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".)

 

Fit To Compete As A Woman

In 1976, male-to-female transsexual Renee Richards was denied entry into the US Open.  The United States Tennis Association based its ban on a "women-born-women" policy of which, it seemed, no one was aware until the USTA cited it.  She won a suit against the USTA and competed for several years, rising to as high as #20 in women's tennis rankings.

The controversy over whether MTFs should be allowed to compete as women has continued through the ensuing decades and over different sports ranging from golf to mountain bike racing.  Now the battle has reached fitness competitions.

Yesterday, personal trainer Chloie Jonnson-- who has lived as a woman since she was a teenager, had gender reassignment surgery in 2006 and has been taking female hormones--filed a discrimination suit against the Cross Fit company in Santa Cruz, California. She sought--and was denied--the right to compete in last year's Cross Fit Games, which determine the fittest man and woman. 

The suit alleges that one of Jonnson's teammates asked about the eligibility of transgender competitors in an anonymous e-mail to the game's organizers. (Anonymous e-mail.  Hmm...Sounds familiar.)  In response, the Game's organizers determined that athletes have to compete in the gender to which they were assigned at birth.

None of the news accounts I've seen mention any previously-written policy on the matter.  Some things don't change in four decades, I guess--namely, the level of knowledge about transgenders possessed by organizers of some athletic events. According to every scientist and doctor familiar with transgender patients and issues, someone who was born a male and takes hormones for several years has no advantage in strength or endurance over female athletes.  Even the International Olympic Committee, not exactly known for its progressivism, allows transgender athletes to compete in the gender by which they identify as long as they've had sex-reassignment surgery.

One thing that makes Jonnson's case particularly interesting and disturbing is that Cross Fit is based in California, which has some of the strictest laws barring discrimination based on gender identity.  I'm not a lawyer, but I would guess that fact alone should compel Cross Fit to allow Jonnson to compete. Or so I hope.

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.