Inspired By Caitlyn To Tell Their Stories

Equality will have been achieved when all trans (or gender non-conforming) people can enjoy the same right to live as the people they are, without fear of losing their jobs, housing, families, relationships or lives, as cisgender people have.  In other words, we'll all be equal when we don't have to be rich and famous to, not only transition, but to be seen as a role model for doing so.

Caitlyn Jenner understands this.  Yesterday I applauded her for mentioning Sam Taub, the Detroit-area transgender teenager who committed suicide.  Now, Ms. Jenner's example is encouraging some of us, who transitioned long before Ms. Jenner, to tell our stories.  And the New York Daily News featured a few of them today: 



 
Caitlyn Jenner said she couldn’t wait to hear the stories of her transgender sisters. Well, the Daily News is providing three gripping tales from men who transitioned long before it became a reality TV show.
Like the 65-year-old Olympic gold-medal champ, this trio has struggled with doubts, fears and tears — including ones shed from the joy of finally embracing a life that’s been in limbo, in some cases for decades.

Each personal journey is unique, but share common threads. The road to transitioning reaches back to childhood — as early as first grade. Experimenting with cross-dressing came long before these women’s brave decisions to live authentically.

Discussing their lives wasn’t an invitation for tell-all revelations about surgery, genitals or sexual mores. But in reading each story, you get intimate portraits of the people living them — and the challenges that face all transgender Americans.

James Keivom

Actress Shakina Nayfack

Transgender actress Shakina Nayfack tells of her incredible journey from being a young Jewish boy bullied by high school classmates to an outspoken theater veteran. "I’m a white trans woman playing the Statue of Liberty in a show about illegal immigration," she says. READ THE STORY.

Aaron Showalter

Willa France

Willa France was at the top of her career as a lawyer when she transitioned to being a woman in her 50s. The East Harlem resident talks to the News about her own transformation, keeping her marriage intact and a defense of Jenner's fashion sense. READ THE STORY.

Bryan R. Smith

Patricia Harrington

Patricia Harrington says her transformation into her "authentic person" has been a series of small victories since trying to stand on the girl's line as a six year old boy. "It took another 35 years or so to open up," she says. " I’ve come so far in my life." READ THE STORY

Photo by Emma

Veronica Vera 

Meet Veronica Vera, founder of the Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, who has helped countless men transition into women from her center in Chelsea. The once-repressed Catholic girl came to New York in the 1970s to explore her own sexuality, which led to her becoming her adopted home town's bbt. READ THE STORY.

Age, Hormones Or Fatigue?

Today I stopped in a bike shop in my neighborhood.  It’s a tiny place that’s been there for about as long as its owner has been in the neighborhood—which is to say, most of his life.

There, I saw someone I hadn’t seen in a while.  He’s worked in the shop during the season for as long as I can remember.  Whatever they’re paying him, he can afford to work there:  He retired from a city job when he was 50.

(Old bike-industry joke:  “Wanna know how to end up with a small fortune in this business?  Start with a big one!”)

We chatted.  “Still riding, I see.”  I nodded, but I wondered why he said that.  As long as I don’t have a condition that precludes doing so, I intend to keep on cycling.

“What about you?”

“My cycling days are over,” he said. 

“Oh, I’m fine.  Just old.  Too old to ride.”

“How old is that?, might I ask.”

He told me.

“So you’re retiring from cycling—but not working?”

He sighed.  “The legs can’t do what they used to do.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I’m not sorry.  I had some really good times on my bike.  Good memories.”

He didn’t mention any injuries or debilitating diseases.  I’m guessing that riding just became more pain than pleasure for him.

I must admit:  It wasn’t comforting to hear what he said, as I’m closer to his age than I’d like to admit.  He was younger than I am now when we first met and did some rides together. 

When I first started to talk about my gender identity issues with my former partner, she predicted that I might give up cycling. “It’ll suck,” she said, “when you’re full of estrogen instead of testosterone.”

“Why should it matter?”

“You don’t realize how accustomed you are to the strength you have.  I don’t know that you’d like riding without it.”

As I mentioned in a post on my other blog, I thought about giving up cycling when I first started living as Justine, about a year after I started taking hormones.  At that point, I hadn’t yet noticed much of a loss in my strength.  I just thought that cycling was part of my life as a guy named Nick and wasn’t sure I could bring it into my new life.

I love cycling now as much as I ever did.  Perhaps more so: I think that in my youth and my life as a male (which overlapped quite a lot!), I prided myself on riding longer, harder and faster than most other cyclists, at least the ones I knew.  Even more, I liked the admiration and respect I got from other male cyclists, some of whom won races.

Since my transition, I’ve become a different sort of cyclist.  I don’t have the strength I once did.  Some of that may be a matter of age or other factors besides my hormonal changes.  Surprisingly, I didn’t have to “accept” that I wasn’t going to be as strong or fast as I once was; rather, I found that cycling heightened the emotional release I have felt in living as the person I am.

I hope that I can continue it—cycling, or more important, what it’s become for me—when I get to be the age of the man I met today.  And beyond. 

 

Riding On Race Memory

The other day, I took a ride I hadn’t taken in a long, long time.

I ended up in Long Branch, New Jersey, as I’d planned.  I rode there back in December.  But I made a wrong turn just as I was leaving the industrial and post-industrial necropolis of north-central New Jersey took a very different route from the one I’d planned.  I didn’t mind: It was a very satisfying ride that took me away from the traffic streaming in and out of the shopping malls that day, the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend.

But Sunday I took the route I rode so many times in my youth, through the weathered Jersey Shore communities that line Route 36 from Keyport to the Highlands.  So much was as I remembered it from the last time I rode it, twenty years ago, and the first time I rode it, twenty years before that. Then I crossed over the arched bridge that spans the Shrewsbury River where it empties into Sandy Hook Bay and drops into the spit of land that separates the river and bay from the Atlantic Ocean.  

At the top of the bridge, the ocean stretches as far as you can see. Whether it was bluer than any eye or stone I’ve ever seen, or grayer than steel, nothing made me better than seeing it and descending that bridge.

Here is something I wrote about the experience of doing that ride for the first time as a woman named Justine—after many, many journeys as a boy and man named Nick:

*****************************************************************************************

Yesterday’s ride brought back memories of the race.

I did not make the turn.  I could not.  I did not for many, many years.  But yesterday I did.

Either way meant pedaling uphill.  To the left I went.  Two hills, instead of one.  Between them, a brief flat, where I could regain some of the momentum I’d lost.

But the climbs were neither as long nor as steep as I remembered.  I forgot that I’m not in as good shape as I was the last time I did this ride, this race, more than twenty years ago.  

To get to the ocean and back.  That was all I had to do in those days.  To the ocean and back before dark, before the air grew as cold and night as false as the water, as the reflections on it:  my reflections.

All I had to do was get back for dinner.  At least, that’s all I was told to do.  Sunday; you simply did not miss dinner.  You couldn’t even be late for it.  So there was only so much time to get there, to get to the ocean and back.

I am pedaling on memory now.  My body’s memory:  the only kind.  The first time I did this ride, when I was a teenager.  The last time, twenty years later, twenty years ago.

Before the memory, I knew nothing.  I could only move ahead, I could only pedal.  Gotta make it.  I could not stop. My memory of this ride, this race, could not, could not let me.  You will.  I could not hear; when you’re in this race, you can’t.

On that flat between the climbs, a woman walked toward me.  She says something; I can only see her.  She knows me perfectly well; I don’t.  She does not stop me; I cannot.

She would climb these hills many more times.  You’ll make it!  How does she know?  I have no other choice.

The climb is easier when you have a memory of the race.  It’s inevitable.  You couldn’t go any other way.  There is only the race, the climb, that ends at a bridge that you’ll cross because there is no other way over the bay, to the ocean.  

Because I made the turn. Because I couldn’t have gone any other way.  Not when a teenaged boy’s elbows and knees slung him forward on his saddle and up the hills.  Not when the memory of a woman in late middle age, the electricity in her flesh—his flesh—guides the wheels beneath her, beneath him, over the bridge and to the ocean.

The day is clear.  Reflections of the sun pulse; she moves the weight of his bones down a narrow strip between the bay and the ocean all the way to the end.  His end, where he turned around for the race.  He would have to get there and back while he could; she knew he would but he could not.  He could not have known.  He could only push; he could only pump.

The sunset is even clearer.  Weathered houses stand ready; the abandoned ones lost to the tides.  I am pedaling into the wind but my bike rolls as easily and smoothly over cracked asphalt as boats, sails like wings fluttering between ripples of water and clouds. 

They will reach their shores, whoever is guiding them, whoever guided them years ago.  I came to the end of yesterday’s ride on my memory of a race:  the teenaged boy who first followed these roads, the young man who did not know how to turn; the man who would not—and, finally, twenty years later, the woman who could not.  She crossed the bridge to the ocean. 

Yesterday I rode on the memory of that race, the race that I am.

The Double Bind

This morning, before going for a bike ride, I went to the store.  Along the way, I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen in a while.  She recently completed her Master of Fine Arts degree.  For her thesis, she made multi-media collages that celebrated women’s sexuality.  While she was working on it and taking her classes, she had a job in the same institution where she earned her degree.

She talked about the shame and guilt she had to overcome to do her creative work.  It occurred to me then that women still have to get past the notions that we are tainted and damned simply because we are women and have sexual desires, whatever they may be.  And people denounce us whether or not we express who we are.  Those who tell us that we’re being too conservative or dowdy are the first ones to condemn us for wearing anything that even hints at our sexuality, and those who denounce us for being “too sexy” are the ones who complain that we’re “too boring” when we “tone it down.”

I’m thinking now about Segolene Royal, who lost the French Presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007.  She’s been voted “the best-dressed politician in Europe and, while not provocative, does not play down her physical attractiveness.  In response to those who criticized her for that, she’s said, “Who says politicians have to be ugly and boring?”

It occurs to me now that this is one of the dilemmas trans people face all the time.  Those of us who identify as women experience everything I’ve just described and, because we have lived as males, we are probably even less prepared for it than people who’ve lived their entire lives as female.  It even happens to someone like Caitlyn Jenner:  There has been the sort of praise and damnation we’ve come to expect, from the people we’ve come to expect.  But there are also people who’ve criticized her for being too glamorous or, as one female celebrity said only half in jest, “Who does she think she is, looking better than I look?”

Now I realize that this bind women, and trans people in particular, face is one of the things that exacerbated the plight of the Lost Generation of Transgenders to which I’ve alluded in other posts. After gaining some visibility—and even a little support—during the 1960’s and 1970’s, trans people were rendered visible, at best, and vilified, at worst.  As I’ve mentioned,  the more extreme aspects of Second-Wave Feminism—sparked by Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire and by other writers, scholars and activists like Mary Daly and Germaine Greer—helped to undo the small gains we made during the previous two decades. 

During the time when we—all right, I’ll say it—were moving with the moment of the nascent Gay Rights movement—trans people were taught to efface all signs of the gender they were assigned at birth and to, in essence, re-invent their pasts.  In brief, we got by (to the degree we did) through induced amnesia and denial.  That, of course, was not a healthy way to live, but it was better than simply being denied and negated altogether.

However, around the same time as Raymond, Daly and their ilk were saying that we were simply men who wanted to take jobs in Women’s Studies departments, there was a “conservative backlash” against whatever gains women, including trans women, made.  Ronald Reagan had been elected; while he is by no means the only cause of the backlash, he at the very least galvanized it.  Although women were becoming lawyers, professors and corporate executives, they were always “under the microscope”:  criticized when they tried to look professional and vilified when they tried to express any kind of personal style.  This actually dovetailed very neatly with Second Wave feminism:  Phyllis Schlafly and Germaine Greer were both saying that womanhood existed only within a very rigid set of boundaries.  What neither Schlafly’s Evangelical Christian conservatives nor Germaine Greer and the Second Wavers never acknowledged, however—or perhaps didn’t realize—is that they were defining womanhood in terms that were set by men long before they or their mothers or grandmothers were born.

The few (at least in comparison to the numbers who came before and after) trans people who decided to live as the people they are during that time were therefore doubly damned.  In addition, the Gay Rights movement focused its attention on the newly-developing HIV/AIDS pandemic—as they should have.  As most of those afflicted at the time were men, HIV/AIDS activism—and, with it, the gay rights movement—became  almost wholly male-centered.  Even lesbians had to subsume their interests and needs; there was almost no room, it seemed, for trans women to simply exist, let alone define ourselves, as a group and individually, and flourish. 

Thus, I think it will be some time before trans women—and women generally—will be able simply to express who we are, sexually and otherwise, and reap the fruits of our labor and talents.  In the meantime, we’re going to be damned—by some people, anyway—whether are or aren’t, can or can’t, will or won’t, do or don’t.

Caitlyn Jenner Enters The World

By now, you’ve heard that celebrity photographer Annie Liebowitz is taking shots of the most famous person currently undergoing a gender transition.  Her work is scheduled to appear in Vanity Fair.

I guess I am like almost everyone else in wanting to see what Caitlyn Jenner looks like.  But more to the point, at least for me, I want to see this next stage in her coming out into the world after spending 65 years living as a boy and man named Bruce. 

What I find interesting is that every news account I’ve seen and heard so far refers to her with feminine pronouns.  Until now, they had been using masculine ones.  It’s not a surprise, really, because when she announced that she was embarking upon life as a woman, she didn’t reveal her name.  She was still Bruce Jenner when Diane Sawyer was interviewing her just a few weeks ago.  It’s hard to call someone named Bruce “she”.

More to the point, she said that she still preferred, at that point, to be referred to as a man named Bruce.  I will not speculate on what her reasons might have been, but I know that all of us who have transitioned, or are transitioning, know that there is a moment when we are ready to come out into the world as the people we truly are.  For some that happens fairly quickly. I guess I am in that category, as I started living as Justine less than a year after I started taking hormones and about two years after I started counseling and therapy.  I’ve met others who lived years or decades longer than I did with the names and genders they were assigned at birth, for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes those reasons have to do with jobs, careers, marriages , family or other social relations.  Others simply have to become more comfortable with themselves in their new identities.

That last sentence might seem paradoxical to some of you.  No matter how early in life we realize we aren’t the gender we’re assigned at birth, and no matter how much we dream about living as our true selves, it still takes time to adjust to our new lives.  For some of us, the discomfort and self-loathing we felt in our old lives has shaped so much about our lives that it takes time—and sometimes brings us pain—to live without those things.  Also, those of us whose bodies don’t conform to our genders tend to be sensitive and vulnerable people.  Shedding our “boy skin” or “girl skin”, as it were, makes us even more prone to being hurt as well as experiencing joy.  Some, I believe, know they’re not ready for the intensity of the love and hate, the embraces and rejections, and the losses as well as the things we find and regain as we enter the world as our own selves, with our own names.

Whether she is experiencing all, some or none of what I’ve described, I am eager to see Caitlyn Jenner enter the world, and hope her passage is safe and joyous.