recall correctly, I offered to help him and his family in whatever way I could, even though I could not envision what that way might be, if there was one.


He died much younger than anyone should.  So did Gwen and Amanda.  Had they lived, Yusuf would be a man coming into the prime of his life, Gwen might be in the early stages of the career to which she aspired--that of a makeup artist.  And Amanda was probably just beginning to live the life she'd envisioned for herself; the beauty that all of those people saw in her probably had to do, in some way,  with her acceptance of them which, of course, was a result of her acceptance of herself.  Few people realize just how powerful that actually is; I would love to see what kind of a life she (or someone) could have had after developing a sense of his or her own self based on that willingness to be who one is.   I've come to it much later in life than she did; therefore, I will most likely never accomplish some of the things she might have been able to do had she lived.   The same could probably have been said for Gwen and for Yusuf.  Still, I can't help but to feel that I have at least one opportunity that they never had.   I have no idea as to why I was given this chance at the life I'd always dreamt about, but here I am.  

Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar: More Thoughts About About A Transgender Woman's Murder

It was utterly gorgeous yesterday: the sort of fine early spring day one envisions during the dreariest winter hours.  So, of course, I went for a bike ride in the afternoon.  Almost all I could think about was Amanda, a.k.a. Edelbuerto, Gonzalez-Andujar.


It turns out that she lived and died only two blocks from the office of the Times-Newsweekly, the local newspaper for which I wrote.   Her apartment is also only two blocks, in another direction, from where Martin lives.  So, of course, I was thinking about him when I wasn't thinking about Amanda.


Perhaps the fact that it's Passover is influencing the way I'm seeing them.  As I pedalled the serpentine roads of Randall's Island, I saw a group of men whose long black coats covered all except the collars and top buttons of their white shirts.  Their wives--at least,that is what the women in wigs and long, loose-fitting dresses seemed to be--were serving various kinds of food and selling handicrafts that, I guess, they made.  I was tempted to stop and check it out, but even if I weren't unwelcome, I would certainly garner more attention than I would've wanted.


In other words, I couldn't have "gone stealth."  They can't do that, either, in any place save perhaps their own communities.  (Even in some of those places, such as Crown Heights, they stand out among their neighbors.)  That is why Jews are always under surveillance and suspicion and, as Jacobo Timerman and Primo Levi have written, they can't help but to think that any crime or misdemeanor committed against them is motivated by their identities.


And, of course, such is the case for any transgender who's the victim of any sort of violence, or who receives any kind of negative treatment other people aren't getting.  As an example, when I had a false accusation made against me at work, I couldn't help but to think that it had something to do with my gender identity--and, specifically, that I recently had my surgery.  


When you raise the probability of such motivations as a possibility, you're accused of being paranoid, if you're lucky, and psychotic if you aren't.  Some will even tell you that the fact that you entertain such thoughts--or that you are what you are and express it as you do--brings the ill treatment upon you. The latter, in other words, is a way of "blaming the victim" and of excusing the perpetrators of any responsibility for their own behavior.


I was reminded of what I've just described when I saw and heard some of the comments and reactions to the news accounts of Amanda's murder.  To be fair, there were a number of commenters who pointed out that no one deserves to die the way she did, or by the motivations of her killer.  A few said that the killing shouldn't be treated as a hate crime or even that hate crime laws are unnecessary because the authorities should treat the case as the brutal killing that it is.  My inner libertarian agrees with that position, but as a transgender woman, I cannot support it wholeheartedly.  Still, it is better than some of the other comments I read.  The more polite ones said that she "deceived" some man or, as one put it, "He was expecting a taco and found a sausage instead."  (Aside from the imagery, it is somewhat amusing in that it may be the first time I've read a bigoted comment that was pro-Mexican, however obliquely.)


Worse still were the ones who referred to Amanda as male, but worst of all were the ones were the ones that would have made "Dude looks like a lady" seem enlightened.  Such remarks reek of the sort of violence that was committed against Amanda, and too many other trans women.  They sound like they came from the sorts of guys who show what a dangerous combination alcohol and testosterone can be. (I'm not man-bashing:  My body has been filled with that caustic concoction, and under its influence, I did things I'm not proud of!)  Plus, they reveal the insecurities such people have about their own sexuality, if not their gender identity.


And that is what I and every other transgender woman fear.  In addition to the ostracism and suspicion we incur and the prospect of violence that underlies so much in our lives, we know that we are prone to some of the most particularly gruesome sorts of attacks.  It seems that every murdered transgender woman of whom I am aware was killed in a way that left grizzled police officers, detectives and coroners saying that it was the most grisly, or one of the most grisly, crimes they'd ever seen. Amanda was strangled and stabbed.  Gwen Araujo was strangled, beaten, hog-tied and buried in a shallow grave.  (I still can't read about it without crying.) Eda Yildirm's head and sexual organs were chopped off and thrown in a dumpster.  I could go on--but you get the picture.  All you have to do is type "transgender murder" in Google, click on to just about any link you find, and you will see some of the most horrendous kinds of killing you've ever heard of.


The standard explanation for such brutality is that nothing makes people more insecure than having their notions about their sexuality challenged--or, at least, to feel that their notions about their identities and proclivities have been questioned.  It makes sense:  After all, the most phobic people are the ones who know, deep down, that they are what they hate.  Are we shocked when we learn that some homophobic preacher was patronizing teenaged boys or when some segregationist reveals, on his deathbed, that he was the "love child" of his father and housemaid? How surprised would you be to know that, as a teenager, I committed a gay-bashing?


But I think that the challenge to one's notions of one's identity and sexuality are the nucleus, so to speak.  The atom is one's place in the social and economic hierarchies.  Why is it that gay-bashings and murders of trans people are so often committed by young men who seem to have few prospect in life?  They are the ones who have no chance of going to college or getting the kinds of jobs their fathers (if, indeed, their fathers are in the picture) have or had.  They feel that others--immigrants, queers or others whom they might see only at a distance--are getting all the breaks and resentment.  If alcohol and testosterone is a combustible mixture, almost nothing will ignite it more quickly or reliably than the resentment and rage such young men feel. 


That spark can also come from the friction between the pressure a young man feels to fit into one role or another and his feelings of inadequacy or unsuitability for that role. That is how I would explain the way I was as a teenager, anyway.


And, when rage and insecurities seek a target, what's better than someone who "won't be missed?"  That is to say:  who would make a better punching bag than someone who's despised more than anyone else--by society at large as well as by the ones who actually deliver the blows, the shots, the slashes?


While every human being is responsible for his or her actions, the terrible thing  is that most of those young men don't realize just how duped, how "had," they are.  The fact that they are committing such terrible violence shows that they have never had the opportunity to think through their own assumptions, most of which were passed on to them.  The night I kicked a gay man in the stomach while he was writhing on the ground, I was trying to redeem myself as a "real man" in the eyes of my co-conspirators.  And we were all, wittingly or not, acting out of assumptions about ourselves and our genders that were so inculcated within us that we didn't even know that it was possible, much less permissible or sustainable, to question such notions.


All of those notions govern what we, as transgenders, fear--and what we all have to live with.  Some of the people who knew Amanda are, I'm sure, saying that she's "in a better place now."  I hope that's true.

Transgender Remembrance Day

Today is Transgender Remembrance Day.

I missed the rally that was held at the LGBT Community Center of New York. However, on Sunday, I plan to attend a memorial service to be held in a church near the Center.

On one hand, I am glad that we observe this day, which is the anniversary of Rita Hester's murder in Boston in 1998. She was stabbed in the chest at least twenty times just a few weeks after Matthew Shepard was beaten, kidnapped, tied to a fence and left to die in a bitterly cold Wyoming desert night.

If people pay any attention at all to murders or other crimes against people who are (or perceived to be) gay or simply not conforming to prescribed gender roles, Shepard's and Hester's murders are two of the major reasons why.

Yet something makes me uneasy about Transgender Remembrance Day. It's not that it reminds me of the fact that we are twelve times as likely to be murdered as anyone else; rather, the observances make me realize that, too often, the dangers we face are recognized--if indeed they are recognized--only after one of us is killed. Or so it seems.

Also, when I read the names and stories of those of us--or those who were perceived as one of us--who were killed, I am distrubed to see how much more brutal and grisly our murders are than most others. The way Rita Hester was killed was not unusual at all, at least for a trans woman: It seems that when trans women are attacked, the attackers not only want to kill us; they also use as as punching bags, voodoo dolls and bonfires for their rage. Lisa Black was stabbed in the eye and beaten twenty times with a hammer; Christiaan D'Arcy was strangled, bound and locked in the trunk of a car that was set on fire and Michelle Byrne was tortured with a hot electric iron to her breasts before her killers cut off her hands and feet and finally beheaded her.

I learned about Lisa, Christiaan and Michelle from this site. None of their stories received any media attention outside the victims' local LGBT newspapers. Nor, at first, did the murder of Gwen Araujo seven years ago in California.

Araujo was killed in October of 2002, just a few weeks before Laci Peterson. Of course, that was a brutal crime, and it deserved all of the media attention it received. However, it's hard not to think that her murder got all that press because she was a pretty white cis-gender woman from an All-American family in an upscale Bay Area suburb. On the other hand, Gwen came from the "wrong" side of the Bay: Newark, a poor-to-working-class town in which a large percentage of the residents are Hispanic, as Gwen was. And, of course, she was trans.

At least her case was solved. The same can't be said for 92 percent of the other murders of transgender people that have been reported since 1975. I learned of this terrible statistic while researching an article I wrote four years ago.

Why are so few of our murders solved? Probably for the same reasons those same homicides committed against us receive so little attention. When one of us is killed, too many people see it as "just" the death of a deviant or a social misfit. Also, too many of us die alone: We have been disowned by families, friends and former co-workers--if, indeed, we ever had them in the first place. A corollary to that is that so many of us are poor: A study done in 2006, a prosperous year for the economy, indicated that 35 percent of all transgenders in San Francisco were unemployed and 59 percent were earning $15,300 a year or less. Plus--and this is one of the few stereotypes about us that has any truth--too many of us are sex workers. It's not that we have any more desire or inclination to such a job than anyone else has; it's that too many of us don't have other options. After all, what else can a teenager do if she's dropped out of school because she's been beat up too many times and her family has kicked her out--or she's run from the abuse she was facing for being who she is?

Finally, there is pure and simple misogyny. Crimes against women still aren't taken seriously by too may law enforcement officials and society generally; a "man" who "becmes" a "woman" is seen as bringing trouble on herself.

So, knowing these things, why am I against the "Hate Crimes Law? I think it has the opposite effect from what's intended: By saying that a murder or beating is worse when it's committed against members of one group, one is setting up a class system of justice. A crime is a crime, no matter who commits it against whom. If someone stabs someone, shoots that person, then douses him or her with gasoline and lights a match, it's a horrible crime, no matter who the victim is, and should be treated as such. That's how it has to be seen if we're to have policies that are actually equitable.

Besides, someone can argue or decide that the murder of a trans or gay person, or a member of any stigmatized group is not a hate crime. The defense tried to argue that Matthew Shepard's murder was a robbery gone wrong. Then they tried to invoke the "gay panic" defense. If such tactics work, as they do in many cases we never hear about, the victim becomes, to those who are adjudicating his or her case, simply another sexual deviant who won't be missed.

And, of course, people like me have to educate both in the sense most people think of that word and through example.

Finally, in the meantime, we need to remember Gwen. And Rita. And all of the others.

A Power Outage, DWB and Panic

So there was a power outage, or something, in Blogland last night. I couldn't sign on to this blog, much less post a new entry.

I know that in the scheme of things, it was small. But all sorts of paranoid thoughts raced through my head. Did the Y2K bug arrive ten years late? (Maybe it was on the Roman or some other calendar!) Had the Great Depression II brought the world--and the blogosphere--to a screeching halt?

Before I realized that the problem was with the site, I thought there was something wrong with my computer. Or, I thought that being in the age range for Alzheimer's (Am I?), an absent-minded professor and blonde had caught up with me and I did committed some blunder that only someone who bears such a Triple Crown could make.

And this fear also passed through me: That someone found the content of this blog--or me--"objectionable" and flagged it. Of course, anything is "objectionable," for someone could, conceivably, object to it, for whatever reasons. But I wasn't fussing over definitions at that moment.

As often as Oprah and other folks on TV talk about transgenders, prejudice against us still exists. Even the ones who are younger and much prettier than I'll ever be are not completely shielded from it: I've heard all sorts of stories of harassment and worse. Then, of course, there are terrible tales like that of Leslie Mora, and the horribly tragic ones like that of Gwen Araujo.

Speaking of whom: A few years ago, I had an idea for writing a book about people who were killed by bigots. I was going to profile the sad stories of Emmitt Till, Yusef Hawkins, Matthew Shepard and Gwen. All except Till's murders occurred during my lifetime; in fact, I can remember where I was when I heard about Hawkins, Shepard and Gwen. While Till has been commemorated in a Bob Dylan song, Spike Lee dedicated "Malcolm X" to the memory of Hawkins and Shepard's murder led Moises Kaufman to create "The Laramie Project," there was comparatively little attention was paid to Gwen Araujo's murder at the time it occured.

I heard about it only because I was at the LGBT Community Center that day. Only a few weeks earlier, I had moved out of the apartment Tammy and I shared in Park Slope; only a few days earlier, I had my first appointment with Dr. Gal Meyer, who would interview me, order tests and, finally, prescribe hormones to me. At that point, I was still going to work as Nick and my neighbors, family and friends--who didn't see much of me--still knew me that way. But I was spending most of my free time en femme, much of it volunteering with or otherwise participating in one Center activity or another.

So you can imagine how much I was affected by hearing about Gwen's murder. In fact, when creating the link for her name earlier in this entry, I was in tears. No other stranger's death has had quite the same impact on me. If you'll indulge me in a cliche, I will say that I felt I had lost a member of whatever race, nation or other group I belong to.

I was also affected (not merely shocked) by Matthew's and Yusef's killings, though in different ways and for different reasons. In "Jack Price and College Point," I described the way I felt about Matthew Shepard's demise. As for Yusef: He was killed not far from where I grew up and, literally, steps away from where relatives of mine have lived. The adjacent streets are as familiar to me as any others in this world: I have, at times, returned to them, and to the rooms my relatives inhabited, in my dreams (and nightmares!). And, when local TV news reporters interviewed residents of the neighborhood in the days after Yusef's murder, I felt as if I were hearing a language I didn't know that I still knew but would, of course, always be a part of me because I heard (and, to a lesser extent, spoke) it so early in my life.

Now, you may be wondering: How did I go from the Blogspot outage to hate crimes? Well, I described one of the scenarios my mind conjured up when I couldn't access my blog: that someone didn't want a tranny posting on Blogspot, or anywhere else. Were Till, Hawkins, Shepard and Araujo still here, I am sure they could relate.

Anyone who is, by birth, a member of any group--whether it be racial, ethnic, religious, sexual or gender--that is stigmatized, has had moments when he or she couldn't help but to wonder whether, or even believe, he or she was singled out or otherwise discriminated against simply for being whom he or she is. I've met, especially at the college in which I teach, far too many people who were stopped by cops for DWB. I've also heard too many stories about women who were denied promotions, or even jobs, for reasons that were not clearly (perhaps deliberately so) stated. And, of course, I've had the same happen to me--and I've been stopped by plainclothes "cops" (I still question whether they actually were commissioned.) for no earthly reason.

Even someone yelling at you hurts, or simply makes you wonder, in an intensified way because you know that even in the most benevolent of settings, prejudice against you and whatever you represent is never far from the surface. So you wonder what, exactly, was the motivation behind someone who did a "routine search" of you or what really happened when your inquiry "fell through the cracks."

People will accuse you of being "overly sensitive," "paranoid" or "sooo defensive"--or of "reading too much into" someone else's words or actions--when you respond to people or react to a situation in a way that is refracted through the prism of your experience. As if they all don't do the same thing. The difference is, their experience doesn't include the sort of prejudice you've experienced.

I really try to respond to everyone I meet as an individual, and to deal with every situation independently. But there are times when, as a member of whatever group, you can't help to wonder if you've been targeted.

To whoever is in charge of Blogspot: I hope you understand. And I thank you for what was, actually, a prompt and proficient response to the technical problem.

I'm writing in this blog again. I'm happy.