Thanks For The Flashback, Donald!

Some have called last night's debate "depressing".

It left me in too much shock to be depressed.  The last time I felt that way about an event in which I was not personally involved was on 11 September 2001.

Perhaps I will be depressed about it later.  That is, after living through the trauma I feel is coming over me.  

It started, I now realize, when Donald got just a little too close to Hillary.  That, in and of itself, was scary enough.  But the expression on his face:  Tell me it isn't that of a stalker!

That, and the way he paced around--and his body language and overall demeanor--practically spelled "abuser".

I know.  I was having flashbacks.  Everything gesture, every word of his, was a threat and would have been even if he hadn't thundered that he would put her in jail if he became President.

Abusers do that, a lot:  They make threats.  Just like Dominick threatened to destroy my life--and nearly did--after I told him I wanted no more to do with him.  I'm sure that if he reads this, he will threaten me again.  Or, perhaps, he won't even give me such a warning, and he will go ahead and do something to make my life hell.  As it is, I have recurring health problems as a result of his abuse and harassment. 

There was the e-mail in which he said that "living in a cardboard box will seem like paradise" unless I gave in to his demands.  And the one in which he bragged that he could tell everyone that I had sex with my students, and with children, and "everyone will believe it and not you because they know your (sic) a pervert" and a "completely worthless human being" who "did nothing to make my life better"

Funny that he was calling me a worthless pervert, and claiming I did nothing to enhance his life--before, and after, he begged me to stay with him.  And that he used to call me at all hours to complain about how people treated him, how they imputed all manner of sexual crimes to him, because of his sexuality--or, at least, the way they perceived it--after saying, the day before, that all I ever did "was listen" to him.  "Big deal!" he exclaimed.

Then when I brought him to court, he said the threats he made were "just talk" and "only words".  Hmm...How many abusers have said that?  "I didn't mean it," he whined.  But if he "didn't mean it", why did he?  Why did he say or do those things?  When I asked him that, he made more threats and claimed that I did worse, that other people did worse.  When, in another incident, I called him on his racism, he sent an e-mail to a bunch of people saying that he saw the white robe and hood in my closet the last time he was in my apartment.

Well, all right, Donald at least said "I apologize" before saying Bill did worse things and Hillary has hate in her heart and started the very lie (about Obama's birthplace) he spent years propagating.  That's more than Dominick ever did.  But both of them did the something else abusers are always doing:  blaming their own words and actions on the victim.  It's a clever way for perpetrators to portray themselves as victims without seeming to.

In short, The Donald is a petty, vicious bully, just like most abusers.  Just like Dominick.

Hey, Donald, thanks for the flashbacks.  I'm going to send you the bill from my therapist.  Oh, right:  You're going to make me pay for it.  Just like Dominick said I would pay.

I hear he's looking for a job.  Do you need anybody to help you on your campaign? Oh, right:  I caused him to be unemployed.  He couldn't have said it any better.

At least all he wanted to be was a cop.  Donald wants to be Abuser In Chief, I mean President.

How I Fell Into It

Someone, I forget who, once said that you are truly in prison when you get used to it.  I could say something like that about being in an abusive relationship with someone who’s transphobic.

If you’ve been in an abusive relationship—or if you have spent time around people who’ve been in such relationships—you know that one reason why people stay with abusive partners is that the abuse starts to seem normal. Actually, the person suffering the abuse doesn’t see it as such, at least early in the relationship, because it comes in almost innocuous ways at first.  It starts with the put-down or other insensitive remark that its target forgives or simply allows to go by.  The thing is, the first abusive remark or gesture doesn’t seem that much, if at all, worse than what the abused person has experienced before.

So, when someone says that if you break up with him, you’ll never find anyone else—or will find someone like him, only worse—because you’re too old, fat or ugly or trans, it’s not that much worse than what you’ve heard from other people.  In fact, you might—as I did—have already believed such things, at least subconsciously.  At least, that is what I felt when Dominick told me those things early in our relationship.  I let those remarks go, in part because he is a good bit younger than I am and, as I noticed, not particularly mature for his age.  Plus, he came from a family whose members always said mean and insulting things to each other “in the heat of the moment” or when they were “letting off steam”.

Also, because he is younger—and much better-looking than I expected from my first relationship in my life as a woman, which I began in middle age—I took it as a sign that, yes, I could “succeed” as a woman.  When I began my transition, I met some really scary—and sorry—males.  They saw me as a “chick with a dick” and imputed all sorts of sexual perversions to me.  They believed that I would do, and submit to, all sorts of things they would never demand of “the girl next door” or their boyfriends.  Also—I realized this almost immediately—some of them were trying not to admit to themselves that they were gay, or that they weren’t.

 

Dominick was somewhat akin to them in that he didn’t want to deal with his own life, and his true desires, on their own terms.  Sometimes he would claim to be bisexual, other times gay, depending on what would work best for the occasion.  When I first knew him, he wanted me to “stick” him.  I politely explained that I couldn’t get an erection unless I stopped taking hormones for a few months.  (At that point, I’d been taking them for almost two years.)  When he realized that I wasn’t going to do that, he used to find things he needed a “he-man” or “alpha male” to help him with and make a point of telling people we met that I was a man who was taking hormones.

What I didn’t realize—or, actually, want to admit to myself—was that he’d never given up the dream that one night I would meet him somewhere for dinner (which I would pay for, of course) and announce that I was going to revert to my old name and life and support him in style.  I realized that as the time drew near for my surgery.  When I first scheduled it, he voiced support and even promised to accompany me to it.  But, he found other commitments, other things that had to be done.  For example, the house in which he’d lived his entire life, and looked as if it had never been remodeled in the sixty years it had been in his family, simply had to be redone.  That meant, of course, that he would have to work during the summer.  (He was a special education paraprofessional.)  All right, I said, do what you need to do.

When the summer session ended that August, I was home, recuperating from my surgery.  Millie, who lived across the street from me, stopped by every day and Tami, who lived up the street, came by a couple of times a week.  They bought groceries, helped me with my laundry, changed cat litter and did other things that my inability to lift prevented me from doing.  They even made a few meals for me.

Where was Dominick?  In Aruba.  He “needed” the vacation, he insisted.

Oh--did I mention that the last time I went to his house before my surgery, he blew smoke in my face?  Whenever I talked to him about his two-pack-a-day habit, he took it as an affront.  Now, I must say that he didn’t smoke in my apartment:  I explained that my landlady, who had young children, lived directly above me and one of the conditions of my renting the apartment was that nobody smoked while in it.  But, when I was at his house, he asserted his “right”—which, of course, he had—to puff away.  “My grandmother’s been smoking all of her life,” he’d insist.  So was everyone else in his family.  But, I insisted, if he had any respect for me as a person, he wouldn’t smoke in my presence.  I could just as well have asked him to give up sex with men.

I told him I didn’t want to see or hear from him anymore.  Then I stopped returning his calls and e-mails.  I figured he would get tired of that, as he gives up on almost anything that requires any effort on his part.  But, somehow, he found the energy to escalate his abuse and harassment.  He started leaving “tranny” jokes and the frankly transphobic dialogue from South Park on my voice mail.  After I didn’t respond, he left messages, e-mails and comments on this blog from phone numbers and addresses that weren’t his own and couldn’t be traced.  The early ones said that I’m not a woman and was trying to avoid the “fact” that I’m a gay man.  At least, those accusations were ridiculous:  He said my Adam’s Apple (which I’ve never had) or some other thing gave me away. 

I igonored his voice messages and e-mails and didn’t publish his comments.  Now, after a few months of being ignored, most people would get the message.  But, in this sense, Dominick wasn’t most people:  The more I ignored him, the more he escalated his harassment.  And the harassment turned into stalking, threats and false rumors and other lies about me. When he couldn’t find a more pointed insult or more creative way to bother me, he’d leave simply yell, “Fuckin’ bitch” into my voice-mail—from some number that couldn’t be traced, of course.

Now, you might think that his words and actions were inconsequential, as he didn’t resort to any physical violence.  I understand; that is what I thought—or, at least, told myself.  But he found other ways to escalate his verbal and psychological abuse, and it’s cost me in a lot of different ways.  I’ll talk more about those things in a future post.

Half Are Without A Home

Chances are, you've heard of Covenant House. It operates shelters in 22 cities (including New York, where I live) that aim not only to get and keep teenagers off the streets, but to help them overcome some of the things that render them homeless.  Those things include, of course, drug addiction and mental health problems. But, as the folks at CH have recognized, those problems are usually just the symptoms: The kids run away from home because they've been bullied or experience abuse or other kinds of violence at home.   Or, they are kicked out of their homes for "coming out".  And, of course, such young people--with no credentials or marketable skills, or any means of support--too often turn to drugs and sex work, among other things.

Jake Finney, the anti-violence project manager at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, is very familiar with his city's Covenant House.  Take a guess at how many of its residents are transgendered.

All right, I'll tell you:  Half.  Yes, fifty percent.  One in two.

Now, what percentage of the US population is transgender?  Depending on whom you believe, it's anywhere from 0.3 to one percent of the population:  In other words, anywhere from one in a hundred to one in three hundred thirty. 

To put it another way, a resident of Covenant House-Los Angeles is fifty to a hundred sixty times more likely to be transgendered than someone in the larger population.  

Of course, we all know that it's difficult to get accurate numbers for anything pertaining to transgender people. Part of that has to do with how trans people are defined, but equally important is the fact that many of us live (as I did) in our birth genders for much or all of our lives.  Also, many trans people--such as the ones who become homeless--"fall off the grid."

After Their Traumas

(I know there are now thousands of women in the US Armed Forces.  However, for the purposes of this post, I'll use male pronouns in referring to soldiers.)

A soldier returns home from combat duty.  He's among family and friends, in places that were familiar to him before he went off to fight the war. 

Yet he is still angry, confused, scared or simply anxious.  Although his brain tells him that the family car isn't booby-trapped with explosives, his nerves are still programmed to expect the car to blow up if he opens the door.  Or some smell that he once associated with pleasant experiences--of breakfast, of a walk through the woods--reminds him of the way he lost one of his buddies. 

Or he simply cannot be close to the people who always knew him; he cannot touch his wife or girlfriend.  And his children can be decoys, or victims of a roadside bomb.

As far-fetched as these scenarios might seem to some people, I have heard or read of ones like them.   Just as a wound is still open, or at least present, even as the person with it is in the best hospital in the world, so are the psychic scars of those expereinces with the soldier even as he's among those who have always loved him.

Most of you will recognise what I have described as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.  It is common, not only to members of the military who have served in combat, but also to others who have suffered physically or emotionally traumatic expereinces.  I am talking, of course, about people who have been in abusive relationships or dysfunctional homes, have been the victims of violent crimes or who have survived some sort of terrible accident or natural disaster.

However, I have come across some literature and websites that have referred to PTSD and transgender people.  It doesn't surprise me that the incidence of PTSD is higher among trans people, as well as L's and G's, or people who are simply perceived as such.  We have, after all, experience violence and discrimination directed against us more than most other people.  And many of us who were perceived as incongruent with the expectations of the gender to which we were assigned at birth, or to people's ideas of heterosexuality, also incurred bullying and, sometimes, physical, sexual or emotional abuse as children.

But there are those of us who cry or simply sulk over those past traumas even after we have successfully transitioned into lives in our spiritual and psychological genders, or found the kind of love we have always wanted and needed.  Someone who had her surgery around the same time as I had mine was talking about that just recently.  Yes, she is happy about the life she has now, and wishes only that she'd begun her transition sooner.   However, no matter how good our new lives are, we never quite forget about our old ones.

In Christine Jorgensen's time--and, until not very long before I began my own transition-- doctors and therapists recommended, not only abandoning one's past, but re-inventing it, making up an entirely fictitious personal history.  Doing so, of course, complicated whatever issues those transsexuals may have had. 

Now I can understand why it's entirely useless to tell someone who's been traumatized to "just get over" their pasts.  I don't care whether that person suffered abuse from his or her family or spouse (current or former), or whether that person carries the residual effects of being called "Nigger!" or seeing her uncle hanging from a tree.  (A student of mine, who returned to school at age 58, related such an expereince to me.)  There are some things you just don't get over.  And maybe you need not to "get over" them if you want to move forward and create the kind of life you envisioned for yourself.

Transploitation

After Sophie's comment on yesterday's post, I could not stop thinking about the ways we are dehumanized, wittingly or not.


The reason why so many otherwise well-meaning people turn us into "things" is that the act of identifying someone by a label strips that person of his or her humanness.  And that is the surest and easiest way to destroy that person's humanity, as well as one's own humanity.


Pardon me if I seem bitter in writing this post.  But I have come to realize that some people who might go and march for someone else's civil rights would think nothing of being manipulative, controlling or otherwise abusive with us.  And the perpetrators don't think they're doing anything wrong, much as previous generations of white people thought it was OK to be condescending, demeaning, abusive or even violent toward black people in ways that would get them thrown into jail if they so treated another white person.


To me, they're no different from the sorts of guys--like the fugitive doctor I mentioned in my previous post--who use us to satisfy their sexual curiosity, or simply their horniness.  Too many of us can recall at least one relationship like that.  It's almost as if they think they're doing us favors by being involved with us and that we are so starved for love that we'll serve as their mental (or, in some cases, physical) punching bags.


I was in such a relationship, and am still recovering from it.  As bad, though, are the ones who are not dating us but with whom we have to live or work, and do not let us forget that, and what wonderful people they are for not throwing us out like a carton of yogurt that's past its "sell by" date. 


They are the bosses who deny us pay, make demands on us they won't make on other employees and who look for reasons to get rid of us because we "don't fit in with the culture" of the workplace.  They are dismissive of our ideas, which they take for themselves or hand off  to some co-worker who gets credit for it.  Those co-workers are the ones who make spurious, false complaints--anonymously, of course--about us that are as likely as not to include some sort of sexual allegation or innuendo.  They may not know anything about us, but they know that attaching sex to our names yields a stereotype or cariacture that too many other people  are all too willing to believe and use as rationales for the things they do to us.


Isn't it ironic that the thing that, according to no less than Mark Twain, people care about more than everything else put together is the very thing that they will use against us?  Yet it is the very same thing for which they come to us--and, in some cases, react with violence when we don't give it to them, or when it turns out differently from what they expected.  Or, after getting it from us, they toss us aside like soiled napkins.


What's ironic is that I'm writing this post at a time when I'm meeting some people who are not treating me in the ways I've described, and when I'm in a different work situation from the one I've depicted. In my second job, my gender identity or transition doesn't come up.  Some know about it; a few have told me they've seen this blog and some of my other writings.  But they haven't pressed me to talk more about them, and I haven't.  On the other hand, on the job I've been working the past few years, I was "outed" by a faculty member a few weeks after I started there.  Then others goaded me into giving lectures and workshops; still others wanted me to be their "show-and-tell" exhibit for their classes in human sexuality or gender issues.  They people who asked--or, in some cases, coerced--me into doing those things are the very same people who used my doing those things (not to mention the fact that I am who I am) against me.


On that job--which I'd like to replace with my second job if and when I can become full-time in it--some other faculty members (Notice that I'm not calling them my colleagues.) and members of the administration seem to think they're entitled to not only knowing about the intimate details of me and my life, but to use them as they will.  If I were to do the same things, I probably would have been out of that job long ago. In fact, I might even be in jail or the target of a lawsuit.


The doctor I mentioned in yesterday's post definitely deserves to be in prison for the things he did to his patients and the way he abused the system.  But if I were the transgendered Dante, I'd have an especially tortuous circle of Hell set up for him and others like him.  

Agoraphobia

I'd been avoiding Sara.  Actually, I'd been avoiding her friend, too, perhaps even more than I'd been avoiding her.  But she sounded distressed in the last message she left me.  I knew I might be wading into quicksand, but I called back anyway.


Turns out, the friend moved out without notice.  They'd known each other for about thirty years and lived together for twenty-five.  Each of them wanted the other.  But she wanted her friend as she is; the friend wanted her only if both of them could change:  she, her desires and her friend, her body.


You may have guessed (if you haven't looked at the link) that the friend is transgendered.  She is probably the most masculine woman I ever met; in fact, she looks and even acts the way I might have had my testosterone count been just a bit higher, or my estrogen level lower.  She just reached one of those round-number years that signals one is no longer young and more than likely has more years behind than ahead of her.  And, due to various medical problems as well as her finances, she cannot have the penis she always wanted.


It's really difficult for me to describe the friend, whom I've called "Dee" on this blog, with female pronouns.  Even more people call her "sir" or use male pronouns in reference to her than to me early in my transition.  I normally don't make such judgments, but Dee really should have been born with the equipment I had.  The shape of her body is even similar to what mine was before I started my transition, and somewhat like my body now.  


But upon meeting her, I could feel her anger toward me.  Some trans people who can't begin or consummate their transitions often project their anger toward the world, including people who have nothing to do with the state of their lives.  (That, of course, includes most people.)  I know I did.  And I realize how awful it must have been for some people who had to live, work or otherwise deal with me.


If I could do something to help Dee, I would.  But there isn't anything I can do.  And, I don't think she wants to change.  In fact, I told Sara that in leaving her, and moving in with her mother (whom she claims to detest), Dee may actually be preparing herself to die.  Given her medical conditions, that's not implausible.




And now Sara needs help, at least emotionally, from anyone who can give it to her.  I'm not sure that I can.  When I've talked to her, she's sounded like one of those women whose abusive husbands just left her.  They are stunned because they have known nothing else for so long.  Whether the abuse is physical, psychological or verbal, it changes the person receiving it.  They're rather like prisoners who start to see captivity as normal; the first taste of freedom is overwhelming rather than exhilarating.  I've known women like that and in fact got involved in romantic relationships with at least two.  


I'm going to have supper with Sara tomorrow night.  I'm willing to help her.  But somehow I get the feeling that there's something she needs, and may be seeking from me.  And I may not have it.  Quite honestly, about all I can do is to empathise with her to the degree that I can understand what it's like to be Dee.  Admittedly, I can do that more than most other people could, simply because of my own experience.  But I'm not sure I have anything else to offer Sara.