One Way To Commemorate This Day

Today, on Martin Luther King Day, I thought it would make sense to share something I learned just recently:  He actually gave his "I Have A Dream" speech--albeit in a slightly different form-- for the first time in Detroit, some two months before the whole world heard him deliver it from Washington.

It's interesting that such a fact has been all but lost to history, especially when one considers how much sense it makes.  After all, he made his speech in Detroit right around the time it became a majority-black city.  Also, King had, by that time, realized that the struggles of the labor movement were part of an overall struggle for justice, and no city has ever been more emblematic of the American labor movement than Detroit.

It's thus fitting that there's a "Tour  de Troit" taking place today. If today's weather in the Motor City is anything like what it normally has at this time of year, I give "props" to whoever rides it.  

The name of the ride is kind of funny.  The name of the city itself means "strait" in French; Francophone settlers who came by way of Quebec named the then-settlement for "le detroit du lac Erie", which separates it from what is now Windsor, Ontario.

(If you are under-age, or of delicate sensibilities, please skip over everything else in this parenthetical element.  The second syllable--"troit"--means "narrow" and is pronounced the way Anglophones pronounce a vulgar term for a part of the female anatomy.  In fact, it's believed that British soldiers in World War I introduced the term in to the English-speaking world.)

Anyway, congratulations to everyone who is riding today. And thank you for everything, Dr. King!

A Year In Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life

I know it's Spring.  And it's time to ride and be joyful. But I think there's something else that bears mentioning.

On this date in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assasinated in Memphis.  I was a child at the time and, until that day, knew nothing about him. However, I think I understood, for the first time, what the word "tragedy" means and that it isn't the same as mere sadness or grief.

He was cut down one year to the day after making what might have been the most important speech of his life--and one of the most important in American history.

Before an audience of 3000 in New York's Riverside Memorial Church, the greatest leader this country has ever had declared, "My conscience leaves me no other choice."  Then he described the terrible effects of the Vietnam War on this country's poor as well as Vietnamese peasants.  Thus, he concluded, he could not continue to fight for civil rights and address the myriad injustices--all of which had to do with race, class and gender--that existed (and still exist) in the United States without opposing the war his country was waging in the former French Indochina.

Here is a video of that speech:

The Next Frontier, Then And Now

Today, Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is being commemorated.  I am thinking now about how he spent the last days of his life working to help the sanitation workers of Memphis to gain better pay and working conditions.  I am also thinking about the speech he gave on 4 April 1967—exactly one year before he was gunned down.  In it, he denounced the Vietnam War and the ways in which the United States was turning into the kind of repressive colonial power against which it fought to gain its independence.

Nearly half a century later, his words and actions remain relevant, if for different reasons than they were when they were new or, say, twenty or thirty years ago.  I concur with those people who see them as evidence that he was turning his attention toward economic inequalities and how power—whether military, political, capitalist or corporate—is used to initiate and reinforce such inequities.  Interestingly, Malcolm X was turning his interests toward those very issues before he was shot to death in the Audubon Ballroom.  Some have posited that it’s a reason why the widows of the two men became allies in the struggle for social and economic justice as well as close personal friends.  Having met Sister Betty Shabazz, however briefly, a couple of years before she died, I would accept such an explanation.

Whatever their motivations, I think she and Coretta Scott King offer valuable lessons for transgender people.  I am not the first person to say that our state is about what that of gays and lesbians was in the 1970’s or nearly all African-Americans until the 1950’s.  The gains made by the Civil Rights movement did not improve the lot of all people of color; that is not a fault of the work Matin, Coretta, Malcolm or Betty did.  While it’s great that my hometown—New York City—and some other jurisdictions have human-rights laws that include language to specifically include transgender and other gender-variant people, such laws—as Martin and Malcolm discovered—will not, by themselves, bring about social justice.  That is because they cannot bring about economic justice.  They might say that a would-be employer cannot discriminate on the basis of race, gender or other qualities, but they do not address the conditions that put us at a disadvantage when we apply for those jobs—or that relegate us to inferior jobs at lower pay and longer periods without jobs and, in some cases, housing. 

Freedom Rider

On this date in 1929, Martin Luther King Jr. was born.   His birthdate will be commemorated on Monday, five days from now. We also observe the births of Presidents Washington and Lincoln, as well as other holidays, on Mondays in this country.

I guess if you want to become famous enough to have a holiday dedicated to you, you have to be born on Monday.  Or, perhaps, being born on Monday will lead you to fame.

But I digress.  I don't often hear or see MLK and bicycling mentioned on the same page, let alone the same sentence.  The biographies I've seen tell us that he enjoyed riding his bike as a kid but make no mention of him cycling as an adult.

From Dan's Globe Bike

So why am I mentioning him on this blog?  Well, I believe that my cycling is one major reason why I began to think about issues of social justice long before I would be affected by them in the immediate and visceral ways I would experience them when I was transitioning from male to female.  Riding my bike through New York--where I have lived much of my life--and other cities, I have seen, close-up, the stark differences between neighboring communities.  Just minutes after spinning by the opulent townhouses and boutiques of Manhattan's Fifth and Park Avenues--which rival Rodeo Drive, Kensington Gardens and l'Avenue Montaigne--I descend the ramp from the Triboro Bridge to the southern tip of the Bronx.  It's part of the 16th Congressional district, the poorest in the entire nation. There, I am as likely as not to be the only woman on a bicycle within a radius of several miles.

In both neighborhoods, people sometimes compliment the bike I'm riding, or (on rarer occasions these days) my riding itself.  In either neighborhood, I am keenly aware of my privilege:  Even if I am riding to work or an appointment, I am riding my bike by choice.  And I am riding a bike I choose to ride.  Even if I have no money in my purse, I still occupy a higher rung on the social--and, yes, economic--ladder then those who are riding bikes that no one else wanted so they can deliver pizzas or get to an appointment with a case worker.

As long as I can ride, and choose to do so, I am privileged.

MLK And LGBT People

Sometimes President Obama seems to think he's channeling Martin Luther King Jr. when he doesn't think he's a reincarnation of President Lincoln.  I guess he can do worse for role models although, aside from his being black and his stated belief in civil rights, I don't see much connection between Barack and MLK.  The latter was a visionary, a prophet.  Whatever his merits, Obama is a politician.  That means MLK adopted views that aligned with what he perceived and exprienced; Obama is thinking about votes and donations.

I don't mean this as a condemnation of Obama.  After all, he did change his position on gay marriage.  However, it's hard not to notice that he opposed it during his first campaign for the Presidency; he finally came out in support of it after Vice-President Biden expressed his.  

On the other hand, he did voice his support.  Plus, even though he could have been more proactive, he's done more to support transgender people than all of the presidents before him did.  Then again, the best of his predecessors did nothing; the others did what they could to make our lives more difficult.

But, as I said, Obama deserves some credit.  And, perhaps, he can claim MLK's mantel after all.  Nobody knows for sure whether King would have supported LGBT equality, as he was slain more than a year before the Stonewall Rebellion.  But we do know that he never said anything negative about queer people, and didn't countenance a "literal" or "fundamentalist" reading of the Bible that interprets Leviticus and other books of the Bible as injunctions against loving people of one's own sex.

Furthermore, King allowed Bayard Rustin, a friend who happened to be openly gay, to serve as one of his closest advisors.  Plus, he when he wrote an advice column for Ebony magazine, he responded in a sensitive (though, not surprisingly, pastoral) way to a letter from a boy who confessed his feelings toward other boys.  Given the time--1958--it was a very tolerant and forward-thinking response.

Still, some insist that King would not have considered LGBT rights the next logical step in the civil rights movement.  One of them is his own daughter, Rev. Bernice King.  In 2005, she led a march her father's grave while calling for a Constitutional ban on gay marriage. During a speech at a church meeting in New Zealand, she said her father "did not take a bullet for gay marriage."

But King's widow, Coretta Scott King, vocally supported gay rights.  One of her closest aides was gay.  (Are you seeing a pattern here?)  Furthermore, the FBI tapped his telephone conversations, and he was one of the most surveilled people on the planet.  Yet no one could find a conversation, sermon, speech, lecture or letter of his that expressed any sort of anti-gay sentiment.

Given what I've seen and read, I think that if MLK had lived longer, he would have made LGBT equality part of his civil-rights platform.  After all, he didn't turn away anyone else whose rights were denied or trampled.  I suspect that, being a preacher from the South in the time in which he lived, he simply didn't think much about LGBT people because, well, they hadn't made it onto his radar yet.  The same could be said for any number of other people of good will from that time.

The Same Struggle

Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. realized that even though laws against discrimination had been passed and that some people who weren't victimized by inequality had at least begun to realize that it exists, the struggle for human rights was nowhere near being won.  He said, in essence, that winning the right to sit at the same lunch counters as everyone else doesn't matter if you can't afford a hamburger and a cup of coffee once you're there.


That, in essence, remains the problem.  Even though I am lower middle-class by American standards (Perhaps I'd be simply middle-class in another part of the country.), I am still doing better than many other transgender (whether pre- or post-op) people.  And, for all of the wealth in the gay community portrayed in the media, they actually suffer with the same levels of povertyas the population in general.  


Actually, the worst thing for trans people is that so many of us can't get jobs, period, and that we--particularly the young among us--suffer from disproportionate levels of homelessness.


We still have to fight the same fight MLK was fighting more than four decades ago.  The difference is, the economy is much worse now than it was then.

Leaving MLK Spinning

Today is Martin Luther King day.  Someone commented that his life and work weren't only about racial equality; rather, he stood for human right and justice.


If that's the case--which I don't doubt--I have little doubt that he would be appalled at the field of candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination.


Mind you, I'm no fan of Obama:  I think he's thrown transgender people under the bus.  However, even Ron Paul--the only one of the Republicans for whom I would even consider voting--makes Obama seem like, well, MLK by comparison.


At least Ron Paul voted against the Marriage Protection Act which, had it been amended to the Constitution, would have banned gay marriage.  Of course, his motives for his vote had nothing to do with any interest in LGBT rights.  Rather, he didn't want to vote for another law that would have allowed the Federal Government to, in his view, usurp authority that belongs to individual states.   Absent such a law, we have a few states that allow gay marriage, even if there is no Federal guarantee that same-sex couples will have the same rights as heterosexual ones. 


That vote alone makes Ron Paul seem like Sojourner Truth next to Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich or even Mitt Romney.  I can just see MLK spinning in his grave.

What Would MLK Do?

Forty-three years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death.  It's the first assassination of a public figure that I can recall:  I was nine years old at the time.


Of course, anyone who concerns him or herself with equality has to think about King.  Thinking about him invariably brings to mind the man who is often thought to be his opposite:  Malcolm X, who was also gunned down.


Most people who are working, or have worked, for the betterment of their group of people see King as an icon.  The fact that he faced the institutionalized (and, too often, legal) discrimination of his time is reason enough to venerate him.  However, I think that it's often assumed that King would be in support of some cause or another.  The same people might have wanted to claim Malcolm X as an ally, except that they see him as someone who pursued his ends through violence, and advised others to do the same.


I think it might be fair to assume that King would favor LGBT equality.  However, I'm not so sure of what he'd think of same-sex marriage, or even legal protections for transgender people.  After all, he was ordained as a minister in a conservative Protestant denomination.  Then again, his views on LGBT equality might have evolved had he lived longer.  There was evidence that some of his views, or at least his focus, was starting to change in the days before his assassination.  He had treated the fight for equality mainly as a legal and moral issue.  However, it is said that by the end of his life, he was starting to think about the economics of the issue more.  Perhaps he understood, as James Baldwin said more than half a century ago, that no community can hope to improve its lot when even the local supermarket isn't owned by someone in the community and the profits are going to some faraway place.


Malcolm X understood that from the beginning of his days as an activist.  He said that, in essence, African-Americans had to develop their own economy, which would be separate from the larger American/Western economy.  He did not want, or expect any assistance from the government or any other established institution.  Ultimately, I believe that he had the right idea:  Groups of people, if they want to better themselves, ultimately must establish their own stores, banks, schools and whatever.  However, that wasn't possible in his time because African-Americans and other marginalized communities didn't have the resources necessary to bring about such a system. 


King was beginning to understand that.  And, after the journey to Mecca he took the year before he was killed,  Malcolm was starting to realize that in order to bring about economic, not to mention ethical and spiritual, justice, unity rather than separatism was needed.  So he started to see the need for a universal brotherhood that would include alliances and friendships with sympathetic whites and people of other races.  That, of course, was Martin Luther King's territiory.


Would they have joined forces?  (Interestingly, their widows became very close friends.)  Would their alliances and brotherhoods have include LGBT people.   Somehow the notion that they would have done those things seems not so far-fetched.  

Ramble On Waking Up Late

It's amazing how quickly the day goes by when you wake up late. I'm not so surprised about waking up late: Yesterday, the first day of the semester, was a Thursday, which will be my longest day of the week this semester, as it is in most semesters. It started with an 8 am class, and my last class didn't end until almost 6 pm. And, in between, it seemed that everyone was having a crisis. That's about normal for the first day of a semester at any college I've seen. Maybe things are different in the military colleges like West Point or in Swiss colleges. Then again, I never wanted to go to either one. Well, a Swiss school, maybe. And my father wanted me to go to one of the Armed Forces academies.

And how much sleep did I get the other night? About 2 1/2 hours. I probably shouldn't have bothered. I was preparing my syllabi and doing some other things to prepare, which took me a bit longer than I expected. Turning on Obama's speech didn't help. Even if he weren't the President, I probably wouldn't have slept through his speech, or any other he's given. Yes, he is probably the best speaker of any major public figure we've had since Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X. But Obama certainly doesn't have the vision--or, I think, the pure- and- simple grasp of reality--that either MLK or Malcolm had.

Even though I voted for Obama, he's really starting to seem scary to me. I can almost agree with those people who say that, at times, he seems like Hitler. It's in his body language: ramrod-still, except for his arm when he's jabbing his finger toward his audience.

The thing that really worries me about him, though, is this: No matter what issue is at hand, it's always about him. People like that aren't just frightening; they're dangerous. In fact, that trait alone makes him, given the current climate, far more dangerous than George W ever was. Bush the Younger was easily the worst President of my lifetime (Then again, Carter had only one term.), but I don't think he was the megalomaniac that Barry can be. Rather, I suspect that, if anything, he was a sort of King Lear figure who was led around by The Dark Side (personified by Dick Cheyney, who did the bidding of the military-industrial-financial plutocrats who really run things) and those who were simply mendacious or murderous. If anything, George II might have actually done better if he had been a bit more egotistical. Maybe those two could effect some sort of exchange.

All right...I shouldn't criticise Obama for everything being about him. After all, I've been writing in this blog, right. But then again, I never claimed that this blog is about anything but me. It's called "Transwoman Times," but I don't claim that the expereinces I describe and anything else on this blog are "typical" of transwomen, whatever that means.

I know, I'm rambling. I haven't had to be very focused today. I did a few errands. In the process, I probably frightened off a few kids and pets. Maybe a few adults, too. Actually, I probably appalled the adults, if they noticed me. I brushed my hair and put on some lipstick before I went out. When I got a glimpse of myself in the Starbuck's restroom, I saw the face of a middle-aged woman who'd just rolled out of bed, brushed her hair and put on lipstick. And I hope the transgender goddesses don't condemn me for the way I was dressed, much less for the weight I've gained. O great tranny goddess, you know that life doesn't always happen at our convenience. I had my surgery; for a few weeks after that, I had almost no appetite. But my appetite came back before I could ride my bike or engage in any other physical activity--and just in time for the holidays.