Speaking Up For Her Daughter

She denies it now.  Still, I think there had to be times when it couldn't have been easy for my mother to raise me.  Given the circumstances--the ones inside my head as well as those around her--she did a great job, I'd say.

There were times she defended me.  Sometimes I needed it, other times I didn't.  And there were times I deserved it, and times I didn't.  But, even though I wasn't an angel, I'd say that most of the times she stuck up for me, I was the sinned-against rather than the sinner, if you will.  Heck, there was even a time--in eighth grade, I think--when a teacher told me to restrain another kid who was acting up in the cafeteria, knowing full well that kid would start a fight with me if I did.  Even the other kid admitted as much to the principal and the teacher got a reprimand from that principal--and an earful from my mother.

But one thing she never had to do was to defend my right to use a bathroom.  Actually, my using a bathroom in school was usually a non-issue because I didn't use the facilities in school if I could help it.  To me, the boys' bathrooms were the most dangerous place in the school besides the locker room, depending on which gym teacher was on duty.  And, of course, I would not have been allowed to use the girl's bathroom.  Nor would it have occurred to me to ask, given the times.   And, to my knowledge, there weren't any gender-neutral bathrooms in the school, and I don't think I would have been allowed to use the one in the principal's office.

Does any mother--or father--ever think that defending a kid's right to use a bathroom--i.e., the one appropriate to the gender by which the kid identifies--is in his or her job description?  Then again, does any parent have any idea of what he or she is in for if the kids' transgender?

Such are the dilemmas faced by Jennifer Surridge.  Her 11-year-old, who identifies as a girl, attends school in Sodus, a rural town on the shore of Lake Ontario, about halfway between Rochester and Syracuse.  Parents there are upset that her daughter is using bathrooms and locker rooms intended for other girls.  At a school board meeting this week, Ms. Surridge had to explain to those parents that her child's gender identity is not a "choice":  She was born a girl, albeit in a boy's body, and she would be in danger in male facilities.

"Transgender is not a choice," she explained.  "I don't care what anyone in this room says, it is not a choice.  Nobody would choose to live this kind of life."

Spoken like a great mother.  Trust me, I am familiar with the species.

I Am A Crime With A Fine Of $2500

I am an offense that carries a $2500 fine.

No,  you didn't misread that.  It's true of me, and every other trans person--most of all transgender kids in the state of Kentucky.

How can that be?, you ask.

Well, Bluegrass State senator C.B. Embry Jr has just sponsored a bill that would allow a student to sue his or her school for $2500 if he or she were to encounter someone of the opposite biological sex in the bathroom.

It is intended as a way to enforce another part of the proposed law:  that students must use the bathroom designated for the sex indicated on their birth certificates, not the one by which they identify.

The bill would also allow students to ask for special accomodations such as unisex bathrooms.  But how many kids would actually do such a thing?  Some simply wouldn't know enough to do so; others would feel intimidation, especially if they are in hostile--or, at least, non-supportive--environments. Nothing is more humiliating and embarassing for a kid than feeling singled out, which is usually what happens when a kid gets "special" accomodations for anything.

So, in essence, the bill would criminalize trans kids simply for existing and fine their schools for it.  That is going to promote the safety and welfare of children...how?

Bathroom Flow Chart

Here's something to help us in the Great Bathroom Debate:

From Transgender Student Equality Resources

School Rules

Speaking of trans kids in school...

By Landon Pan and Ethan Lopez

Does GRS Count?

It's the bathrooms, again.  Should I be surprised?

Well, perhaps.  It never ceases to amaze me that the anti-trans crowd always manages to sink to new lows over the issue of where we can relieve ourselves.

Listen to what Colorado school board member Katherine Svenson has to say on the subject:




She says trans people should be castrated before we're allowed to use the bathroom appropriate to the gender by which we identify.

She probably believes that the surgery I underwent four years ago is castration. So, I guess she wouldn't be upset by my using a girl's bathroom.

What AB 1266 Really Means

I can just hear the bloviators at Faux News now...

Governor Jerry Brown has just signed AB 1266 into law.  It means that transgender students will now be a "protected class."

It seems that any time a new law to protect trans people is passed, discussion goes into the toilet.  I mean, literally: Somehow, it always ends up being about the bathrooms.

So, to hear the right-wing sages, a kid could just one day decide he wants to be a girl--or she wants to be a boy--and use the bathroom he or she "chooses".

Let me tell you:  It doesn't work that way.  I know of no boy who wakes up one day and decides he's a girl--or any girl who begins a new day by trying on the guy thing.  If anything, 99 percent of boys don't want, in any way, to be perceived as feminine (as they understand it), much less as girls.  Even kids like the one I was will  do whatever we can to avoid hearing that we run, throw, kick or do anything else "like a girl." 

Girls, on the other hand, are less anxious about being perceived as boyish.  Still, not many--if any at all--ever "decide" to be boys.

Those of us born with male bodies do not merely "believe" we are female or choose to be so; we know that is what lies at the essence of our beings.  The same can be said for male beings born into female bodies.  

AB 1266 is not about allowing kids to use "whatever bathroom they want."  It's instead a way of fostering an environment in which a kid can actually learn about who he or she is, and to be given the means (which others will also be given) of understanding it.

When I was growing up, neither I nor any other kid--nor, for that matter, most of the adults--had the means of understanding--the language, if you will--gender identity and expression.  One of my earliest school memories is of a hall monitor telling the boys to stand on one line and the girls on the other.  If you're reading this, you know which line I stood on, and you can imagine what the consequences were. Telling that monitor--or, most likely, any teacher or the principal in that school--that I was indeed a girl was met by incomprehension, as if I'd spoken a dialect they'd never before heard, or hostility toward what they perceived as my insubordination.

What's really frightening for me to realize is that, in spite of my isolation and the alienation it would engender, I probably had an easier time than other kids with my predicament.  What I hope is that AB 1266 and other initiatives will help to ensure that kids growing up today won't have similar experiences.

California Bill For K-12 Transgenders

Today, California lawmakers approved a bill that would allow transgender K-12 students to decide which bathrooms they will use, and on which sports teams they will participate.

As usual, some people worry that boys will pretend to be transgender in order to "sneak and peek" in girl's bathrooms.  

I can tell you that such a fear is unfounded.  No boy who wants to see what a girl has under her panties would ever pretend that he's transgender.  After all, most boys--at least those of a certain age--want to date girls.  There's no way they'll get to do that if they're trans, or even if they are seen as "girly".   Plus, almost no boy--not even the toughest--would subject himself to the bullying and worse he would experience for being perceived as "girly".  

Plus, I remember the bullying I experienced in boy's bathrooms, even though my clothing and other aspects of my appearance were completely congruent with what most people in this society (at that time, anyway) expected of boys.  It would begin with a comment like, "I thought this was a BOY's bathroom!" and go downhill from there.  I can only imagine what I would have faced had I dressed like a girl and manifested my mind and spirit in other ways.  

I hope that at least some kids--including, now, the ones in California--won't have such experiences.

It's About The Bathrooms, Again

When I was in school, I very rarely went to the bathroom.  That wasn't because I ate an unusual diet or had extraordinary self-control.  Rather, I was just too damned scared to use the boys' bathrooms. To me, they were the most dangerous parts of the school:  If I were harassed or beaten, there would be nobody to stop it.  

In elementary school, all of the teachers were female.  In high school, we had some male teachers, and most of the security guards were men, but their bathrooms were separate from the students'.    


I was always a target for bullies because I was considered a "sissy" or "girly" boy.  In fact, some--and, I would later learn, a couple of teachers--actually referred to me as a "girl".  Ironically, they were right, but in school that put me in danger.   After I started to work out and play sports, the school thugs no longer punched me in the face in the hallway or body-slammed me into lockers.  However, the bathrooms were like black holes:  Kids quite literally disappeared into them.

If it was so dangerous for me even though I was a fairly athletic teenager, I can only imagine what it would have been like had I been living and dressing as a girl, or even if I'd been more androgynous than I was.  

Even after I left school, male-only bathrooms terrified me.  Whenever I had to use a toilet while away from home, I sought out bathrooms that weren't gender-specific.  That meant going to a pizzeria, coffee shop or store that had a single bathroom or toilet stall for all customers.  Even the filthiest, smelliest ones didn't frighten and repulse me as much as male-only facilities.

I think of those experiences whenever any government or other institutions is crafting transgender-inclusive policies, or at least rules that don't discriminate.  It seems that most people don't object until it comes to the part about bathrooms.  That is where people's acceptance of diversity in gender identity and expression stops.  People who were all for equal rights adopt "boys are boys and girls are girls" attitudes that could make any fundamentalist preacher seem like the director of PFLAG.  

Not surprisingly, that's happening in Massachusetts right now.  The Bay State's Department of Education has just issued a list of directives for handling transgender students so that schools are in compliance with the 2011 anti-discrimination law to protect transgender people.  Included are policies that allow students to use bathrooms or play on the sports teams designated for the gender by which they identify.  


While resistance to these policies has been, perhaps, not as strong as opposition to similar policies in other parts of the nation, it has been not only present, but almost entirely predictable. 

How predictable?  It uses the same trite and misinformed arguments as other objections to such policies.  Here's another maddening similarity:  the name of the group leading the opposition.  In this case, it's the Massachusetts Family Institute.

Why is it that so many transphobic and homophobic groups have the word "family" in their names?   My cynical self says it's a smokescreen.  However, people who oppose the kinds of policies adopted in Massachusetts almost always are sincere in the belief that they support "families"--or, at least, their concept of them.  They usually make voice their objections in religious terms: "The Family" is, in their view, based on differences in gender that are ordained by God.

However, I cannot understand how anyone can purport to be advocates of families or "The Family" if they are not concerned with the safety and well-being of children.   Trans kids need to be in an environment where they can learn without unwarranted threats to their physical beings and emotional health.  In that sense, as in many others, they are exactly like all other kids.  

I can understand the discomfort some might feel over someone they perceive to be of the "other" gender in their bathrooms.   Most of us feel the need for privacy as we take care of our needs.  Most school bathrooms provide that, at least to some degree:  The ones I've seen all have stalls.  (When I was living as a male and using men's bathrooms, I used the stalls even if I had only to urinate:  I didn't want to stand alongside other men at the urinals!)  Others are worried about the potential for rape and harassment.  I have looked long and hard, and I have yet to find any report of a male-to-female transgender of any age harassing a woman in a bathroom.  We don't go to bathrooms for that reason; still, we are conflated with "peeping Toms" and pedophiles.  

I have found that most people understand what I've just described if it's explained to them, and they actually get to know a trans person or two.  On the other hand, those who belong to "Family" organizations seem to cling to their phobias, no matter what facts are presented to them.

Stories of Men And Women

Nobody's a hero; nobody's decorated.  Nobody's remembered...at least not the men, anyway.  Now that everybody who was related to me--that I know of, anyway--is gone, I hope nobody on this block remembers me, either.  It's a privilege I could've claimed for myself the day I left, no matter where I went next.


But of course I didn't have to.  That may be the one advantage I have as a result of growing up here:  I've never had to claim privilege; I've never had to pull rank on anyone.  At least, I've never felt any such need.  You might say that I'm not impressed with people or with anything they do; I'm even less awed by men and their stories.  That isn't to say that I fear no one:  I simply have a pretty good idea of who can or can't, or who will or won't, do what, and to whom or what.


So there're lots of things I've never had any use for.  Like most of the things they tried to teach me in school--or, more precisely, most of the things they were supposed to make gestures of teaching me and I was supposed to make them think I'd learned--and everything I heard in church.  The canons of the academies and monasteries echo thousands of lies and even more exaggerations and misrepresentations.  No one you will ever meet is like anyone you read about in any history book or any epic tale, whether it's Beowulf, The Deerslayer or All Quiet On The Western Front.  The ballads I had to hear and the paintings we looked at in textbooks and school trips to museums were all about generals, emperors or mystic visionaries:  all about solitary men leading lonely young men to their deaths, in the fields or in the trenches, or at their own hands.  No man like any of those characters or figures ever came from this block--or, for that matter, any other blocks like this one that I've seen or heard about.


Who's ever written an opera about a woman and her cat?  Or a woman and another woman, or a woman and her children?  About the latter, there's the story of Mary and Jesus.  Of course!:  two people who never could have existed on this block.  Not only is he too good to be true, she...well, let's say she contradicts one of the few relevant facts that's ever been taught in any science class!


Why can't we have a religion--if we have to have one--based on the story of a woman and her cat?  At least someone could get that one right, I think.  I don't believe anyone could set down the story of a woman and her child, and whenever anybody's set down the story of a woman and a woman, it sounds like a man's fantasy.  (Trust me.  I know the difference:  I've had lots of time--and more opportunities than anyone should have--to learn.)


But about a woman-and-her-cat tale:  If someone could write it, that person is not me.  I've never kept a feline, at least not long enough to have such a relationship.  The one time I had one--a gray, smoky shadow I never named--I ended up giving him to an old woman.  It just didn't seem fair to make that cat dependent on someone like me; it was no more fair to the cat than my dependence on my mother, for so many years, was to her.  Since then, I've done my best to avoid creating any need for me in any other living being.


Even if I'd had a cat, a child, or any other permanent companion, I couldn't have written about me and him, her or it.  Maybe, as people have told me,  if I'd stayed in school, I'd've learned how to put some experiences--my own and those of others--on a page, or even between the covers of a book.  There's so much I never learned.  As a kid, I asked myself, "Why should I?"  "So I could write the kinds of things they made us read?," I wondered.  "Or to play what they taught us was music, or how to say their prayers?"  


So now I have practically no education and, as far as most educated people are concerned, I'm illiterate, or close to it.  Still, I've managed to read a bit since I stopped going to school.  I've even finished a few books, a couple of plays and a whole bunch of poems:  something I never accomplished when I was in school.  I'm not going to explain or analyze anything I've read:  Anything I could say about them isn't that important and probably has already been said.  I don't know.  Maybe I'd've stuck with school or "done something with" myself if I'd've known, while I was still in school, that such pieces of writing existed.  Let's just say that they're not about war heroes, and they're not the sorts of things that give men excuses for belieiving that women are neurotic.


I don't think anybody on this block has read them.  Living on this block isn't like being in one of those neighborhoods where people spend their Sundays talking about what was in The Times Book Review over brunch.  (I had never heard of brunch when I was growing up!)  I don't think even Mrs. Littington--who'd seen more of the world than most of us and spoke at least two languages--had ever read them.  (I can only hope that she didn't have to read some of those really awful books and even worse translations they tried to shove down my throat:  their Bible, for instance.)  


As far as I know, the male gender has produced three real poets--at least, when it comes to writing about other men.  One of them--who actually could create convincing female characters, too--wrote Othello, The Tempest and Macbeth, and of course a whole bunch of sonnets.  Another wrote some fine poetry and Les Miserables. And, finally, there's the one who wrote about Don Quixote.  I'll pass on the rest.  Just for once, I want a story about a woman opening--or closing--her window.