Department of Justice To Train Police To Work With Transgender People

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I had to go to my local precinct--the 114th in Astoria, Queens, New York--three times before they would even take a complaint from me regarding the harassment and bullying I experienced from Dominick.

Simply being brushed off, as I was the first time, was bad enough. But the second time nearly pushed me over the edge: two out-of-uniform officers harassed me on their way out of the gym, after a workout.  They made air-smooches, asked me (in a mocking yet menacing way) whether I wanted to "take a ride" with them and, finally, threatened me if I didn't respond to them.  The desk sergeant sat only a few feet away and watched it unfold but claimed to see nothing.  Then, as I was unlocking my bike from a parking meter on the next block from the station, two officers barged in front of me.

"You're not supposed to park there!," one of them bellowed. "This spot's only for officers."

"I'm sorry, I didn't see a sign..."

"Just shut up and go, " the other one yelled. "And if you know what's good for you, you won't come back."

As it was dark and everything happened so quickly, I didn't see the officers badges--or, indeed, whether they were not wearing them or had covered the numbers on them.  The cops who harassed me on their way out of the precinct gym didn't have their badges.

That came about seven years after I'd been stopped and frisked by two men who might or might not have been cops (They were in an unmarked van.) as I was riding my bike home from work on a hot day.

I don't know whether the stop-and-frisk incident had to do with my being trans:  They claimed I was in the projects (which I wasn't, but "so what" if I were) and demanded to know what I was doing there. But I have little doubt that what happened during my second visit to the 114th had to do with my identity if for no other  reason that I mentioned that fact about myself in all of my visits, as Dominick was using it to impute all of the old sterotypes to, in order to spread false rumors about, me.

As you can imagine, I've had no love (not that I had much before), and lost whatever respect I had for, the police until recently.  The only reason why I am now willing to even entertain the idea of revising my opinion of them is that I've met a detective in my church who is nothing like I expected any officer to be.  I think she really means it when she expresses her sorrow over my experience.

We need more like her.  Even for those who, like her, became cops because they wanted "to help people" or "be a positive force in the community", understanding of people whose gender or sexual identities might be different from their own are developed.  (The same is true of most people, I believe.)  

That is why I am glad to see that the Department of Justice has just launched a program to train local police departments to better respond to transgender people.  It is, if nothing else, a good first step:  a recognition of a need. 

Deputy Attorney General James Cole understands that one result of mistreatment is that too many of us simply don't report harassments, assaults or other violations against us.  As a matter of fact, even after that third visit to the 114th, when an officer finally took a statement from me, I vowed to never again report any crime, against myself or anyone else, to the police.  Maybe, just maybe, I'll reconsider.

Sneaky Queers And Treacherous Trannies

When I was growing up, one rarely saw an LGBT character in a movie or TV show. 

In fact, one almost never heard about "queer" people or characters in the news or other parts of the media.  On those rare occasions when one appeared, he was almost invariably a gay man.  And, if his sexual orientation was not denounced, there was an implication that it defined--in overwhelmingly negative ways--every other aspect of his character and life.  

So, the few gay men we saw or heard about were shadowy, sneaky figures.  They were seen as vaguely--or not-so-vaguely--dishonest.  They were often double-agents or simply double-crossers, or their homosexuality was used to depict them as such.  

One example is Clay Shaw, who according to his onetime lover (and male prostitute) Willie O'Keefe, discussed the JFK assassination with Lee Harvey Oswald and others believed to be involved in the killing. All of this is depicted in Oliver Stone's film JFK.  Stone, of course, does not imply that either man's proclivity or interest in each other was a root cause of their involvement in the killing.  But he shows how people commonly believed that such a thing was possible--and that O'Keefe's and Shaw's preferences and relationship (as well as the prison sentence O'Keefe served for solicitation) was used to discredit them.

Although some people have moved away from such attitudes--or, at any rate, wouldn't publicly express them--about gay men, transgender people are being portrayed as devious in almost exactly the way gay men were not so long ago.  (Interestingly, there doesn't seem to have been a similar stereotype about lesbians.)  Even people who have gay or lesbian family members, friends and colleagues--or who themselves are on the "spectrum"-- may hold or express the notion that trans people are fundamentally dishonest.  In fact, I have talked--before, during and since my transition--with gay men and mental-health professionals who said, in essence, that trans people "just don't want to admit they're gay," as a onetime friend of mine put it.

So, although I was upset, I was not surprised to learn that Caleb Hannan had not only "outed" Essay Anne Vanderbilt; he used the fact that she was born male--something, apparently, only a few people knew--to explain her true dishonesty:  lying about her academic credentials and work experience as a scientist, much of it as a private contractor to the Department of Defense.  She apparently used those fictions to convince someone to invest in a new golf club she'd invented.   

About all I know about golf is that Tiger Woods plays it (and the field).  So I couldn't tell you whether Vanderbilt's club was everything she claimed, and her investor believed, it to be.  But, apparently, some swear by it.  Even Hannan acknowledged that he played a better game when he used it.

Now, if people like the club, they're probably not going to care whether she actually worked for the DoD or went to MIT or whatever.  On the other hand, I can understand that someone would hold her, as a person, in low regard for lying about her credentials and just generally being a difficult person, as many have testified.  After all, great ideas and creations don't always come from good people:  Wagner was one of the greatest composers and most detestable human beings who ever lived. I'm not so sure I would have wanted Bach as a father, husband, brother, friend or neighbor, either.  And T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Fernand Celine were notorious anti-Semites.  Still, their flaws don't degrade the quality of their work, any more than Vanderbilt's fabricated resume makes her golf club less of a marvel than its enthusiasts say it is.

However, to imply that someone who was born with one of the most fundamental conflicts a person can live with cannot be anything but inherently dishonest as a result of that conflict, as Hannan does, is simply ignorant at best and vicious at worst.  I can't help but to tend toward the latter interpretation:  He portrayed Ms. Vanderbilt as one born to manipulate even though he knew about her suicide attempt--which he uses to further the idea that she was congenitally unstable.

But the real reason I am so upset at Hannan is that while he was "researching" his article, Ms. Vanderbilt took her own life.  Now, I realize that it's probably not possible to "prove" that his outing her caused her to off herself.  Still, I think he should be taken to task for "outing" someone who has the sort of history she had--or, for that matter, anyone who does not disclose that information about herself.

I realize that in writing this blog, and some of my other works, some people might think I'm giving them permission to "out" me to people who would use that information to portray me as a monster, criminal or worse.  However, there are still many, many people who do not know my history and never will--unless, of course, someone "outs" me.  As an example, I was renewing my state ID last week.  The clerk did not know that, at one time, my name and gender weren't the ones on the card I was handing him.  And, really, there was no need for him to know.  I don't know whether knowing that aspect of my history would have changed the way he treated me (He was, in spite of the stereotype about Department of Motor Vehicle employees, friendly:  Somehow we found ourselves talking about our cats!) or added another layer of bureaucracy to a transaction that, for most people, is routine.  

I will probably never see that clerk again--or, for that matter, most people I encounter on any given day.  They don't all need to know about my gender history and, really, have no right to know unless I disclose it (which, of course, I do on this blog).  More to the point, neither they nor anyone else has the right to use it to paint me as anything other than I am, for better or worse.  

A Self-Hater Smears Tyler Clementi With A Stereotype

Robert Oscar Lopez may well have the courage of his convictions.  But, it seems that he doesn't have a whole lot of logic to back them up.

He was raised by a same-sex couple but has become an anti-gay activist. I don't even need to speculate about that; if anyone is still paying attention to him in a few years, we'll find out what has motivated him.  Perhaps it's nothing more than the youthful rebellion people often express against their parents.

Lopez claims that Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge not because his roommate secretly recorded him kissing another man and aired that video on YouTube, but because he was raped by gay paedophiles when he was a teenager.

Now, in spite of its reliance on, and reinforcement of, crude stereotypes, I am willing to entertain such a notion pending further evidence and explanation.  Most paedophiles are not gay; they do not engage in sex with adults of their own gender. (I know this from experience; as a child I was sexually assaulted by a man who was not sexually interested in grown men.  Then again, one could argue--as I would--that I wasn't a boy.)  But, even if we allow Lopez the benefit of the doubt when he expresses such crude and misinformed notions, we cannot let this go:  He says that society's acceptance of homosexuality has resulted in the widespread sexual abuse of children by gay men.

I have yet to see a plausible explanation of how "acceptance" of homosexuality results in gay men having sex with children.  In fact, I don't see how "acceptance" of any sort of orientation results in more sex of any kind.  As we have seen, people express their love and attractions whether or not society approves of them:  The only thing that changes is that they become more open about such expression when they are less likely to face hostility.  

And what do gay men express more openly?  Their love of other men.  If we accept all of the research--and testimony of gay men and other people--that "gay" is not synonymous with "paedophile", it's absurd to claim that an "acceptance" of homosexuality leads to paedophilia.

On top of that--This is something else I can say from my own experience and that of others--people rarely, if ever, commit suicide over being sexually abused.  At least, we don't do it in the way of Tyler Clementi: Sometimes we engage in self-destructive behavior of other kinds that leads, over time, to our deaths.  More often, though, we drink too much, take drugs or engage in other self-destructive behavior until something leads us to confront the abuse we experienced.  Or we express it in other ways:  Had Tyler Clementi been sexually abused, he might have expressed it in the way he played the music he was studying.  And, perhaps, he might have had a breakdown or some other traumatic event.  But I have a hard time believing he'd have killed himself over childhood sexual abuse--or, for that matter, had he experienced such abuse, that it would have been committed by a gay man.

Murder, Then Character Assassination

Have standards at journalism schools declined even more than I'd imagined?

I'm asking that question after seeing the way a major metropolitan newspaper--one that was once one of the most respected in all of journalism--covered the murder of a transgender woman.

For starters, Cleveland Plain-Dealer reporter John Caniglia used male pronouns in referring to Cemia "Ci Ci" Dove.  He also referred to her as "Carl Acoff" in his dispatch on 29 April. The male pronouns have since been removed but, in the story, she is still identified as "Carl Acoff."  Mr. Caniglia very cleverly got around having to use female pronouns by referring to her as a "self-identified transgender woman."

Oh, but it gets better.  This Caniglia person simply had to tell his readers that Ci Ci was dressed in a Betty Boop tank top, three black bras and a light hooded jacket. As if this isn't enough to trivialize her, he also mentions that she was naked from the waist down.  I don't think I have to tell you what sort of picture he and his editors were trying to paint.

Also, he mentions some previous criminal activity.  I neither condone nor excuse such behavior, but trans people--especially the young--are often driven to desperate measures, especially if their families and former friends and acquaintances have disavowed them. I suspect that such was the case for Ms. Dove for, as Caniglia reports, attempts to contact her family were unsuccessful.

After such sensationalism, the fact that she died so brutally and lay at the bottom of a pond for, probably, a month or more, is almost lost by its placement later in the article.  What's really sad is that, as awful as it is to be repeatedly stabbed, tied to a block of concrete and dumped into a freezing pond, it doesn't even come close to being one of the most gruesome attacks ever committed on a trans person.

To add insult to injury, it wasn't bad enough for Caniglia to simply be sensationalistic and to trade in stereotypes.  His editors brought the quality of his story even further down with this headline: "Brutal Slaying Marks Clevelander's Fight for Acceptance."

What the fuck?  The stabbing ended Ci Ci Dove's life, at age twenty.  I mean, if we follow that editor's line of reasoning and have his or her command of the English language, we would say that the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 marked the end of his Presidential campaign.

What the hell are they teaching (or not teaching) in J-schools these days?

The Only Other Yarmulke In The Room

Two things about meetings: They always seem longer than they actually are, and the most verbose and monotonous people will do most of the talking. Is that some hitherto obscure corollary to Murphy's Law? If I am the first to report it, will it be called Justine's Corollary?

The meeting followed a day on which I met two of my classes--both of them Intro to Literature--for the first time. In the first one, two young Orthodox Jewish men sat next to each other at the front of the room, all the way to my left. I could see that one of them is rather self-conscious and shy: Perhaps having to wear a yarmulke and dress, well, like an Orthodox boy in a world that could be hostile made him so.

Anyway, as I was calling the names on the roster, I came to "Menashe." The shy young man's friend responded. A few names later, I saw "Lior" and looked at the shy young man. Process of elimination: His was the second Jewish name on the list, and he and Menashe were the only two Orthodox Jews in the class. At that moment, I felt a little embarrassed--both for me and him. I realized, too late, that I probably made him feel a bit more self-conscious, at least for a moment, than he already felt.

After the class, I saw them in the hallway. Menashe asked me about the assignment for the next class (on Wednesday) and we got to talking about other things. Finally, Lior mentioned that when I called his name, I just automatically turned to him.

"I'm sorry about that."

"That's all right. What made you do it?"

"Well, after I called Menashe, you were the only other Jew in the class. And when I came to your name, I recognized it as a Jewish name, so I figured it was yours. I'm sorry if I embarrassed you."

"No, you didn't." He was being unnecessarily deferential. "I mean, you did what you thought was best."

"And I goofed." Then, tongue in cheek, I added, "We as professors are supposed to know everything. But sometimes we do stupid things."

"No, it was no problem..."

Then he told me he was impressed that I knew about the names Menashe and Lior. I mentioned that I have never been very far from Jewish people and, in fact, taught in a yeshiva. They were both impressed, something I wasn't expecting. "All I ever do is the best I know how to do."

"Yes, I can tell," Menashe said.

This exchange made me think of the times people have gotten my pronouns wrong. All you can do is to realize that most of the time, such mistakes are exactly that. On the other hand, I've had a couple of people call me "he," "him" or by my old name out of anger or malice. I've learned to be patient with the former. As for the latter, there really isn't much I can do, except perhaps to distance myself from that person.

But today, I got something right for what may have been a bad reason: the yarmulke fit the name, or something like that. Sometimes I think that there's even more to be learned from that than there is from simply getting something wrong or right.

The Gender-Variant Breakfast Club

John Hughes died today.

I have always one beef with him: Most of the teen films for which he was known were set in Chicago. Yet there is nary a black person (at least not that I can recall) and scarcely a Latino in any of his films.

To be fair, one could change "Chicago" to "New York" in the previous paragraph to make exactly the same criticism of Woody Allen.

However, as much as I enjoyed Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters (which, by the way, is the name of the nail salon I frequent) when they came out, I don't feel any great urgency to see them again. And I thought Allen was operating out of his depth in Interiors.

On the other hand, I intend to see The Breakfast Club again. It's often dismissed as a "teen" movie: a label perhaps more fairly applied to most of his other movies. But that film, as I recall it, has elements that I think I could appreciate even more now than I did when I first saw it--Was it 25 years ago already?

The story itself is very basic and won't appeal to a snob or cynic. I guess that's proof that I wasn't really either; I was just a poeur hipster. Long live poseurism! And long live you if you're a poseur: You'll outgrow it eventually, and when that happens, you'll get a great laugh at your own expense. If you can do that, I've learned, you stand a greater chance of loving yourself, not to mention other people.

All right: Off the soapbox. At least I wasn't wearing high heels. I haven't worn them in weeks; the sandals with three-inch wedges I wore the other day don't count: they were too comfortable!

Anyway...In BC, a few kids end up in Saturday detention. Among them were a jock, a brain, a princess, a criminal and a pure-and-simple basket case (my favorite character, played by Ally Sheedy) who's in detention mainly because she had nothing better to do.

They find ways to pass the time and, in the process, reveal secrets to each other and discover commonalities in the narratives of their lives. At the request of the other students, Brian, the "brain" of the group, writes the essay the principal assigned them. For that essay, each student was to answer the question "Who do you think you are?" Brian writes the esaay as a letter to the principal, challenging him to look past his pre-conceived notions of them. One version of the letter is read near the beginning of the film and the other toward the end.

The first version goes like this:

Saturday, March 24, 1984. Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois. 60062.

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was that we did wrong. What we did was wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write this essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us... in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That's the way we saw each other at seven o'clock this morning. We were brainwashed.

The later version of the letter is:

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong, but we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is

...a brain...Brian Johnson

...and an athlete...Andrew Clark

...and a basket case...Allison Reynolds

...a princess...Claire Standish

...and a criminal...John Bender

Does that answer your question?... Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

Call me a sucker, but just for that letter, I'm willing to forgive, if not overlook, the omissions and other deficiencies of Hughes' work.

So why am I thinking about that letter, or The Breakfast Club, now? Well, as simplistic as the plot and the expressed point of view of that movie are, that letter--and the way the actors portrayed their characters--shows at least an awareness of the blind spots not only of the characters, but of those who created, played and directed them. That, I think, is more than can be said of anything Woody Allen ever did. And it's certainly shows more awareness than most writers, directors and others involved in film and TV show when it comes to the way they portray people of color, not to mention transgender or other gender-variant people.

"Transgender," "transsexual," and "transvestite" are among those "simplest terms" to which Brian Johnson alludes in his letter. At least, they are in pretty much every film and TV program I've seen that has a gender-variant character or in which gender variance is a theme or sub-theme. And, because they are the "simplest terms," they can only convey "the most convenient definitions."

And that is why David Reuben's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask and Woody Allen's eponymous movie were so wildly popular. If I recall correctly, Dr. Reuben's book spent a year or so on the Times best-seller list and the film was Allen's most commercially successful up to that point. (I suspect that people who liked it probably weren't fans of Annie Hall, much less Interiors.)

It's been decades since I read Dr. Reuben's book or saw Woody Allen's movie. But, as I recall them, they both reinforced the ideas most people had about transgendered people: that they were guys in dresses who had sex with prepubescent kids. (How ironic was it that Woody Allen was engaged in, uh, extracurricular activities with his stepdaughter?)

As near as I can tell, part of being "in the closet" means accepting, and even reenforcing those stereotypes that are presented as verities and accepted as archetypes. By that definition, I reckon, most of us have been in the closet at some point or another. Although I lived in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood until I was thirteen, I rarely, if ever, saw an African-American, Latino or Asian person. And, although I called other kids "queers," I had no idea of what that meant, much less that, according to some people (and the American Psychiatric Association), I am one. So I didn't realize, until much later, the degree to which people of those backgrounds were stereotyped in the TV shows and movies, not to mention the cartoons, I saw when I was growing up.

One of the first TV shows I recall that seemed to make any attempt to break away from the dominant characterisations of non-white as well as other "minority" people was All In The Family. But even in that program, as good as it was, black characters like Jefferson as well as members of other groups, the old and the infirm were used mainly as foils for Archie Bunker's hang-ups rather than developed as full-fledged human beings. In the end, those characters were still defined by their labels, just as Archie Bunker was as a bigot, albeit a lovable one.

The TV show I recall that featured a man who wore women's clothing on a regular basis was One Day at a Time. We watched that because, actually, it was pretty good and my brother had his first crush on Valerie Bertinelli. (He could have chosen worse.) Although people got used to the transvestite character, the show did not in any way challenge the ideas most people, including me, had at the time: that such men were gay and more than a little creepy because they wanted to be women because they didn't know how to be men. And, of course, the cross-dressing was always played for laughs.

I must say, though, that in making "comic relief" out of cross-dressing, One Day At A Time was probably no worse--mainly because it was no different--from other shows and movies that featured any form of gender variance. "Guy in women's clothes" became the convenient definition for the simplistic terms of "gay," "transsexual" (No-one, to my knowledge, was using "transgendered" then.) or "transvestite."

If I recall correctly, The Breakfast Club came out about a decade after One Day At A Time premiered, and One Day appeared about half a decade after All In The Family made its debut. And it has been about a quarter-century since BC first came to the silver screen. It's fair to ask just how far movies--or we--have come in understanding people who are too often circumscribed by those "simplest terms" and "most convenient definitions." Even Trans-America, at times, falls prey to that sort of thinking, which is the reason why that what most people remember about it is "that Desperate Housewife playing a guy who becomes a girl."

In a way, I feel sorry for John Hughes. People always seem to have thought of him as a "teen" film director, and the vogue for that type of film seems to have died somewhere around 1992. What if he had found a new subject? Could he have made films that took up the challenge Brian Johnson posed to his principal?