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I know I haven't mentioned "two-spirited" people much on this blog. I have avoided that because although I wouldn't necessarily identify as one, I feel that I can identify with them.
In other words, I feel that I am related, in some way, to them because I do not fit into American culture's dominant ideas about gender and sexuality. I was born with a male body and female spirit. That spirit needs to live fully, which is the reason why I transitioned from life as Nick to living as Justine.
And, yes, I am masculine in some ways. Some of that has to do with the body into which I was born; some of it is a matter of education and acculturation. But, in spirit, I see myself as female.
Perhaps my conception of myself is congruent with how two-spirited people see themselves and are seen by their communities. Even if that were the case, though, I would be reluctant to identify myself as two-spirited simply because the concept of it has a cultural context. And I am completely outside of it, just as I am not part of the South Asian cultures in which hijras live.
Still, I have great respect and empathy for the two-spirited people and know there's much I can learn from them. That is the reason why I am happy they are having a pow-wow that's open to the public this Saturday in San Francisico's Cow Palace.
A Jewish man whose parents survived the Holocaust once told me that the only time he ever felt safe was when he was in Israel.
I mention that, not to take a side in the conflicts that tear that part of the world, but to relate something I thought about as I heard some more terrible news.
Taja DeJesus was raised in San Jose but moved to San Francisco because of the greater acceptance of transgender people found in the City By The Bay. Some in our community think of it as our Israel, if you will.
She was found with stab wounds on McKinnon Avenue in the city's Bayview district around 9 last Sunday morning. Authorities are not calling her murder a hate crime. According to anonymous sources, the suspect was found dead, an apparent suicide, behind a warehouse not far from where De Jesus's body was found.
Even in a city with a reputation like San Francisco's, there are areas--Bayview being one of them--where trans people aren't accepted or that are simply dangerous. Lord knows we have such places here in NYC. Even the "gayborhoods" aren't always safe for trans people. Actually, they can be even more dangerous because thugs come from other parts, and outside, of the city, specifically to get their thrills from bashing actual or perceived LGBT people.
Perhaps we need a place an Israel: You know, a place where we can go and be accepted for who we are--or at least be reasonably sure that we won't experience bigotry or bullying, or get killed, just for being who we are.
"I'm very sorry for the nice man who was enjoying his McDouble when I ran in bleeding and screaming for the police."
It's only the fifth of January, but that statement might be the quote of the year for 2015, and a few more years to come.
It wasn't said by some comic-book character in a cheesy movie. It was said, apparently, without irony or sarcasm.
In other words, the one who said it is a much, much better person than I am, or probably will be. At least, she did a much better job of embodying the principles of Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Mother Teresa or Malala Yousafzai than I ever could.
The person who made that immortal declaration is Samantha Hulsey, a trans woman who grew up in Savannah, Georgia. You might say she was being a gracious young Southern lady in expressing her sorrow for the man munching on a McDouble. But I think there's even more than that behind her espousal of compassion in the midst of her own suffering.
She was with her partner, Rae Raucci, when a man harassed them as they were boarding a bus. "He was saying a lot of hateful things," Hulsey recalled. When she and Raucci got off the bus, the man ran after them and plunged a steak knife with a 3 1/2" blade into Hulsey's chest.
The bus she and Raucci were boarding was the 49 Muni in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco.
Yes, you read that right: San Francisco. Hulsey moved there from Savannah where, she hoped, she could live openly as a woman. In Savannah, , "I was bullied and had things thrown at me," she recalled, "but no one tried to kill me." She, like many others, lived in the City At The End Of The Rainbow with the believing "that sort of thing shouldn't happen here".
Unfortunately, it can happen anywhere. Yes, even in San Francisco. As Otis Redding noted, there are some things about Georgia you can't escape on the dock of the bay.
According to a recent study, the US city in which the highest percentage of itsr gay couples is raising children is in a state that I wouldn't expect to legalize same-sex marriage in my lifetime. In fact, two of the next three cities with metropolitan areas of a milion or more are in such states.
The winner in that category is Salt Lake City. Next is Virginia Beach, followed by Detroitand Memphis. Jacksonville, FL is another place where more than one in four gay couples is raising children.. Of those cities, only Detroit is in a state in which there seems to be any chance of legalizing same-sex unions any time soon.
Mind you, New York, San Francisco and Boston have larger overall numbers of gay couples raising kids. But the percentage of such couples is actually much smaller than the cities I've mentioned--or the California communities of Visalia and Porterville.
The researchers who conducted the study say that the main reason for this phenomena is that members of gay couples in Salt Lake City and the other seemingly-unlikely hubs were in heterosexual marriages before coming out as gay. They had kids in those unions and brought them into their new domestic arrangements.
The terrible irony of this is that in such places, gay people often feel more external or internal pressures to get married and have children--whether to mollify members of their families or churches, or in an attempt to silence their own inner voices. A young person who's grown up in Park Slope or Chelsea or Castro or the Back Bay is less likely to feel such pressures and thus more likely to come out earlier--and less likely to enter into a heterosexual marriage. On the other hand, I can only imagine how it feels to grow up gay or trans in a place where the center of life is a fundamentalist church.
Now, I don't want to depict all of those places where gay people are raising kids as backward or imprisoning. Rather, I want to point out that the very same social milieu that causes people to avoid living as themselves--or simply not to be aware of their true natures--is also, in many ways, more conducive to raising families than what we find in larger and more cosmopolitan cities.
One, of course, is economics. One almost has to be very wealthy to raise kids in New York, where I live, or in San Francisco, Boston or Washington. At least, one has to be wealthy if one wants his or her kids to be safe, attend good schools and get good health care--and find kid- and family-friendly facilities. What that means, of course, is that one has to have independent wealth or the sort of career that both pays well and has policies that allow parents to take time off to care for kids and such without losing a day's pay--or risking his or her job. Contrary to popular perception, not all LGBT people are in such careers.
Also, while there is more than likely plenty of homo- and trans-phobia in the smaller cities and towns, those kinds of hatred are not absent in the Big Apple, the Hub or the City by the Bay. In fact, gay, lesbian and transgender people from other places have expressed, to me, their surprise at how much homo- or trans-phobia they found here. One reason for that, I think, is that New York is a much more segregated city than most people realize. Many people live in neighborhoods populated mainly by people who come from their country or culture, or share their religion. And, in another contrast to public perception, there's religious fundamentalism in this city. We may not have snake-handlers and such here, but there are people who belong to various fundamentalist churches. And, of course, there are ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic Jews who, although they barely communicate with anyone else in this city, have a disproportionate influence on public policy.
(To my own surprise, in my early transition, I didn't encounter prejudice from religious Muslims or Catholics, even those who come from "macho" cultures. The latter may have to do with my own Catholic upbringing and the fact that I speak Spanish.)
So, really, I'm not surprised that so many gay couples by the Great Salt Lake or along the Virginia coast or across the river from Windsor are raising kids. To me, it means that simply legalizing same-sex marriage or adding protections for LGBT people to civil-rights laws--as important as those things are--aren't enough to ensure that any kid with gay parents (or, for that matter, LGBT kids) will have the same access to the benefits of a good family and community that their peers (some of them, anyway) have.
Kudos to all of the people in those places--and in my hometown and the other gay "capitals"--who are doing what they can to understand (and, hopefully, accept and support) same-sex parents and their kids. If they are doing so out of their concern for children, as I suspect they are, that is as good a starting point as any.
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