Michelle Dumaresq: 100% Pure Woman Champ

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.  

This day was first observed in 1999, one year after Rita Hester was murdered in her Allston, Massachusetts apartment.  She was killed just two days before she would have turned 35 years old.


Her death came just a few weeks after Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die on a cold night in the Wyoming high desert.  Their deaths helped to bring about the hate-crime laws now on the books in the US as well as many state and local statutes.  Moreover, Hester's killing--while not as widely publicized as Shepard's--galvanized transgender activists all over the world.

Because I am--at least to my knowledge--the only transsexual woman with a bike blog, I am going to use this post to honor one of the greatest transgender athletes of our era.

Michelle Dumaresq was born in 1970.  In 2001, she entered and won her first competitive mountain biking event--the Bear Mountain Race in British Columbia, Canada.  After she won two more races, her racing license was suspended in response to complaints from other female riders.  The cycling associations of British Columbia and Canada, after meeting privately with race organizers, tried to pressure her into quitting.  Of course, she wouldn't, and after a meeting with UCI officials, it was decided that she could continue to compete as a female.

Other female riders felt she had an unfair advantage.  Their resentment was, not surprisingly, based on a common misunderstanding.  Dumaresq had her gender reassignment surgery in 1996, five years before her first victory, and had been taking female hormones--and a male hormone blocker--for several years before that.  By the time she started racing, she no longer had any testosterone in her body (Biological females have traces of it.) and she had lost most of the muscle mass she had as a man.

I know exactly where she's been, as I also had the surgery after six years of taking hormones and a testosterone blocker.  A few months into my regimen, I started to notice a loss of overall strength, and I noticed some more after my surgery.  Trust me, Ms. Dumaresq, as talented and dedicated as she is, had no physiological advantage over her female competitors.

I remind myself of that whenever another female rider (usually, one younger than I am) passes me during my ride to work!

But I digress.  Michelle Dumaresq had the sort of career that would do any cyclist--male or female, trans or cisgender, or gay--proud.  She won the Canadian National Championships four times and represented her country in the World Championships.  That, of course, made the haters turn up the heat.  When she won the 2006 Canadian National Championships, the boyfriend of second-place finisher Danika Schroeter jumped onto the podium and helped her put on a T-shirt that read "100% Pure Woman Champ."

Ms. Dumaresq would have looked just fine in it.

Fred Phelps Is Dead

This is a sort of update to an earlier post.

Fred Phelps is dead.

We all knew this was coming. After all, he had been in ill health and recently moved into a hospice.

Now, I am one of the last people in this world who would ever defend him.  Still, I hope that nobody pickets his funeral as he and his congregants did at the funerals of Matthew Shepard and soldiers who died in Iraq. After all, do we want our community (or any level) to descend to the level of non-civility exhibited by the Westboro Baptist Church?

But, as awful a legacy as he left with his "God Hates Fags" protests and campaigns, he actually did quite a bit of good. Believe it or not, he was once a civil-rights lawyer who fiercely advocated on behalf of African-Americans who experienced discrimination in schools, work and the American Legion, and abuse at the hands of their local police. He also sued President Ronald Reagan after Reagan appointed--for the first time in US History--an American ambassador to the Vatican. Phelps argued that the appointment violated the Constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state.

Then, of course, there are his family members, some of whom were excommunicated and others, like his son Nathan, who left the Westboro church. They mourn the loss of a father, grandfather and uncle, even if they came to disagree with his teachings.

The life and death of Fred Phelps Sr. should, if nothing else, help us to remember that tragedy begets tragedy. Somewhere along the way, a sense of righteous anger turned into resentful hatred that caused him to be estranged from the very community he built around it.

How Much Is A Transgender Woman's Life Worth?

If you fire shots into a car with three transgender women, what kind of a sentence you should expect?

Depends.

If you're a police officer in Washington, DC, you can expect to get--are you ready?--three years of supervised probation, 100 hours of community service and a $150 fine.

So, a transgender woman's life is worth one year of probation, 33.3 hours of community service and $50.  The next time I go to DC, I'll be very happy to know that I'm such a valuable commodity.

Actually, our lives are worth even less than that:  Those transgender women were accompanied by friends.

Officer Kenneth Furr received the sentence I mentioned for shooting into the car in August 2011. While drunk, he approached a transgender prostitute for sex.  When she refused, he followed her into a CVS store and pointed a gun at her outside the store. After Furr drove away, the woman and her friends followed him until he stopped and fired his gun at them.

Furr claims he was acting in "self defense".  Right.  Just like Matthew Shepard's killers acted out of "gay panic".   


At least Furr has been suspended without pay.  Even if that hadn't happened, Furr would have a harsher sentence than others who have committed similar crimes against transgender people.

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.  

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.

Jack Price and College Point

Had I known about yesterday's march, I might've gone over to College Point and joined all of those people who were showing their solidarity with Jack Price.


Last Friday, two young men beat him while taunting him with anti-gay slurs as he left an all-night deli in the neighborhood. He's still in the hospital with a broken jaw, collapsed lung and shattered ribs.


The good news is that residents marched alongside LGBT activists and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. The interesting thing is that they were outraged over the fact that Price was attacked for any reason and that such violence should occur in their neighborhood. Most of them knew him, or knew friends or relatives of his, and were upset that he would meet with such violence in their neighborhood.


In other words, they weren't necessarily marching out of sympathy for gays. Rather, some were marching for someone they knew, and possibly loved. Probably others were marching out of a sense of justice: that no human being should meet with such violence. One of the more gratifying things I've learned is that there are many more people than I imagined who feel that way, or, at least, can have that sense evoked in them. Still others were worried about their neighborhood "going down the tubes."


The bad news is that many more people didn't go to the rally because they feared, not necessarily the attackers themselves, but the homophobic and otherwise bigoted "element" they all know exists in their neighborhood, as it does nearly everywhere else. Some of that "element" was penned up by cops in one of the parks: They chanted their slogans and held up their signs but weren't allowed near the march. I wonder if anybody had a sign that read "God Hates Fags," as the Most Right Reverend Fred Phelps sported in a rally that followed the murder of Matthew Shepard.


Speaking of whom...It was around this time in 1998 that he was left to die in the cold Wyoming desert night. I remember that time well: Tammy and I were taking a weekend trip to a town near Syracuse, where I would meet her family for the first time. We heard about Matthew on the way up. She was shocked, in part, because two of her best friends were gay men; I felt my skin crawl, as it did in those days whenever I heard about a "hate crime," because I wasn't "out of the closet" about my own identity or the gay-bashing I committed when I was a teenager.


Places like Wyoming are often dismissed as "flyover country" and neighborhoods like College Point are often derided by denizens of more affluent and trendy arrondissements for being too far away from downtown or not having enough trendy cafes or nightlife. I can't speak for Wyoming, but I have spent enough time in College Point to know that, prior to the attack, it was no more or less likely to have had one like it occur on its streets than any other neighborhood I know of--including Jackson Heights.




Unlike Jackson Heights, where three young men beat transgender woman Leslie Mora as she left a club in June, College Point has never been known as an LGBT enclave. Much of it is industrial; the rest of the neighborhood consists mostly of small houses occupied by their working- and middle-class owners and their families. Narrow streets wind between those houses and some old churches; all of those streets follow or end at the shore of Flushing Bay.


Another difference between Jackson Heights and College Point is that the latter neighborhood is very much like it was twenty or even forty years ago. Most of the residents are white, mainly of Irish, German and Italian ancestry. There are more Hispanics and Asians than in years past; still, one is struck by the absence of people of color, particularly blacks, when walking along College Point Boulevard or any other thoroughfare in the neighborhood.


Some would expect narrow-mindedness, if not outright hatred, in such a place. Certainly, one can find it there, as one could find it anywhere inhabited by humans. On the other hand, the neighborhood's constance means that many people there grew up and work with, and even married, each other. Given that, according to whichever researchers you believe, anywhere from one out of every twenty to one out of every five human beings is not heterosexual, just about everyone knows someone who is. The thing is, in a place like College Point (which, in the aspect I'm about to describe, is much like the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bensonhurst and Borough Park were when I was growing up in them), people not only know that you're gay; they've seen you grow up gay. So, even the most conservative people come to realize that, yes, some people are indeed "that way," and that some of those people are in fact their children, neighbors and friends.


Of course, not everyone embraces their "difference." Again, as in almost any other community that comes to mind, there are families who exile their gay children and others who harass and terrorize them. But many other residents understand something that most of them never articulate, mainly because they never have to: That their gay children, siblings, aunts, uncles, classmates and co-workers are a part of their community and that an attack on any of them is a "black mark" on the neighborhood. In other words, if their gay children, siblings or neighbors are attacked, it means that the neighborhood isn't "safe." To blue-collar and middle-class people, who are nearly all of College Point's population, that is no small consideration, as, for most of them, the homes in which they live are, along with their cars (The nearest subway station is about three miles away.), are the sum total of their wealth. If the neighborhood goes "bad," they lose and have nowhere else to go--at least not locally, anyway.


And, if they lose their neighborhood, they lose not only their investment, but their entire way of life and sense of who they are. Even if crime rates don't go up and property values don't go down, they still feel that an attack against one of their own is a reflection of some failure or inadequacy on their, or the neighborhood's, part. In other words, such an attack shatters their sense of security, which many of them cite as one of their neighborhood's assets.


If that's the reason why some people were marching, well, that's as good as any. And, in the end, those people are as important as earnest activists for calling attention to our need to feel secure in our persons and the right to be the persons that we are, whatever that may mean.


One of my history profs said that all effective revolutions begin with the middle class. Of course! The rich have no reason to revolt (If they want lower taxes, they find havens rather than take to the streets.) and the poor, who often have reason to, can't--for all sorts of reasons--mount as effective a movement as those who have a bit more time and money. Those in the middle are the ones who have everything invested and nowhere else to go. When they see no recourse through the very institutions they have used to gain whatever they have, then no one else has that recourse, either.


And, it seems that at least some people in College Point know what is at stake, at least for them, with Jack Price's beating.