A Timeline Of Our Visibility

I have not forsaken my promise to write more about the Lost Generation of Transgenders.  Sooner or later, though, I think it will turn into a project that will extend well beyond the boundaries of this blog.

With LGT in mind, I thought I'd post this Transgender Visibility Timeline:

From Christine Jorgensen To Jan Morris

It's been a while since I wrote about the Lost Generation of Transgenders.  In this post, I'm going to talk about something related:  Specifically, two of the world's best-known male-to-female transsexuals. One of them was at the vanguard of the first generation of transsexuals, while the other was its rearguard or, perhaps, on the front line of the following generation.

I am speaking of Christine Jorgensen and Jan Morris.  In reading an article about the latter, I found out that she's 87 years old and, interestingly, was born only five months after Ms. Jorgensen.  

The reason why those facts are interesting (at least to me) is that Jorgensen, being one of the first trans women to become publicly known, conformed completely (perhaps even more so than most cisgender women) to the gender norms of her time, while Jan Morris was able to define her own womanhood and femaleness to a much greater degree than Jorgensen could or would have.

Although they were born in the same year, they underwent their surgeries two decades apart.  The fact that gender roles had changed between 1952 and 1972 cannot be overstated.  What's even more important, though, is the way the generational difference affected Jorgensen's and Morris' paths to living as women.

Jorgensen began her transition just after World War II, in which she served as a soldier. She had even fewer precedents than Morris had, let alone than I or transsexuals of my generation had.  And, because the Internet was decades away, accessing information about hormones and surgery, and accounts of transgender people, was even more laborious than it would later be. 

That may be a reason why she modeled herself after the ideals of femaleness--or, more precisely, femininity--that prevailed in the immediate postwar years.  She studied to be a nurse because that was one of the few career options available to women of that time. Her mannerisms, dress and lifestyle were in line with what was considered "ladylike."  While she may have had the natural physical features to become the Marilyn Monroe-like blonde bombshell she would become, it's hard not to think she also did everything she could to enhance and maintain that image, especially after she found herself working as an entertainer.  Finally, she married a man and followed him in moves to suburban Long Island and southern California.

Morris, on the other hand, did not begin her transition until 1964.  By then, treatments--and, some would argue, societal notions about womanhood--were more advanced. Perhaps even more important, she had already established herself as an historian and travel writer, and had been married fifteen years, when she began her transition.  In fact, she went to Morocco for her surgery, which Dr. George Bourou performed, because in her native England she would not be allowed to have her surgery unless she divorced her wife, something she wasn't prepared to do at the time.  They eventually did divorce, but remained in contact and reunited in a civil union in 2008.

Christine Jorgensen died nearly two decades before that union was consummated. She was just three weeks short of 63 years old.  Somehow I have the feeling that the lurid jokes and other ridicule and ostracism directed at her shortened her life.  That's not to say Morris had an easy time, but even she has admitted that she didn't have to endure what Jorgensen and other early transsexuals experienced.

I don't know how much longer Morris has in this world.  Whatever the amount of time, I hope young trans people learn more about her, and the way she was a bridge between two generations of trans people who made their lives and mine possible.

Trans-Positive Images From The Lost Generation

After yesterday's post, I thought today's should be something more positive and hopeful.

It just happens that someone passed along something I never even would have imagined:  something trans-positive from the era of the Lost Generation of Transgenders.

Even more interesting, it's anime.  

I love the way it ends.

Same-Sex Marriage And The Lost Generation Of Transgenders

In previous posts, I've said that I am glad that same-sex marriage has been legalized in New York and other states, and hope that it will be recognized by the Federal Government of the US, mainly because it's the best solution we can achieve under the current social and economic system.  

That situation, I believe, has at least a little to do with what I have described as the Lost Generation of Transgenders.  It also has to do with the fact that, early in the modern gay-rights movement (or "gay liberation", as it was called in those days), transgender people were allied with gays and lesbians.  To some degree, trans people chose such an alliance, but the media and the general public (to the extent they were thinking about us) lumped us with gays and lesbians simply because most people, at that time, conflated gender identity with sexuality.

Whether or not Sylvia Rivera actually threw her red stiletto-heeled shoe at police officers who raided the Stonewall Inn on that fateful early summer night in 1969 (I have spoken with people who claim to have been there and insist that it didn't happen), there can be little doubt that transgender people were active in, and integral to, the Gay Rights movement in its early years.  Rivera herself, while participating in various marches and demonstrations for gay equality, drew attention to the plight of trans people.  

However, two things happened to marginalize trans people within the LGBT movement--and to leave us further marginalized than we already were within larger society. The first, as I have mentioned in other posts, was the rise of Second-Wave Feminism, spearheaded by Janice Raymond.  The second was the AIDS epidemic, which led to LGBT movements being dominated (some would say hijacked) by affluent gay white men.

Now, I will not deny the importance of AIDS activism:  After all, sixteen people who were friends or acquaintances of mine have died from illnesses generated by the disease, and every one of their deaths was horrific.  However, once ACT UP and other organizations dedicated to the effects of the epidemic--most of whose victims, at the time, were gay men or intravenous drug users--came to be dominated by affluent gay white men, there would be no turning back.  No other part of the LGBT rainbow can even come close to matching the financial power, not to mention the organizational ability, of the men of Christopher Street or the Castro district.  And trans people were far behind even lesbians of color, as there are fewer of us and, then as now, we are more likely to be unemployed and living in poverty.

The more affluent and integrated people are, the more they are likely to try to use the system, as it's constructed, to further their own interests.   In the case of gay men, the ones who were white and working as in the FIRE industries or as advertising art directors wanted (understandably) to enjoy the same sorts of tax benefits, and to be "respectable" in the same ways, as their heterosexual peers. 

What I've described in the previous paragraph led to a nearly singular drive, among LGBT organizations, for "marriage equality"--at times, nearly to the exclusion of every other issue.  While some trans people want to enter same-sex marriages (or are, in fact, in them), many more are preoccupied with day-to-day survival and the issues that are part of it, e.g., employment, health insurance, homelessness and being victims of violent crime and other forms of discrimination.  

However, discussion of--let alone advocacy for--such issues was largely absent during the days of AIDS activism and the drive for same-sex marriage. In the meantime, those who could gain from marriage "equality" pushed for a parallel system to the one most heterosexual people take for granted, i.e., same-sex marriage that followed the heterosexual (and hetero-normative) model. Rarely, if ever, was any consideration given to the idea of getting the government out of marriage altogether, and of taking away the churches' (and other houses of worship's) power to decide, for the (nominally secular) government, who is and isn't married.  

Instead, organizations like the Human Rights Campaign focused their efforts on allowing gays and lesbians to have the same kinds of marriages as straight people. I can't help but to think that if trans people had been more influential, we would have fought for the the separation of Church and State in matters of matrimony, and to have other kinds of relationships (including ones that don't follow the heteronormative script of marriage).  But that didn't happen, in part, because one of the results of a Lost Generation of Transgenders is that because we are far fewer in number (and, proportionally, far less wealthy) than we might have been otherwise.  So, while we were able to get language protecting us into the New York City Human Rights Law in April of 2002, we were (arguably) further from having similar language included in New York State's or the Federal Government's laws and policies than we were in 1972.

I still hope that we will have fair and equitable policies for trans people everywhere.  Then, perhaps, we will be able to move beyond the effects of losing a generation of our people.

Homophobia And The Lost Generation Of Transgenders

Parent: "So, are you going to date men or women?"

Adult child: "Men."

Parent:  (Expression of relief.) "At least you're not a lesbian."

If I ever do stand-up comedy (which is about as likely as my becoming the Pope), I will include that in my repertoire.

Now, I didn't have an exchange like that with my own parents.  But it wouldn't surprise me to learn that something like it was part of some other male-to-female transsexual's "coming out" to her parents.  

The principle espoused by the parent in that conversation--a paradoxical mixture of homophobia and a willingness to accept a trans child--actually governs an entire nation.  

The nation to which I'm referring is second only to Thailand in the number of gender-reassignment surgeries performed within its borders every year.  Yet, in that same country, same-sex relationships, and even cross-dressing, are punishable (at least in theory) by death.

That country is not governed by transgender equivalents of Janice Raymond and Mary Daly.  Rather, it's ruled by a man whom various groups tried to bar from speaking at Columbia and other American universities and who has done about as much for women's rights in his country as Raymond and Daly have done for transgender equality.

I am talking about Iran.  Not only do its doctors perform more gender-reassignment surgeries than their counterparts in the US; its government pays for up to half the cost of the surgery for those who can't pay for it themselves.  Moreover, male-to-female transgenders are allowed to live as women until they have their surgeries.  After surgery, their birth certificates and other documents are re-issued with their "new" gender and they are allowed to marry men.  

Did you notice that I've referred only to male-to-female transsexuals?  I did so, not only because I am one, but also because I couldn't find information about female-to-male transsexuals in Iran.   Also, I found, in my research, that when one is approved for surgery, one must begin to undergo treatments (hormones, psychotherapy, and such) immediately.  Anyone who doesn't undergo those treatments is considered to be of the gender assigned to him at birth.  That means that if he were to have sexual relationships with men, "cross-dress" or live as what we might call "genderqueer", he is subject to the same penalties as gay men can incur.

In other words, Iran's encouragement of GRS and related treatments is really, at least to some degree, a way of negating homosexuality.   I can't help but to wonder whether something similar happened here in the US during the 1960's and 1970's.  While those times were not easy for us, they were still better than the era of the Lost Generation of Transgenders, which spanned the decade-and-a-half (or so) following the rise of Second-Wave Feminism.  I have to wonder whether some people, in the time of Renee Richards, simply found trans women who dated and married men more palatable than men who dated other men.  

If that is the case, it certainly didn't help trans people.  If anything, it may have had something to do with the Lost Generation of Transgenders I've mentioned in earlier posts. 

Homophobia And The Lost Generation Of Transgenders

Parent: "So, are you going to date men or women?"

Adult child: "Men."

Parent:  (Expression of relief.) "At least you're not a lesbian."

If I ever do stand-up comedy (which is about as likely as my becoming the Pope), I will include that in my repertoire.

Now, I didn't have an exchange like that with my own parents.  But it wouldn't surprise me to learn that something like it was part of some other male-to-female transsexual's "coming out" to her parents.  

The principle espoused by the parent in that conversation--a paradoxical mixture of homophobia and a willingness to accept a trans child--actually governs an entire nation.  

The nation to which I'm referring is second only to Thailand in the number of gender-reassignment surgeries performed within its borders every year.  Yet, in that same country, same-sex relationships, and even cross-dressing, are punishable (at least in theory) by death.

That country is not governed by transgender equivalents of Janice Raymond and Mary Daly.  Rather, it's ruled by a man whom various groups tried to bar from speaking at Columbia and other American universities and who has done about as much for women's rights in his country as Raymond and Daly have done for transgender equality.

I am talking about Iran.  Not only do its doctors perform more gender-reassignment surgeries than their counterparts in the US; its government pays for up to half the cost of the surgery for those who can't pay for it themselves.  Moreover, male-to-female transgenders are allowed to live as women until they have their surgeries.  After surgery, their birth certificates and other documents are re-issued with their "new" gender and they are allowed to marry men.  

Did you notice that I've referred only to male-to-female transsexuals?  I did so, not only because I am one, but also because I couldn't find information about female-to-male transsexuals in Iran.   Also, I found, in my research, that when one is approved for surgery, one must begin to undergo treatments (hormones, psychotherapy, and such) immediately.  Anyone who doesn't undergo those treatments is considered to be of the gender assigned to him at birth.  That means that if he were to have sexual relationships with men, "cross-dress" or live as what we might call "genderqueer", he is subject to the same penalties as gay men can incur.

In other words, Iran's encouragement of GRS and related treatments is really, at least to some degree, a way of negating homosexuality.   I can't help but to wonder whether something similar happened here in the US during the 1960's and 1970's.  While those times were not easy for us, they were still better than the era of the Lost Generation of Transgenders, which spanned the decade-and-a-half (or so) following the rise of Second-Wave Feminism.  I have to wonder whether some people, in the time of Renee Richards, simply found trans women who dated and married men more palatable than a man who dated other men.  

If that is the case, it certainly didn't help trans people.  If anything, it may have had something to do with the Lost Generation of Transgenders I've mentioned in earlier posts. 

Victor Imperatus, Lost Classics And Transgenders' Lost Generation

One of my students, who is very articulate and rather feisty, brought up the subject of bias in history.  "No matter where you go to school, the history they teach you is completely slanted", he averred.

He cited some examples from wars.  "What German kids learn about World War II is completely different from what we learn", he explained.  "And what French kids, Japanese kids and British kids learn is all different, too."

I told him that, while I haven't read enough history books from other countries to know, I suspected that what he said is true.  That, I suppose, was the Properly Professorial Thing To Say.  However, I know--intuitively as well as experientially--that the principle behind what he said is one of the truest things ever expressed.

He's the sort of bright student we sometimes see in City University schools:  very smart, literate and verbal, and from a home where there are probably few, if any, books and a family of few, if any, educated people.  He's the sort of student who mispronounces words he reads in books because those books are the only places in which he sees those words:  He has never used them in a conversation.

I was something like him.  Sometimes I feel I'm still like him:  I mispronounce words or use ideas out of context (or, at least, in ways they aren't normally used) because I've encountered them on my own, in isolation, rather than in bull sessions with people who seem to have spent their entire lives around holders of advanced degrees.

Anyway, I mentioned the phrase Victor Imperatus and explained that it's not the name of one of my neighbors in Astoria, but rather the notion that history is written by the winners--or, at least, those who have power and privilege.  To illustrate what I meant, I described my own experience as an undergraduate just over three decades ago:  None of the histories I read were written by women or African-Americans.

Or transgenders.

I didn't mention the lack of trans history simply because I didn't mention my gender identity at all, and don't know whether I will.  (It's still early in the semester.)  But I know that there's very little, if any, history--or, for that matter, much of anything else--written by trans people that's in print.  I don't think it's because we don't write (Just look at this blog); if anything, we might write more, per person, than other people.  However, much of what we've written was published before we transitioned or was written by people who were trans but, for whatever reasons, lived in the gender to which they were assigned at birth.  I'd bet that some writers were never published or read again after they started to live in their true genders, and that some continued to publish under the names they received at birth, or under pseudonyms.

One result of what I've just described is that, save for a few books and other works we've written about our experiences, there is very little--in literature, history, science or any other area--written with a transgender perspective.

When you're part of a privileged group, you don't have to think about a perspective or point of view.  "History" is about you and your people; "African-American", "Women's", "Hispanic" or "LGBT" History are about other people, who are not considered "mainstream".  When I was in school, we did not read books (whether histories or works of fiction or poetry) by any of the people I've just mentioned; I would later learn that some works, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" were out of print and forgotten for decades.  After such works were rediscovered, they were ghettoized into "Women's Studies" (or, later, "Gender Studies), "African American Studies" or whatever.   

I don't know whether there are transgender "lost classics" waiting to be rediscovered.  I somehow believe that they are.  Until we find them and start writing more stories of our own, the "lost generation" I've described in previous posts won't be our only one.

Passing Into The Lost Generation

In yesterday's post, I started to describe some of the ways in which spending so much time and effort on "passing" has harmed trans people individually, and as a community.  I talked mainly about the ways in which it has held us back from gains other people, such as African-Americans, cis women and gay men, realized from the Civil Rights movement.  

Now I want to mention some of the ways in which society's demand to pass (which is also turned against us) helped to create a Lost Generation of Transgender People.

When I was younger I, of course, read everything I could find about Christine Jorgensen.  At that time, she was one of only two transgenders (the other being Renee Richards) of whom I'd even heard.  In my reading, I stumbled over the newspaper headlines and stories about her.  "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty", screamed the New York Daily News headline.  Others were more salacious, or simply more vicious.  They all, however, seemed to focus on her resemblance to Marilyn Monroe and other blonde movie stars of the time.  

What I have said, and will say about Ms. Jorgensen and her role in the history of transgender people is in no way meant to disparage her.  She was indeed a beautiful woman.  More to the point, though, she was also a very intelligent, talented woman who took great pains to educate herself, and always exuded dignity and class. On the other hand, she fit into every notion of womanhood that prevailed in 1950's America.  It was a time, of course, when the standards of beauty and glamor were almost always blonde and blue-eyed.  They also had hourglass figures with impossibly small waists.  Jorgensen fit that image to a "T".

What's more, though, she declared herself as attracted only to men--and, in fact, married one.  And, although she worked as a photographer before her surgery, she wanted to settle into a quiet life as a housewife.  Perversely, the very same sorts of people who would have demanded that she, or any other woman, lead such a life were the same people who "outed" her and kept her story in the public eye, to the point that she almost had to become the entertainer she would be for much of her adult life.

In other words, people accepted, or at least tolerated, Christine Jorgensen--who was probably the first transsexual of whom most of them had even heard--in wholly heterosexist terms. Some of those people may have been perfectly well-meaning; they may have "wanted to do the right thing" but had little to no understanding of what it meant to be transgendered or transsexual.  However, their understanding--and the way Ms. Jorgensen had to conform to it, whether or not she waned to--gave people a very limited way of understanding, not only transgender people, but of their own gender and sexuality.  

As I write this, I finally realize why the alliance--however tense and strained it may be--between trans people and lesbians and gays is not only beneficial, but necessary.  Trans people will never have equal rights, let aloneopportunities,  as long as there is so much pressure to confirm to traditional roles of one gender or the other.  

In some people, this understanding of gender and sexuality, as well as their expectation that trans women would conform to "traditional" female roles, were really just very thinly-veiled homophobia.  

So, three decades after Christine Jorgensen became a "blonde beauty", the pressure to "pass" was even greater than it was at the time she started her transition.  The AIDS epidemic had, by that time, exploded in Castro, The Village and other gay communities throughout the United States.  During that time, right-wing talk radio and other media grew exponentially in popularity. They famously advocated quarantining gay men, or even killing them:  One commentator went so far as to compare gay men to the rats that carried the fleas that caused the Black Death.   

In such an atmosphere, the pressure to "pass" must have greatly intensified. Who would want anyone else to know that he or she had  been, at any time in her life, a man--let alone a gay one.  

Having such heterosexist (and,I might add, Eurocentric) ideas about gender meant that only trans people who looked like Barbie dolls would be approved for hormones or the surgery.  It also meant that only those who met such standards would have any hope of affording it--or of marrying someone who could support her after she became a "traditional" housewife.

The conditions I've described had much to do with the Lost Generation of Transgender people, and how people (including cis ones) continued to hold onto their notions of gender and sexuality,and teach them.  So, during my first year of living as a woman, a prof who knew I was going through my transformation said I was "the last person she expected" to be trans because I had expressed interest in women--including her.

I wonder how many trans people gave up on their dream of transitioning as a result of what I've  described---or, how many people delayed their dream, or simply gave up on it altogether. And I wonder how many were beaten, killed or simply demonized because they were thought to be one of the vectors of disease--or because they simply didn't fit into feminist organization, let alone the white heterosexual organizations they represstn.

A Generation of Elders Who Are Novitiates

Writing about the Lost Generation of Transgenders, as I did yesterday and in a few earlier posts, got me to thinking about my own situation.  Although I have had my surgery and I rarely have to talk about having lived as a man (although sometimes I still do so by choice), I consider myself to be part of that generation.  That's because I missed living decades of my life as a woman; others never had the chance--or had only a very brief time--to live their lives whole.  Some, of course, never transitioned; others lived in a ghetto (which was mental and spiritual as well as physical) of substance abuse, violence and AIDS that cut their lives short.  

On the other hand, my history has left me in a position in which very few people find themselves:  As a transsexual person, I am still fairly new or, at least, young. After all, I began my transition a decade ago, began to live as Justine a year after that and had my surgery three and a half years ago.  Chronologically, my current life is only as long as that of a child who has yet to reach puberty.  But I am also an elder, if you will.  Many people my age have grandchildren; a few even have great children.  And many of us reach the apogee of our careers or other trajectories in our lives.  If nothing else, we come to an understanding of ourselves and others and some--like me--start to feel we don't have the time, energy or patience for cant, hypocrisy and evasion.

So, even though my time of living as a woman is relatively brief, I am indeed one.  I am a woman who happens to be a good bit older than all of those young people who are transitioning  and even some of the later-in-life transitioners.  What that means is that when I'm talking to a younger trans person, an older one who's doing what I did a couple of years ago, or someone who isn't trans but wants to learn more, I am--for lack of a better way of describing this--teaching what I learned only recently.  That includes a sense of what we've come from and where we've been.  Many transgender and transsexual people who could have taught those things died along the way or ended up too broken to teach themselves, let alone others.  

So the burdens--and joys--of passing on what this community has learned, collectively as well as from and among individuals--fall to those of us who are surviving members of the Lost Generation of Transgenders.

Health Care Professionals And Lost Generation Of Transgenders

In several posts on this blog, I have mentioned some of the difficulties transgender people have in getting appropriate medical and psychiatric care.  One of the main reasons is, of course, the high percentage of trans people who are poor, uninsured and even homeless.

As bad as the situation is now, it was much worse during my youth.  The poverty and homelessness, and the lack of insurance, probably were even bigger problems for trans people thirty or twenty years ago than they are now.  However, there was yet another factor that made it difficult, or even impossible, to get the necessary therapies and treatments, and helped to create a lost generation of transgender people. 

That factor is a trait of a particular group of people--the ones who were, in essence, "gatekeepers."  I'm talking about medical as well as psychiatric professionals.  They, like nearly everyone else, were inculcated with their culture's notions of gender and sexual norms.  That is to say, nearly all of them believed in the "male-female" gender binary and the normalcy of being a heterosexual.

What that meant, of course, is that nearly all such professionals were deeply homophobic to one degree or another, whether consciously or not.   (I will admit that I shared much of that homophobia.)  So, for example, a female-to-male transgender who wanted hormones and surgery could not give even any indication of sexual attraction to women.  She also had to exhibit what were considered "feminine" traits and desires.  Worst of all, she had to commit herself to living a life of denying her past.  In other words, she had to re-invent her life as that of a woman growing up to become a girl, in the name of "passing."

Victoria Brownworth has written, "Passing never works; the lie distances you from those who aren't a party to it.  Society may reward the lie, may even demand it, but the passing person is punished for passing--either by being caught in the lie or believing it.  Every closet is a prison, whether it is a construct of sex or class. Passing kills; it annihilates who we are and keeps us from who we could be."

About the only beneficiaries of this emphasis on "passing"--which is to say, living in an enforced closet--were the Four Horsemen of our community:  AIDS, drugs, suicide and violence.  They all reached staggering proportions during the 1980's.  Although good, let alone exact, statistics on trans people from that period are nearly impossible to find, I would guess that an even larger percentage of trans people died from those causes than are claimed by them now.  In a literal sense, they are the reasons why we have a lost generation of transgender people.  But even the survivors of that generation--who include me--had to endure decades of depression, isolation and, in many cases, substance abuse, as a result of not seeking the care we needed until much later in our lives.  That left us as isolated from each other as all of those transssexuals who "passed", or tried to, were from each other.  The result was that, really, we didn't have a community for at least a decade, and could therefore not offer each other the advice, mentorship and other help we so desperately needed.

In other words, even those of us who wouldn't begin our transitions for another two or three decades had to live with the same lie as those who told doctors, psychiatrists, endocrinologists and surgeons what they wanted to hear.  They, of course, told those lies because the health professionals themselves believed, if not the lies themselves, then in the homophobia that made them necessary.  Those of us who survived are still dealing with the aftermath, and will probably do so for the rest of our lives.

Relationships Lost By The Lost Generation

A post from Feministe that recently came my way highlighted an aspect of life for the Lost Generation of Transgenders.

During the time in question--roughly from the time The Transsexual Empire was published until transgender movements were revived (and new ones, particularly for female-to-male transgenders, were begun) in the 1990's, many of us entered into long-term relationships or, at least, relationships we or our partners hoped or planned on being long-term.

Many of us married members of the "opposite" gender from the ones to which we were assigned at birth--that is to say, the gender of our mind and spirit.  Others entered into partnerships of one kind or another, and even had children, but never had the ceremony or got the license.  And then others among us were in relationships with people of the genders in which we were living at the time.

Some of us remained in those relationships for years, or even decades.  In addition to having children, some of us bought houses, started businesses and did any number of other things married couples do.  Some of us even changed careers or other aspects of our lives in order to be with our partners, or they did the same for us.

A few of us (I am not among them) are still in those relationships.  Some are living as siblings or roommates; a fortunate few have spouses or partners who accomodated to the new circumstances of the relationship.  Those partners, whether or not they voiced it, realized that they were in love with the person, not his or her gender.

Unfortunately, not all partners saw their love that way.  Many women base their relationships on the manliness of the man, and many men base their feelings on the womanliness of the woman.  Other men and women simply cannot cope with the fact that they loved people who are of their own gender.  The last relationship I had before I started my transition ended for that very reason.

Sometimes, when we "come out" to our partners or spouses, we are accused of having lied to them when we met.   Some may indeed have practiced such a deception.  More of us (I include myself), however, simply could not articulate, with the language available to us and in cultural climate that surrounded us, exactly how we felt.  During the age of the Lost Generation of Transgenders, most people--even LGBT people and those who could accept us--still thought of gender more or less the way people did at the time Christine Jorgensen had her surgery.  Some of us thought we couldn't be trangendered because we weren't gay or even bisexual; given the ideas we had, we could not reconcile, the fact that we were never attracted to someone of the gender to which we were assigned at birth with our knowledge of our true genders, and our love for someone who was of that gender in body as well as in mind and spirit.  And if we didn't have the knowledge and language to explain it, how could our partners or anyone else understand it?

So, many of us were in relationships that neither we nor our partners could understand.  Some of our friendships and business relationships, and even ones with family members, were based on their and our then-limited understanding of our gender identities and sexualities.  In fact, most people--include yours truly--conflated one with the other.  As a result, we not only lost those marriages and partnerships into which we entered; we also lost relationships with friends, family members and professional colleagues or business associates.  

Those relationships are among the casualties, if you will, of the Lost Generation of Transgenders.  I can understand why someone whose spouse says, after a number of years of marriage, that he or she feels he is trapped in the wrong body would feel betrayed, duped or simply angry:  They feel that the assumptions and beliefs on which they based their lives with the other person were false, and--to use a cliche--that the ground has been knocked out from under them. On the other hand, I also understand (perhaps too well) why we asked those people to become our spouses and partners.  Some of us were indeed desperate and hoped that being in a relationship with someone of the "opposite" gender would extinguish our feelings of having bodies that didn't express our true gender identities.  Others simply loved the people they married, even if they couldn't understand how or why.  (Some would argue that true love is that way in any event.)  I don't think many of us deliberately deceived our partners.  However, they may always feel as if we have.  And that may be one of the more damaging legacies of having to be part of the Lost Generation of Transgenders.

Reagan, Wall Street And The Lost Generation of Transgender People

In previous posts, I've talked a bit about the Lost Generation of Transgender People.  I've mentioned a few of the possible reasons why, it seems, trans people you meet transitioned before the early 1980's or from the mid-90's or so onward.  

Among the things I mentioned were some of the ways in which LGBT-related movements were taken over by relatively affluent gay white men, and the influence of the so-called Second Wave Feminists.  There are, of course, many other factors, which I hope to discuss in this blog and in other fora.  In this post, I'll talk briefly about something that happened in the culture and economy of this country (and, in particular, New York City) that caused us to "lose" a generation.

Perhaps the recent death of Larry Hagman got met to thinking about the things I'm going to say.  (I don't mean to imply that he was a reason why the state of transgender people was worse in 1990 than it was fifteen or twenty years earlier!)  He, of course, was a star on the wildly popular TV series Dallas --which, for many people, epitomized the Eighties, a.k.a., the Reagan Era.

Now, of course, Reagan himself was certainly of no help to our cause.  For all of his first term, and the first half of his second, he wouldn't even say "AIDS" in public.  And he espoused a conservative right-wing "fundamentalist" policy that was, essentially, a code for racism, sexism and homophobia.  The latter, of course, included transphobia by implication because, to the extent that most people thought about it, we were just more extreme versions of gay people.

But what I've yet to hear is the ways in which the so-called economic "boom"--which was concentrated mainly in the FIRE industries--left transgender people even further from economic, as well as legal and social, equality than they were two decades earlier.  

One obvious reason why Reagan's economic policies were disastrous for trans people is that it all but eliminated the few services that were available to us. Believe it or not, some people diagnosed as transgender actually had surgeries for which the government paid during the 1960's and 1970's.  And folks like Sylvia Rivera found more of other kinds of assistance available to them in the years immediately after Stonewall than they would a decade later.

But there was something else in the zeitgeist of the 1980's that made American society--not to mention the country's legal and economic systems--noticeably more hostile to trans people (male-to-females in particular) than it was only a decade earlier.

From the end of World War II until the election of Reagan, Wall Street and its related industries were largely "gentlemen's" clubs.  Most of the men in charge, if not the floor traders, came from the same schools and, sometimes, families.  They were interested mainly in protecting the wealth they had and living off the interest; they tended toward safe, conservative investments and strategies.  Their demeanor and attire reflected their origins in the (mostly) East Coast elite classes.  As one old Wall Streeter told me some years ago, while there was a kind of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, the fact that Wall Street had its fair share of gay men was an open secret.  In such an atmosphere, this man explained, gay men could fit in simply by dressing well and maintaining an air of detachment, if not indifference.

All of that changed during the "go-go" years of the Reagan administration.  Deregulation of the FIRE industries (begun, ironically, under Jimmy Carter, Reagan's predecessor) led to more aggressive behavior in the boardrooms as well as on the trading floor.  Even the few women who were working on "the Street" engaged in hypermasculine behaviors that included excessive drinking and cocaine usage.  In such a milieu, not surprisingly, one could be more openly homphobic or transphobic than his father could have been.  

The "Greed Is Good" era disdained any sort of empathy for--let alone willingness to help--people who are subjected to bigotry and, too often, fall victim to violence for no other reason than their own identities.  People who were poor or otherwise disenfranchised were seen as somehow morally defective.  Transgender people, who were already at or near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder when the era began, lost even more ground during that time.   The ones who weren't destroyed outright were turned into shadows wandering through clubs and alleyways in parts of New York and other cities where neon and strobe lights masked how sad and dirty most of them actually were in daylight.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, too many young trans people didn't survive those years.  And the atmosphere of the era deterred many of us from coming out and transitioning until much later in our lives, if we did those things at all.

A New Sundance Series And The Lost Generation Of Trans Men

The Sundance Channel has just list of original scripted series for the 2013-14 television season.  Among those new shows is one about a trans man dealing with his new life as a male and his past as a lesbian activist.

That outline also defines the lives of a few trans men I know.  They, like me and many trans women I know, transitioned in their 40's or 50's.  Some have had gender-reassignment surgery, as the protagonist of the Sundance series has.  Others took hormones and managed to "pass" well enough to live as male.  And I know of two who looked so masculine they didn't need to take hormones or have surgery.

The ones who lived as "butch" lesbians and were activists also described a common experience:  rejection.  One trans man I know was a lesbian activist for about three decades before he finally transitioned.  Once he started living as male, he lost  friends and allies with whom he shared hunger and meals, apartments and homelessness, and even jail cells.  An organizer with one organization flatly told him he was no longer welcome; others shunned him or simply stopped returning his calls and e-mails.

When he tells people of such experiences, he's often told the same thing I often hear:  "Well, they weren't really your friends, were they?"  While that may be true, losing the companionship and emotional "safety net" such people once provided still hurts.  And, for many of us, their support was a lifeline, literally as well as figuratively.  That is especially true for those whose families and communities cast them away, and who lost jobs or were kicked out of schools or other institutions because of their non-conformity to accepted gender roles and mores about sexuality.

Also, most of the people who think they're consoling us, or simply giving us good advice, have never had their friendships similarly tested. Most people don't ever have to know whether or not their friends are as true as they believe them to be.  Knowing who your friends is, of course, invaluable. But you can pay a terrible price for it.

The trans men (and trans women) who have transitioned in middle age during the past fifteen years or so are, as I have mentioned in previous posts, part of the Lost Generation of Transgender people.  These trans men and women share the experience of being cut off from earlier and subsequent generations of trans people.  Many of our contemporaries who transitioned (or, at least, started dressing and otherwise living as members of the "other" gender) when they were young are dead now. Others are broken in various ways.  And then, of course, there are those who never transitioned or who lived "underground." 

Those of us who survived long enough to transition in middle age were sustained, in part, by whatever relationships and organizations we had in our lives.  I was living as a male in the straight-to-bisexual part of the spectrum of sexual orientation; thus, even though I had gay male friends and acquaintances, I really wasn't involved with LGBT political or social movements.  But other sorts of relationships with individuals and groups, some of which I lost during my transition, sustained me.  Those who were involved in LGBT movements--particularly trans men who were lesbian activists--may have depended on them for emotional, intellectual and spiritual sustenance, or even their very identities to an even greater degree than I had to depend on my involvements and entanglements.

So, when those trans men transitioned, they had to build new friendships, communities and other support networks, much as I had to do when I did in my passage from living as Nick to life as Justine.  Sometimes young trans people are willing to be friends or at least allies, and I love them for that.  However, they don't understand what it's like to be the person who is nearest, rather than the truest, to what they are.  The ones who are transitioning while they're in college, or in other relatively supportive (or at least non-hostile) communities, aren't going to understand what it's like to give up those to whom they have given, and who have given to them.  And they won't have to experience those people giving up on, or rejecting them.  

While I am happy that those young people may not have to face the same kinds of loss and rejection my trans friends and peers have faced, it's sad to know that they'll never truly understand that the gaping chasm of loss, rejection, abandonment and death that stretches between them and us.  I am glad that Sundance plans to fill at least some part of that gap.

The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade

Well, as you might have heard by now, this year's Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village is being postponed.

In its four-decade history, it has never been cancelled.  In fact, it's never been held on any night but the 31st of October.  As Jeanne Fleming, the Parade's artistic director, has pointed out, it is one of the few events in this city whose timing has never been co-opted.  Whatever day of the week the 31st fell, and whatever the weather, it was held.  Even in those uncertain days after 9/11, the Parade made its way down Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas to those of you who aren't from around here!). 

I believe that the parade will be held this year and in the future because, quite frankly, we need it.  At least, some of us do--or did. 

Although I had not planned on being in the Village with the other revelers, I've been a part of parades past.   I never was a "party girl" (or guy), but every once in a while I like to let loose.  And, at the parade, I could always express some part of my self, or some yearning, that I could not at almost any other time.  One year I even won a prize:  Some bar on or around Bleecker Street gave gift certificates for the best costumes.  At least, that's as much of that night as I remember! (Hey, it was a long, long time ago--near the end of the Parade's first decade.)  I went to a couple more after that one, but then there was one Parade--1992, or some time around then--that left me in tears. Many of the marchers wore "Grim Reaper" costumes, or other equally morbid outfits.  

That, of course, was about the time the AIDS epidemic peaked, at least among gay men and white people.  In one seven-month period, between Memorial Day and Christmas of 1991, I lost five friends and other people who were important in my life to illnesses wrought by the disease.  Others--some of whom I knew--were experiencing even more illness and death in the families and communities they created for themselves as well as the ones into which they were born.  As I was completely in the closet (except, of course, at events like the Parade), I could neither give nor receive the support I and others needed to anyone besides the loved ones of the victims I knew.  And, perhaps, I was not as supportive as I might have been had I been living as the person I am.

What is often overlooked is the roles transgender people played in, and the ways they were affected by, the events I've described.  Some people still think of the Parade as a "gay" event.  There's no doubt that many of those who marched and made, or rode in, floats were indeed homosexual men.   However, it's (or, at least, I'm) equally certain that I wasn't the only trans person at the Parade.  Of course, some were openly so.  But I can tell you that there were many others, besides me, who went, whether as spectators or participants, to release some of the tensions brought on by navigating a hostile, or at least uninformed, world.  

Now, what I'm about to say may seem wildly improbable.  But here goes:  Although I didn't realize it at the time, the Parade (among other things) helped me to learn, over time, that I was not a transvestite.  Although I preferred wearing women's clothing to donning men's garb, I never got any sort of sexual thrill out of it.  It just felt like a truer expression of who I am.  Every costume I wore to the parade was one of a female character, persona or role.  One year I was a ballerina.  Another time I was a diva.  Then, a suburban housewife like June Cleaver or Harriet Nelson.  And Dorothy.  (I sprayed a pair of shoes with ruby-red paint.)  They were exaggerated female roles, to be sure.  But what other kind of role could I have played?  Also, what's a parade--especially on Halloween in the Village--without exaggeration.

As campy and ludicrous as those outfits might have been, they allowed me--even if only a few hours--to express who I am, at least somewhat.  Since those days, I've come to realize that people who feel repressed and frustrated express their yearnings, in those brief moments in which they can do so, in ways that seem almost parodical.  We've all seen, or at least heard, about the things some males will do when they're trying to show that they're men.  (A few institutions, such as the military, make use of this.)  And, of course, in the days between the Stonewall Revolution and the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, many gay men mimiced the most extreme icons of maleness:  All you have to do is look at The Village People to see that.

Anyway, as I've mentioned, there were--and probably still are--more manque as well as outre transsexuals than almost anyone realizes at the Parade.  Some will, in time, acknowledge and live by their true natures. Others will go to events like the Parade as a "release" and return to their families, communities and jobs in the costumes of the genders in which they are living.

And then there are those who have been taken by the Grim Reaper in the same ways as gay men--and, to a lesser extent, lesbians--have been:  suicide, homicide and AIDS.  Much has been said and written about how those things have devastated gay males, and the communities and industries in which they are concentrated.   It was indeed devastating, but for transgenders, it was little short of an apocalypse (or, as some would argue, a genocide).  They are among the things that are responsible for the Lost Generation of Transgender People I've described in previous posts.   And the Parade is one of the few institutions that has endured from that time.

Two Members Of The Lost Generation Do Lunch

Yesterday I had a late lunch/early dinner with a friend who's just passed a significant milestone in her transition.  

She is a few years older than I am, and came from what are, on the surface, very different circumstances than mine.  However, for both of us, growing up meant inhabiting a world that isolated both of us, save for when our peers bullied or otherwise abused us.  Her parents were openly hostile to non-heterosexual, non-gender-conforming, people, while my parents' understanding was merely a reflection of what most people understood, or misunderstood, when I was growing up.  That is not to denigrate my parents: Neither they nor I had the knowledge or the language to understand what I was going through.  Still, in my own way, I spent my childhood and most of my adult life as isolated, emotionally and spiritually, as my friend spent hers.

After we parted, I realized that our isolation was such that we could not have known each other.  We might have recognized each other on some subconscious, intuitive level that I would not have acknowledged and, in fact, would have tried to suppress.  But I don't think we could--or, at least I would--have based our friendship, if we had one, on an understanding of a basic truth about ourselves.  It then goes without saying that we could not have offered each other advice, encouragement or support--or, at least, the kind either of us needed.

But, as my friend pointed out, that isolation may have kept us alive.  Had we started our transitions in our early 20's instead of our mid 40's or early 50's, we probably would have ended up as sex workers, or under even worse circumstances.  As I've mentioned in other posts, few other lines of work expose its practitioners to the prospect of incurring violence that could be fatal.  If we hadn't been beaten or shot to death in some back alley, or succumbed to an overdose or drugs or alcohol, being sex workers would have broken us mentally and spiritually.  At least, I know that would have happened to me.

We are indeed part of the Lost Generation of Transgenders I've described in a few previous posts.  During the two decades or so that followed the onslaught of Second Wave Feminism (and the concurrent conservative religious and political movements that had more in common with it than most people realize), people like me and my friend lived our lives, as best we knew how, as members of the gender indicated on our birth certificates.  We may have been reading the works of Second-Wave feminists and other writings that have become part of the canons of Women's Studies, Gender Studies and Queer Studies. (Please don't construe my use of the latter term as an endorsement of it:  I'm simply using the term the field's practitioners use!)  And some of us "cross-dressed" or occasionally interacted with the underground world of cross-gender entertainment and such.  But we did so in isolation, and were therefore unable to learn many of the lessons we could have gotten from the transsexuals and other gender-variant people (few though they were in number) who were around at that time.  We could have better understood how to navigate the world we would face--and that, in spite of the bigotry we might sometimes face, it hadn't changed, at least not fundamentally.  Although some of us would get educations (or, at any rate, credentials) and careers or vocations, we would fully understand what was, and wasn't, important and useful about them only after we began our transitions.  We'd learn the ways in which we had to educate ourselves, and each other, because those normally charged with instructing and directing us couldn't do so, sometimes because they didn't know how.  

Because we had to learn those lessons for ourselves--without the mentors and role models we might have had if we could have transitioned ealier in our lives--there is not a continuity between us and our ancestors, if you will (most of whom are dead) and the ones who transition while they are in college, or even high school.  I think now of the student of mine who said he couldn't understand why someone would "go through all the trouble of changing their sex, only to become a sex worker" and of the young trans people who think that if you don't have surgery by the time you're 25, you're not really a transsexual. They remind me of a young woman who remarked that she doesn't care about the debates over Roe v Wade or other "women's" issues; in her words, "Taxes affect my life every day; those things, almost never."

As much as I love history, it is not the only reason why I lament the fact that there had to be a "lost generation" of transgender people, and that people like me and my friend had to be among its survivors in order to transition in these times.  The fact that a generation had to be "lost" had tragic consequences.  I think now of someone I've called Corey in this blog.  I was with her on the last night of her life.  She was reaching out to me; she had recognized something in me that I was doing everything I could not to acknowledge.  Given where we were--geographically as well as historically--I might have been the closest thing to, if not a mentor, then at least a sympathiser, that she could find.  She, too, might be alive today--and, I would hope, living as the female she truly was--had I or someone been able to give her the understanding, if not the support, she needed.  

I also wonder whether I could have helped someone else who committed suicide, in part over his gender identity, when I was a little more than a year into my transition.  He was the same age as my friend is now and, not long before he OD'd, he told me of his gender identity conflict and how he admired my "courage."  I realize now that the unease I felt in hearing that came from understanding that his praise was really a cry for help, or at least a lament for what could have been.  All I can do now is to remember him in his true gender, as I remember Corey in hers.

What Was Lost In The Lost Generation of Transgenders

Yesterday, I wrote about the African-American and Latino gay and transgender world of the 1980's that was depicted in Paris Is Burning.  As I mentioned, some of the young people shown in the film are dead; if you watch the film now, you can't help but to wonder which ones, if any, are still living.

In that very literal sense, they are a lost generation of transgender people.  But even the ones who have survived are part of the lost generation I've described, for they were not able to pass on what they learned, whether from a previous generation of trans people or from their own lives.  They taught each other how to shoplift, find places to "crash" (Most of them had little or no money; if they had any, they were saving it for surgery.) and deal with cops and tranny-chasers as well as tranny-bashers.  

In other words, they were only learning how to survive for the moment.  Now, of course, that is important, for if we don't live through this moment, we won't have others in which we can live.  But, as we have seen in history, people who expend--whether through choice or necessity--all of their energy in immediate survival tend not to make advancements in their consciousness, let alone in the ways they do things.  And they tend not to live very long.  In those senses, young trans people in the 1980's were not so different from almost anyone who lived in Europe during the millennium or so that followed the disintegration of the Roman Empire.

But the young people who were living in the ball culture shown in Paris Is Burning were marooned in a moment of history.  Most of them did not know about pioneering transgender activists like Sylvia Rivera, who were shunted aside when LGBT organizations and movements were taken over by, and therefore focused on, gay white men.  (Lesbians found themselves stuck in their own kind of limbo in the feminist movement.)  Although they were less than a generation removed from the Stonewall Rebellion, they were as unaware of it as most American college freshmen are of John Brown and the slave rebellions.

What was even worse was that they were stuck without the knowledge of how to deal with the struggles they faced in a society and nation (at least in its political leadership) that had grown more hostile to them. Sylvia Rivera herself was all but forgotten, homeless and battling addiction, as transgenders and drag queens were shunted aside to make the gay-rights movement (which was dealing with the stigma of AIDS) more attractive to straight people and others in the mainstream.   

In brief, the young people who were competing in those balls had already lost what little history they had.  We all know that one of the easiest ways to destroy a people--or to make it an underclass--is to separate it from its history.  I'm not talking about History in the academic sense (although that matters, too); I mean a person's own history and that of the family and community from which he or she came.  

The older trans and drag queens could teach them how to "boost" designer purses and eyeliner.  But they couldn't teach them the things a previous generation would have been able to teach them.  That is what was lost with the lost generation of trans people.

Paris Is Burning: A Document Of The Lost Generation Of Trans People

I saw Paris Is Burning not long after it was released in 1990.  I was very deeply in the closet then.  So, perhaps, it wouldn't surprise you to know that I went to see it with a woman with whom I was trying to initiate a more-than-friends relationship.  (It didn't happen.)  The funny thing is that she suggested the film.

But I digress.  One thing that's very interesting about the film, even for someone who's not interested in drag balls or "voguing", is that it shows a city and culture that were disappearing at the very moment Jennie Livingston (a white lesbian) was directing it.  In that sense, it reminds me of Leslie Feinberg's novel Stone Butch Blues, which portrays an upstate New York of smokestack industries and blue-collar jobs, and the "butches" who worked some of them.  That way of life was dying just as the novel's protagonist was coming of age, and was long gone by the time the novel was published.  As Jay Toole (who is not given to hyperbole)  remarked in a recent conversation with me, "There aren't any stone butches anymore!"

Likewise, the kinds of young African-American and Latino gay males and transgenders Livingston presents are all but gone, literally as well as figuratively.  Several of the subjects of the film are known to be dead, from AIDS and other forms of violence, and it wouldn't surprise me that others have passed.  Many ran away from, or were thrown out of, their homes before reaching the age of majority, which means that some were probably "off the grid" in that era just before the Internet.

The ones who have survived, as Melissa Anderson points out, probably would not recognize New York as it is now (assuming, of course, they still live here).  Then, the Christopher Street pier, where many of them hung out, was as weathered, splintered and rotted--and, in daylight, as forlorn--as a piece of driftwood on a beach. So were most of the other Hudson River piers of Greenwich Village, Chelsea and other downtown and West Side neighborhoods in Manhattan.  Now the Christopher Street Pier and others around it are, in essence, little parks that stand between the Hudson Greenway and the river.  Instead of young people who are essentially homeless and outcast in other ways, the Greenway and piers are filled, at least on fair-weather days, with cyclists, runners and parents with their kids in strollers, and  people walking their dogs.  The Chelsea Piers, which occupy the piers that formed planks from the ends of the streets in the West 20's, is full of restaurants, shops and other attractions that bring in families and tourists.  The subjects of Paris Is Burning almost certainly could not have afforded to go to any of those establishments--not that they would have--even if they were doing sex work, which was the most remunerative employment available to most of them.

Which brings me to my next point...The young gay and trans people who were "voguing" in the '80's and early '90's almost certainly wouldn't recognize me, my trans, gay and lesbian friends or, in fact, nearly any member of today's LGBT communities.  Although things are far from perfect for us today, we have no need for those balls to which the young gays and trans people expended much of the energy, and what little money, they had.  The fact that they tried to portray, as accurately as possible, supermodels, actresses, singers and other female performers, in competitions in which they represented "houses" named after fashion designers like Chanel, is an expression of their yearning to belong to the rest of the world and the knowledge that they don't, and perhaps never will.  (Note the use of the word "houses" by young people who were disowned by their families.)  Some would never have the means to belong--Many of them shoplifted the clothing and makeup they wore for those competitions!-- while others simply won't live long enough.  

Most of them could not finish high school, and could not imagine going to college or into any sort of program that will train them for a job that would provide them with the trappings of a middle-class life.  They never met gay or trans people who were writers, scientists, professors, economists, musicians, engineers, doctors or historians; if their teachers were in the LGBT spectrum, those young people would not have known, at least with any certainty.  And they almost certainly could not have imagined a world in which Dick Cheyney would express his support for same-sex marriage, or in which straight entertainers or other celebrities would advocate for trans people.

They would not have seen trans people my age, and might not have known that any existed.  That is because--as they could not have known--most trans people around my age would begin their transitions at an age, and in an age,  to which most of them would not live.  

In other words, whatever Jennie Livingston's intentions were, Paris Is Burning has become a document of the lost generation of transgenders and the history and culture that disappeared with them.

A Lifespan Of 30 To 32 Years, And A Lost Generation

Two decades ago, a widely-circulated report caused a lot of shock and disbelief.

Among its findings was this:  Black males aged 15 to 29 had a higher rate of mortality than anyone except people over 85.

But what caused perhaps the most consternation was the fact that black men in Harlem had a shorter life expectancy (51)  than men in Bangladesh (55).  At that time, as now, the average life expectancy for males in the US was 73 years.

(Aside:  At the time of the report, Bangladesh differed from any Western country in that males had a longer life expectancy--by one year--than women.)

I was in graduate school at the time the report came out.  Fellow students and faculty members talked about it for weeks afterward.  More than a few faculty members, I'm sure, were stunned to realize that they were near, or had exceeded, the numbers for men in Harlem and Bangladesh. And those--including my fellow students--who hadn't reached that age bracket knew that, barring some unforeseen tragedy, they were likely to live well beyond 51 or 55.

As terrible as those findings were ( I concur with those who said a "genocide" of black youth was, and is, taking place.), they paint a positively rosy picture compared to something I stumbled over a couple of days ago.

According to Argentinian psychologist Graciela Balestra, "Transgender people have an average life expectancy of 30 to 32 years."

That is less than the average life expectancy during the time of Christ, and about how long people could expect to live during the Dark Ages.  Even during the time of the Black Death, a person--assuming, of course, that he or she wasn't among the one in three who succumbed to the epidemic--could expect to live a couple of years longer than that.

And Dr. Balestra works closely with the transgender community in a country where, arguably, trans people have more rights and protections than in any other in the world!

When I think about it, I have difficulty rebutting her claim.  I know, personally, about two dozen people on the transgender spectrum, and have probably talked with about two hundred others, perhaps more.    Of the transgender people I know personally, about four or five are 30 or younger; the rest are 40 or older.  Of course, that last fact may simply be a result of being over 40 myself!  However, I can't help but to realize that all of the 30-or-older trans people I know--and, most likely, most of the ones I've met--began their transitions after that age.  In my experience, it's really unusual to meet a trans person around my age who started his or her transition thirty or even twenty years ago.  We are, as I said in yesterday's post, survivors of the Lost Generation of transgender people.  

So, while I know that today we have a more hospitable (though far from entirely hospitable) environment, I still worry sometimes about those young people who are making their transitions, and even having surgery, before their mid-20's.  While I am happy that they will be able to enjoy a youth in their true gender--an option too many friends and acquaintances, as well as I, didn't have--I still have to wonder just how long they'll live, and what their quality of life will be like. 

For all of the advances that have been made--at least in some parts of the US--to protect our rights and safety, a transgender person is still 16 times as likely as anyone else to be murdered.  One of us is also 20 times as likely to be assaulted.  Moreover, we have unemployment and poverty rates that are multiples of the ones suffered by any other group of people.  Even if you talk about the real, as opposed to the official, unemployment rates, we are three to four times as likely not to have paid work.  

And those of us who have employment, health insurance and safe housing are likely to have garnered those things before our transitions.  

Perhaps the clearest sign of progress we might see will be when we see gainfully employed, insured and well-housed trans people in their 30's and 40's who have attained those hallmarks of a stable life after, or not long before, beginning their transitions in their early-to-mid 20's, or even earlier. Until then, we will have a gap created by a lost generation of trans people. Having such a gap has devastated the African-American community for a long time, and could do something similar, if it hasn't already, to the trans community.