Stranded For Coming Out

People sometimes tell me I'm lucky to be a writer and in the academic world.  They believe--with more than some justification--that "educated" and "creative" people are more receptive, if not welcoming, to transgender people.

Now, if you think I've used a lot of qualifiers in the preceding sentences, you're right and I have good reason for doing so.  On the whole, I probably fared better after "coming out" and starting my transition than I might have in other work environments.  Still, there were people who said and did things that were inappropriate and reflected ignorance if not outright hostility.  Interestingly, I never experienced such treatment from students or fellow writers.  A few faculty members chilled toward me, but most of the difficulties I experienced came from administrators. That may have had more to do with the particular administrators in question than with any general principle.  

Fortunately, I have good relations with my current colleagues.  Some have known me "from the beginning", if you will, while others I met during and since my transition.  

So, perhaps, I can say--as Dan Savage likes to tell LGBT teenagers who are being bullied--"It gets better!"  At least, I'd like to be able to say that to Meredith Talusan.

I've never met her.  In fact, I learned of her only from a news item posted on ABS-CBN News yesterday. She's a graduate student in literature at Cornell University, where she recently applied for a professional position.  As a scholarship student, she's entitled to free on-campus housing and meals.

But now she may lose those--and, perhaps, her scholarship and standing as a student.  No, she didn't fail a class or miss a deadline.  Rather, she had the temerity to protest the harassment she experienced from her housemate and, apparently, others in the university community.  She says people heckle her with comments like "You're a man dressed as a woman!" and "You lost your penis!"

What makes her situation all the more disconcerting, at least for her, is that she's thousands of miles from her home in the Philippines. During an impromptu protest she and some friends staged against her mistreatment, they chanted, "This is what democracy looks like!"  

Like so many who come from faraway countries to work and study in the US, she works hard toward her goal of "a better life".  But her path to that life has been detoured, at least for now, as she was suspended from the house in which she'd been living and has been denied access to meals.  But she has refused to leave and has filed an appeal.

 

Prophecies Of Hate On The Campus Walls?

Last night, a friend told me that there has been a rash of "hate" graffiti on the campus where she teaches.  Most of it has been anti-Semitic, but there have been scrawlings against gays and other groups of people.

Based on my own none-too-scientific observations, I'd say that there's more such graffiti, and it's in a greater number of places, than there was a few years ago.  I wouldn't say there's more graffiti overall, although I have seen it return to the subways after an absence of nearly two decades.  However, the kinds of graffiti I'm seeing give me pause.

In Sounds of Silence, Paul Simon wrote, "The voices of the prophets are written on the subway walls."  In other words, graffiti is often an echo of what people will say when they're not in "polite" company.  While I won't venture an opinion as to whether more people are prejudiced, or whether people are becoming more prejudiced, I think that current conditions are causing some people to murmur, if not say out loud, what they've been thinking.

For all that we hear about "tolerance," it's the people who feel more or less secure that express acceptance of people different from themselves.  In other words, it's the people who haven't slipped into the underclass, whose jobs haven't been outsourced or made redundant.  And they're the same people who can rely on their social and professional networks if things get a little rough.

However, there are whole communities that are being displaced, even in this so-called economic recovery.  In previous economic upheavals, it was mostly the unskilled and semi-skilled workers who lost their jobs and never got them back.  Now we're seeing professionals and managers exhausting their unemployment benefits without getting new jobs.  And the industries in which they worked are disappearing--or moving to other countries, or online--in much the same way the steel industry all but vanished during the past three decades.

According to Bob Marley, "a hungry man is an angry man." People--particularly men who were conditioned to expect a well-paying job--fester with resentment when they lose what they believe to be their rightful place in society and the economy.  Too often, that resentment turns into hatred and violence against members of "minority" groups, who are seen as privileged.  All it takes for that hatred and anger to turn into a full-blown pogrom is a fiery, charismatic leader.  What I am describing, of course, happened in Nazi Germany:  Hitler channeled the misery and desperation of people whose lives were ravaged by hyperinflation and a worldwide depression by scapegoating Jews, Gypsies, gays and other marginalized groups of people.

It's really disturbing, though, that such hate is being expressed so openly on a college campus.  I often hear students express little or no faith in the future:  They realize that they could end up unemployed, and unemployable, even with a degree.  If they start to feel real despair, and that is channeled into hatred against some group or another, who else will fall prey to the sort of rhetoric that equates prejudice with social justice?

Not Eager To Go Back

Yesterday I had breakfast with Millie.  She's old-school and the wife of a retired blue-collar guy, so she doesn't do brunch.  That's one of the reasons why she feels like family to me.

Anyway, she asked whether I was looking forward to starting classes this week.  I'm not; she was surprised and almost a little hurt to hear that.  She said she never cared much for school, but she always liked the fact that I teach and have something resembling an education. In a way, that's not such a surprise:  She is knowledgeable about things that surprised me when I first knew her but don't now.

Why, she asked, am I not so eager to go back to school?  Well, I explained, I'm glad to be teaching again, but I'm not especially anxious to deal with some of the faculty and administrators.  Not all of them, mind you, but some.  And among them there just happen to be people I have to deal with regularly.

As I mentioned in some posts a while back, on a typical workday, I felt anxious and sometimes sick from the time I walked out of my apartment door until I set foot in the classroom.  I felt the greatest tension in my body when I was in a campus building but had not yet entered the classroom in which I was scheduled to teach.  My pre-classroom tension and nausea weren't quite as intense when I rode my bike to school:  At least on those days, pedaling relieved the tension for the time I was on the bike. But once I was parked,  my entrails felt even more tense and tightly wound together than the strands of the cables on the Verrazano Bridge.

I now realize that last year, when the semester was about to begin, I was just a few weeks removed from my surgery.  I was feeling ecstatic and as if I were learning a million things every second.  At times I was positively giddy.  When you feel that way, you overlook a few things, to put it mildly.

But the colleagues and supervisors who had been speaking to me condescendingly and treating me as if I were born the day before yesterday (Give them credit:  They didn't treat me as if I were born yesterday!) had not changed their attitudes or ways.  Being educators--at least in the sense I don't like--they are accustomed to dealing with people by exploiting their insecurities.  They assume that students and instructors with lower ranks than theirs--or people they perceive in any way to be less than themselves--are confused and unsure of themselves.  Contrary what they like to believe, they had a role in creating those fears and uncertainties.

Now I am everything they can't deal with.  I know who and what I am, and am still learning.  I give my best (which, in some areas, is pretty good, if I do say so myself) and go far beyond the written requirements of the job and the unspoken expectations of anyone who does it.  I'm not saying that I can't do more or better, I am saying that I'm not a slacker and, more often than not, I get the job done and I get better at it.  However, they still don't believe that a person like me is supposed to be capable of doing what I do.  

After what I've experienced, I can easily understand why Letitia left the college's Office of Students with Disabilities for its counterpart at another college.  I can also understand why someone who used to direct a campus office told me, "The day I turned in my ID and backed out of the college parking lot for the last time was the best day of my life. "  And, no, she hasn't retired.


They are examples of something I heard once:  Great spirits are the targets of mediocre minds.  

Brunch At The End, No Furlough For Now

There's no furlough...at least for now.   A judge issued a restraining order against it, and there will be a hearing on the 26th.


So it was business as usual at the college. Some classes met for the last time yesterday; others will meet for the last time on Monday or Tuesday.  Then the final exams begin.  This is the time of year when students you haven't seen in weeks come out of the woodwork and the stories  grow longer by the second.  Maybe it seems that way because I got so little sleep last night.


Yesterday there was a brunch for the English majors and minors who are graduating.  In a way, it was bittersweet:  I'm happy for them because they're graduating, but I'm also a bit sad the see them go.  One young woman, who was presenting the research she did as her honors project, was a student of mine during her--and my--first semester at the college.  Another student, in talking about the work she did, said that all she would miss about the college are the department and her professors.


Then there was Joan, a Haitian woman who did some fine research on the poetry of Leopold Senghor.  She took the hip-hop course I taught last year.  Last semester, I saw her in the hallway one afternoon, looking exasperated.  "You look upset," I said.


"That man is driving me crazy!"


"Typical guy.  What's his problem?"


"I can't figure him out."


"Well, you know, guys are simple." (Who would know better, right?)  


"Not him"


"Oh, dear."


"So tell me about him."


The man to whom she was referring was William Butler Yeats.  At the end of our conversation, she exclaimed, "I've got to have a talk with that man."


She's been accepted into a master's-Ph.D. program.  I have mixed feelings about that.  She may well have a successful career as an academic.  She has the commitment to scholarship and the intelligence she'll need.  I just hope the experience doesn't destroy her love of literature, as it does to so many other graduate students.   That's one of the things that made the course I took last year such a dreadful experience:  None of those students seemed to have any love of literature.  Most of the young professors I've seen don't have it, either.  In fact, I daresay that some of them, and my fellow students in that class, hate it.


I really wouldn't want to see Joan lose her passion for poetry and other kinds of expressive language.  I also wouldn't want her to become the petty, vindictive kind of person too many academicians are.  You could see some of those kinds of people on display at the brunch.  Predictably, they are parts of cliques, and will remain in them as long as those little, watered-down fraternities and sororities suit their purposes.  


And, I am reluctant to encourage any student, no matter how intelligent or talented, to pursue graduate studies in literature because the job market is so dismal.  Even during the so-called "good times," there have been hundreds or even thousands of applicants for every new position in any English or literature department.  I said as much to Jonathan, who's a bit socially awkward but who is, at least, achieving what he is on his intelligence and talent rather than on subterfuge.  He is quickly becoming one of the exceptions.


Another example of the petty politics that runs the department and college was evident at the beginning of the brunch.  At the department meeting the other day, a new chair was voted in.  She defeated the incumbent chair, who was supposed to host the brunch.  She had a "commitment" develop at the last minute, so the deputy chair stepped in.  


It was a good time and place to be a student.  I hung out with them after the presentations and speeches.  They, and the food--fried chicken and corn on the cob, along with some sides that I skipped--were the best reasons to be at that brunch.

Lesbians In My Future?

Today Doreen, an advocacy coordinator for SAGE, asked me whether I could spend a day or two in Washington, DC. I would be meeting with other people from SAGE, as well as lobbyists and possibly officials. The only problem is that most of the events in which I'd want to participate are on Monday. I really can't take the day off: I've already taken a sick day and the atmosphere at the college, and in my department, is becoming more and more like what I imagine the CIA to be. Everybody--at least the non-tenured people--are overworked and tense, and nobody seems to trust anybody. I find that I'm becoming more and more like them, at least when I'm not in a classroom or otherwise working with my students.

I realize now that's one of the reasons I enjoyed last weekend so much. The people were great; I would have enjoyed them under just about any circumstance. I felt like I was on a little vacation: There was nothing to do but learn and meet people. At one time, being an educator was like that, and for a time, that's how it was at the college in which I'm teaching now.


Maybe it will be like that again some day. I guess I should be thankful I have a job. I also guess that the powers-that-be realize that we all are thinking that way, and they're exploiting that, if in covert ways.


It seems that since the year began, I've spent every waking hour at the college. What do I have to show for it? What have I accomplished? I might get the opportunity to help more students, but what am I really doing for them if I never have enough time to focus on anything enough to do it well? I sometimes feel like I'm in a crowd and everybody's trying to talk to me at the same time. That means, of course, that I can't really hear anybody, and some of those whom I don't hear will grow angry and hostile. And the authorities will penalize me if any of those angry, hostile people act out of those emotions.


OK. You're going to tell me I'm paranoid. If that's so, I've absorbed what's around me. It may be the reason why I've gained weight and why my sinuses have been acting up.


Plus, I'm noticing that some female colleagues with whom I'd once been friendly--or at least who had been civil toward me--have become disdainful, and have even tinged their interactions with me--to the extent that we have any-- with an undertone of hostility. I'm not saying that all, or even most, most female faculty and staff members have been treating me that way. But a few have been acting like sorority girls faced with a particularly unattractive pledge. They are straight and consider themselves progressive and open-minded. And they all use the rhetoric and vocabulary of gender studies and related fields.


I guess I should have been paying more attention when Elizabeth decided to end her friendship with me: That experience parallells, in so many ways, what's happening now. The funny thing is that she admitted--without any input from me--that the problem is not one of my transition itself, but of her unwillingness to understand. (Ironically, one of my brothers said exactly the same thing when I talked to him for the first time since I "came out.") She expressed resentment that I was unfairly claiming my status as a woman even though I do not share some of the experiences, such as menstruation, that she and other women have in common. She even said that I was "changing gender" to achieve favored status under affirmative-action laws. That, she said, was completely unfair to women like her, who have chosen to pursue degrees in fields like Gender Studies but can't get jobs in them. As if I took a job away from her, or any of her classmates!


It may also be that until people like her and the colleagues I've mentioned met me, they had only read about transgenders in their gender studies books and talked about whatever they read in those books. That, of course, makes transgenders the objects of study. But when you know someone in person, she cannot be an object; she becomes a subject--like a strong, articulate black person, whom liberal academics also cannot stand unless they're dead and in history books.


Now, as I said, not all female academics are as I've described. And almost no woman I've met who isn't an academician is like that. However, I've had my worst individual experiences, so far, with straight women with PhDs in liberal arts subjects.


Maybe I'll be spending more time--or even working with--older lesbians in the not-too-distant future. Right now, that sounds really good.

Gender Studies Is For Faggots; Why's a White Tranny Woman Teaching Hip-Hop?

Don't ask how we got on the subject. But Dominick asked an interesting question: Since I began living as Justine, have I ever entered a men's bathroom by mistake.?

Actually, I haven't. I can confidently say that because if I did, I'd probably remember even though I wouldn't want to. Ironically enough, I can recall times when I accidentally (Yes, I'm telling you the truth!) entered women's bathrooms while I was in boy-drag. Some might argue that my subconscious was guiding me; I wouldn't argue. However, bathrooms for either gender, or both genders, never had any great appeal to me. Why would anyone want to be amid the filth and smell of most bathrooms for any other reason than to do what one needs to do? I mean, I never saw the appeal of "peeping" or having sex in bathrooms.

So what have I "accidentally"done since beginning my transition? Well, early in my life as Justine, I signed documents (including a newly-issued ATM card) and answered the telephone with my old name. Then again, I've always had lapses: I now recall the time early in my sobriety when I signed up for a workshop and gave a telephone number I hadn't had since I was twelve years old. Funny, I can recall it now: 212-435-0470. However, that number--or whatever phone number is assigned to that house--begins with "718" instead of "212" becuase it's in Brooklyn.

Wow! That alone is enough to date me: I can remember when all five boroughs of New York City used the "212" area code.

Anyway...Now that I think of it, I haven't really had many instances of gender spasmosis, if you will. At least not in logistical matters, anyway. But I've found myself lapsing into old ways
of thought and expression, and of acting on attitudes I'd absorbed, as Nick, by osmosis.

Why don't I want to teach that course called "The Poetics and Rhetoric of Hip-Hop?" Well, for one thing, I got into it accidentally. (No, I'm not one of those people who thinks everything happens for a reason.) But more important, I'm exactly what some hip-hoppers despise: I'm a white professional and I'm a woman. But not just any bitch or 'ho: I'm one who used to be a dude, at least on the outside.

Now, I know that not all hip-hop expresses misogyny or homophobia. And hateful ideas don't necessarily make for bad art. (cf. Pound, Celine and goddess-knows-how-many-others) However, knowing that a number of rappers have expressed their disdain or outright disgust for me and my sisters, it's still odd for me to be the one who will not only present the music, but also help students build bridges between it and all those books written by dead white men and taught to me by old white men who are most likely, by now, dead white men.

Oh...So that's why I'm having trouble getting published? I'm not a dead white man. Nor will I ever be. Instead, one day, I'll be a dead white woman. Or tranny-girl.

So I'm all wrong for that course I've designed. That means I'm also wrong for the course I planned to take: Literature, Gender and Sexuality. I've always been wary of gender studies. I don't want to be just another LGBT person with a certificate or degree in gender studies. For one thing, I suspect it would close many more doors than it would open. Haven't you heard: Gender Studies is for faggots. The latter term doesn' t necessarily gay or effeminate men. Instead, it means people, usually men, who wimp out on commitments, or who just generally shrink away from life.

All of this could lead me to what I've been avoiding for so long: becoming a scholar, becoming the enemy, accidentally. I already feel as if I've become one of them, though I'm still not convinced that I could do much in the way of theoretical work.

Yet everyone tells me I'm going to do fine. I must be absolutely amazing and fabulous if I can inspire that kind of confidence when I'm abut to do things for which I have absolutely no aptitude, inclinaton or desire.

So what would I be doing in a class for faggots or about people who despise them? It's a matter of pure, dumb luck.