Brendon Ayanbadejo Gets It--Almost

Kelli Busey's Planet Transgender has become one of my favorite transgender-related blog.  Actually, it achieved that distinction not long after I discovered it.  She's usually on the right track and on point, and manages to be both assertive and gentle.

She shows all of those qualities in her most recent post.  In it, she mentions the support  Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo's attempt to express his support for transgender rights, as he understands them.  The only problem is that he understands them in the same way too many other well-meaning but misinformed people understand them:

If a woman wants to wear a man's clothes or if a man wants to wear a woman's clothes or you feel like you're a woman on the inside and you're really a man. Who cares? Let's just treat everyone equally. Let's move on. Let's evolve as a culture, as a people.”

My impulse is to be charitable with him. Some of us who are members of the gender-variant community, and some who spend a lot of time around folks like us, would excoriate him for showing that he seems not to understand the difference between a cross-dresser and a transgendered person.  Perhaps he doesn't understand such a distinction:  Somehow I don't think he doesn't know a lot of trans people or cross-dressers and doesn't spend a lot of time around people who are familiar with us.  That's all right:  Most people probably don't know any trans people, either--or, at least, they don't know that they know us.

Plus, I somehow get the impression that his heart is at least in the right place.  Basically, he's saying that we should try to get along and to realize that we're all in the same world, in the same struggle, together, and that we can and must move forward.

I don't go to Facebook very often.  However, I'm going to post a comment on his fan page.  In it, I will praise him for saying that we should treat everyone equally and "evolve as a culture", while pointing out the difference between transgenders and cross-dressers.

Transgender Veterans

Today is the real Veterans' (Armistice) Day.  So I thought it would be interesting to share something I found on You Tube.

Monica F. Helms--who, interestingly, created the Transgender Pride Flag--is a transsexual Navy veteran who began her transition at about the same age that I began mine.  She made two videos tracing the history and contributions of transgender" and "transgender-like" people who served in the Armed Forces, from the American Revolution to the Gulf Wars.  

She uses the term "transgender-like" because, as she points out, the term "transgender" wasn't invented until the mid-20th Century.  While there are accounts of people who crossed gender lines and served in the military, the records and details of their lives are often sketchy, particularly about their lives after the military.  Some "transgender-like" people may have crossed gender lines (as you might expect, from female to male) in order to enlist and returned to living in their birth genders after taking off their uniforms for the last time.

I suspect that in some of the earlier wars, gender-crossing might have been more common than people realized:  a Union Army nurse during the Civil War estimated that she had seen 400 cross-dressing women in blue uniforms.  There are accounts of women who lived as men, both in and out of the military, whose "secret" wasn't revealed until they went for medical treatment, or even until they died (as happened to the jazz musician Billy Tipton). However, by 20th Century, records and medical tests had become more accurate, so there are fewer accounts of female-to-male soldiers and sailors in the two World Wars than there were even in the Spanish-American war.

Anyway, Ms. Helms did a great job, I think, especially when one considers how much difficulty she must have had in getting the material for her documentary.    For one thing,  military and medical records from, say, the War of 1812 are  far from complete.  (Even in more recent times, records were destroyed in fires, floods and such.)  Also, many families--and, I am sure, the Army and Navy--managed to keep secret the identities of many who served, particularly as spies.  And, of course, one has to wonder whether very many people who were in a position to help--let alone the Armed Forces--were helpful.

Part 1:




Part 2: